1. Earn Bitcoins by accepting them as a means of payment:

In my opinion, the best and easiest way to earn Bitcoins is to accept them as a means of payment. If you have a small business, the integration is done quickly and easily. No matter if you have a brick and mortar shop or an online business, no matter if you sell goods or services. You just have to complete the following three steps:

1. Get a free online Bitcoin wallet from Blockchain.info. There are also many other providers apart from Blockchain.info. Find out which works best for you. And remember, no wallet is absolutely safe, so be careful with your money.

1. Display a QR-code with your Bitcoin address next to your cash register. There are two options here.
• When you have your Blockchain.info account go to 'Receive Money'. Under the 'Actions' drop-down menu select 'QR-code'. Print out the image with the QR-code and place it next to your cash register. Your customers will typically have a Bitcoin app installed on their smartphone where they can enter the value of the purchase in USD or EUR. Their app calculates the corresponding Bitcoin value. It automatically takes the current exchange rate to get the right amount. On your Blockchain.info account you can check the confirmation of your incoming payment.
• The other option you have is again on your Blockchain.info account. Go to 'Receive Money' and then under the 'Actions' drop-down this time select 'Create Payment Request'. Now you enter the Bitcoin amount the customer has to pay and it will show the corresponding QR-code. This way the customer doesn't need to enter an amount. For this method you need to calculate the Bitcoin amount from your USD or EUR price before you can enter it for the QR-code to generate.

1. Display the 'Bitcoin accepted here' logo at the entrance to your shop to show everybody your innovative payment integration. You will find a printable version of the logo plus a free guide under Downloads.

That's it. It's so easy, start to earn Bitcoins by selling goods and services today! This is just a quick description how to earn Bitcoins by accepting them as a means of payment. These links are also helpful:

• How to accept Bitcoin, for small businesses includes more info for online businesses
• The Bitcoin Wiki Trade page shows you which other businesses already accept Bitcoin. Add your shop here to get more publicity
• Coinmap is an OpenStreetMap where you can see the geographical distribution of Bitcoin accepting businesses. Add your shop here as well

There are many other lists and indexes where you can add your shop. I find the two mentioned ones to work best so far. If you have one that you think is really good and complete, contact me. I will be happy to add other links here.

2. Earn free Bitcoins by completing tasks on websites:

There are many websites which offer you to earn free Bitcoins. With most of these sites, the concept is that you visit the site and just for looking at it you get a small amount of Bitcoins. The concept has something in common with watching good old free TV. You watch a lot of ads and inbetween you get something you actually want to see, like a film or music clips.

While this is a legitimate concept, the return on your invested time is very little. So when you earn Bitcoins from these advertising sites, the Bitcoins actually come at the cost of your time. As the saying goes 'there is no free lunch'. But see for yourself, here is a list of some of the sites that I find interesting

• BitVisitor :: Earn Bitcoins for watching websites or videos. Every page is shown for five minutes. Then you can click 'Next' for confirmation and move on to the next page. What I like about this site is that payouts come within roughly an hour. This is a major advantage compared to other sites that pay Bitcoins for completing tasks. Also, you don't need an user account here, you just enter your Bitcoin address. The amount of Bitcoins you can earn here is limited though. Per five minutes you get something like µBTC 100 (that's 100 microcoins or BTC 0.00001) which means that your hourly payout is something like BTC 0.00012. That's not too much money but it is a start to make you first Satoshis and get familiar with Bitcoin. And note, payout per five minute period varies. So the above calculation only holds if the average payout per five minutes is µBTC 100.
• freedigitalmoney.com :: Earn Bitcoins by getting rewards fo purchases made in Bitcoin. On this site you also don't need a user account and just have to enter your Bitcoin address to earn Bitcoins.
• CoinWorker :: Earn Bitcoins by completing analytical tasks. A user account is required here. I haven't tried this service but payouts seem to be a bit higher than with the aforementioned sites.
• BitcoinPlus :: Earn Bitcoins for providing computing power to a mining pool. The good thing about this site is that you do not actually have to spend time on it because your computer works in the background while you can do other things. However, when you check the task manager of your computer you see that CPU usage skyrockets. That means your machine consumes more electricity. And since the payouts per hour on BitcoinPlus are really small, you need to do a proper calculation that takes the power consumption of your hardware, your electricity costs and the current Bitcoin value into account. If this turns out profitable for you, BitcoinPlus is a fine thing.
• Rugatu :: Earn Bitcoins by answering forum questions. This is a nice service because it brings people together who are interested in Bitcoin and many other things and allows to pay rewards for answering questions. This is something that would not have been possible without a currency like Bitcoin that has low transaction fees and instant transfers.
• FaucetBTC :: Earn Bitcoins just by visiting this site (and looking at the ads). There is a large number of other sites like this and I picked this particular one quite randomly. All you do here is go to that site, enter your Bitcoin address and fill out the CAPTCHA. You can repeat this as often as you like but only once every 30 minutes. For each visit you get BTC 0.0000025 (as of August 2013; this is likely to change when the Bitcoin exchange rate goes up). After your visit, your reward is sent to CoinBox.me. This happens to collect many small payments and to combine them for one bigger payout. When you visit many sites in parallel, this could be a way to keep you busy throughout the day and make some change.

Earning Bitcoins from completing tasks on websites is a viable option to actually earn some Bitcoins, but don't expect your income to be very large. I regard it as a first step to get familiar with Bitcoin in general. Also, it is interesting to see what kind of services are enabled through frictionless money transfers.