MAKING MONEY ONLINE
First rule: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Rule 2. Research any company or organization BEFORE you sign up. 3. Know that you will not be issued a check until you reach a certain dollar amount. 4. Don't expect to make a lot of money without spending a lot of money (the "offers" paying the most require you to pay or to take a "trial" offer and give them the credit card #. Of course you can cancel, IF you are organized enough to remember what day you need to cancel it. I opted not to try any of these "offers" so I can't say whether your cancellation will be credited back efficiently or not, but my gut feeling is no. 4. It takes a long time to earn the minimum amount if you don't buy anything, and then there is a delay in payment. Frankly six months to earn $30 is an absurd waste of time, unless you are absolutely desperate for any and all income you can generate.
Getting $ for reading emails & searching onlineEach email pays a tiny amount. You will have to participate in other activities in order to get paid, or wait a long long time. I save the emails under the company name to compare the # I show read and the # they show. Also earnings at different points in time are saved. At least one entity seems to have regular "glitches" which mysteriously result in small amounts being "lost." -- not enough to notice usually. However, since I started the program, I have noticed that about once every few days I lose anywhere from a couple of pennies to around 50¢. Makes getting that payment take a bit longer! Some only pay to PayPal. Some only pay you to read the email IF you accept/ complete the offer. Offers are repetitive from one service to the next, so you may reach a point where you have already accepted or rejected all the offers you are sent. Some offers you will receive multiple times. For instance, one is for auto insurance. I don't own an auto, so I will not be buying auto insurance.. I find the repeats annoying, especially when I don't get paid for opening and reading it.
SEARCHING ONLINE This also pays very little, but as far as I have been able to determine is more reliable than reading the emails. |
Getting $ for answering surveysI have encountered a few disturbing results in these efforts. The most annoying falls under "when is a survey not a survey?" This includes anything that requires you to "accept offers," submit a credit card number, or sign up for a free trail (which automatically bills you for the service after a given time period, and they're hoping you forget to cancel), The next category I call "we'll get the data and welsh out on you." It tells you that they need to verify that you qualify for the survey. OK that sounds legitimate. Most market research studies have legitimate screening issues & target markets.. For instance Cadillac probably doesn't want to get a lot of opinions from people with incomes under $25,000 a year, since those people are highly unlikely to buy a Cadillac. L'Oreal probably doesn't want the opinions of a lot of men about makeup products. So on and so forth. However, I have seen some rather questionable "screening" questions, and I have training in research design and actual job history (even if it was 30 years ago) in market research. It's questionable to me once they start asking the kinds of questions usually presented in an actual study and then tell you didn't qualify (thus avoiding having to pay your for the survey). Examples of this are asking you where you shop, how often you shop there, when you last shopped there, how much you spent, describe your experience in the store (friendly helpful employees, cleanliness, easy to find what you wanted, etc) and then they tell you you didn't qualify. HELLO! They got the information they wanted and you got screwed if you aren't compensated as they agreed. The third category involves the actual screening process. I don't know how many times I've been asked my age, whether I have children, etc and have then been sent to an inappropriate survey. I'm almost 60, poor, and childless (therefore grandchildless) & I have been sent to surveys for children's products! Similarly, I have been screened as not owning an automobile and sent to a survey about auto insurance. The final category of wasting my time is when I keep getting sent to the same study I have already not been qualified for -- one case in point was a Diabetes Clinical Trial that I had been ruled as unqualified for by virtue of other health issues -- I was sent to it 10 days in a row, and there's NO option to say "I was already screened for this and not qualified." True, I can say I choose to not participate, but really that's a different issue and might get one excluded from all such studies, even when the other health issues are not relevant.
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Other pitfalls to these programs A $3 processing fee for transferring the minimum amount of earnings to your PayPal account. EXCUSE ME? I do not recall being told this up front!
Delay in sending the earned monies to PayPal. On 4/8/12 I finally had enough money to meet the minimum for requesting payment from one of these services, ($30). First I was told there was a $3 processing fee, THEN I was told it might be June 1, 2012 before they could process payment --- to PAY PAL??? CIRCULAR REFERENCE Service A has an "offer" for Service B which has an offer for Service C and so on until you get "Offered" Service A again. Plus on most of these sites, you see the same "offers" over and over. |
Programs I have tried out & my reviews
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Product Testing |