Get Paid To Read E-Mails: A Moral Dilemma?

If you’re looking at ways to make some money online, you’re probably going to come across programs that offer you money to surf the web or read e-mails. Today’s post will explain how this works and will tell you why you might choose to avoid these types of jobs.

Why Would Someone Pay You To Surf?

When faced with an online business opportunity, the first question you should ask yourself is, “What’s in it for them?” Understanding the motive of a potential client or employer is important in helping you determine if the job opportunity is right for you. Many people who accept paid to read email type job offers don’t really know that the job typically entails stealing from advertisers. Let me explain.

Online Pay Per Click Advertising and Click Fraud

In most instances where someone is paying you to click a link or view a webpage, they’re taking advantage of pay per click advertising. For every dollar they earn, they might pay you a penny. In a program such as Google Adsense, advertisers pay a specific amount of money to have their ads displayed to potential clients. The advertiser pays Google a portion for each click and sometimes for a page impression as well. Google will pay some of that money to publishers of sites that show advertisements. When you join a PTR program and you are paid to view a webpage and / or to click on a link for something you’re really not interested in buying, you’re costing a company advertising money. Many of these advertisers aren’t just big companies with deep pockets. Some of those advertisers are entrepreneurs just like you who are trying to earn money online.

Very often, a paid to surf or paid to read e-mail job will pay you a penny or fraction of a penny for you to open an e-mail, click a link and view a website. Sometimes you’ll be encouraged to click an ad. Sometimes you’ll just need to view the page for 30 seconds. Many of them also take advantage of affiliate programs that pay for job leads. If a program pays $1 for every referral and you pretend to be a referral the program manager might share their commission with youAutosurfing is something you might consider running on your computer to earn a few extra dollars a day but in reality, it’s a lot like watching illegal cable. It might seem harmless but it truly is theft.

Also, a lot of the companies out there that run these programs don’t last very long. . By the nature of their unethical business they are not very trustworthy people and that should tell you something as well. Many of these sites won’t pay out to their members until a high dollar amount is hit. This demonstrates to many that they are hoping you’ll never hit payout and then they don’t need to pay you at all.

You’ll probably find some people saying they’re making money with this method and have never been ‘stiffed’ by someone running one of these programs. This may be true but after understanding how much of this money is derived, do you still feel good about this type of job?

The more scams and cheats out there, the more difficult it is to make money on the internet because companies that host revenue sharing opportunities are on the lookout for click fraud and will eventually disable accounts of people that are caught. Not only could you be stealing from advertisers but just before you hit that magical payout number, the program manager who’s supposed to pay you could have their accounts banned and forfeit their earnings.

There are a lot of honest ways to make an online income. This blog aims to present you with many of those options.

Tips To Make Extra Money For Christmas

f you’re just taking the plunge into working at home and are desperate for ways to make some quick money for the Christmas season, here are some helpful tips for you. This is by no means an exhaustive list of online money making options but for those looking to get started quickly to get some income flowing, these tips can help.

  1. Sell some items on eBay. There is a wealth of information on the eBay site that’ll enable you to get started.
  2. If you can write, start writing how-to articles for sites like Bukisa and eHow. These sites share revenue with you and some writers on ehow, for instance make over $900 a month in residuals. You may or may not hit payout in time for Christmas but if you start straight away you could at the very least have earned some funds before those first 2009 credit card bills come in.
  3. If you can write, you may visit an online webmaster forum and look in the classifieds section to find pay per post jobs as well as people looking for virtual assistants.
  4. Open your own online niche store. If you get started in November or early December you could cater to the hungry Christmas market.
  5. Join a job bidding site like Elance where you can make money selling your services which could include writing, translation, technical or virtual assistant services.

3 Ways to Work at Home Writing For eHow.com

Are you making money yet with ehow? Here are three ways that writers can make cash from the ehow.com website.

All of these options have the potential for great earnings. You’ll probably have to pick one of these, though because you’ll be unable to use all three due to non-compete clauses. I have opinions on which program is best which I share below.

Good Option: Get Paid to Work With WRG

Writer’s Research Group is a writing company that will pay you to write eHow articles due to their contract with Demand Studios. I worked for them for several months in 2007 and ghostwrote about 70-80 articles for the eHow.com website. They were a professional company but it took me about 3 months to get my first pay. You can get paid to write how-to articles through them and they have other clients as well but whn you write for WRG but must sign a non-compete clause. Writers should be VERY careful about signing non-compete clauses as it can seriously hamper your earning potential in the future. If you’re not in the U.S, this can be a good option for you to earn money writing.

Better: Work With Demand Studios Directly

Demand Studios owns eHow.com and will pay writers to write directly for them. They have a self-serve system where you can claim titles and submit your own ideas and they pay weekly via PayPal. I was accepted into this program after I left WRG, but luckily realised I wasn’t really eligible due to being Canadian before I submitted my first article.

BEST: Passive Income With The eHow Writer Compensation Program

The eHow Writer’s Compensation Program (WCP) is a system that enables you to do revenue sharing by writing your own articles. You get to put your own name on them also so these are NOT ghostwritten. I’d love to make money this way but it’s for Americans only (at least for the moment.) You can still write on the program if you’re non-U.S but you won’t get paid directly.

It can be good for high profile clips or to help you promote your other websites. If you use it now and they open up beyond their borders later, you’d be set to earn some cash. Because this site is a highly ranked site, it can help you get a lot of traffic!

How much can you earn?

Demand Studios doesn’t divulge the % or formula so you’re writing similarly to writing for Google Adsense where they keep the formula secret to maintain the integrity of the system. The great thing about the eHow writer compensation program is that instead of writing and getting paid once, you can write something once and earn from it for ever and ever. You do need to write the right way in order to maximise your earning potential, though…

That means you’ll need to learn a bit about hot trends to write on subjects that have good earning potential and you’ll want to learn a bit about search engine optimisation (SEO) as well.

When I wrote for WRG, I wrote some titles that I’m sure would have earned me a lot of money had I written them for the writer’s compensation program instead. They are coming up in the search engines regularly near the top (or at the top) of Google’s results even today. I now know that the $10 per article I earned could have earned me hundreds of dollars by now.

Learn to Maximise the Writer’s Compensation Program’s Potential:

My writing friend MariaO’Brien wrote an ebook on how to make money through this program. She’s been doing it for several months and is making over $1,000 a month now from the program, mostly through residuals. The longer you do this, the less effort it takes because articles you wrote six months ago could be gaining momentum.

I just finished reading her e-book and highly recommend it! Check out the book. Maria has spent a lot of time perfecting her methods and shares those methods in this book.

The great thing about this program is that taking ten minutes to write an article now could earn you money indefinitely. I once wrote a blog post for a shared revenue blog that took me literally 2 minutes to write and since late 2006 it has been earning me $20-$30 a month in Google Adsense revenue ever since and I’m not even getting all the revenue from it! I can only daydream about how much I’d have earned by now if it were on ehow.com considering their high monetization and traffic results! That’s why this program is so awesome. You get to capitalise on e-how’s Google juice to get maximum exposure for your articles which could have some great results.

Make Money Writing Articles for Bukisa

Check out Bukisa. It’s another revenue-sharing earning program. I already write for their ArticlesBase website so already know that this company knows how to promote and monetize their site. They also have lighting fast response times to support issues which is important. I joined another article site lately and their support sucked so I haven’t bothered to go back.

Anyway, this site looks to have great potential and a multi-level referral program which makes the money making potential pot even sweeter. Check it out