Online Earnings

I have yet to complete my tax return this year - mostly because I am still waiting for my P11D from my 'day job' employers. Last year I completed most of my tax return whilst waiting impatiently for my P11D - this year I have done nothing yet as my paperwork has been tied up while I was redecorating. No excuses now, I can catch up with the revenue that I haven't recorded over the last two months, and I have my P60, although I am still waiting for the P11D.
I am less anxious this year because I know the P11D won't come very quickly, and the fact that I was delayed by redecorating has not bothered me at all. I have been really lax in recording income and expenditure since I closed the books for the financial year 2011-2012, in fact I don't think I have recorded anything since the start of April. It's time to dig out the paypal account and start recording all the transactions for the new financial year, although whether I shall get back into the habit of recording monthly income remains to be seen...

Spend, spend, spend...

I read an article the other day which spoke about the way in which we are so willing to spend on technology and it really rang true with me (although I don't go to the extremes with spending in this particular area). The writer was an IT professional, but was writing about his personal spend rather than work-related, and this is the gist of what he was saying, but from my own perspective:

The basic requirements of a home PC are email, word processing, spreadsheets and internet browsing and like many people, my adventures into full-blown PC ownership started between ten and fifteen years ago. My PC configuration of approx 13 years ago was something like this: An 8GB hard-drive partitioned into 4 x 2GB (!!!this was the factory settings!!!), 300MHz PII with 64MB RAM and Windows 95 with a dial-up 56k modem. This mighty machine cost £1200 ($2000).
Actually, I still have this PC (in bits) though nothing of the original is retained in the casing. I recently started a project to renew every part of the old machine just to see if I could do it. It now has a motherboard which cost £10 from eBay which has a CPU that runs at a mighty 500MHz, has 384MB RAM and a 20GB drive complemented by a 120GB drive (all bought from eBay) - the only thing still in use is the casing...

This ancient machine is my 'backup' in case of catastrophe, my main machine is a more respectable 1.6GHz, 2GB RAM with a 160GB drive and a 320GB drive with a 250GB external drive - To be fair this one was given to me, but without drives and with 512MB RAM. The point of all this is that once I am settled with a new PC, I start to look at how I can make it better. The reason for this is that PC's are expandable in all sorts of ways, and there is this desire to have the best spec available even though it may not be totally crucial. After all the main things that I use the PC for are email, word processing, spreadsheets and internet browsing IE. exactly what they were thirteen years ago. We seem happy to spend a LOT of money even though we have not really improved things a great deal. Admittedly money spent on broadband has seen some significant returns in the way the PC is now used, and hard drive size allows us to store huge amounts of data, our PC's run faster, but the bang-per-buck is very difficult to justify when you look at how much people (blokes in particular) actually spend on their PC's.

Now I am a skinflint, a meanie and a user of second-hand technology so to be fair I have probably spent less than most, and if I'm totally honest, I only really spend money that I have generated from internet earnings, so I feel justified... but the fact remains that we can pour money into these bottomless pits and feel that we are getting good value. This 'value' is distorted by the comparisons that we make.
Yesterday you may have had a total of 160GB hard-drive space, today you spent £80 and have a total of 66oGB hard-drive space. If you had waited for 6 months, you could have had the same thing for £30 probably... yet you still feel a sense of value because you can remember when a 500GB hard drive would have cost £500. I'm starting to think that maybe that is the crux of the matter, the fact that we place a value on something, then can see it get cheaper almost daily until we can resist no more and end up buying it, regardless of it's real value in terms of what it can offer us.

Of course, one of the reasons that you can get such a cheap hard-drive is that someone else has felt the call of a 1TB hard-drive (even though they don't need it..) and is prepared to sell off their 'previously enjoyed' 500GB drive to make room for the new shiny 1TB drive. Ebay is the driver behind this culture of replacing old with new and passing on the old so that it becomes new for the 'followers', the 'early adopters' are forging the way whether it be for components or for a complete PC. The idea that I can go out today and buy something for £300 that is far more powerful that the equivalent thing I bought for £1200 thirteen years ago is a compelling argument on it's own.. Do I need it? Well no, but it's ONLY £300...!

New Cashback site

Saving money and making money go hand-in-hand. For me, I decided to make sure that I was saving as much money as I could before I embarked on my making money projects. The return from saving money is immediate whereas making money takes a little longer. There are schemes set up to help you save money with everyday purchases and WePromiseTo Cashback is one of those schemes that has a radically open approach to saving you money. They say that they pass on 100% of the commission they get for referring you to a service, just taking the initial £5 (this is a UK service) that you save as their one-off fee. They can pay you directly into your bank or send you Amazon vouchers (with a 2% bonus) as payment.
You can get cash back on your car insurance, betting with paddypower, Amex or Goldfish credit cards, but opportunities to get cashback are not limited to online buying, off-line purchases can qualify for cashback too.
Looking at some of the offers I might be interested in, I was particularly interested in the 3% cashback on Tesco wines by the case, and even better 5% cashback from Majestic wine. Right next to those offers are some for chocolate retailers, so I’m pretty much covered…
With a little work, you should be able to shave some money of your regular bills by searching through the site to find the best offers on goods and services that you are already using anyway… It’s free to join, so nothing to lose.

Making money

Lately I have been looking into more schemes to achieve what many of us are aiming for ie. to make money online. I have posted about the sort of things that I do personally, but there are a whole load of other types of schemes that although I don't do them myself, are equally viable ways to make money online. There are the schemes that pay you to sign up for something and those that offer cashback incentives for products that maybe you were going to buy anyway. I have said before that saving money is equally as important as making money, there is no point making loads if you are not careful what what you have.
So keep an eye on future posts for schemes that are available for making legitimate income or genuine savings online..

Blogsvertise - investigation

One scheme I have been able to make use of is Blogsvertise. Like Creamaid, they have offered opportunities to younger than 90-day-old blogs, but the number of opportunities seems limited. No doubt if this blog had been older or other criteria had been met, more opportunities would have been forthcoming. I completed a couple of assignments and cash was allocated to me and then paid out a month later. However, the last post that I completed is still awaiting acceptance after three weeks…. The post has not been rejected, yet it remains in limbo and unpaid as yet.
I have received newsletters from Blogsvertise about lots of new opportunities and better payments, but so far I have received no new opportunities whilst this last entry remains ‘unapproved’.
My overall impression of Blogsvertise is that it pays moderately (better than Creamaid if we ignore the unproven Creamaid referral fee scheme), and that the system is easy to use. Unlike Creamaid, but like most of the rest of these schemes, you login to your account with a password and see if there are ‘offers’ waiting for you. You have a few days to accept or reject the offer (if you should feel that you can’t do the task for some reason). Once the task is complete, you submit the URL of your post and wait for your entry to be approved – normally this is done within a day or so…
As far as rewards go, you can see the earnings in my monthly earnings review – March is here… April will be done soon.
To be specific, the Creamaid posts pay one, two or maybe three dollars in the main with varying amounts for referrals. There are exceptions, but this has been my experience so far – you will have to follow future posts to find out if the referrals amount to anything at all, but I have not noticed a huge amount of posts being submitted AFTER mine, so I can have very few if any referrals at all. I learned later that you can have offers emailed to you. To get in right at the beginning of a big campaign would be the best way to get referrals, and the best way to discover new campaigns is to get email notification.
I will have more to say about Creamaid in the fullness of time.

Blogsvertise pay from around four to six dollars in the main, again better rewards have been mentioned, but in my experience, the offers I have received have been in the four to six dollar region.

March 2007 earnings

Well, here it is then, the truth about paid to blog...

My first report has included income from MyLot, this took a long time to accrue, and is NOT a recommended way to make decent amounts of money... I managed to get three jobs from Blogsvertise , but no new jobs for a while now... and one job from Creamaid - I completed two jobs for them, but the latest one has not been accepted as yet - after I had done all the hard work, I think the job got over-subscribed and they may not have needed my offering - this is the down-side of Creamaid... the upside is that they pay more or less instantly, hence I have been able to cash out US$2.00..... All the rest of the payments should get processed on the dates above, so next months 'cashed out' should look a bit healthier. I have some more schemes to check out and am working my way up to the magic 90 days which is a requirement for a couple of different paid to blog opportunities to kick in.

I will keep a running total and post a link to it on the blog for future reference, and I plan to diligently report every month so that visitors can get an idea of earnings. I really hope to make some progress on the earnings front over the next couple of months.

I kicked off Adsense as the adverts it was showing were irrelevent to my site and went with bidvertsiser instead - big news here is that they will pay out at $10 rather than $100, so there is just a chance that I might earn something - I reinstated Adsense as a link bar at the top of the page, but it remains to be seen whether this is a viable way of advertising. I did earn a little from adsense before I removed the 'skyscraper advert', presumably on the odd ocassions when the adverts matched the content...

Is it possible to make money online?

When I first saw this question in a forum, it was actually phrased more like ‘Can I make lots of money online?’, and I guess the important question for a lot of people is ‘Can I make a living’, or more often: ‘Can I make a decent second income?’. My first reaction to the question of whether there was money simply waiting to be made online was ‘Surely not!’ I went on to say that if you wanted to make decent amounts online, you would have to really work hard at it. In the main, I think that this answer still stands up, but I am coming to the conclusion (I am one of those who has to see it work, before I will advocate it..) that actually there IS money to be made, and PAID TO BLOG is one of those opportunities. If you live in a place where the USD is very strong currency, and incomes are relatively low, then you probably can make a relatively decent income online, and if you live in the West, you may be able to make a small second income without devoting ALL your spare time…
I retain the view that if you want to make a legitimate living online, you will probably need to put at least as much effort into it as you would in a regular job, and I suspect that in reality, you would have to work harder. The upside is that if you do the groundwork, you may be able to establish a base that provides an income from less effort as you get better at it. The reality is though, if you have that sort of energy, you will be spurred on to achieve more and if spending more time with the kids was the plan, you might be better off with a 9 to 5.
How is the money made then? Simply by making a website that is very attractive to a lot of internet users and cashing in on it’s popularity… It IS that simple, but getting to the pinnacle of popularity is very hard work and you really need to know how the internet really works. In the recent past a site (at least in the UK) offering mobile phone (cell-phone) ring-tones would be the type of thing that would attract a lot of attention for example. At the moment, a blog well-placed in the blogging community can achieve phenomenal traffic – and can be put together for free!
How do you make money from your traffic? Tip: It’s all about advertising – there are several schemes on the internet that will offer you cash for hosting their adverts (Google Adsense, Ad-brite etc…), and there are schemes who will pay you fixed amounts for you to write an entry in your blog which promotes or at least mentions their product or service - this is PAID TO BLOG (payperpost, blogsvertise, creamaid etc...). One other legitimate way to raise revenue that may be worth considering once your site is up and running, is the selling of ‘e-books’. There are loads of e-books out on the web, these are basically home-produced documents in electronic format. If you have some good ideas that you think might be useful to someone, you can write it up on your PC in MS WORD, convert it into an Adobe Acrobat (PDF) document and offer it for sale again and again and again…The easiest way to do this would be through a pay-pal account accessed directly from your website, you can charge whatever you think the market will allow or you could offer them for sale or auction on e-bay.
Getting your site to be popular is the Holy Grail of internet activity, proving to be a moving target as Google and other search engines develop their search-bots to constantly prevent you from developing a formula which guarantees popularity. The best way remains developing networks and gathering ‘votes’ in the form of visitors and links to your site – all very time-consuming, but once you have it, the opportunities for your ‘non-active’ money-spinners (ie. stuff that doesn’t actually take you any time or effort to speak of) such as advertising revenue and e-book sales takes off…
In conclusion then – Can you make big bucks online? Yes if you are prepared to put the effort in – the majority of us will make do with the ‘pocket money’ earnings that are far easier to achieve.