In most cases, the more money being offered for the survey, the more money YOU have to invest. What does this all mean? Well, many sites say advertise $10, $20 or even more payments to complete surveys. I question these sites on the term “survey”.

Most of these “surveys” are actual what I would call “offers”. They usually include joining some type of membership where you have to pay a monthly fee (e.g. Book clubs, movie clubs, etc.). Sometimes there are legitimate free trial offers or low cost trial offers that may seem interesting. In all these cases, you must submit a credit card. The catch to these offers is that you must remember to cancel BEFORE the end of the trial or your credit card will be charged. I have tried a few fo these offers with much success. However, I am very careful to read all the fine print and cancel on time so that I am not charged. Bottom line, you will not make a fortune off of doing simple surveys.

So, what does all this have to do with the title of this article? You may not make a huge amount of money doing surevys, but you can make some easy and fast money. One survey site I would highly recommend is Light Speed Panel. This site sends several surveys a month. Each survey is usually worth 75 or 150 points. Points can be redeemed for gift cards or money straight to your PayPal account. I found it took about 5 surveys completed in a little over a month to make $5 in my PayPal account. Although this does not seem like a lot of money, the time I spent making it was minimal and easy. I found the surveys on this site to be quick, easy, and enjoyable. So, if you enjoy doing surveys and want to make a quick $5 in your PayPal account, I would highly recommend joining this site. If you are a member of InboxDollars you can sign up for Light Speed Panel through your InboxDollars account and earn $0.50.

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We’ve had a busy month! For those of you wondering where we’ve been, well, we’ve been here. It’s just been “one of those months” for us. Busy at home with our son… Busy with life… Busy at work…

Do you find yourself wishing that you didn’t have to worry about your “day job” so that you could concentrate entirely on making some serious money online? We’re headed there, are you?

One thing that we’ve learned is that you need to be deliberate with your time. Let’s face it, time isn’t going to fall into your lap! If you’ve got kids, work, a spouse… a life… you’re not going to have much free time.

Follow a Leader
Being deliberate with your time also means having a plan. If you’re like me, it’s easy to get sucked into spending a lot of time on really small details that have little payoff or you just don’t know exactly what you should be focusing on to get the most out of your time. This is when it’s important to learn from someone that you trust who’s been making money online for a while now — a true pro.

Jim Cockrum is the “man with the plan”. He’s been making money online full-time for years now. His book, Silent Sales Machine has just been updated for 2008 and provides you with an up-to-date plan for you to follow. Whether you want to sell products on eBay, build up your mailing list, or create your own eBook, this book has a plan for you to follow.

Whether you want to make some extra income on autopilot — which is very smart in today’s economy — or go at it full time, Silent Sales Machine is going to help you spend your most valuable resource — time — most effectively by giving you a road map to follow.

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photo credit: Marc Shandro

Starting out on a quest to make some money on the internet can be stressful.  What method should you use to make money?  If you need a web site, how should it look?  Who will create it?  Most importantly, how do you get people to go to the web site?

Good SEO — Search Engine Optimization — is a must if you don’t have a lot of money to spend promoting your website.  It allows your site to appear high up in the searches returned by the Google’s and Yahoo!’s of the world for specific keywords or phrases.

A cool web design will do you absolutely no good if no one finds it!

We found a great (and free) report on search engine optimization that covers the basics of good SEO.  This free SEO reportdoes require you to sign up for the author’s newsletter.  However, we haven’t been disappointed that we signed up.  The author of the report, Josh Spaulding, has some good stuff that he sends out.  He has a  free report on the process he uses to create web pages that make $5/day using Google AdSense.  We’re trying this out and will report what we find later.

 If you need to know more about how to get more traffic to your site, go download the free report.  You won’t be disappointed.

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photo credit:
gierszewski

When I decided to take leave from work to stay home with my son, I wanted to explore making money online at home. In doing some research, one avenue I found that I thought was interesting was survey taking. So, I searched on “paid surveys” and got back countless numbers of sites offering paid surveys online. I visited as many websites as I could. Some required fees to join and get a database of all surveys. I stayed away from any requiring fees, but started signing up for all the free survey sites I could find. After all, every site I read recommended signing up for as many sites as possible to increase your chance of making more money. Here are the things I discovered from this:

• Many of the survey sites required a lot of time to complete surveys with little payout or just an entry into a sweepstakes
• Many began sending me spam emails
• Many were simply just sites recommending other survey sites

It all became really confusing and started filling up my inbox. I found that I was spending time on emails and sites that led to little to nothing instead of focusing my time on the survey sites that I found most beneficial to me. I had to stop and take some time to really evaluate each survey site and determine which ones worked best for me. I wanted to help others avoid the same issues I had starting out, so I have decided to write a series of articles highlighting different sites that I have found to be a good return on investment of my time. In each article I will outline the main features of the survey site and provide recommendations on using the site based on my own experience.

The first survey site is InboxDollars. This site is a great way to generate some extra cash. You are credited $5 just for signing up. Once you are on the site, there are several ways to make more money. After you reach $30 in earnings, you can request a check be sent to you. Following are all the ways you can make money from this site:

1. First, you can take surveys. Each survey that you qualify for and take pays you $0.50. You may spend several minutes answering questions to determine if you qualify for a survey.
2. There are many special offers that pay you various amounts. Some offers are 100% free, some are trial offers, and others will require some investment. Keep in mind that most trial offers request credit card information and will automatically bill you once the trial offer is over unless you have cancelled your account prior to the offer expiring.
3. You can earn cash back for shopping online through InboxDollars. The cash back usually ranges from 1-18%. I have noticed that most fall within 3-4%. There are a large variety of stores and many highly recognizable names such as Kohls, ToysRUs, Amazon, and many more. Use a credit card with reward points or cash back option to make even more.
4. You can also earn money through cash games. I have no interest in paid online gaming, so I am not as familiar with this option. Keep in mind that this option is NOT free. You also need to set up a separate account. The payout for this is typically for every $1 you spend you will earn approximately $0.05 on your InboxDollars account.
5. Lastly, the site pays you for just reading emails. Typically you will receive 2 or 3 emails a day. Some days you may receive more. You make only a couple of cents reading these emails, but it takes less than a minute to read each one.

If you are interested in signing up or learning more, click here. I highly recommend checking out this opportunity. Because this site offers so many ways to make money, I feel you earn more at a faster rate than sites just promoting surveys.

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How much does it cost?

It’s $97 right now. This seems like quite a bit. With a single income and a family of three, we don’t have a whole lot of disposable income. However, we would have made this back on our first site in a month or two. The fact that you can create as many sites as you like, makes it more attractive at that price.

How hard is it to set up?

We have friends who aren’t “techies” and who have never put up a web site before, putting up multiple BANS sites.

Aren’t you just trying to make money off of the BANS software?

Yes. But we wouldn’t recommend it or promote it if we didn’t think it would help you make money online. We’re doing it. We aren’t getting rich off of it anytime soon, but the fact that you can put up a site and then make money off of it while you’re setting up your next site is a really great thing.

If a site makes us $50 per month, we’ll put up 100 of them in a year or so. That’s $5,000 a month. Not bad money in our opinion. Anyway, that’s the theory. Stay tuned to see if we get there or not.

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photo credit: TW Collins

The first affiliate program that we became part of was the eBay affiliate program. This program allows us to create a web site that features eBay auctions and receive anywhere from 50% on up to 75% commission on eBay revenue.

There are two ways that you can make money as an eBay affiliate:

• Get people to sign up for eBay. You get $25 for each person that joins eBay by clicking a link on your site and then goes on to buy an item or win an auction on eBay in the next 30 days.

• Get people to win eBay auction items from your site. You get up to 75% of what eBay makes on the auction. So, if your site is showing current listings for widgets and someone places a winning, $20 bid on a widget from your site, you would get anywhere from about $1.15 to $1.72 (50% - 75% of about $2.30). The percentage that you get depends on how much you have sold from your site. We’re still in the 50% range.

How Much Can You Make?

This doesn’t seem like much, but we’ve actually seen it add up to a couple hundred dollars since we launched our first site in January - Low Price Drums. Since then, we’ve also launched Morgan Dollars Online, Low Price Bass (bass as in guitars, not the fish) and Huskers-Gear.com. We’ve been fairly successful with the new sites as well.

Since I’m in IT, I was able to write the code necessary to get the auction information from eBay. If you’re into creating web sites and working with programming languages like PHP or Java, eBay has some very good examples that you can use to implement this into your site.

If you’re not into writing code or creating your own web sites, fear not! There are a couple of things that you can do to start out:

• If you have an existing site, eBay provides you with a tool that allows you to build a display that you can place right on your existing web site.

• If you don’t even have a web site you can use BANS. BANS stands for “Build A Niche Store”. It’s software that you can buy in order to set up your own web site and display eBay auction items. Here is our affiliate link for the software - BANS software. Again, we don’t use this software, but we know of quite a few people who do and they were able to set up multiple sites. They have also been happy with the support that they have received from the company as well.

Steps To Get Started Making Money

1. Sign up to become an eBay affiliate. Go to http://www.ebaypartnernetwork.com to sign up. It’s free. They also have a lot of the tools that you can use to get started listing auctions on your web site. You will also be signing up with someone like Commission Junction which manages a host of other companies offering affiliate programs that you might be interested in as well (Edit: eBay is taking over the management of their affiliate program from Commission Junction).
2. Think of a niche that has potential. It maybe something you know a lot about. Maybe you want to create a site about collecting antiques. You could display antique auctions on a site with a lot of articles about collecting antiques.
3. Create your site. Again, if you’ve never created a web site — and don’t care to learn how — we’d really recommend the BANS software.
4. Once you’ve got the site up and running. Promote it by writing articles. Write an article about collecting the antiques that you have on your site and then place a link in the article. Submit it to sites like EzineArticles and GoArticles.
5. Repeat — the BANS software can be used for an unlimited number of sites.

Conclusion

All of this may be overwhelming to some of you just starting out. Don’t worry, it was a bit overwhelming to us at first too. You’ll learn as you go and have fun doing it. It’s fun to see more and more people coming to your site (more on how to track visitors to your site on a later post).

We give the eBay affiliate program our recommendation. We won’t be able to retire by the end of the year, but we are bringing in a pretty good income doing this. If you find a good niche, you could easily see a four or five figure yearly income — eBay states that their top 50 affiliates have averaged $1 million a year.

If you have any questions or things that you’d like us to clarify, don’t hesitate to let us know!

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Welcome to our blog! We are a real couple with real jobs — Ryan is in IT and Bri is staying at home to take care of our son for the time being. As with any single-income family, it can get a bit tight.

The Beginning

In November of 2007, we decided to look at alternative ways of making money — Internet Marketing/Affiliate Marketing/Making Money Online, whatever you want to call it. We have a friend — who we’ll reveal at a later time — who’s been incredibly successful at it. If it weren’t for him, we probably wouldn’t even be looking at this stuff as a viable way to make money.

We’re a bit cynical about a lot of the products that are out there. We don’t know what can get us on our way to making some serious money and what is just a waste of money… but we’re determined to find out.

So What is This Blog About?

Looking on the web, it seems like there are a lot of people making money online and everyone has a product — or five — that they will sell you. We don’t have any products to sell — we might later — but we don’t right now. Right now, we’re just checking some different things out. We’ve found some things that have already provided us with some extra income and we’ll tell you about those in later posts.

Our goal is to provide honest reviews about products that we find helpful. Unless we find an all-out scam, I don’t think we’ll provide any real negative reviews about a product, we’ll just keep it positive. In those reviews, you may see some links to go buy the product that appear to be affiliate links — links that provide us with a residual if you buy the product. We will do our best to let you know if we make money off of any product that we’re reviewing. We promise not to be biased in our reviews in order to make money.

If you’re just starting out in making money online and don’t know where to start, feel free to check us out. We can take this journey together.

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