Thursday, August 11, 2011

postheadericon Some other money making ideas, continued, continued!

On this fine day we will be trying out a fun new way to make money, a little program called zPag.es. I signed up at their site, and when once I clicked on the email link to verify my account I was brought to a fancy looking summary page with graphs and tables and what not it all looks a little bit confusing now but lets go ahead and find out what this program is all about.
Basically zPag.es has a little widget on their site that you enter a full length URL into, and it shortens it into a nice little URL like this one http://zpag.es/633P however there is another function to this, the link now contains a short ad that must be viewed before you are forwarded to your intended destination (you can click the above link to see exactly how it works, it just links back to this site.
Another option they offer is, instead of a full page ad you must wait for to proceed, you can have a banner ad over the top of the page you have linked, like this one http://zpag.es/633c.
So, now that we know how it works, how much money are we supposed to expect to make from this? Well here is a table from their site that might clear it up a bit for us:
From taking a quick glance at this table we can see that every 1000 page views generated you are paid between $0.50-3.00 for the full page ad or $0.06-1.00 for the banner ad. How much you are paid is dependent on which country your traffic is originating from.
Ok this all seems straightforward, but one of the most important things to check for is how often you can request a payment for all of your hard work. This particular program pays out solely through Paypal and only in increments of $20 or more which seems perfectly reasonable. 
While $3.00 for every 1000 page impressions may not seem like a lot, if you have a page that many people will want to access and you post this link on a social media site with many followers, or if you have maybe an e-book you want to sell you can make your customers access the purchasing of it through this link, the possibilities are endless. 
There is a pattern in all of these money making ideas and that is traffic. Traffic is the lifeblood of the internet and thus the lifeblood of our business, making money on the internet. I have been learning a lot about driving quality traffic to your website or blog and will be writing an article or a series of articles about this very soon.

Monday, August 8, 2011

postheadericon Some other money making ideas, continued!

So yesterday we talked about Fileserve, a program that pays you for people downloading files you have uploaded. Sort of a weird concept, but it seems like it could work, but now today we are looking at the next item on the list, Imagetwist (again that is a referral link, if you don't want to be referred for whatever weird reason just google it.)
Imagetwist is a program that pays you for having people view an image that you uploaded to their site. here is what it says under their "Earn money!" tab:
At first glance there are a few weird things I see, for example minimum payout is only $1.00? I hope that is not an indicator of the amount of money you will be making with this program! Also it says they will cover your Paypal fees, which sounds nice but I guess if you are only getting paid a dollar you would definitely need them to cover the fees because that would be half of your payout.
I cruised on over to their forum via the link at the top of their page and lo and behold they had just what I was looking for, there is a section of the forum labeled "Payment proof" how lucky!
Opening a few threads my suspicions became certainty as I saw amounts such as $1 to $5 payments everywhere, however there were a few $10 and $20 amounts in there, perhaps these were the "Power users."
So right of the bat it looks like this is going to be a low grossing venture but we will mess with it a little bit before giving it an official thumbs down. If you have some images you think you could make money on, sign up and give it a try you have really nothing to lose but your time! Don't forget to report back with your findings and tomorrow we will look at a program that pays you every time someone clicks a link leaving your site. 
pay per click
Sunday, August 7, 2011

postheadericon Some other money making ideas

Well after messing with eBay literally all day and all night, I decided to make this post about something a little different. I'm doing this not only because to be honest I'm pretty sick of eBay right now but because variety is the spice of life. For those of you looking forward to more eBay and drop shipping posts, don't worry there will be many, many more to come in the near future.

So today's topic, thanks to our friends at http://brothersblogs.blogspot.com/ I learned about a few different sites that will pay you for things like people downloading your files, or viewing your image. This sounds pretty interesting, lets see exactly how these sites work.

First on the list (we will review them in the order I found them in so nobody's feelings get hurt!) is Fileserve, and yes of course that is a referral link, if you don't want to be referred you can google it.

So how does Fileserve's program work? Apparently what you do is upload your files that you think other people would be interested in downloading up on their server, and for every 1000 downloads racked up for that file they pay you a set dollar amount based on the size of the file that was downloaded. Here is a screen cap of they payout table for clarity:

Well this seems pretty straightforward and everything but I have one question; What is Fileserve gaining for this? Well it turns out when people go to download your file, anonymous users must wait an amount of time before downloading but they offer a premium program with faster download speeds and no wait time etc. Apparently they make enough money from this and ad revenue to pay you for people downloading your files.

Unfortunately I can't imagine that I have anything that anyone would download, but I will think on it for a while. If you have something people might be interested go ahead and give it a try and report back.
Saturday, August 6, 2011

postheadericon Sorry for the wait, eBay post!

Well since my last post I have been working very hard research a new source of income on the internet. No doubt you've heard the story of eBay millionaires and maybe you want to get a piece for your own. From what I've found, the gold rush over there in auction land isn't quite what it used to be, it's now dominated by large volume selling power-sellers. However there seems to still be a bit of a profit available for small time drop-shippers. You may or may not have heard the term drop-shipper before but just so we are on the same level:
Drop shipping is a supply chain management technique in which the retailer does not keep goods in stock, but instead transfers customer orders and shipment details to either the manufacturer or awholesaler, who then ships the goods directly to the customer. As in retail businesses, the majority of retailers make their profit on the difference between the wholesale and retail price but some retailers earn an agreed percentage of the sales in commission, paid by the wholesaler to the retailer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drop_shipping

So basically, as a drop shipper, you will generally be purchasing  all of your good from china, plain and simple. China is notorious for having poor quality products and as a retailer that has no chance to inspect your merchandise this can be a little bit risky. Often you can order sample products from the manufacturer to see the quality before you sell it but that defeats the purpose of our quest, to make money, not spend it. One way around this is to make sure your Chinese manufacturer will accept returns. If you end up selling a crap product and your manufacturer does not have a good return policy, try to help your customer out, stop payment to the manufacturer and grant them a refund. We are trying to make money but not rip people off.

One way to get started drop shipping is to buy some products from Dealextreme. I have had no problems with them so far the only problem is, they are an aggregate which means they are basically a middle man turning a profit distributing these products. But for our purposes to get started we can use them.

Basically what you do at this point is look for products that you think would sell well on eBay and more importantly items you can turn a profit on. If you see something that is really cool looking, that you might even buy yourself and it seems really cheap, imagine what the price would be if you bought it in a traditional retail environment. Finally, scour eBay for any listings of the item, if there are none, list the item at the price you came up with. If there are already listings for your item, see if you can undercut the competition a little bit.

I'm going to play with it some more, I will report back with my findings. I suggest you do the same if you want to make some money!
Thursday, August 4, 2011

postheadericon Amazon's Mechanical Turk PART DEUX

Sorry if this post is lacking in a little bit of quality but to be completely honest my mind is absolutely numb from the last few hours of working on MTurk (this is the cool short way to say Mechanical Turk.)

Some people say they hate their job, well this is like a job that hates you. The tasks are absolutely soul crushing, I have never seen anything worse, seriously.

Here are a few examples of the tasks that I did:
Choose the best category for a product (Category Recommendation)
Write suggestions for tasks
Categorize the following business and capture their URLs
Moderate Tags for 5 Images - Magnum Photos

Out of all of those only one was halfway decent, the "Moderate Tags for 5 Images" was ok because you got to see some actually pretty interesting pictures, the ones I saw were from Iraq. Still, the task itself sucked, you  are required to go through all the tags for the image which about half were relevant and half were totally random and unrelated, so it ended up that instead of looking at the picture you were mostly reading random tags and their description. Also I earned $0.04 for 10 minutes worth of work on this task, not sure what that equals in dollars per hour but it doesn't seem worth it to even try and calculate.

All in all I'd have to say Amazon's Mechanical Turk just isn't for me. I'm probably going to work on it a little bit more and write a little bit more about it but if you'd like to try it here's the link: https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome
Give it a try and see if it is for you, apparently there are people out there that can do this kind of work, and you may be one of them.
On a positive note, Amazon is an awesome company and have always been reliable and their payment system is great so you at least don't have to worry about getting paid.
Wednesday, August 3, 2011

postheadericon Amazon's Mechanical Turk

Time for the my first post with actual content! Today I have decided to talk about a program from amazon called the mechanical turk. The Mechanical Turk is what is known as a crowdsourcing internet marketplace, and basically Requesters (employers basically) offer small to medium sized tasks for you to complete, each one having a different monetary reward.
A way Amazon is able to make sure Requesters get quality work is that they can only allow workers with certain qualifications.
As you make money with this program you are supposed to be able to buy products on amazon with your money earned, or transfer to a US only (sorry friends across the seas) bank account, which can be withdrawn as cash, or used however you like.
Unfortunately the Mechanical Turk is notorious for doling out simple repetitive tasks and has thus been dubbed a "virtual sweatshop."  Luckily I'm not one to complain about competitive work as long as the money is right. I'm going in, I'll let you all know how it went with my next post.

Monday, August 1, 2011

postheadericon First post!

I'm not entirely sure what this blog will consist of in the future, or how it may evolve, but everything requires that first step. After designing a template and trying to get it working correctly for the last few hours I have just about got it working 100% and now can no longer procrastinate making this dreaded first post.

I guess once you get a few words down it isn't so bad, right?

I have already tried several common internet money making ventures such as drop shipping on eBay (a nightmare for sure!) or answering text messages with answers quickly researched for pennies on the dollar (ChaCha, KGB) and many other small time gigs. What I really wish to accomplish with this blog is to find some money making opportunities that not everyone knows about, and actually have a decent work to pay ratio. So on top of reviewing common money makers I will be taking risks on some of the lesser known ventures so you can learn from my successes and mistakes.

Don't forget to follow me and come back for new posts every day!