Get Paid to Read More Email

At the end of every month I look at what's been happening with my PTRs (Paid to Read programs) and make any adjustments that might be necessary. If I'm not earning enough to make membership worthwhile, I'll either decide to put more effort in, or quit.

This month has been reasonably good. Not a lot of payments, but a few. Enough that I could buy a few things on eBay, purchase a few ads, etc. All the programs I listed in my last PTR entry did fine. I didn't earn as much as I could've from Avant-Cash and HaulingCash, but only because they sent more emails than I could find the time to read.

I'll add a new program to the list of those that I recommend -- BeeHiveMail. Edited on 18 Mar 2007: This program is no longer recommended. In fact, it's completely disappeared. Good riddance.

That's about the only new program I've found to recommend, but hopefully I'll find a few more soon. I joined several that seemed promising, but they just can't seem to find enough advertisers to get going.

One new thing I tried this month was buying some referrals. I've never thought much of the idea of paying people to join your downline, but in this case, I won an auction for 5 signups in the program of my choice for $0.99 so I thought I'd give it a try. If I make more than $1 in referral earnings, then I guess it was worth it.

Recharging Regular Alkaline Batteries

When my kids got old enough to have a lot of toys that required batteries (we managed to avoid too many battery-powered baby toys), I bought a battery charger and rechargeable batteries of all sizes. And apart from a few more lost batteries than I'd expected (who knew a three-year-old would be so determined to remove up to four screws just to remove a battery cover and lose the batteries???), it's worked brilliantly.

But if I hadn't already purchased a ridiculous number of rechargeable batteries, I think I'd just have to this Alkaline Battery Charger from BatteryXTender. For $40 for the charger, you can reduce the cost of buying batteries by well over 50%.

If you go through batteries the way we do, that's some serious saving.

Star Wars Revelations

Star Wars Revelations is a low-budget fan film with high production values. I haven't seen it yet (its a 260Mb download and I'm hoping it'll be available as a torrent soon) but I've heard its really good. It's around 40 minutes long and has everything you'd expect in a Star Wars movie -- space battles, lightsaber duels and everything.

You can read more about it, and download it, at the Star Wars Revelations website.

RoboMaid -- a great gift idea for under $20

My little brother got married recently and, as young couples do these days (so I'm told), he and his wife worked out a fair and equitable system for sharing the housework. One of the things on his list was sweeping the floors, so he immediately bought a couple of these RoboMaid robotic sweepers. He says the things work brilliantly, and I think they're also a great gift idea.

A RoboMaid sweeper is an electronic ball that randomly rolls around the room, inside a hat-shaped sweeper. It picks up dirt, dust, hair etc. from all sorts of smooth floor surfaces like tile, wood, and linoleum. It has a timer, so you set it for enough time to clean the room, and RoboMaid will automatically shut itself off. Its not a particularly bright robot, so it won't find its way back to its recharger, but it gets the job done, and is a bargain for 10 bucks.

I think they're a great gift for the laugh factor alone, but when RoboMaid proves its usefulness, it won't end up being "regifted" on eBay like so many other gifts seem to do these days.

You can find RoboMaid at Shop.com for $10.00 + $7.99 s/h

Get Paid to Read Email

While there are big companies like MyPoints and EmailCash that essentially operate as multi-store shopping rewards programs, there are also a lot of small one-person sites that pay their members to read email ads (PTRs). The most important thing to remember about these sites is that they're not big companies, they're a guy named Dave or work-from-home Mom named Stacy. A lot of them have no experience running a business, know little or nothing about marketing and advertising, and add 2 + 2 and get 5. And they're operating in a seriously overcrowded market with razon-thin margins, so most of them end up going broke really fast.

But there are a few who have managed to be successful, or at least managed to keep going. A lot of their success is based on the fact that they've managed to make enough advertising sales to keep their members interested. Usually, that means search engine advertisers. For members, that means instead of seeing ads for interesting products and services, they get ads for search engines. Not big search engines like Google or Yahoo! Search, but little search engines who's owners get paid every time somebody makes a search.

So if you join any PTRs, be prepared to visit a lot of search engine pages.

Over the last few years, I've joined hundreds of PTRs. To be honest, most of them aren't worth the time it takes to sign up. But I've found a few that are ok. They're run by hardworking, professional people and if you do what you're asked to do -- read the email, click a link and visit the advertisers website until a timer expires -- you'll be paid.

If you want to give it a try, I suggest you start with these:

• Avant-Cash
• BeezyClickin
• Disco-Dollars -- No longer recommended this PTR (30 June, 2005).
• HaulingCash
• HeavenlyEmail

Actually, I no longer recommend ANY of these programs. I'll try to put together a new list of recommended programs (they change over time) and link to it from here. -- 28/09/2006

How much can you earn? Not as much as you could flipping burgers. Maybe $10-20 a month. Not enough to pay the mortgage, but its a start. You can earn more by getting referrals -- people who join the program using your special affiliate link.

To give you an idea of potential referral earnings, let's say you get 100 people to join a program. If that program pays you 15% referral earnings, then instead of earning $1 a month at that program, you could make $16 ($1 + ($1 x 15% x 100).

When I'm looking at a PTR and trying to decide whether I want to join or not, I don't worry too much about referral earnings. It's a nice bonus, but to me, if a program isn't worth joining for what you can earn without referrals, then it's not worth joining at all.