Get Paid to Be Organized

OK, nobody's really going to pay you to get yourself organized, but I do believe it will pay off in the end. I'm a fairly organized person, and I've been earning online for so long now that I've got a pretty good routine. But a friend of mine mentioned that, while it was easy to read emails, she felt she was missing out on a lot of other earning opportunities simply because she'd forget to do them. So I've been thinking about things that could help her organize her 'Get Paid' activities better.

One thing that has helped me a lot is an application called ThePaidHelp. It is really useful for keeping track of your Paid to Read accounts. It tracks your earnings, your referrals, you payment requests, it creates charts, and will even let you compare two or more PTRs. It's great if you're a member of more than just a handful. I tried it free for 7 days, and was more than happy to buy it when the free trial was over.

If you don't buy ThePaidHelp, I strongly advise that you work out a system for tracking your different programs. Before I bought ThePaidHelp, I had a notebook with a page for each program, with major details of the program, my username and password, etc. Other people use spreadsheets, screenshots, etc. Whatever works, but I think everybody should use something.

Something else I was thinking might help is some kind of reminder system. My wife uses the Tasks tool in Outlook. I'm also going to try the Mozilla Calendar -- it's available for the Mozilla Application Suite, Firefox, Thunderbird, or as a standalone application called Sunbird.

And I've found some websites that offer free email reminders services, so I'll sign up with a few of those and see how well they work. They include RememberIt, RememberTo, Free-Minder, and RemindTime.

And I'll download and test a couple of different applications that put electronic versions of 'sticky notes' on your computer called TurboNote+ and Post-it Software Notes.

'Get Paid' Goals for July

I think it's important to set goals, so I thought I'd post my 'Get Paid' Goals for July.

Earning over $30 from PTRs this month was one of my best ever. With most paid email ads only worth 1/4 to 1/2 cent, it takes a while for it to add up. Several of those payments were from programs that have taken months to earn the minimum request, and after getting paid, I quit several of them. So I don't think PTR payments for July will be as much. My goal for PTR payments is $7.50. I've checked my stats and I think that's entirely reachable.

I've got some content writing assignments that I'll finish next month, and I should get paid $70 for those, so I'll add that to the 'Get Paid' total. And I requested a payment from PureProfile, so that'll be another $25.00.

All together, that's a goal of $102.50 in payments.

My other 'Get Paid' goals for July include:

• Join 5 programs from my list of 'Search-Free PTRs' -- I'm getting really tired of ads for search portals.
  
• Write and post at least 2 new reviews at ePinions.
  
• Use $20 of my June earnings to buy ads -- and make a profit.
  
• Get at least 10 pages of the FreeCashSpace website online.

That ought to be enough to keep me busy!

More Payments This Week

Wow, it looks like this is a good week for payments. In addition to the earlier payments a few days ago, I also got these:

BeeHiveMail: $1.16
SendMeCash: $0.26
BeezyClickin: $6.09
Total: $7.51

Weekly Total: $11.29

Monthly Total: $32.18

It hasn't all been good news, though. I quit a couple of programs today including one because the owner hasn't been heard from in almost a month. No worries as far as that program was concerned, but she also owns one of my favorite programs, Disco-Dollars. For now, I'm removing Disco from my list of recommended PTRs.

Payments This Week

I think I'll try to make these payment updates a regularly weekly thing. This week, they included:

ItPaysToLearn: $0.26
ClassicalMail: $0.50
MailingMoney4U: $3.02
Total: $3.78

The payment from IPTL was for verifying my PayPal account. I sent them $0.01, they sent me back $0.26 -- and now they know I have a valid PayPal account, and that at least according to PayPal, I am who I say I am. Win-win.

The payment from ClassicalMail was for about 2 weeks 'work'. Most, if not all, of the ads they send are for fairly useless PPC search engines, and at one point there was talk that they wouldn't pay members who weren't doing enough valid searches. If I find out that's true, I'll quit, but so far they've paid me quickly, with no hassles.

And finally, the payment from MM4U has been a looooong time coming. I joined this program on 9 April, 2003 and finally earned enough to request payment this week. It took me 8 months to earn the last dollar I needed to request a $3 payment. I was paid quickly and courteously, and then I deleted my account. Nothing against MM4U or it's owner, but it just wasn't for me.

I've still go a few other payment requests pending, and hopefully I'll receive the payments in the next couple of weeks. I'm also only 10 cents short of the $25 minimum balance needed to request a payment from PureProfile, and I've been getting heaps of surveys from them, so it shouldn't take long before they deposit another payment into my bank account. They've really picked up lately, and for the last 4 months, I've been averaging earnings of around $5.50 for doing 3 or 4 surveys each month. Sweet!

Free Game

There are a lot of free games available, and I like to keep a collection of links handy. You never know when you're going to need to kill 15 minutes.

Here's a submarine shoot-em-up game I found today called Alpha Blue. Score: 6.5/10

Another site with a bunch of games is FreeOnlineGames.

Free Music from Amazon.com

Free MP3s from Amazon.com? Sure! Amazon has new MP3s that you can download for free every day. You can listen to a 30 second sample to see if you like it, and if you do you can download the entire song for free. And of course if you want the whole CD, you can buy it. And if you're a regular use of Amazon's a9.com search engine, you get a 1.57% discount on any Amazon.com purchase.

To get a list of all free MP3s available at Amazon each day, subscribe to this RSS feed from Paul Cowan's funkwit.com site:

Amazon.com latest free downloads.

Not familiar with RSS feeds? Here's a great c|net article that explains what they are and how to use an RSS reader to read them:

How to...read RSS feeds

The Wikipedia has a good list of RSS feed readers -- they call them 'news aggregators':

List of News Aggregators

If you've never used an aggregator before, give it a try. It'll totally change the way you surf the web.

Joining Spree

Yep, I did it. I went on a bit of a joining spree, and signed up for a bunch of new programs. Before I've the process of dumping a bunch of old ones. Sometimes I just can't help myself. Some have been around for a while, and I've been meaning to join. Others are new, and were impulse sign-ups.

Some of the new programs include:

ScreenRotator -- a new traffic exchange with a twist -- you can earn credits running a screensaver.

StormOfCash -- this one's been around for a while, but never really made onto my radar. Today, for whatever reason, it did. (Note: This program has recently been sold to a known scammer. My advice is to stay away from it.

MailerMart -- absolute impulse sign-up. But they're a no-min (no minimum amount required for payment) so I'll see how it goes. UPDATE: After a week I've decided to cancel my membership at MailerMart. Nothing wrong with it, just not for me.

ItPaysToLearn -- I've been meaning to join this program forever, and today I finally did it! You can earn cash and points from reading emails and doing quizzes! I love it!

I also joined a few more paid survey programs -- mostly Australia-only ones.

More Payments

Just a quick update on payments:

• BeeHiveMails: $1.14
  
• HeavenlyEmail: $3.22
  
• Total: $4.36
  

Every little bit helps. Neither of those payments was requested, so I got a nice surprise when I checked the balance in my PayPal account.

Mark Cuban on Success and Motivation

After reading this post by Mark Cuban at blog maverick, I've been thinking about success and failure. And in particular, about how fear can be such a big barrier to success. A lot of people don't like to talk about, or acknowledge fear, but for many of us, fear is a big part of our lives.

Fear of failure. Fear of ridicule. Fear of confrontation. Fear of risk. Fear of self-disclosure. Fear of success. These are all fears that can immobilize us, stop us from trying -- even when the negative results of failure are minimal.

As Cuban says, if you get it right once and achieve success, the failures won't matter much. Babe Ruth, Reggie Jackson, and Sammy Sosa all held the record for most strike-outs in a season more than once in their career. But they're much better remembered for being being home run hitters -- they're all in the All-Time Top 10.

Successes tend to be proportionately related to attempts. The more often you try -- including the times you try and fail -- the more successes you'll end up achieving. In most cases, failure isn't a total disaster. Success should be your goal, but fearing failure to the point where you don't even try achieves nothing.

One way to deal with a fear of failure is to look at it for what it is. What specifically are you afraid of? What will happen if you fail? Once you've figured that out, it's often possible to get rid of the fear, or at least go on in spite of it. It's not always easy to do that, but just because it's not easy doesn't mean it isn't worth trying.

New Host

I finally decided it was time to move the freecashspace.com website to a new host. The old host was OK, but I've been using another hosting service for some other websites, and decided it was time to get all my sites on one host. In the end, I've decided to rearrange things a bit, so there may be some broken links or other screw-ups until I get everything sorted out.

I might as well give a plug to the 'new' host. The company is called Cubic Hosting and I've been using them for a year or so now, and I've got absolutely no complaints. I particularly recommend them to anybody interested in building their first website. Cubic will give you 50Mb of space with just about everything you need to get started, for $12 a year. Not $12 a month. An entire year of hosting. Another $7 to $9 for the domain name registration, and you're all set to go for around $20. That's a sweet deal!

Or if you'd like to build the website before you pay for the domain name and hosting, you can use a free host like FreeWebs.com, Geocities or Bravenet. Then when you're ready to move to a full-featured website of your own, you can sign up at Cubic and move your website onto your own domain.

Search-Free Paid To Read Programs

Here's a list of Paid to Read programs that do NOT send search ads:

5StarPromotions - member since 24 June 2005
Boonz
CashFold
CTMailSolutions
EarningByEmail
EmailsForMoney2
Fantasy-WorldMails
GloballyPaidEmail
HalloweenPTR
HistoricalWanderingsPTR
Hits4Pay
InboxDollars
ItPaysToLearn - member since 17 June 2005
KoolahClicks
LillythsMagickMails
MesmerizingMails - member since 5 Jan 2005
MesmerizingMails2
MSClicks
NewGenerationPTR
NoBannerZone
NovemberTears
OurPTR2
PartyTimeClicks
PTParty
Searchers-Haven
SendEarnings
ShareLoot
Shocking-Results
The Kerosene Cucumber -- member since 30 July 2005
VerifiedClicks -- member since 30 July 2005
WanderingElfEmails
WeAllGetPaid
WolfEmails

Paid to Search? Absolutely not!

If you join a few Paid to Read programs one thing you'll notice is that the quality and variety of ads often leaves a lot to be desired. Instead of ads for Apple, Foot Locker, or Starbucks or even online companies such as Amazon, eBay, Google, or NetFlix, what you tend to get at PTRs are ads for PPC (Pay Per Click) Search Engines.

In fact, with many PTRs, if you don't have 'Search' (or some variation) selected as an interest in your member preferences, you may not get any emails at all. So what's the story with all the search engines?

Here's how it works. Somebody buys a set of scripts that let's them create their own PPC Search Engine. Then they partner with other search engines that provide them with search results through what's called a search 'feed.' In some cases, the search engine website you're visiting gets results from a number of different 'feeds', and these feeds may go through a number of layers (sometimes called 'tiers') until somewhere in the whole process there's actually a somebody who gets the money from advertisers in the form of 'bids' for specific keywords.

Big search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Overture make money from these kinds of keyword bids, and other companies use the same technique. The difference is that these other companies then use a form of multi-tiered affiliate networking to get more search traffic for the keywords their advertisers have purchased.

So Joe of joeswidgets.com might bid 50 cents for the keyword 'widget' at ABCDSearch.com. This means Joe pays 50 cents every time somebody visits his website after searching for 'widget' and clicking on the link in the ABCDSearch results. And to get more search traffic, ABCDSearch offers to 'feed' its search results to other PPC search engines, and pay them 40 cents every time one of their users clicks on Joe's link. And then those search engines offer to pay other search engines 30 cents, and so on. And in the end a search engine affiliate figures they can make money by buying an ad through a PTR and paying people to visit their search page.

But here's the thing. Those search engine affiliates can't pay people to search. It's against the rules of the search engines they're affiliated with. Why? Because ultimately, Joe is the one paying for the traffic. And Joe's paying for people who searched for 'widget' because they were interested in widgets -- hopefully interested in buying widgets -- not because they're a member of a PTR and they were paid 1/4 cent to do a search.

Search engine advertisers can only pay you to visit their website. They can't pay you to search.

The end result is that PTR advertising is in a fairly sorry state. Most advertisers just don't see any value in advertising through PTR programs. The search engine advertisers continue to do it only as long as they feel they can make a profit. And to make a profit, they have to get paid more for the searches made by PTR members that they spent on the ad. When they consistently lose money because not enough people search, they'll stop buying ads. But on the other hand, if Joe keeps getting traffic that isn't interested in widgets, but only in getting paid by the PTRs, he'll stop paying to advertise his website in the search results. Either way, the money dries up.

Ultimately, PTRs have to find ways to attract other advertisers. If not, they'll die. There are a few who seem to be managing to do just that, and I think they're worth having a look at. I think I'll create a list of them in a new post.

Losing Control at Amazon.com

I've been a happy Amazon customer for years. But only for books. Despite the fact that Amazon has so many product categories they had to give up on giving each one a separate tab at the top of the screen, I've continued to think of them as a bookstore, that also happened to sell the occasional lawnmower, trombone, or laptop.

But today I decided to buy something from Amazon, and it's not a book. It's a TV tuner card for my PC. Specifically a Hauppauge WinTV Go Plus Model 1033. I researched TV tuner cards for about 7 1/2 minutes and decided to go with a Hauppauge WinTV Go Model 190. Read some good reviews from people who appeared to know what they were talking about. The price was right. I was all set. I'd already decided I was going to buy it at Amazon, because I've got some gift certificates that I need to use. Sure enough, they sell 'em, but just before I add it to my shopping cart, I see the "Other products by Hauppauge" link. Can't hurt to just have a quick look. Right?

And that's when I see the WinTV Go Plus. Plus what? A remote control. Otherwise, I don't know that there's any difference between the two cards. If there is, it's probably something too technical for me to have an opinion on anyway. So for a bit extra, I can get the one with the remote.

Now keep in mind I've got a TV. Several. And they all have remotes. As do the various VCRs and DVD players connected to them. But none of them are in the family room, or even visible from the family room, so I can't watch TV and use the computer at the same time. This was the unfortunate and unsatisfactory situation that led to the decision to buy a TV tuner card. So I could sit on my butt in front of the computer and watch (or more likely listen to) TV. But I can't for the life of me work out why I need a remote control to do that.

According to the product info, the remote works up to 30 ft. away from the PC. That would put me sitting in my neighbor's family room. And hell, he's probably got a TV in his family room, so I could just watch his TV. Or I could watch one of my TVs if I wanted to watch TV and not be sitting in front of the computer. I know all this logically. I have absolutely no need for the remote control for a TV tuner card for my PC.

But I'm going to buy it anyway. It has me in it's power.

Help me.

Categories: Amazon.com, shopping, gadgets, TV

More Payments!

I've just checked my PayPal account and I've gotten several more payments in the last week or so.

SendMeCash	$0.13
BannerFoxAds	$0.07
Avant-Cash	$2.18
Mesmerizing-Mails	$0.84
Total	$3.22

Not a lot, but keep in mind that some of those payments were for reading no more than 1 or 2 emails a week, so it's not exactly a lot of effort.

And it's also important to keep in mind that the earnings from reading the emails shouldn't be the only reason for joining and participating in PTRs. Hopefully the ads themselves provide value. Unfortunately at the moment a lot of the ads sent through PTRs are for low-quality search engines that don't provide much of value. But even with those, sometimes you find something worth looking into.

More Traffic Exchanges

I tell you what, these traffic exchanges are a bit addictive. I've joined a few more, and so far I'm enjoying the different features they offer.

Surf4TheEarth has a conservationist theme, and you can even donate some of your cash earnings to various environmental charities.

DeepSeaCash has an "under the sea" theme, and in addition to surfing for credits, you can play hangman!

I'm going to have to control myself, or I'll be spending so much time surfing in traffic exchanges, I won't have time for blogging!