Month: October 2007

Yuwie has added a new feature, called Shop.

It’s basically a tab where you can buy items online from Amazon.com, Walmart, and others. Yuwie gets a commission when you shop through those links, and those commissions add to the amount paid per 1,000 page views for the month.

This added feature shows that the Yuwie admins don’t understand their target market. The early adopters of Yuwie are not the people who like to use sites like MySpace, but the people who want to make money online free. The same sorts of people who would do offers at Cash Crate or click ads at Clix Sense.

Those sorts of people are fairly sophisticated, compared to the average person who isn’t into making money online but just wants to socialize and make a little on the side. They’ll realize that, while they could buy through Yuwie’s links, they will get only a very small portion of the commission back out again. They’ll also realize that they could open up a My Power Mall or a Big Crumbs store, do the same shopping, and get a much larger commission out for themselves.

Yuwie seems to be expecting members to voluntarily lose money in order to support the site. While that might work if Yuwie had been building a strong sense of community all along, the addition of interstitial ads, and the fairly arbitrary enforcement of their “no advertising” policy, have left Yuwie members with no real loyalty to the site.

Yuwie could have added a paid offers section, paid the normal sort of commission directly to the person who did the offer, and allowed Yuwie’s part of the commission to add to the amount paid per page view every month. That would have done quite well, as people would get paid what they could get paid at Cash Crate for the offer, and then also had a higher Yuwie check due to increasing Yuwie’s profits.

Properly understanding your user base is critical for any membership site. Failing to understand your user base leads to putting forth time and effort developing content nobody really needs or wants.

There’s quite the divide among ways to make money online.

Some are great for short-term gains, and others are great for long-term profits. If you don’t recognize which is which, then you may find yourself disappointed.

A short-term gain program will pay you some amount of money for getting someone, perhaps you or perhaps a referral, to perform an action. That action may be signing up for a newsletter, or buying an item, or whatever. You get that money once, and that’s it.

The benefit from short-term gain programs is that it’s usually easy to get someone to do something once. There’s even a saying that’s popular in the United States, “I’ll try anything once!” The disadvantage, of course, is that to continue earning you need to keep getting new people to perform the action.

A long-term program will pay you some amount of money for as long as another person continues to perform an action. This action is usually paying a membership fee, of which you get a portion for referring them. Or it may, as in the case of Yuwie, be participating in the site for free.

The benefit from long-term programs is that you continue to earn from your past efforts. The disadvantage is that it’s harder to keep someone performing an action over and over again than it is to get them to do it once. And the short-term benefit from these programs is often so small as to be trivial.

If you go into a short-term gain program expecting long-term profits, you’ll be disappointed. And if you go into a long-term program expecting your immediate benefit to be large, you’ll be disappointed.

I’ve seen this happen with a number of long-term programs, such as Yuwie or Traffic Wave. People join expecting short-term gains, and never stay around long enough to experience the long-term profits.

There’s a place in everyone’s online marketing efforts for both short-term and long-term programs. Short-term gains can be converted into the membership fees for long-term programs until they start to show a profit, and also into paid advertising when you’re ready to get into that arena.

Take a look at what you’re marketing online, and the mix of short-term and long-term programs. If you don’t have at least one long-term program in there, you might want to consider shopping around for one.

This post is a collection of sites that pay you to recruit free subscribers.

An example would be the old way that the Power of 10 was going to work, paying you $1 for every free subscriber you recruited. These sorts of programs are attractive, because it’s easier to recruit a free subscriber than it is to recruit a paid subscriber. The Power of 10 has since changed it’s plan to only pay for paid subscribers.

There are precious few other sites that work like this that I’ve found, but here’s a list of the best.

Resource A Day

Resource A Day pays you $0.40 for every free subscriber you recruit. They also pay you $10 for subscribing.

Before you get too excited about getting your $10 for subscribing and going out to eat on it, the minimum payout at the site is $50. So you need to earn an extra $40 from recruiting free subscribers to get that free $10 out.

Luckily, they do payout on multiple levels. You earn $0.20 on second level referrals, $0.05 on third level referrals, and $0.03 on fourth level referrals. If you recruit 6 new free subscribers, and they each recruit 6, and so on, you’ll have made about $60, plus your $10 for a total of $70.

This is clearly not a get rich quick program, but you do get paid for recruiting free subscribers. If you have a website that gets decent traffic, you could make some extra money each month from it.

Click here for Resource A Day.

MichaelBadger.com

MichaelBadger.com also pays you to recruit free subscribers.

Rather than set a dollar amount on each subscriber, though, the site gives you a share of the site’s profits just for subscribing. Each additional free subscriber you recruit gets you another share of the profits.

There will be a paid option at the site, too, and you’ll earn commissions on any of your referrals who opt for the paid membership.

Since the site is in prelaunch, you can signup here to reserve your share now, but you’ll have to wait to see what it’s worth.

Clix Sense

Clix Sense is a paid-to-read site that pays you to read advertisements. Clix Sense is one of the better PTR programs, and has a steady stream of advertisements waiting to be viewed for $0.01 each.

But they also pay you $0.10 for every free member who joins through your referral link. There’s an upgraded membership that makes a lot of sense if you’re going to work the site on the PTR aspect, and you get $5.00 if any of your referrals upgrade.

Click here to go to ClixSense.com.

Conclusion

I ran across some other programs that pay you to recruit free subscribers when I was researching this post, but they seemed a bit spammy. With the above programs, you can safely use your primary email address and not worry about getting spam emails.

I also have not included on this list sites that pay you for free subscribers, but require conditions other than a minimum payout to get your money, or sites that require new members to complete offers.

If anyone runs across other legitimate programs that pay for free subscribers, let me know and I’ll add them to this list.

The Power of 10 launched finally.

For anyone who didn’t read the original review, the site is an Internet marketing newsletter that paid you to recruit free subscribers. The launch of this particular program is a textbook example of how not to launch a program.

Since we’re here to learn how to make money online, it’s useful to look at program launches that aren’t smooth in order to see what to avoid in our own.

I’ll Get Back To You Next Week

The Power of 10 had an original launch date back in August. That date was postponed to September, and then again to October. Their final launch-or-we’ll-give-all-the-money-back date came and went, and they finally launched a week or so after that.

All this postponing of the launch date ruins their credibility. It doesn’t matter if they know Internet marketing inside and out, their subscribers who have been in from the beginning will now read anything they write with skepticism.

We’ll Pay You For Free Subscribers…or Maybe Not

Another example of changing their plan in mid-stream is that they now only pay commissions on paid subscribers, and only to paid subscribers. This takes them out of the make money online free market and into the MLM market.

Since a great many of their initial subscribers signed up to make money for free, that’s a bad thing. Some may opt for the $20 one-time payment to earn commissions, since you’d only need to recruit 20 people to break even, but most will not.

The Power of 10 does still provide the free Internet marketing newsletter, you just don’t earn from referring free subscribers anymore.

PowerOf10 Step by Step System

They’ve been hyping this system all during the pre-launch, and it’s finally available. It’s a short ebook that is supposed to show you how to earn $111,110 in 60 days. The basic idea is that you pay to upgrade at The Power of 10, then you recruit 10 others in 10 days who also pay to upgrade. Then you help your referrals get their 10 upgrades in 10 days, and so on.

The logic is inescapable, but ignores the reality that most referrals won’t upgrade, and most who do won’t be able to recruit their 10, no matter how well you mentor them. And you can’t personally recruit their 10 for them in any reasonable amount of time.

The ebook does cover various free methods of advertising online, and even gives good advice about when to get into paid advertising (only after you’ve started to earn from your free advertising).

The main purpose of the ebook, though, is to get you to join GDI, a $10 a month webhosting company. GDI pays you $1 for each referral, down 5 levels, just like The Power of 10. But GDI pays each month, because it costs members $10 a month to keep their web hosting.

To their credit, the Power of 10 people have put a rotator link into the ebook. So when you sign up for GDI through the ebook link, you then send them your GDI username to get yourself into the rotator. So you’ll have a chance to get GDI referrals from other Power of 10 subscribers.

The main problem with recruiting people to GDI on the basis of how much money they can make is that it is an MLM. And ultimately, the people on the bottom pay money out without making their monthly fee back. Since they joined to make money, they’ll quit, which leaves their sponsors not making money. So they’ll quit, and so on, up the line.

To make money long-term with any MLM, you must recruit people who truly need the service being provided and are willing to pay for it even if they never make anything from the MLM.

Overall Impressions

The Power of 10 has left me with mixed impressions.

On the one hand, they screwed up the launch. Pre-launch buzz is a marketing tactic, not something you do while you’re trying to work the bugs out of whatever software you have to write and finalize your commission schedule. You start pre-launch buzz when your site’s ready to go, not before.

Doing anything else hurts your credibility.

On the other hand, they are trying to do the right things. They’re running a rotator to spread referrals to subscribers, which is something I’d have done (and am doing with my Traffic Exchange Secrets course).

The newsletter itself, ostensibly the product they’re providing, is a bit light on content but has good information. They link out to plenty of free information, other ebooks and audio/video courses.

I’m willing to give them some time to see if they shake off the pre-launch disasters and mature into a useful source of information.

Click here to see what the Power of 10 is all about.

Profit Peelers is a new way to make money with your website traffic.

You’ve probably seen peel away ads all over the place. They’re a nice alternative to popups for exposing your visitors to something that might make you some money. You can get the peel away ads code for $20 or so around the Internet.

The problem is that you have to integrate it with your website, create (or buy) pretty graphics for it, find programs that will make you some money, etc.

Profit Peelers has taken the peel away ads technology and combined it with GPT offers to allow you to offer your visitors the chance to complete offers. But instead of them getting the money from the offer, you do.

I’m running a zip code offer on my personal blog as an example. It’ll appear in the upper right corner of the screen. Hover your mouse over the little paper flap that appears, and you’ll see the rest of the offer. Any one who clicks that ad and enters their zip code on the page that comes up earns me $1.05 (at least according to Profit Peelers…we’ll see how it works out).

Profit Peelers has the potential to earn you extra money from the traffic you already get, in a fairly unobtrusive way. Your traffic would have to be the sort that doesn’t know about the GPT industry, otherwise they won’t complete offers to make you money, but will go to Cash Crate and complete them for themselves.

Click here to sign up with Profit Peelers for free.