I promised some safer opportunities than what I talked about in my MLM case study, and here’s one: get paid to click ads.
Online advertising is a multi-billion dollar a year investment by companies that are desperate to get you to look at what they have to offer. Some of those companies are taking the paid to click route, where you get paid a modest fee, usually one or two cents, for looking at their advertisement.
Their reasoning goes, if enough people look at the advertisement, someone is bound to be interested and buy. This is hugely untargeted traffic, from an advertiser’s point of view, and I’d think it isn’t the best use of their advertising dollars. But we can take advantage of their desire for live eyes to view their ads.
Here’s a selection of programs that all pay you to either view or click on ads. I’m not trying to be comprehensive here, just provide an overview of what’s available.
AGLOCO
AGLOCO is a paid to surf company. You run a small program called a viewbar on your computer, and while you surf the web targeted advertisements are displayed in the viewbar. You get paid a portion of what the advertisers pay for displaying the ad.
If you also them purchase something through viewbar, say a book from Amazon.com, you’ll earn a part of the commission on that purchase.
Note that AGLOCO is still in the pre-launch phase as the viewbar development finishes. Signing up now will ensure you get the viewbar when it’s ready.
The real earning power with AGLOCO comes from referring other people to the program, since that means there’s a larger pool of users to attract higher paying advertisers.
ClixSense
ClixSense is a program that pays you to click on ads and view an advertiser’s web page for about 30 seconds. While there’s no requirement you actually look at the page (you can open it and then work in another window while waiting for your account to be credited), the assumption is that you’ll see the page even if just for a few seconds when it first comes up.
The vast majority of the clicks are worth one or two cents. By paying a $10 annual fee, you’ll get access to higher paying clicks.
One tip when creating your profile in ClixSense. Check every box when they ask for your areas of interest. They’ll use those to determine which ads to show you. Since our focus isn’t on finding products, but on getting paid to click ads, having as many ads available as possible is the idea.
ClixSense also has a referral program, where you earn 10% of whatever your referrals earn.
Inbox Dollars
Inbox Dollars is primarily a paid survey site. They do send emails that they pay you to read, which consists of clicking a link in the email to view an advertiser’s page. But the primary purpose of the emails is to get you back to their site where they’ll remind you to take a survey.
Pay per email read is generally about 5 cents. They control how often they send emails, so you cannot work harder to read more emails.
Surveys typically pay $1, and there are also various free offers that pay up to $2, and free trials that pay up to $15.
Inbox Dollars has a referral program, too, paying you $5 for each person you refer. They also have a signup bonus, where you get $5 just for signing up.
Earnings Potential
So how much can you earn with these free programs?
Well, AGLOCO earnings are unknown, since the viewbar isn’t available yet. Let’s focus on ClixSense and Inbox Dollars.
Assume an average pay per click on ClixSense of 1 cent. You can get higher priced clicks, but not often enough to affect the average if you’re going for high volume. Assume a minute viewing each ad page. You only need 30 seconds, but if you’re switching windows to do something else you probably won’t check back in 30 seconds every time.
If you have a couple of hours free each evening, with weekends off, that’s about 40 hours a month, for about $24 per month. Nothing to write home about, but if you’re on the computer anyway you might as well get the money for it.
Inbox Dollars earnings for paid emails will be about 5 cents a day, for a total of $1.50 each month. The real earnings with Inbox Dollars comes from paid surveys and trial offers.
Let’s say you take their daily survey for $1 every weekday, and complete one trial offer a week for $10. That brings you up to $61.50 each month.
So your total earnings between the two programs would be $85.50 each month for a couple of hours investment each weekday.
Many beginning bloggers don’t get up to this level of earnings. But with blogging you get far more leverage for higher earnings, if your blog becomes popular.
Use a New Email Address
When you sign up for these programs, do not use your regular email address. You won’t get a huge amount of email, but it’s best to isolate your personal email from this sort of traffic, just in case your email gets onto a spam list of some sort.
You can get a free email address with plenty of space at Gmail.com.
Conclusions
You can get paid to click ads, but the amount of money you make from any one click is small. So, as the saying goes, you have to make up for it in volume. Join as many programs as possible, and click as many of their ads as you can in a day.
You’ll make far more money creating a popular blog or website, but getting paid to click ads requires far less creative energy, if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t think they have anything interesting to say (I disagree, but that’s the subject of another post).
Regular readers will remember my Marketing Pond review. Marketing Pond consolidates quite a few paid to click opportunities, including those mentioned above, under one banner, making it easy to join them all and to take advantage of the various programs’ referral bonuses.
Have any experiences with paid to click programs? Leave a comment and let us know!
very informative post.. are you planning on posting your success with each of these?
great blog, take care 😉
My biggest problem with these sorts of programs is that I get distracted by doing other things online, and forget to come back to click a new ad for half an hour. 😉
I’ll try to do a case study here soon, though, and see what a week’s actual earnings would be.
Jay
Yes, it’s totally true about being able to make money taking online surveys.You can make a few hundreds dollars a month depending on how many you sign up for. I have done online surveys for a few years, one to two hours a day, and make a couple of hundred dollars a month every month. Of course you won’t make a living out of it but it’s better than nothing and above all it’s fun.
I use a few different ones – I think the real money is in referring other people – if you just click ads, it’s not worth your time – but if you have thousands of referrals clicking ads and your getting part of the revenue then you’re in business.
You can get referrals on autopilot by sending a message to each of your new twitter or facebook followers using this program. http://bit.ly/ejrOIg