I’d done my post about How To Make Your First $30 At Inbox Dollars as an experiment.
I picked Inbox Dollars because it was the first GPT site I’d come across, so in my mind it was the GPT site. I wanted to see if a nuts and bolts explanation of how the program worked ended up converting more visitors into referrals than a simple review.
And it did. I currently have 55 referrals at Inbox Dollars, many of those people who came to the post through Yahoo Answers, others who found it through Google searches.
The experiment was a success, but ultimately the program turned out to not be the best choice.
Oh, you can make money at Inbox Dollars, no doubt about it. But their referral program isn’t that great. You make money from your referrals in two ways at Inbox Dollars.
First, when they get paid for reading an email, you get a percentage of it. They don’t say how much you get, but my referrals have read over 740 emails and I’ve made $1.13 from it. So clearly the percentage is not high, since they make around $0.03 per email they read.
Second, when each referral is mailed their first payout check, you get $5 credited to your account. At a $30 payout, that’s about 16% going to the sponsor. That doesn’t sound bad, except that apparently very few people actually follow through and get the payout. Out of my 55 referrals, only 1 has received a check. If they’d all followed the instructions in the post and immediately requested a payout, the number should be closer to 20 by now (checks take about 45 days to be mailed).
So my total income from the experiment so far is $6.13.
On this side of it all, I realize that I should have picked the program based on the referral benefits. Cash Crate would have been a far better choice, where you earn 20% of what your referrals earn, regardless of whether they ever make payout or not. Although, with payouts being a low $10, the chances of anyone not making payout are slim. But you continue to earn from your referrals there, unlike at Inbox Dollars.
I’ll probably rerun the experiment with a post targeted at how to earn a payout at Cash Crate, just to see if the results can be duplicated in an environment that is a bit more earnings friendly.
The moral is, don’t promote the first program you come across. Look for similar programs that might provide better benefits for getting referrals.
I signed up with Cash Crate a LOOOOONG time ago and haven’t done anything with them since but I always see people promoting them. I’ll have to check them out a little more I guess. I hope you’re flu is better;)
Hi Lori, if you’re going to promote a GPT type of program, Cash Crate is a good one. Treasure Troopers is also not bad, and both are far better than Inbox Dollars. Even if you never do any offers yourself, you can earn continually from referrals in both.
I’ve done that with some programs…earn from the referrels only but never thought about it with Cash Crate. Maybe I’ll get some time next week to check it out. So much to do, so little time;)