Online Opportunity

I’d intended for this to be a more comprehensive review, but picked up the flu over the weekend. So I’ll follow up with posts next week that cover more detail.

Project Payday‘s website says it can provide “Realistic Extra Income for the Average Joe”.

It’s refreshing to see a website that doesn’t claim to tell you how to make a million dollars in 30 days or double your money back. The slogan at Project Payday makes me feel like anyone can do this. It isn’t clear, though, what this is from reading the front page. There is an interesting guarantee, though…if you follow the instructions they give you, and don’t make money within 24 hours, they’ll pay you $100.

Project Payday is free, as long as you complete a sponsor offer. Those of you who have been around the Get Paid To (GPT) industry will recognize this as you performing an action that provides Project Payday with an affiliate commission. This is the first site I’ve seen that provides this alternative to simply paying for access.

Once you get in, there’s the predictable OTO (one time offer). You can upgrade and earn higher commissions from your own referrals to Project Payday. Again, you can upgrade by simply completing an offer. The standard commission is $1.50 per referral. Upgrading raised that to $2.00 for me.

One of the nicest things about Project Payday’s referral program is that they pay you for leads, not for activations. You get paid when someone fills out the form on the front page, regardless of whether that person completes an offer to activate their membership or not.

So what is the way that Project Payday gives you “realistic extra income”?

As you might expect from how the site uses GPT offers, the income comes from the GPT industry. But not the side of the industry I’d expected. I’d expected another site like Cash Crate that pays you to complete offers, essentially splitting the referral commission with you.

Instead, Project Payday includes an impressive set of training articles and videos that teaches you how to make money from the various “free item” sites. You’ve probably seen them around, the “get a PS3 for free” sort of site. What you generally have to do is complete one or more offers at the site, and refer some number of friends who do the same.

Project Payday shows you how to make money from these sites in three separate ways.

1) Get paid to help others get their free items.
2) Find sites that will give you cash in place of an item, and then pay others to help you get it
3) Pay others to help you get an item, and then sell it on Ebay

They also offer a mentoring program, where you can request a couple of mentors to be assigned. Mentors must be using the system successfully, so you know that you’ll get good advice.

Click here for the Project Payday site.

Update: See Project Payday Pays You To Join for more info on this program.

Squidoo has just released its latest earnings update.

This update covers the month of July. My total earnings for July were $13.26, compared to $9.49 for the previous period.

Some highlights: Computer Game Making For Kids earned $4.12, up from $3.80. Roleplaying With Kids also earned $4.12, up from $3.80. My personal lens, Who Is Jay Shaffstall? earned $.04, down from $.65.

The main factor in these earnings figures is traffic (this is all Adsense sharing revenue). I’ve basically allowed Google to send me what traffic it wanted, without doing anything in the way of traffic building.

Will this continue to rise? With the additional lenses I’ve created, I imagine so.

How does this compare to running your own blog with adsense? Poorly. Your earnings from a blog running adsense will be higher, because you’re not sharing anything with Squidoo. But, a blog that covered as many diverse topics as my lenses cover probably wouldn’t get much in the way of regular readers.

Plus, creating a Squidoo lens is dead simple and free, while starting up a blog does have some overhead and cost associated with it.

If you have a topic about which you’re passionate and plan to generate a lot of content about, start a blog.

If you have a topic you want to put up a quick single page about, create a Squidoo lens.

The month of August has come and gone, and the first set of earnings are available at Yuwie.

I ended up with a total of 22,879 page views between myself and my referrals. The amount paid out per 1,000 page views was $0.47. Depending on what level a page view was generated on in the referral tree, I ended up with some percentage of that $0.47.

Here’s a screenshot that shows the percentage and amount earned at each level:

Now, $0.66 for the month probably doesn’t seem like much. Some points to keep in mind.

1) Most of my referrals were not active. Many people signed up to have a look around, and then apparently decided Yuwie wasn’t right for them at the time.

2) Since they weren’t active, most of my referrals did not get referrals of their own. So my referral tree is more of a pole, with relatively the same number of people at each level. At each level, very nearly one person is responsible for all the referrals on the next level.

3) In a single month, my referral tree grew down to level 7.

4) In the first six days of September, I have nearly half as many page views from referrals as in the entire month of August.

5) You earn three times as much from your level 10 referrals as you do yourself.

So, my conclusions from this are that you have to be in Yuwie for the long-term benefit. To get to the point of making serious money, you need active referrals all the way down an expanding tree. You can’t really do much about referrals being active or not, but for those that are active you can help them to build up their own set of referrals, and encourage them to do the same for their referrals.

This will help to expand the tree, which is where your earnings potential lies. If the tree expands all the way down to level 10, you’ve suddenly got a pretty nice income.

Luckily, getting referrals to Yuwie is pretty easy, as shown by #3 above. Most of my referrals come from online efforts, but most of their referrals come from friends and family they’ve told about Yuwie. Those are the people who will tend to be more active, because you know them outside of Yuwie.

Here’s a guide I wrote about getting the most out of Yuwie. It’ll give you an idea about what’s required to get results.

Click here to see what Yuwie is all about.

I ran across the Power of 10 the other day.

It’s an Internet marketing newsletter that claims you can generate $111,110 in 60 days. The newsletter is in prelaunch right now, but is supposed to launch Sept 4th. Unless you’re new to Internet marketing, you know that “prelaunch” really means, “get enough members so we can justify writing the newsletter”. I’ve timed this post to be published Sept 3rd, so you’ll have time to sign up before the first newsletter goes out.

As a bonus, they pay you $1 for every subscriber you refer to them. It gets better…you also get $1 for each subscriber one of your referrals refers. All the way down 5 levels. That’s where the $111,110 comes from, assuming you refer 5 people, they refer 5 people, and so on. You are limited to making a bit over $200,000, because they’ll only pay for a certain number of referrals on each level (unlimited on first level, 100 on second level, 1,000 on third level, and so on).

All told, they’re paying out $5 per subscriber. This tells you that they feel they can make money from the subscribers. There will be some links in the newsletter that will earn them money when you buy through them. What distinguishes a great newsletter from spam is whether their reviews are unbiased. We’ll have to see.

They’re also making money on the back end, by only making payments through Piggy-eBank.com. Dig a little on both sites, and you’ll see that they’re owned by the same people. Again, nothing wrong with that, it’s only smart to make sure you get money out of your visitors in as many ways as possible.

The fact that they’re funneling payments through their own payment processor is encouraging for the content of the newsletter. They’re clearly not beginners at Internet marketing, and have some experience to share.

So how does the 60 days figure into it? Well, when you sign up there’s a One Time Offer. You can pay $10 to have the earnings limit removed, and that also gets you into their rotator. They guarantee that you’ll get 10 referrals from their rotator, which will pay you your $10 back. If each of your referrals also paid the $10 to get into the rotator, you’d quickly get a decent amount of cash.

Note that there’s currently a delay in deposits being processed through Piggy-eBank.com, so it’s likely you won’t be able to sign up for the OTO anyway.

Click here to sign up for the newsletter.

Update: on September 4th, they changed the launch date to be September 25th. This isn’t the first time they’ve pushed the launch back. Given that their back office lists over 7,500 subscribers, it makes you wonder why the delay. Either they’re having technical issues, which is always possible, or they’re holding out for more subscribers.