Ok, so I have had a lot of people ask me recently about ways they can make money at home and online. A lot of friends, family members, subscribers and people I run into and the problem is that when you are searching online for “make money online” or “ways to make money” etc you are going to hit a lot of garbage! People unfamiliar with making money online are going to fall into the traps, scams and schemes and waste a lot of their valuable precious time and just end up frustrated with a few cents or lose whatever money they had tried to invest in memberships, software, services and whatever else they got sucked into.
Right off the top here are a few things you need to stay the #$@# away from!
- MLM/Pyramid systems – Multi-Level Marketing and Pyramid systems are everywhere, they come and go with the breeze and somebody always starts one saying it will be the next greatest thing, and you’ll make all this money just by referring people. The truth is that 90% of them will be gone within a year and you’ll be left promoting them and trying to get more referrals waiting to cash out your measly few dollars. Basically the people at the very top of the pyramid make all the money and everyone below works for peanuts. A lot of these systems involve nothing more than referrals for cash, say you pay $20 to signup right and you are 3rd from the top of the pyramid. The person who referred you is 2nd and he gets $15 or whatever and the person on top the pyramid gets $5. You than have to go out and get people under you, so you spend your money advertising and time promoting this system and you get two people to sign up for $20 fees, you get $10 from each of them, the person that referred you gets $5 and the top of the pyramid gets $5 and this goes on forever. Basically if your at the top you just sit back and collect money once you start it going. Many years ago I tested out a lot of these sites and most disappeared very quickly and many never paid out their customers fully or waited until there was a ridiculous amount of money in the pot and took it and shut down the site. The only types of MLM sites that ever last are ones that involve actual selling of products such as AVON because there are real products being sold and customers purchasing.
- HYIP – High Yield Investment Program, somewhat similar to the above. Here these sites always end up shutting down at some point. Basically somebody starts up a HYIP and tells customers that if they invest $10-$100 they will get a return of 1-5% A DAY on their money, I have even seen them as high as 10% a day which attracts a ton of risk takers and get rich quick people to take chances and invest their money for ridiculous returns. Most of them start out nice, and they will pay for awhile and you make bonuses for referring new members and get some of their action, la dee da but sooner or later the money always runs out. The site can’t might have 5,000 members and $100,000 in the bank account but once those people need to cash out and the $100,000 invested from the members expecting their return can’t be paid out its game over. Basically over time that interest and juice runs so quick that the site would owe $500,000 to all the members if they cashed out and they can’t pay it so they stay alive by customers withdrawing small portions and they HAVE to get new customers and NEW money to survive or eventually the money runs out and the site shuts down and runs away with your money. Funny story, in 2005 I purchased an expired domain name that was an autosurf HYIP called WebberCash and I saw that it used to be an autosurfing site HYIP and didn’t think much of it or really care what it used to be and I slapped up a new website for manual surfing with no money involved and I must of received 500 e-mails in the first month from former customers demanding to be paid for their earnings from the HYIP and sad stories about how much money and time they had invested into it. So long story short STAY AWAY!
- PTR/PTP/PTC – These sites drive me nuts, not to say that they are scams or schemes to steal your money because most of these sites are legit and have been around for many years such as donkeymails and clixsense and many others. The problem with these sites are they are a massive waste of your time. PTR stand for paid to read and it is usually reading e-mails so you are basically selling your e-mail account for like .001 cents for every e-mail you read and may have to click a link and visit the site. PTP is paid to promote and it is usually a website that is full of banners, affiliate links and ads and pop ups and pop unders. You have to go around marketing this website and for every 1000 people you send to the site (PPM – Pay Per Thousand) you earn $.10 or whatever and the person who owns the site made $.20 (eCPM) earning cost-per-thousand from the banners and ads. PTC is paid to click, many of these are not legit and involve systems where your clicking adsense ads, Microsoft ads, etc where advertisers are spending their hard earned money paying for a $5 click and have you stealing basically from them. There are legit forms of it and it involves advertisers knowingly paying for you to click their site links but for very little because they know your clicking just to make money and their conversion rates are horrible and they may make some money from banners, etc. Clixsense is one of these sites, paying you $.001 or whatever to click links…..OMG is your life that horribly desperate that you would waste your time clicking for less than a dollar an hour#@%# Yes these sites all offer referral and multi-tier levels to get your head filled with dollar signs, you might get 20% of people you refers income so enjoy 20% of $.50 cents if your lucky from each person you refer.
- Paid Surveys – I mean come on, again with the legit companies you are going to be paid but you will get an average of $1.63 for a 20 minute survey according to paid survey researchers. The ones that offer you a lot more money such as PandaResearch which I actually do like but are not what they seem. They are legit, I actually got paid $400 for about 2 hours of work last time I used them but the catch is you have to basically sign up for free trials of things, i.e. free credit report and than cancel the membership in 30 days or your going to be charged but you’ll get maybe $15 for signing up through them and it only takes a matter of minutes. If you can’t handle canceling memberships and free trials, again STAY AWAY!
- Dropshippers that CHARGE for signup – so many of these out there now, they claim to have all these products you can sell and the best prices in town. They are just reselling legit dropshippers products at either a marked up price or straight up and taking your money and processing the orders. Never pay to setup a drop shipping account!
- Sales pages that you land on that have this great new guaranteed system, make blah blah blah an hour and a million dollars from home and $10,000 your first week, look here’s my check from last month and you can do the same thing, just pay me $50 for this great new system or product or ebook. Stay away, 90% of those are just the same stupid ebooks being resold and recreated. They are making their money from you over paying for useless information. They rarely tell you exactly how they are making the money, they might give ideas and post affiliate links everywhere with sites you can make money from. There are some sales page products that are decent, you need to read reviews online first. This is a general guide for new people to online money making so as a precaution I am advising you to stay away from these types of sites, once you’ve seasoned yourself you may find some valuable information or at least know what to look for and what to avoid.
I will probably continue this post with more scams and what to stay away from in a future post, I am done ranting and raving for now on this……..I will also try and post LEGIT ways to make money online…I didn’t realize this was going to take so long to write this one.