Compilation

Here's a random assortment of things I've been killing my time with:

King.com is a free site with a lot of fun games. It's pretty well done (I especially like "Big Bang"), but you can't make any money unless you first deposit some, which goes against my money-earning principles, but maybe not yours.

Big Winner Cash Games is a similar site, however as soon as you make a deposit, you can withdraw the money, even if you haven't played any games! I haven't tried this yet, but they say they give you a 50% bonus on your first deposit, so if you put in $10, they give you $5, you withdraw the $10 you put in, and you have $5 complimentary to build and earn with!

I've been looking for other places with an even better setup (i.e., you can earn without having to put in money, like Prizee) so if you see any of those, let me know.

Google Vs. AdBrite

Which one is better? Which one rocks my socks? It should be obvious by the side-bar ad to your right that it's

(click it if you're feeling generous). But the relevant question is why AdBrite is the best.

If you run a making money-blog: Google AdSense does not endorse any blogs which make money by paid blog entries or paid links or referral programs. This is why they never approved my AdSense application (even though they didn't have the courtesy to tell me so) and why I was running public service ads for nearly three weeks.

If you want to make money on your website:

had me approved, up and running, and earning money in under 24 hours. That is darn impressive.

So if you're looking for no hassles on a blog with content you control completely... well you get the idea.

*This is not a sponsored post, it just sounds like one because I'm so jazzed*

Progress and Standstills

I think the weekend strategy was a good one. It really brought into clarity what enterprises were making progress and what ones had stalled out.

Progress: My Triond earnings increased by $0.30 which puts me at $0.64 cents total. Because that exceeds their payment minimum of $0.50 I'll get paid through PayPal when they do their June payments (July 15th). Unfortunately I am no longer on the Hot Members page, even though I have a lot of recent views. Maybe that means the site is getting more popular overall. Whatever it is, I'll have to write more to stay in the game.

Helium had further earnings of $0.02 for me, which is really just negligible. I like the site and it's fun, but because of how they're set up you have to write to answer the specific question they have on the site. Given that and my lower earnings, it doesn't seem worth it to work at that.

Global Test Market sent me two surveys over the weekend. One I was ineligible for, and the other had filled up by the time I tried to fill it out. Even so, they gave me 15 Market Points for the attempt, which is equates to $0.75. Not bad. I don't feel terribly helpful, but I'm getting paid pretty well.

Standstills: Survey Spot sent me a lot of surveys, almost none of which I was eligible for. Their payout is much bigger at $2-$10 per survey, so I guess I'll keep trying.

Blogsvertise has yet to send me a single "task" (paid post). I am on probationary status, but their suggestion to get off of probationary status is to accept and complete the tasks they offer you! Well Blogsvertise, I've done every single (n)one!

Google AdSense has yet to approve me. They said they would get back to me within one week of my application. That was on June 24th, exactly one week ago. Am I a difficult case? Worse blogs than this have Google Ads on them! I can't give you a link because really, why would I save a link to a blog worse than this one?

Other: AGloCo, Constant Content, and Slash My Search are all dependent on my activity, and as such have not changed over the past few days.

Something I Actually Do Anyway

Yes, I waste my time online as a matter of course. But I wouldn't be choosing to waste it like this unless I were looking to earn money, right?

Well I found a site that pays you to use it as a search engine and to use its forums. They do a pretty good job, from what I can tell, and I like that they give you a preview of the site before you click on it, so you can browse more effectively. The money's not bad, from what I've been able to learn by researching. Go ahead, try it out. You know you want to.

The other thing I'm looking at is AGloCo. You surf the web with their toolbar installed, which sends info to advertisers, and they pay you in cash and shares. I'm not sure I buy their business model, but it's free and right now they're just building their network anyway. They're going to release the toolbar to people in the order they signed up, so get in line!

Edit: whatever website referred me was WAY out of date. The toolbar has definitely already been released.

Mitigated Success

I logged into Helium to check my earnings for the day, and they had skyrocketed to a whopping 17 cents! Why then don't my Stats reflect that, you ask? Because an "adjustment" was made which took 8 cents off my total! After much searching and digging, I eventually found a grain of factoid in their discussion forums which said that adjustments can be because articles which have earned money have been deleted. Problems with this system:

1) If an article has earned money (i.e., acheived financial success), why is it being deleted?

2) Any money earned is because of advertising. That money is earned by Helium, regardless of whether the article later becomes deleted. So when they delete your article and rescind your earnings, they're just keeping that money for themselves.

It gets better. The article that was deleted? The title I wrote under was "How long should Helium articles be?"

My article?

"Like a girl's skirt: long enough to cover the subject; short enough to keep it interesting."

The reason they deleted it?

"It was meaningless content."

Excuse me? I answered the question and the answer encapsulates its own message in its length, which is the subject proposed to be addressed in the first place! That's meaning on two distinct levels people!

Approved!

Blogsvertise has approved this blog! That was really fast! That means that I will occasionally be posting paid entries. Don't worry though, they can't pay for my integrity! I won't lie about the company or product, at least not anymore than I already lie to all of you!

Unfortunately, I don't have any assignments yet, so we'll see whether this site ends up being worth my time or not. Even so, I am updating the Stats table accordingly.

Slight Progress

I'm making four cents a day between Helium and Triond, which isn't half bad, and will only increase if I keep writing and submitting content. Submitting pictures to Triond hasn't earned me a cent yet, it's all from the two articles I've done.

I signed up for MyBlogLog today under retrogradesonnet. I think it's the first thing I've signed up for in this experiment that doesn't directly purport to make me money. I'm still not quite sure how it works. It seems pretty obvious that it's a giant community of networking bloggers, but how it could possibly succeed I'm not sure of.

I also signed up this blog for Blogsvertise, a site which pays bloggers to talk about certain advertised products on their blogs. It's one of the only ones that might take me even though my blog isn't 30 days old, so I've given it a shot, but I've yet to be approved, even on a probationary status. We shall see.

In the meantime I think I'll be focusing my efforts on writing articles for Triond which I will then post on Helium. Triond is better, but you can do both with barely more work, so why not?

Harder Than It Looks

Well, after getting all seven of my tips rejected in less than a day by DayTipper, I'm officially giving up on them. I did my research, tried to write well and on a variety of topics, but alas, no luck.

At least I've earned four cents on the content sites.

Normally at this point I'd get discouraged. But since I have the time to do this when I'm on the clock, I might as well, right? Four extra cents per week is more than I would otherwise be adding to my income.

It's funny, I'm now at the point where these pennies seem like Monopoly money or points, rather than spendable cash. Who would do this for the spendable cash? It's a crazy lot of hoops.

Reluctant Opening

I have an addiction to starting things. I start websites and blogs and craft projects and novels on a regular basis. This addiction often prevents me from finishing anything. Ever. Which is why I am reluctantly writing the opening post of yes, a new blog.

I always want a summer project. This summer my project-on-the-side (you know, next to the paying job) has been to see if I can actually make money on the internet! I've pored through reviews and FAQs and wikis all to see what the best schemes are and what the best ways to go about them are.

I ran across this article which gives a pretty good overview of lots of ways to make money online, some of which I'd heard of, and some not. One new one was the idea of being paid to review something on a blog. Unfortunately, this requires (surprise, surprise) a moderately well-established blog. In my enterprising nature I thought, "Sure, I could have a well-established blog and do this and make money on the side!" but I realized that such was not the case and that in my desire to forever begin projects anew, I will never follow through.

(Sorry, didn't mean to rhyme that one.)

The one thing I have kept up with is my work through Google. Google is so EASY! You just sign up for the one account, it's only one password to remember, and you have all sorts of applications at your fingertips! Including Blogger!

So we'll see. I've got lots of time to kill at my job, and I'm trying to put it to good use. Basically the idea is to see if I can bum around online and accidentally earn some cash along the way, which is better than none!

To keep myself organized, so I don't forget to check my earnings anywhere, links to sites I'm currently using (and my username, in case you want to look up my work, or I forget what my login is...) will be to the side.

Could this be... off in the distance ... is that what I think it is? My goodness yes!

A PLAN!