frugal underground

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If you are new to earning money on the internet, chances are you have already come across the Paid to Click websites, which are mushrooming all over the internet. They seem very attractive at first glance because it requires absolutely no skill whatsoever and can be done as passively as is humanly possible. They provide a great way to create a passive income (though not much, but can still be worth it) with minimum work.

However, the problem is, there is no regulation of this paid to click market and most such sites are outright scams. It is difficult to identify the scams because there are so many of them and also because many turn into a scam only after a decent amount of successful running. However, a few precautions from your side, outlined below, will go a long way in helping you pick the right programs, or at least increase its probability.

• Check the advertising rates. If the advertising rate is below the payment rate, in all probably it is a scam as it is not sustainable. The owner will then have to pay you from his pocket, which is ridiculous. Many scams can be identified by this method.
• If it seems too good to be true, it probably is. Any site claiming to pay you a few dollars for a click is a scam without any exception, since no advertiser would ever pay such prohibitive rates. The maximum that a click can ever pay is a cent or two and a little more in certain exceptional cases.
• Very high payouts. This is a problem because it can take a long time to reach the payout in which time, there is every chance the site closes down. As a general rule, the lower the payout, the better.
• Check the payment processors. You don’t want to be paid in an obscure payment method that itself can turn scam anytime. This is true, because historically online payment processors have actually paid such sites to promote their processor. AlterGold is perhaps the most famous recent example of this.
• Prefer automatic payouts. Of late, quite a few sites are introducing automatic payouts wherein you request the payout and you will get paid immediately. This only shows the site is sustainable.
• Try to contact the owner. This can be important because it is becoming increasingly common for a bunch of high school kids to go around buying a script, starting a site, closing it down in a couple of weeks and never paying anyone. If a site has a forum, it is still better.

Finally, remember that it is very difficult to build any sustainable income using the paid to click sites. However, it can provide you with a nice passive income source if you have a good downline. Try to get as many people as possible to join under you. There is a method to get people joining under you by giving them back a percentage of your earnings through their clicks for a site. Consider different marketing and advertising options, and you should do just fine, if not go on to make a fortune.

Blogging is one of the most trendy ways to make money online these days. The question is, though, is it effective? Meaning, for the time you put into it, are you getting as good of a return as you could somewhere else?

I’m not sure. That’s saying something considering that I’m a blog developer.

Don’t get me wrong; I believe that blogging is a tremendously useful marketing tool, but mostly for someone who already has something to sell. It could be a product, a book, or services, but blogging helps multiply efforts to get a reputation as an expert.

Similarly, I believe that blogging offers many benefits beyond money. One is the reality that blogging about something on a regular basis forces you to learn new things and process information in useful ways, and that’s a skill that can help anyone in any job. You could probably even argue that the benefits would be worth paying for.

It starts to get a little murky, though, when you look at blogging as a direct path to money. There are really only a few ways to make money directly from your blog (”monetize it”). There’s advertising (either working with advertisers or going through a service like AdSense). There’s affiliate programs (where you make a commission by encouraging your visitors to buy something). There’s sponsored posts (where you write about a product, service, or site in exchange for a fee). Or you can write for a network (they take care of monetizing the blog and you provide the content for a fee).

As far as I know, those are your options. So the question is, are they good options? Yes and no. Yes, because some people really do make good money with those options. No, because the vast majority of bloggers make an absolute pittance. When you consider the time put in for the money pulled out, it’s much less than minimum wage.

On the other hand, sometimes it’s worth making less than minimum wage if you get other benefits. Besides the afore-mentioned educational benefits, blogging is flexible and allows you to, say, write while staying home with the kids. Try doing that with a traditional job!

It’s really a question of comparisons: how does the effort required and money returned compare to other alternatives? If you’re single or don’t have kids, it’s probably going to make more sense to spend your time elsewhere. That doesn’t mean blogging isn’t a possibility, just that you should consider creating a full-fledged business and blogging to help promote it.

If you’re looking for a small supplementary income that can be made in short spurts of free time, blogging might be a good choice.

In closing, I’ll tell you that this isn’t just an academic question for me. I’m thinking of starting a new blog on Christian wifehood (but a little edgier than that might sound) and am having a hard time justifying the time it would take for the money it would make. That said, it’s something that I care about for reasons other than money, so I might just do it anyway. Would anyone want to write for such a blog?

I am one of the many people who are better at “paying back” than “saving up” for bigger ticket purchases. That’s obviously not a good reason to use credit cards (or any other form of debt), but that’s my personality.

So what is a spender to do when faced with this dilemma? Anyone remember layaway?

For those who don’t, layaway was a service that many stores used to offer (but most have discontinued, thanks to the popularity of credit cards). Instead of buying something now and paying for it later (the credit card model), layaway let you pay for something over time for a small, fixed fee (if there was one), and have the product stored for you until you’d paid for it. Maybe not as fun as instant gratification, but much more responsible and frankly, more satisfying in the long run.

Well, as it turns out, the fabulous Internet has enabled layaway to make a comeback. Enter eLayaway, the online service that gives you the old layaway benefits with modern technology. There are some smart features, like auto draft from a checking account to make it easy to stay on top of it, and automatic shipping when the item is paid for.

The only downside is that there aren’t very many participating merchants at the moment. I expect this is a short-term problem, because they’ve made their pricing very attractive to merchants (much cheaper than credit card processing if there’s any sales volume at all) and merchants will be able to use this service to differentiate themselves and show they are thinking of their customers’ best interests.

Found via Springwise.

Last week I received notification that the site 100 Big Coupons wanted to purchase a review here. Fair enough, I thought, and agreed.

According to their review request, they “… offer coupons for all the major online stores to help people save money while still getting what they want. The service is free to use for anyone who wishes and requires no registration or personal information.” With that in mined, I’ve looked over the site and have come away with a few main impressions.

Design

My first impression was one of being overwhelmed. There is a lot of information on that front page, and I can’t immediately tell what’s most important. The headings on the sidebar are decent, but what can I say, I’m a designer and I felt somewhat lost. Because I’m getting paid for this review, I took the time to sort through everything, but I’m not sure I would have if I’d just stumbled across the site.

Functionality

What does the site actually do? They share coupon codes. You know when you place an online order and it says “If you have a coupon code, enter it here”? Well, there are lots of sites that gather and share various promotional codes in the hopes of making money either through advertising or affiliate programs. 100 Big Coupons is one of these sites. I make it a habit to search for coupon codes when checking out at stores that usually have them, like GoDaddy, so I’ve seen lots of these sites.

When I clicked around through 100 Big Coupons, I found a fair amount of coupons, but also some confusion. For instance, clicking on a product category brought up a list of stores in that category, and also said: “View the 36 coupons in this category:” The colon made me assume the coupons were listed below… but they weren’t. I assumed something was broken. Later, I moused over the statement and realized it was a link, and clicking it brought up the promised coupon. However, since it isn’t underlined until I put my mouse over it, I didn’t realize that I could click it.

Similarly, I tried a search for GoDaddy, since I know they almost always have coupons floating around, and essentially got a blank page as a result. There wasn’t even a statement that there were no coupons found. I understand that no one website will have all available coupons listed (and I think that 100 Big Coupons isn’t even interested in listing domain name coupons) but I found the response unhelpful and potentially confusing.

When you DO find a coupon that interests you, though, the site is good about giving you the information you need to use the coupon.

But can it save me money?

Possibly. It depends on the kinds of things you buy, and mostly on whether you’ll remember to check the site before purchasing.

Suggestions

I feel like 100 Big Coupons is trying to be too many things to too many people. I imagine that offering coupons is a fairly low-profit-margin business, so a lot of eyeballs are crucial, but I’d much prefer to see the site focus a little and branch out within a niche. For instance, I frequent sites that feature domain coupons. Why not create a site that focuses on exclusively on Women’s Clothing (for instance) and has a blog that not only lists coupons but alerts readers to unusually good deals? That way you as a customer don’t have to go out of your way to check the site; it’s more likely that you’d use a coupon because you were already subscribed to the site.

Related Link: SmashDeals - Online Shopping Coupons, Codes & Bargain Sales Offering the best coupon codes and deals from around the web. Browse our latest computer, electronics, clothing, gadgets and other deals today!

I know I just posted about Dreamhost’s deal yesterday, but today I’m going to post about a completely different kind of web host, and the permanent deal they offer you.

NearlyFreeSpeech.net is a very unusual host. To start with, they don’t offer any hosting “plans”. They do something that’s almost unheard of instead: they charge you for what you actually use. Specifically, they charge a penny per megabyte of storage you need each month (this covers the files you put on their system) and a dollar per gigabyte of traffic (the “traffic” is the amount of information your website sends over the Internet to reach your visitors—the more visitors you have, the more traffic).

Let’s do a little compare-and-contrast. Dreamhost offers a truly insane amount of storage space and included traffic. 99.9% of people will probably never use the full capabilities of this account.

For example, let’s look at my usage. I wanted to see how NearlyFreeSpeech would shake out for my actual sites, so I looked at my stats for storage and traffic over the last few months. Right now, I’m holding pretty steady at about 77 MB of storage each month. Since I’ve been a Dreamhost customer (around 7 months), I’ve used about 4.5 GB of traffic. I didn’t sign up for a really great deal with Dreamhost, but it’s not bad at $7.95/month. That’s about $56 over the time I’m looking at.

Now what would this cost me at NearlyFreeSpeech? Let’s look. 77 MB/month * $0.01 = $0.77/month. 4.5 GB (not measured per month, just total) * $1 = $4.50. My total for the last seven months would be $9.89.

Now beyond cost, there’s another upside. Because I’m paying for actual usage, it is definitely in the best interest of NearlyFreeSpeech (hereafter refered to as NFS) to keep my site up and running. All hosts try to keep sites up, obviously, but NFS has an extra motivator: if my site’s down, they stop earning money. If no one can visit my site, I don’t pay for traffic. NFS has every reason to try very hard to keep my site operating.

Similarly, if my site takes a long time to load, visitors won’t necessarily wait around. If they leave, again, I won’t be paying for traffic, and NFS won’t make money. So you can also bet that they care deeply about keeping equipment modernized and optimized, and will rapidly look into any issues that are hurting the performance of sites.

From a technical standpoint, I’ll also point out that NFS has a very sensible load-balancing setup designed to keep both slowness and outages to an absolute minimum.

Obviously, I think NFS has a lot of “pros”. There are a few “cons”, though.

First, they don’t seem like a “hand-holding” kind of company. They expect their setup to appeal to people who have some experience with web hosting, so while I hear that provide great tech support and a members forum, I would sincerely doubt that they have a lot of “touchy-feely” tutorials or techs. If you’re starting from scratch, and have never done the web thing before, and don’t have a web developer helping you, another host might be a better option.

Second, there are some technologies they don’t support. These are clearly stated in their Frequently Asked Questions and include (sorry for the geek-speak!) SSL, FastCGI, cron, and Ruby on Rails. If you want something outside of normal hosting, you should make sure you read the FAQ before signing up. (Actually, it’s a pretty entertaining read, regardless…)

Other than those two items, I see no downside. When my contract with Dreamhost runs out, I’ll be moving my sites to NFS.

I know this was a pretty nerdy post, so please, if you’re confused-but-curious, or have questions, leave a comment and I’ll do my best to help you out!

A month or two ago, I received an email from someone who had seen this blog and wanted to tell me about his own frugal site. I get a few of these emails each month, but this one hit me at a crazy busy time, and I didn’t take the time to look at his site until now.

Because the gentleman was kind enough to include a summary of what the site does, I’m copying it here:

DealMine.com is aggregating member discounts and rewards from loyalty programs, credit cards, associations (AAA, AARP), unions, etc and matching them up to comparison shopping technology. The idea from a consumer perspective is that as popular as comparison shopping is, the information they provide is limited to price, tax and shipping info and that does not provide all the information and consumer needs to make a purchasing decision. For example, the average consumer has nine credit cards, belongs to four rewards programs and at least one association or club (sources: FairIssac and Colloquy) all of which have member benefits and have not been aggregated anywhere before in a way that makes them easy to use. We help consumers discover deals they didnt even know they had available like 10% off at Target.com with AAA or $15 off at Bluefly with Visa cards…

The site features two types of searches. The first is into the directory to compare discounts or rewards like this one for car rentals currently featuring over 100 deals: http://www.dealmine.com/deal-directory/Travel-discounts/Car-Rentals/49

The other search on the site is actual comparison shopping where prices at various stores are matched up to affinity/membership discounts and benefits. See below for an example of a “Compare Prices” search on jeans: http://www.dealmine.com/compare-prices.php?s=jeans

The site currently features discounts and rewards from 29 member programs and is growing quickly.

I was impressed at the concept when I read the email. It seems like a tool that could help a certain market segment (namely, us, “the cheapskates”). And goodness knows I’m part of way too many rewards programs, and don’t keep track of them nearly as well as I ought to.

I tried out the site to see what I thought. My impression: a touch clunky, but extremely useful. The registration process includes a spot where you tell DealMine what rewards programs you’re part of, and then future searches are customized to your actual memberships.

I was impressed at the options for filtering and sorting on a product search. For instance, I did the example jeans search, and found loads of bargains on pants. But then I saw I could filter to show only five-pocket jeans, or bootcuts, and limit it to deals under $20. That’s handy.

I went on to find a lovely pair of bootcut jeans at Sierra Trading post that were under $20 shipped, and would net me 4 hotel rewards points per dollar. I didn’t buy them (that’s still a lot of money for jeans, in my opinion, and I don’t need any right now), but it was a good exercise in seeing the potential benefit of this site.

My biggest concern? Whether I will remember to use the site. I’d like to see them offer a search plugin to the Search Bar in . That would make it much more likely that I’ll return when it’s time to buy.

Yesterday morning, I was reading the Excess Voice newsletter by Nick Usborne. The topic of the newsletter is copywriting, of all things, but it started me down a path that had some surprising results.

In this issue, Nick was talking about the importance of being aware of new technologies and services as they relate to your business. His point was that, whether or not you choose to employ these new technologies, your competitors might, and you should be making an informed decision. To illustrate his point, he rattled off a number of interesting new technologies and examples.

One of these was MotorMapUSA.com. Nick was using it as an example of a “mashup”—two services sort of “glued” together to make a more useful service. In the case of MotorMapUSA.com, they have combined the features of eBay Motors (buying and selling vehicles via online auction) with those of Google Maps (locating things by proximity). By combining these sites, you end up with a map of vehicles listed on eBay that are near your location.

In my opinion, this is huge.

While most people haven’t used eBay yet for vehicle purchases, the numbers are starting to pick up. I think it’s going to become more and more common to shop for cars through a number of online tools, especially as these mashups make it easier. The problem with car shopping on eBay, though, is that there are tons of great deals—but most of them aren’t convenient. It’s great to find a vehicle for $1000+ below Blue Book value, but if it’s halfway across the country, then you’re going to have to figure out how to transport it, adding expense and hassle. Granted, sometimes the bargain is worth it, but most of us won’t go to the effort.

By showing only local vehicles for sale, MotorMapUSA.com eliminates that inconvenience. Since eBay Motors is still a relatively little-used shopping tool, and most people are only interested in local vehicles, you have a great advantage with the auction format: less competition. You also have the advantage of a limited time frame (rather than a seller who is glad to wait around for a higher offer). Additionally, the seller might have a different perspective than the average private party seller.

I’ll tell you what happened yesterday as an example. We’ve been saving up for a new vehicle. We have one that is seemingly always on its last legs, so we wanted to be prepared if it suddenly died. We also need a different type of vehicle—last summer we had our properly-installed bike roof rack fly off our car, complete with two spendy bikes. So we wanted either a little pickup truck or a minivan that can carry our bikes securely (we bike a whole lot).

While I was checking out MotorMapUSA.com (just because it sounded like a great idea), I saw a few trucks listed. I looked at them out of curiosity, and found one that was particularly interesting. It had all of the features we wanted (4-wheel drive, a small extended cab to haul passengers in a pinch, not overly large) and the current high bid was significantly below what we had been considering paying for a vehicle. It also only had four hours left on the auction.

I thought, “What the heck?” and called Daniel. The listing had many pictures, so we both looked them over. We could see from the listing that the seller was a local new car dealership. Daniel called them to ask a few questions, and it turned out that it was a trade-in on a new Volvo, and the dealer mostly just wanted to move it. I’m guessing that for a new car dealership, it is much easier and less resource-intensive to sell the trade-ins on eBay than to run a used car lot or farm it out to other dealers.

Since the truck was just a few miles away, I went to look at it. It had been accurately described on the listing (this didn’t surprise me since the seller had lots of great ratings) so there weren’t any surprises, but it was nice to look it over and feel confident—I was able to check things like even tire wear, look for any engine compartment leaks, smell the interior, that kind of thing.

I came home, studied the Blue Book values more carefully, and talked to Daniel some more. We decided to bid on it, and set our maximum bid at about $800 under Blue Book (we wanted a bargain, after all!). I’m not a “professional eBayer” so I didn’t attempt to do any bidding tricks, like waiting until the last minute; I just put the max bid in and let it go.

It’s kind of odd to sit and think, “I might be buying a truck today.” But when the auction ended, we had won it for about $200 under our maximum bid (sales tax came to just about $200, though). We started the transfer of the savings money from HSBC, went down to the dealership, signed all the papers, wrote them a check (that was convenient, since most private party sellers want cash—a little tricky since all of our bank accounts are with Internet banks and we usually keep the maximum daily ATM withdrawal limit low for security), and drove home with our new truck.

Could we have gotten a better deal by scouring the local papers and looking at a bunch of vehicles over the course of several months? I’m sure we could have. But this was definitely a case of a “convenient bargain.” The shopping process took a grand total of four hours, most of them passive, and we got a good vehicle for less than it is worth.

Like everything else, you have to weigh your priorities: are you more interested in spending the time to save the money? Or spending the money to save the time? We felt like this was a great compromise between the two, and I’ll be recommending the MotorMapUSA.com service to anyone who’s car shopping.

I just signed up for Blingo on the recommendation of a friend. It is an interesting idea. Basically, it’s a search engine built on top of Google (it provides Google results) that gives away prizes (hence the “Bling” part of their brilliant name). I’m assuming that they use Google to supply the results but put their own ads in there, which is how they make money and can afford to give some away. Doesn’t much matter to me if I see Google’s ads or Blingo’s ads.

The prizes vary somewhat but my friend has won a gift card to the iTunes store, which sounds good to me. Blingo’s made it even easier for me by letting me use the search feature that’s already built into Firefox, so I don’t even have to go to their site to use them. On top of that, if someone you refer to the site wins a prize, so do you (so use my referral link, hint hint!).

In case you can’t tell, I think this is a cool gimmick. I don’t really see a downside: quality search results; ease of use; free stuff. I like it.

There are a limited number of good, free personal finance programs available, and less that are web-based and platform independent (meaning I can recommend them to anyone). So it was with great interest that I read a press release today announcing a new online personal finance budgeting application: MySpendingPlan.com.

A first glance at the site was promising: it’s attractive, simple, and provided some enticing information. Top on my list?

MySpendingPlan.com is budgeting software that uses a modernized version of the “envelope system” that fits today’s lifestyle and home budgets.

I am a big fan of the envelopes concept, just because it’s forward-thinking decision-making rather than after-the-fact “guess that’s where we spent it” reporting. We use envelopes-style budgeting in my household (though my husband insists on referring to it as “funds” and “accounts”). The only software out there that I’m aware of currently promoting this kind of system is Mvelopes, who annoyed me both with their crappy Java interface and their spendy, monthly payment plan. No thanks, I want to save money. So free seemed exciting.
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