There are many websites out in the great beyond that offer free money for completing surveys and doing other mindless acts on the web. Most of these sites are frauds or for you to make money you must enter a credit card and pay them before you can get paid. If you are like me the whole reason for looking for free money online is for exactly that reason “FREE MONEY”. Not pay for a membership survey. Therefor having said that no website is perfect, there are a couple of things that can get you fairly close to earning real money without having to put out any money to get started.
A.W. Surveys
This is a website that promises to payout for every survey that you complete. There are some good points to this website and some bad points.
Pros: The surveys on this site are simple and easy to do. All you have to do is review websites and write about 2 to 3 sentences per website visited. Sounds simple, and it really is simple.
Cons: The problem came when all of the given surveys were completed and I tried to retrieve the money I was promised. So I clicked the “Redeem Money” button and it took me to a site where I had to choose the amount of money that I wanted to collect. The minimum being $75. My account balance was only $27 at the time of completing all the available surveys for the month.
So after being kind of let down I read the FAQ's page and came across a text that outlined the payment methods. You can have the money shipped by USPS or sent through paypall. The first method takes 4-6 weeks and the second only 3-4 days. The problem is that the second method charges $25 from your total earnings for a “Convenience Fee”. This brings your total money redeemed to only $50 for you minimum payout. I'm not sure how long it would take to earn the $50 but I assume it is quite a bit of time.
Overall: This site has a membership referral bonus that you can receive If you have a social networking site such as myspace or a facebook you can paste your given URL in there and for every member referred from the link you receive $1.25 bonus fee.
To check out the site and help me out with the referral bonuses click here.
Advertising
This technique involves creating your own website and then having advertisers put links to their websites on yours. You can actually gain a nice income if you can successfully do this technique but this is probably the most in depth method of receiving free money online.
Pros: Like mentioned before this is the most rewarding thing that can be done to receive money. All you have to do is create a website that has some interesting data or content then advertisers will pay you per how many hits you get on that site. This is how many websites you like to visit generate revenue. They host games, videos, and interesting articles and based on how many people visit the site the pay dividends. The advertisers want their advertisements to be broadcast to a large audiences so that is why they reward based on how many hits the site gets.
Cons: It is kind of dificult to create a website that attracts large audiences. Creating a free website from geocities or some other free website hosting service is not going to cut it. You will have to dish out some cash for a website hosting service. These prices can range from $3 a month to about $12 a month for more space and content. With the expenses of website hosting you need to make your site which could also cost money. Along with the first 2 expenses you will need to find content that and develop a site that is worth while and interesting. Some examples could be an easy image hosting site, an ideas forum, a programmers coding site, or maybe something as simple as your reviews on popular videogames.
Overall: Like mentioned before this is the most rewarding type of Internet money making but it is also one of the most intense and time consuming adventures.
Intrade
In trade is a website which mimics the stock market on things ranging from who will win the American Idol competitions to who will be our next President. The way it works is that you buy shares of a certain person or event, and based on future expectations and happening the share prices go up and you can hopefully sell your shares for more than what you had boughten them for.
Pros: The pros are that you can potentially gain allot of money. There was a recent news story that aired on TV about how a couple playing on Intrade with the current presidential election earned more than $200,000. Potentially there is allot of money to be earned from playing on In trade.
