On a scale of "good, bad, and ugly," I'm not yet certain where this fits in. At first, I was leaning towards ugly, but after doing more research, I'm leaning more towards good. Only time will tell.
Getting paid to click pays about the same as getting paid to read emails. But, in most cases, there's no waiting for the emails.
One things for certain, before embarking on pay to click opportunities be sure to be prepared to receive an incredible amount of emails, and I highly recommend getting a "free" designated email account for this. I wouldn't want important emails from friends and family to get burried in all the emails that come in.
Market Pond is a free site that has about 40 companies. Several of the companies are pay to click companies. After registering with Market Pond, registrations with all the companies can easily be done through new windows that appear.
Click here to get to Market Pond
It's been about a month since I posted Market Pond, and I now have an update on what I think of paid-per-clicks in regards to my scale of good, bad, and ugly.
Beginning with Market Pond. Market Pond itself is not bad. It is basically an easy way to sign up with several work from home opps, most of which are on my site. But, there are some very "UGLY" work from home sites on Market Pond.
Here has been my experience over the past month with one of the sites that offers pay for reading emails and pay-per-clicks.
This site promises not to send more than 288 emails per day. This actually got me a bit excited at first because I am starting a club called, "The Penny Clickers" (it will be PCC on my navigation bar when it's ready). If you read my blog "reading emails," you know it's about building a team. So, thinking I found a site willing to send out 288 paid emails a day was too cool in my book.
But, as the old saying goes, "If it's too good to be true, it probably isn't." Here's how it went:
First, I started doing some clicks on their site, and I watched my account go to $.72 over the course of about 15 minutes. That's roughly $2.80 an hour. I didn't mind this because if it's all legit and can be added to the team building concept PCC is based on, $2.80 could become much much higher. So, again, I'm thinking, "I can work with this."
For for the first week, I deleted the 100 or so emails I got from them every day because I was too busy to research it at that time. Once I found some time to start adding their emails to my work load, here's what happened.
For the first few emails, I was a bit confused about where the "advertised" email link was. The emails contain more than one link, including a link that is a "cheat link." After figuring out this part of their system, I began clicking on the emails, and after a few clicks I accidently hit the "cheat link."
A second window openned up, stating something like, "You have hit the cheat link close this immediately." So, I did and went directly to their site. Sure enough, all the money in my account was gone. Not that it was a lot of money, but think for a moment about how much the site benefits from anyone who makes this mistake. If they're getting paid from the advertisers for sending these emails out, and no longer have to pay out on them that's could add up to mega bucks for the site. Now, I did notice there were points in my account, so it may have been my $$$ were converted to points. I'll tell you about the points later in this article.
Anyway I looked at it, I thought it was sleezy that they even had this link in their email. Maybe someone else thinks it has a benefit, but I don't. Because I was discouraged over this, I deleted all their emails for the next few days. I don't mind working hard for an honest dollar, but I loath scamming, and this was beginning to look like a scam to me.
A few days went by, and I decided to give it another try, give them the benefit of the doubt. I figured I wouldn't make the "cheat link" mistake twice. So, here's how it went this time:
I openned emails and it takes 12 seconds to credit your account. Most often the 12 seconds are up before the email even loads....cool. But, then, after a dozen or so emails, here's what I started getting. Something like "You've already been credited for this site, but you can still visit the site for free." HUH???? Now, I am expected to take the time to open up emails from a we-pay-you-to-work-for-us site just to figured out if I'm going to get a paid email?????
Now, I have posted on my site five companies that pay for reading emails, and on occassion, I will get something like, "This offer has expired." But, this is the exception and not the rule for these five companies. As for the one site I am talking about, this became the norm and not the exception as I went along, so again I stopped doing it for a few days.
When I first started secret shopping, my family and everyone thought it was a scam. I showed it wasn't, and now some of them secret shop as well. But, at first secret shopping takes time to figure out and is definetley patience driven in the beginning.
This is mind, I thought to myself, "Maybe, I just need to figure out the system for these types of companies." So, after waiting a few frustrating days, I returned for a third try.
I went along, reading emails, avoiding same subject lines and all went well. I don't know exactly how many emails I went through, but it was roughly 30. I'm thinking I got it down, and it's time to go look and see how much money I made. Wow!! After all this, I earned, $.02 and 616 points. Un-friggin-believable. Excuse me, I earned, $.0238 cents...about another 30 emails and I'd be at 3 cents. As for the points, if this were MyPoints, I'd be loving 616 points added to my account. As for this site, here's what I can get for my points:
1.) Once I have accrued 37,554 points, I can give it all back to them for an upgraded membership to the first level.
2.) I can use my points to bid for cash. At the time I wrote this, here's where the bidding was:
The bid for 20 cents is currently at 4,200 points.
The bid for 30 cents is currently at 16,000 points.....I guess these bidders here don't understand division and muliplication because if they did, they would realize for 16,000 points they could bid for 20 cents three times to win 60 cents.
3.) I can trade in points for free advertisement. It costs roughly 50,000 points depending on how much you want. The advertisement I could get is this site, which I currently have an opinion of them as being sleezy, will send out emails to my site address.
So where does this leave me thinking about them? At this point, I am about to write a blog or article about how bad this site is....but, before I do,
Guess what? I'm not a quitter. Notice I haven't mentioned this site's name. Before I remove this page from site, and write an article or blog on them, I am going to give it one more try to be certain there is something I'm not missing. But, I don't recomend anyone clicking to Market Pond untl I can find something good in one of the companies listed on their site that is not listed on mine.