Paid Online Surveys For Money Tips and CashCrate Referrals

This is a picture of my February 2009 check from CashCrate. This is a real check that any bank will cash. You too can learn how to get a check like this from paid online surveys referrals and if you do want to learn, sit back and start reading this blog from my very first post. There is a lot of free information here that you would pay hundreds of dollars for if you bought it in an eBook. But I won’t charge you a thing. Just read and learn. 

How to use this blog: make sure you read this blog from the first post I wrote on March 3rd 2009. Click on this link HERE to get to the back of my blog and then scroll down the page. You will see my very first post dated 3/3/09 titled “ HOW TO REALLY MAKE MONEY WITH ONLINE SURVEYS”. Start from there then read all my posts in order. If you do as I say, you will learn how to make money at home online by making affiliate sales and leads from blogs.

Here at Online Surveys For Money, I wanted to give credit where credit is due. I owe Darren Rowse (Problogger), Yaro Starak (Entrpeneurs Journey), and ShoeMoney some much needed thanks for what they are doing in the Internet marketing community. All three of these guys have recently opened up paid membership sites that will teach you and your loved ones how to become a successful blogger and make money doing it. I for one, want to let them know how appreciative I am.

Now some folks are upset at them because they say these three (and other “gurus” like them) are taking your money and not giving you the real goods. Take Griz over at make money online who has a new long rant about the Cool Aid these guys are selling and calls it blogging nonsense. Griz thinks these guys intentionally target new bloggers and fleece them of their money one month at a time through their useless membership sites. It’s all done under the guise of teaching them how to make money online but the methods they teach won’t work for 999 out of 1000 people.

These membership sites, Griz says, teach you how to Blog and that won’t make you money. Bloggers don’t make money because they have all the wrong kind of traffic. Internet marketers on the other hand, will make money because they understand how to rank their sites in the search engines and traffic that is specifically interested in what they are selling.

Splork over at his ways to make money online blog is saying similar things and he is upset as well. He clearly has a lot of disdain for these “A-List” bloggers who rehash the same thing over and over and charge clueless noobs for the privilege of reading it. These membership sites all preach the same “load of boring shit” according to Splork and the beginners don’t know enough to know that it is all a load of crap and they will never learn how to make money online.

Well, I must apologise for these harsh words of criticism from Griz and Splork and want to make sure Darren, Yaro, and Shoemoney know that I am very grateful for what they are doing. If it weren’t for them and their fantastic “How To Blog” membership sites, think of how much more competition there would be out there for all of us?

These three fine gentlemen are making sure that all the people they sign up for their sites will never learn how to compete with me and even if they do, they will probably be broke before they ever get the chance. I am extremely grateful that they are taking so many IM wannabe noobs right out of the gate and making sure they never learn the real ways to succeed online. 

Problogger, Yaro, and Shoemoney have been around for years cutting down the competition for the rest of us and I want to give a big “THANK YOU” to them for that. With the launch of their new membership sites, I can only hope they have spectacular success for many years to come. Lets hope they make a lot of money and are a big success at confusing and cutting down any potential competition that might be coming our way.

As for Griz, well that guy might have taught me much of what I know but he just won’t shut up. He keeps telling people how to really make money online which can only be hurting my business. The Internet is a big sandbox and there is room for everyone but still….shut up already. At least he only posts about once a month.

People who are new to online surveys for money and are trying to make money for the first time, might wonder how some people make so much on CashCrate.

You can surf the Internet and find lots of pictures of CachCrate checks that are in the hundreds of dollars and even some in the thousands. It is a mystery to newcomers how people are doing it and this blog tells you how.

The short answer is that they are making lots of money by getting referrals. However, that is much easier said than done. It is something that takes a lot of work and dedication but if you work hard, you can make quite a lot of cash.

If you are interested in learning how to set up a website or blog the right way and how to go about getting it ranked on Google, please read this blog from the beginning. Once you start ranking on the first page of Google for some money keywords, people may find your blog and start signing up.

Getting lots of traffic to your blog is one of the best ways to make money online. It can also be done for free and many people make so much on CashCrate that others want to find out how. So read through this blog and learn.  

I was just like everyone else when I first started trying to make money online. I didn’t have a clue so I read other blogs like John Chow and Yaro Starak and thought they had the right formula: start blogging and get famous and the money will start coming in. It may work for them but they are wasting your time trying to make you believe you have a chance too. They make money from duping you in and charging you for overpriced membership programs (Starak) and tons of affiliate products (Chow).

For my first 6 to 9 months, a $100 month would be a great month for me. And with all the time I was spending blogging, trying to get paid for surveys, and trying different ways to make money, a $100 was probably the same as $1.00 an hour. I was clueless. I made some money at CashCrate and sites like it but I knew that referring people was the best way to make money but I didn’t know how to get the traffic.

Now days there are all sorts of other diversions and time wasters that weren’t there when I started. You have Facebook and now the whole Internet world trying to tell you that you should be making money on Twitter. In my opinion that is bullshit and people are sheep. Of course some people are making money but the liklihood you can is very low.

I didn’t make money for my first 6 months because I didn’t understand that I needed targeted traffic and not just any traffic. If you want to make money you need to sell something and then find the people who are looking to buy what you are selling. If you are selling computers online, you need to find people who are looking to buy computers. Whatever you are selling, you need to find people that are interested in specifically what you are trying to sell.

If you are trying to make money with CashCrate referrals, you need to find people who are LOOKING for ways to make money. Period. Any other type of person is NOT going to convert. Having lots of followers on Twitter is NOT GOING TO CONVERT INTO CASHCRATE REFERRALS. Period again.

You hear that social media is the wave of the future and that you should be all over it making money.  You hear about traffic exchanges and all sorts of other things to get more traffic to your blogs. If only you had traffic! But until you learn how to get TARGETED TRAFFIC, you won’t make a dime.

Keep chasing that social media and hanging around the forums hoping for the big secret. It won’t get you anywhere but you can keep doing it. Most of what you really need to know is right here on this blog if you will just take the time to read it.

If you like to get paid for surveys and are looking for other websites that give a $1.00 bonus for referrals, you may want to try SquishyCash.

SquishyCash a site similar to Cash Crate in that there are all the same type of free offers, cash offers, surveys, daily surveys, contests, and a whole lot more. The good part about their referral system is that everyone gets a $1.00 bonus for every active referral and that is even for people that have just signed up.

With CashCrate, you have to reach the silver level (I can’t remember for sure) before you get the option of the $1.00 payout. This makes it hard for some people to earn referral money because they never make it to silver. With SquishyCash, everyone gets the $1.00 bonus right from the start and they also pay by PayPal!

The one drawback I see is that it is harder to get actives or at least that is the way that it has been for me so far. I have had 85 people sign up and only 13 of them have gone active for about a percentage of 15%. I think the reason for this is partly because the site is a bit confusing and new people who have just signed up don’t know where to start. This leads to them doing nothing and leaving.

There are so many things going on over at SquishyCash like the daily contests and events that I couldn’t really figure out how to get started. It is great that there is a lot of activity and stuff to do but in the end it might be a drawback in terms of getting new active referrals. This is further evidence that simplicity is often the best website design.  

The one thing I love about CashCrate is the very simple and clean interface which is quite easy to understand for most people. With Cash Crate, I have about 30% of my referrals go active which is double my percentage so far over at SquishyCash. Nevertheless, if you are looking for another site similar to CashCrate for getting referrals, Squishy Cash might be the one to try.

One of the best parts of CashCrate is the referral program and its ability to let you earn a passive income online. Once you reach the Elite level, you will make 30% of your first level referrals and 20% of your second level referrals. There is no other online surveys for money site that I am aware of that gives you that big a percentage back for 1st AND 2nd level referrals. If you are lucky and get some good people under you as your 1st level referrals, they can truly give you a hands free passive income for many years.

The picture below shows how many referrals I have as of 11/2/09 with CashCrate. As you can see, I have over 30,000 first level referrals and ONLY about 4000 2nd level referrals. While most people would love to have those statistics, it is that 2nd level number that I am very disappointed with:

What it shows is that out of all the 30,000 people that have signed up under me, no one has learned to effectively refer others. Contrast that chart against this one of someone who is very lucky and no longer bothers to even promote CashCrate much (as far as I know) because they are happy with all the money the 2nd level referrals are bringing in:

As you can clearly see in the chart above, out of the 2705 first level referrals this person has gotten, one or more of them have turned into referring whales. According to the blog where I found this, this person is consistently making $600 to $800 per month by doing NOTHING as a handful of their 1st level referrals keep signing up more people.

Using CashCrate and other online surveys for money sites like it, you can truly build up a passive income online if you are lucky. The problem is how to get 1st level referrals who will become adept at making their own referrals so that you can make the 20% off of what those referrals do?

If you only refer beginners (which are what 99 % of the people who sign up to CashCrate are), there is little chance that any of them will truly take the time and have the patience to learn how to blog and get their own referrals. I have found that trying to teach beginners is about as painful as pulling my hair out. It is no fun at all and largely a total waste of time, at least so far.

If you  do get lucky and somehow refer someone who is already an established Internet marketer, then you will have a great asset under you but how do you find someone like that and then get them to sign up?

Unfortunately, I have still not been able to figure out a way to raise my odds of getting any of these 1st level referrals that already know what they are doing or ones that will learn how to refer other people and end up making me additional money passively. One of my goals with this blog was to have a learning  source that I could direct my own referrals to and where they could learn how to start a blog and become successful on their own. After all, the more successful your 1st level referrals are, the more money the original referrer will make.

The number of my CashCrate 2nd level referrals has been going up faster than it used to but still no where near where I would like it to be. I’d love to be building a passive income online and CashCrate is a great place to do it. Unfortunately, getting 1st level referrals who know how to make referrals of their own seems to involve a lot of luck.

Just a quick post here to talk about Google page rank which I have never done before. If you hangout on the CashCrate forum or any other money making forum, you will find people who are severely misguided about page rank and its importance.

Here is the truth about page rank: it has no bearing whatsoever on your rankings in the search engines.

I know you will read in a lot of places that it does but anyone who tells you that PR is important for ranking in Google is clueless. This blog just got a PR of 4 and my rankings for any and all of my keywords like paid online surveys have not gone up one bit. And they won’t as the only bearing on your rankings is the number and quality of the anchored backlinks you have.

The one good thing page rank is good for is getting people to exchange links with you. Now that this is a PR 4 blog, I will have little difficulty in finding people who want a link from me. I can use this blog in 3 way link trades and thus it is valuable for that in itself. However, Google can lower PR at any time so it might not stay at 4 forever.

One way to get some traffic to your paid online surveys blogs and to get the much needed anchored backlinks is to use article marketing. Unfortunately, like everything else in this business, you need to know how to do good keyword research (how to make money with keywords for beginners) to actually be successful in getting traffic from articles.

Some Internet marketers go all out with articles and write thousands of them. In the resource box they point a link to their blogs and sometimes they have their blogs redirected to an affiliate offer so the person goes straight to the offer. An advantage with articles is that sometimes they can rank high right out of the gate because they are coming from an authority site. That is what EzineArticles.com and HubPages are – authority sites.

I was doing some research for another niche this morning and came upon one writer who had over 149 active articles, resulting in 183,427 views on EzineArticles. Almost all these articles were for the same niche! I then did some more poking around and found someone by another name had over 167 articles for that same niche on ArticlesBase.com and these were all pointed to the same domain so it was the same lady.

One of her articles had over 58,000 views itself and obviously this one article has made her a ton of money even when you assume that only 10% or so click on the author box and get directed to her sight.  If only 10% of the people click her link (and often it is higher) that means almost 6000 readers had clicked through to her site which was redirected to the affiliate offer. That’s a lot of clicks for one article.

If you want to make money with CashCrate and any other paid online surveys sites by referrals, you need to get people to your blog. One way that can help is to pump out a lot of articles like that lady has done that are all loosely centered around the same subject (niche) and hope that a few of them are home runs. Like I have explained before, this would mean writing articles that were aimed at different groups of people who all need money. Thus, they would be interested in CashCrate and more likely to sign up.

If you want to know where to get backlinks for your online surveys for money blog, a good way is to write articles and submit them to article directories like Ezine, GoArticles, Buzzle.com and many others. Ezine is the best so you should start there. These are all authority sites which means that Google will often rank articles from these places quite high, especially if there is little competition. You, on the other hand, with your two month old CashCrate blog will never rank for the same keywords until you get tons more authority which may take months or years. That is why some people put a lot of effort into articles in hopes that a few will rank high and get a lot of clicks like the 58,000 clicks mentioned above.

People who go overboard with articles can get a lot of backlinks but they are all coming from the same place(s) so they are worth less as more come in. Also writing all that content and putting it up on someone else’s website is a questionable tactic. I write some articles but only enough to get some backlinks as I would prefer to put most of my material on my sites themselves. In other words, why would I spend all that time writing articles and helping build up other sites when I could be building up my own sites with that material.

One last note, if you do a Google search for any keyword term and find that the first page is full of articles, that means the keyword are very easy to beat. Any keyword that you see lots of articles on the first page of Google is a keyword that is easy to beat and outrank those articles (relatively easy anyway). If you do a search and find MSN, Forbes, and other similar sites occupying the top spots, you know that is an impossible term to attack. But if you see all articles at the top of the serps, that means those terms are ripe for the picking. This will not happen for anything associated with the word “CashCrate” or any other paid online surveys terms because there is so much competition.

Obviously this whole blog is about how to get CashCrate referrals the right way – by setting up blogs, getting them to the front page of Google, and getting free search traffic. If you want to learn how to do that, make sure you read my blog from my first post here about how to make money with online surveys. This method is the best long term way of making money with online surveys for money and your blog.

However, many beginners get frustrated when they start their blogs because they get absolutely no traffic. If they do happen to get some, it seems like hardly anyone signs up for CashCrate or whatever they are selling which is equally frustrating.  

One of the ways you can get targeted traffic is to print business cards and distribute them around town. I want to stress that this is a short term solutionwhile you are working on your website by creating content, getting anchored backlinks, guest posting on other blogs, commenting with on other blogs with your anchored link, creating Hubpages, and all the other things that need to be done to eventually get your blog seen by Google searchers.

You can get  500 Vista premium business cards for $1.99 and you can pay by credit card or PayPal. That is a pretty cheap investment if you want to give it a try and you use them intelligently. Once you have picked your card and added all your info, you will have to keep hitting the “Continue” button till you reach the checkout and payments screen. (they will try to upsell you lots of stuff along the way which you don’t need)

First of all, DON’T PUT YOUR AFFILIATE LINK on the card. You need to put your website name on the card so that people will go to your website and then click through your affiliate link. If you make the mistake of just putting your affiliate link on the card, you are trusting that everyone will type it in correctly and that just won’t happen.

So, with your website prominently displayed on the card and a good call to action, where do you put the cards. I would put them on bulletin boards at grocery stores, schools, colleges, libraries, and anywhere else you can that has some walk through traffic. You could try putting them on windshields of cars but I would only put them on the cars that are a little run down. In other words, don’t bother with the Lexus’s and BMW’s as those people probably don’t need the money.

Be creative and you have 500 cards to get out their with your website on them and hopefully get some CashCrate referrals. The good thing about bulletin boards is that multiple people can see your same card so it is not wasted on just one person. The shorter and more catchy your website name is, the easier it will be for people to remember it.

Remember, the 500 Vista premium business cards for $1.99 is not a solution to getting traffic to your blogs but just something temporary that you might try. If you use your cards smartly, you will probably be able to get enough sign ups make it worth your while.

If you live in any country other than the United States, you might be frustrated trying to make money online. This is because the bulk of the advertisers only want U.S. traffic. Anyone who lives in another country and tries to make money with online surveys for money sites like CashCrate will not be able to make much because there are few surveys and offers available to them.

So how do you make money online if you live in the U.K., Singapore, the Philippines, India, or Malaysia? How do you make money if you live in any one of the European Union countries and would like to take advantage of the sheer numbers of buyers we have in America?

This whole blog is how to get CashCrate referrals and anyone from any country can do it. You can see my check proofs here (CashCrate check proof ) and ANYBODY FROM ANY COUNTRY CAN DO THIS TOO! There are already lots of international users and checks get sent around the world every month.

If you live in another country and you join, you won’t have many offers to do BUT you can refer other people and get full credit. There are many members from Canada and Australia who are very successful at making money with CashCrate by making referrals. I am sure there are people from other countries as well.

The best way to make referrals for CashCrate is to have at least one blog. You need to learn how to write original content on your blog and you need to get backlinks to move it up to the first page of Google for the terms you are targeting. It seems hard at first but anyone from Great Britain, the Philippines, Singapore, Canada, India, Malaysia, or any country can do it.

Please read my whole blog which gives you all the information you need to get started. Once you learn how to get CashCrate referrals, you can make a lot of money if you work hard. None of it is easy and you really do need to be able to write in English to get American people to sign up. You see, only referrals from the U.S. count so you need to target Americans.

Please read my blog from my first post. You need to go to the bottom of each page and click on the link that says “Older Entries” till you get to the first page. Read from my first post and you will discover how you can make money with CashCrate surveys by making referrals. As you can see by my checks, it can be quite profitable and all international users can do it too.

Here is a question I got on another post. I will answer it here in this post but pretty much I am going to type fast and ramble:

This question is typical of the frustration of anyone just starting out trying to make money online. Not only is there tons of confusion about what to do, but if they do continue on and work hard, will it all pay off? Will their blog ever make money? Will anyone ever see it?

It is easy to get discourged and that right there is why most people quit. Much of it has to do with the keywords you target. If you target something too competitive, you will never make it to the first page of Google. If you target something too easy, you will get to the top but there may be no one searching for those keywords and that is why it was easy to get there. Either way you may never get any search traffic and it is all because of the words you targeted.

Of course that is all if you even know what keywords are and know how to plan a blog with a specific course of action. People who are in tune with current events and the things happening around them are best able to make money online. They are able to figure out what words people are searching for.

Take my blog that you are reading and look at the content I have written. It contains tons of content by most people’s standards (47 posts I think) and now I am really trying to figure out what direction to go. I have mentioned this before but it seems like I may have targeted some bad keywords like online surveys for money. I don’t want to go into my whole thought process for this blog but right now I have spent more time than it was worth.

However, I still have an asset. I have a blog that is getting older by the day (that is good) and it has a PR 2. I can use it for link exchanges and I can also change course at any time and target different keywords. Just because it is not producing right now like I want it too doesn’t mean it is and always will be a failure.

My advantage is that I know I can make money online and most beginners don’t know that. I know that not every blog I make will be a success and that is why I have many blogs. Most of you have one blog and all your eggs are in that one basket.

Back to the readers question: you should write at least 4 more Ezine articles and link to your main page for one link and an inner page for the second link using anchor text. You need to get your Hub score above 75 and keep it there. You need to write more content for your site. And after that you need more content again. The more you write, the more words Google has to pick from when looking at your site. Sometimes people search for things you would have never thought of and if you have tons of content on your blog, maybe those combinations of words are there.

You can write guest posts for other people’s blogs and they will let you put in a do-follow anchored link or two to your blog. That is why you need a good looking blog with MORE content so that other blog owners will accept your posts. You would need to save your best writing for those guest posts so they are accepted. Don’t just ask anyone though: find a blog that has a little PR or some authority and has been around a while. Try this one as I and many others have done guest posts here:  http://moneymakerinfo.blogspot.com/. But you need a bigger blog before you do that so you have some credibility.

Finally, you need to find people to exchange links with. This is hard but if you have the guts it will help you greatly to contact other blogs and try to work out 3 way exchanges. That is why it is smart to have 2 or 3 blogs for every niche you have and to make them look better than some of the crappy CashCrate blogs that are out there.

If you want to see an example of a successful blog please see my review of make money online free and click through to Trini’s blog. She has turned that into a money making blog that anyone would like to exchange links with. Look at the work she has done there.

The reader who asks this question has a blog that has about 3 posts and is brand new. Seriously, if anyone thinks they can slap up three posts and a few articles, they need to go back and read my whole blog again. IT ISN’T EASY AND YOU HAVE TO DO TONS OF WORK AND IT MIGHT NOT PAY OFF FOR SIX MONTHS! In fact, if you target too competitive keywords, you might never get any traffic. That is why 99 out of 100 fail and give up. Sorry, but its true.

The reality is that the only way you will ever succeed is to keep on trying and keep targeting different keywords. You have to slap things up against the wall and see what sticks. Did I mention that just about every CashCrate blog I have seen is NOT A BLOG and need more original content? If you can’t put up some original content then your chance of making money online is pretty slim.

BTW, I might be trying some things and looking for new keywords on this blog very soon myself. You might see some weird posts that don’t teach you much.