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.

Many people overcome this by signing up to many survey sites and maxing out each one every month. They don’t all have exactly the same offers and surveys so it is possible to make $20 on one site, $30 on another survey site, and maybe even $50 on a third one. The more sites you sign up for, the more opportunities you have to make money. Many people are perfectly happy doing surveys and offers every month and they can make a consistent $100 to $200 that way and maybe even more with some hard work.

Making money with paid online surveys is slow and methodical if you have the patience to do it. CashCrate though, gives you the opportunity to make a lot more by referring other people to the site and having them join up. For that they will give you a “finders fee” which can, for the more successful referrers, add up to a lot more than they could ever make by just doing the surveys.

This is the way the world works if you think about it. If you spend your time trying to refer other people to CashCrate, you are really a salesperson on commission. There are hundreds of millions of people in the world who make their living by selling things or trying to convince someone to buy something. Next time you are out and about, look around you and discover all the people in sales.

The person at Nordstrom or any other department store who brings you your shoe selections is in sales. In fact, almost all people on the floor of any store you walk into are there to try to make you happy, show you where things are, and try to get you to buy things. Think of every ad you have ever heard, read, or seen on any media outlet. Media in general is all about advertising and trying to get you to buy something. 

The bank teller you go to is probably constantly trying to “cross sell” you some other product the bank has.  Waiters and waitresses at restaurants will always ask you if you want apetizors first even though the portions of the main dishes are so big that most people can’t finish them. Even the person taking your order at McDonalds is in sales to the degree that they ask you if you want to “supersize” your order. They want you to buy more and spend more money.

By now you should realize that pretty much from the beginning of time, the world has revolved around advertising and getting people to do or buy what you want them to. CashCrate has one of the best paid online surveys sites and probably the best referral program of anyone so how is it a scam to promote it? Everything a person needs to succeed is there on the site either in the tutorials or the forum and any new member can get answers to all their questions.

There are many ways to make money on your computer but they all involve some degree of work. To be successful, you need to learn what your options are and what methods are best for you. Not everyone can make money online because not everyone has the writing ability and the computer knowledge to be successful. If you don’t have any skills though, there is no reason why you can’t learn everything you need to learn but you can’t expect overnight success. People claim CashCrate and other sites are scams out of frustration and their false belief that it should be easy to make money online.

If you are one of the ones who think CashCrate is a scam you should head over to the forum and find the “I Just Got Paid” thread. If CashCrate is a scam, then everyone in that forum is lying. Why would they do that? If there is no money to be made with these paid online surveys, why would everyone be lying about it? 

This is one of the reasons it is nice to have a real blog where you write things on a regular basis and have lots of posts as opposed to one of those one or two page pieces of crap most CashCraters put up. For instance, in this post I talk about lead generation and with that link, I have just told Google what that page is about. Links from within your blog count too and help give those pages authority that you link to.

The bigger your blog gets, the more opportunity you have to link from page to page. This is one thing that I admittadly don’t do well enough because it takes time and I am a bit lazy. For every post you write, you really should go back and link to anything relevant that you talk about in your new post. Likewise, you should go back and see if the post you have just written applies to anything you have already written and link from the old post to the new post.

These internal links help Google crawl your blog and help clearly identify what each page is about. It is hard to get link exchanges with other people and make secondary blogs all the time and many people overlook this simple thing they can do with their own blog to help with getting links.

The value of these internal links is not great but if you are in a niche with very little competition, they can help alot. Anyway, a link is a link and you should be doing anything and everything to get as many as you can if you want to make money with your online surveys for money blogs.

Finally, CashCrate is not one of the online surveys for money scams and I and many others have proven it month after month with the checks we get. CashCrate is a great survey site with the best referral program and that is what this blog helps you learn to take advantage of.

If you have not seen my CashCrate check proof, please take a look as it shows what you can do if you are willing to work hard at getting CashCrate referrals.

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You can try to make money doing paid online surveys or you can try to make a lot more money with lead generation. The art of getting CashCrate referrals is nothing more than online lead generation: you get leads for CashCrate and in turn they pay you a small commission. CashCrate is compensating you to go out and bring back potential customers to them. This is, in a nutshell, what affiliate marketing is all about.

CashCrate isn’t the only online surveys for money site that has a referral program and beyond surveys, there are thousands of other companies that you can make money generating leads for. This is why learning how to get CashCrate referrals is really learning how to make money online. If you can figure out how to successfully make lots of referrals for CashCrate, you will then have the knowledge of how to make money doing the same thing for other companies and “niches”.

When I get asked how I make money online I tell people I have a few websites and make money from them. People then invariably jump to the conclusion that I sell something (Ebay always comes to mind) as they have no idea that you can make money without having or selling a physical product. Usually the more I explain, the more confused they get as they just can’t grasp the idea of getting paid to lead someone to a product.

Lead generation is nothing more than another form of advertising. Advertising in one form or another has been around since the beginning of man and it is what makes the Internet tick. People seem to understand the concept of advertising on television, radio, and print media but they begin to get confused when confronted with the different types of advertising online.

The online world is different from any other media in that it is more immediate and produces results right away. When a company places an ad on TV, they are merely getting the word out and increasing brand awareness. They don’t make any immediate sales as a person viewing the ad would have to actually go somewhere where the product is sold and then buy it.

The online world is different in that it is both the viewing medium and the store. If you have an ad on the Net, someone can see the ad and immediately decide to buy the product right then and there. This opens up the opportunity for advertisers to make a lot of money and know exactly where that money is coming from. It lets them get detailed feedback right away as to whether an advertisement is working or not. The offline world of advertising involves a lot of guesswork and delayed numbers as to efectiveness while the online world gives an advertiser immediate and detailed results.

Since detailed tracking is possible online, the world of affiliate marketing has opened up where someone can get compensated for sending customers to a product or service of a company. This is what CashCrate referrals are and their affiliate prgram is one of the best for affiliates. If you doubt that please take a look at a couple of my CashCrate checks as proof of the amount of money that can be made.  

The Cash Crate affiliate program is run in house but many other affiliate programs are run through a second party affiliate network. Market Leverage is one such network that has many different affiliate programs under it and that makes it very easy to have a wide variety of things to promote. They have a check sent to your address every month by FedEx which goes way beyond what other networks do. When you start to reach the level where you want to promote things in other niches besides paid surveys, I recommend Market Leverage as one of the first networks you should sign up with. (it is free to sign up of course as they want your business)

Online lead generation can make you some very good money if you understand how to get targeted visitors to your blog(s) that are interested in the subject at hand. Much of this blog has been written to help you understand what you must do to make that happen. If you want to learn more about how to start earning money with CashCrate, please go to the beginning of this blog and read it from the start.

The casual blogger puts up a family blog of photos or their life’s journey and they have no intention of ever making money. Yet other bloggers and potential bloggers have heard about blogging for a living and easy money making by blogging and so they set out to try to do it. Unfortunately for them, they have no clue how it’s done and have all the wrong expectations.

I am not a blogger but I do make money blogging. Does that make sense? I have a lot of blogs (including this one) and on none of them do I ever want to become well known, famous, or have a huge following. Really, I don’t care about anything other than making money. The blogs, and blogging, are the instruments I make money with and nothing more. All I care about is learning how to make money and getting more CashCrate referrals.

I am an Internet marketer and not a blogger. I set up a blog and from the first post I try to strategically figure out what to write about, what keywords to use, how to get links, and how to get traffic. If I do succeed in getting traffic, then and only then does the fun start. Once I get traffic I then can figure out how to monetize it. Of course I have an idea before hand of what I will do but sometimes things change.

Being an Internet marketer instead of a blogger means that I pay special attention to figuring out what affiliate products to sell, where to put the ads, where to put the Adsense ads if I have them, and all things to do with ad placement and making money. Each blog is a big puzzle and when you get traffic to it you need to be able to figure out how to capitalize on that traffic and turn it into money. Internet marketing is a business and blogging is just how I do my business. With each new blog I begin, I am starting a small business online, or at least I am trying to.

Many of the CashCrate newbies set out to make a blog as they hear that is the best way to get referrals. CashCrate tends to get a young audience and many of them are teenagers and people in their 20′s. Blogging for 15 year olds is not something many of them want to do or have any interest in. All they end up doing is copying and pasting a few things from the CashCrate website and putting them on their “blog”. They think that is enough to get paid online surveys referrals but you can’t make money being lazy.

Blogging can be a business if you set out to make it a business and get search engine traffic. You can make a lot of money with the right kind of targeted traffic but you can’t make much money from return visitors which is what most bloggers are hoping for. The standard make money blogger hopes to create a following and become so popular that everyone will buy affiliate products from him. This is a dream that will never happen to 99% of the bloggers out there. Yet they are too naive to ever recognize this and they keep on trying.

Do you want to make money or do you want to be a blogger? That is the question you need to answer before you go to far with your blog. If you are writing blog posts and hoping they get Tweeted, Stumbled, and Digged, then you are a blogger and are not going down the right path to making money. If you want to learn how to make money blogging, then you need to learn about keywords, keyword research, getting links, on and off page SEO. You need to also learn how to sell things to your readers.

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 from home online by making affiliate sales and leads from blogs.

                                                      research keywords
                                                                      +
                                                           add content
                                                                      +
                                                    get anchored backlinks  
                                                 _____________________
                                                               = money

When you set out to make money online for the first time, chances are you will be overwhelmed by the amount of information that is out there on the Internet. There are tons of ways to make moeny and thousands of people and places that will eagerly sell you an ebook with the magic money making formula. Most people end up quitting because they never figure out what is BS and what is the truth.

If you want to make CashCrate referrals or referrals to any of the surveys for money sites, the formula above is really all you need to know. In fact, once you learn the importance of that formula and how to do it, you don’t have to stop at making just survey referrals. Open to you will be a whole world of Internet marketing where you can find leads for any type of product or service and make money over and over with blog after blog.

Yes you can make money by just making referrals for the GPT sites, but you can also make money by getting people to sign up for any number of products. Not all products and services are equal though, and the trick then becomes picking the right products that will sell and then getting your blogs in front of enough Google search engine eyeballs to make sales.

CashCrate is great because it is a proven winner and all you need to do is look at my check to see that. If you find the right kind of traffic, they will sign up to Cash Crate and you will make money as seen with my CashCrate check proof.

Getting anchored backlinks is really the part of the puzzle that most bloggers don’t know about. Even if you pick the wrong URL, you can overcome it with the right anchored links to your site from other sites. With enough incoming links for a certain keyword or keyword phrase, you can rank high for almost anything. Most bloggers don’t bother getting any links at all and if they do, they don’t know what an anchored backlink is.

If you want to make money getting survey referrals from your blog, you need to spend most of your time getting those anchored links. Picking a blog name and then writing the content is actually the easiest part. Of course the better the writer you are the easier it will be for you to write the posts so writing the content may not be that easy for everyone. By far though, the hardest and most boring part is getting anchored backlinks coming to your blog from as many different kind of websites as possible. It is something you have to do over and over and over and never stop. Making money with paid survey referrals is hard work but if you keep at it, you can make some good money.

Up until now I have just talked about picking keywords to target and build your blog around. These are the words people will type into Google and if you have done things right, your blog will pop up on the first page of the search engines and you will have the type of laser targeted traffic you need to convert into survey referrals.

Once you pick your keywords that you want people to find you through, what is the next step to actually getting your blog to start rising in the search engine rankings for those words? What makes your blog stand out from all the others that also use those same words?

The first thing you have to do is write posts around those words and use those words within the posts. You need to structure your post titles and the body of your posts around those keywords. For instance, if you want to go after people looking for how to get referrals to CashCrate, you need to write posts about how to get referrals to CashCrate. If you get bored and start writing posts on your blog about camping outdoors, it won’t help you reach the people you are trying to target.

Ideally you need to keep your blog on topic and on target. If you are also interested in writing about camping outdoors, start another blog about that. Keep each blog to one subject or one general subject area. Unfortunately though, that alone won’t help your blog enough to start it climbing the rankings. Anchored back links will.

Anchored backlinks are links to your blog which have the words you are targeting in them. With this blog I am hoping to find people looking for paid online surveys and that is an anchored link. The more of those anchored links I can get pointing to this blog from other blogs, websites, and what have you, the more authority this blog will have for that term.

Let me explain with this example. When you go to Google and type in anything you are searching for (lets use the words how to get referrals), Google has a big decision to make. How does it know which sites to pull up? I am sure there are tens of thousand of sites that have the words how to get referrals somewhere in them or are about that topic. Remember, there are BILLIONS of sites on the Internet. Google prides itself on being the best search engine and so it had to figure out a way to pull the best sites up first and then the farther you go down the list the weaker the matches get.

Above you can see what you get when you type those words into Google with ” ” around them. It shows 50,900 sites with the exact words how to get referrals.

Now if you type in how to get referrals without the ” “, you get the results as seen below. It looks like there are 14,400,000 sites with those words or some combination of those words out there on the Internet. Thats 14 MILLION! Now, a lot of those sites will be easy to beat because they don’t have those exact words but either way you look at it, there are a lot of sites ahead of you and somehow you have to pass all of them if you want that exact traffic.

A simplistic way of explaining links, anchored links, and anchored backlinks is that Google has decided that an anchored link to a site is a vote for that site. So, when I make a link to this site with the words “how to get online survey referrals“, I have just told Google that I think this site is about how to get online survey referrals. My other two links toward sthe top of this post also tell Google that my site is for slightly different things as well. Each anchored link is a “vote” for my site being about whatever the link says it is.

This is a very complicated subject that could never be covered in one post. All links are not of equal value and the three that I have put in this post won’t really help a whole lot but they won’t hurt. What I need for this blog, and what you need for your blogs, are as many anchored links that you can get from other blogs and websites that all have the keyword terms you are shooting for.

So, going back to the “how to get referrals” scenario from above, if that is what your blog was about, you would need as many anchored incoming links from other blogs and websites that all had to do with that subject. You would want everyone to link to your blog using any variety of terms that all had to do with ‘referrals’, and “how to get”. Some examples might be:

how to make referrals
how to make CashCrate referrals
how to refer
how to get survey referrals
how to make online surveys referrals
how to get more survey referrals
how to refer people to CashCrate
how to make paid surveys referrals

These are all keyword terms that you would love to have people link to you with if you had a blog specifically about making referrals to the survey sites. This would build your blog’s authority for all those terms and eventually you would move up the search engine rankings (SERPS) and be on the first page of Google for many of those phrases.

There are many ways to make money on the Internet and one of them is with blogs. Whether they are free blogs or not, you can make money with blogs if you know how to get referrals to the surveys for money sites. Really it comes down to doing three things: keyword research, writing content, and getting links. All three of those things are important but once you have done the first two, it is all about the links. You can never get enough targeted anchored backlinks and most of your time should be spent getting them. Much more about this in future posts.

In my last post I started the discussion about the importance of having a plan with your blog and targeting specific keywords to get traffic. So many people start a blog with no plan and think (hope really) that visitors will just start showing up. I know this because I was once one of the clueless people starting a blog and having absolutely no idea how get traffic to come to it. That was years ago before I learned how to make online survey referrals. Folks, the Internet is not magic and unless you do certain things, NO ONE WILL EVER FIND YOUR BLOG! Period.

Many of you are taken in with trying to get traffic to your blogs from the social websites that are all the rage right now. I’m talking about sites like Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. Getting traffic from these sites is what all the “A-List” bloggers preach and most people go down that line all the way to failure. Social traffic will not convert for survey referrals or any other kind of referrals you want to make to make extra cash. You need targeted search engine traffic and not social traffic to make money online.

The only way people are ever going to find your blog is if it shows up in the search engines (Google) on the FIRST page for specific search terms you are strategically targeting. Targeted traffic for someone hoping to make referrals to any of the online surveys for money sites would be people searching for ways to make money. You need to think about who and what type of people need money, what they are searching  for, and go after them.

Most people who start a CashCrate blog are hoping to get visitors who search for CashCrate. I know this because they use “CashCrate” or some variation of that in their URL and title. I know that because that is all they talk about: how great CashCrate is and how they are making money with it. Meanwhile they make a referral here and there but it never adds up to much and they only get a few visitors. Most of their visitors have probably already heard of and signed up for CashCrate anyway and they have no chance of making a referral.

So, how are the people who do so well in the referral contests making all those referrals? Again I show you the results for the February contest where the 10th place person had 361 active referrals in just one month all the way up to the 1st place winner with over 1000 active CashCrate referrals! Since probably only 50% of referrals become active for anyone, all these people were probably signing up at least double the numbers you see on the chart!  

Many of you that will read this blog may never get that many active referrals in your lifetime. I am not saying that to be condescending but just because I know it is true. I see on the CashCrate forum when people get all excited and brag that they made 2 or 3 referrals in a day. Then there is the thread where everyone tells each other how much they have made for the month. Poster after poster is ecstatic if they make enough just to meet the payment threshold for the month! I can tell you I am unhappy when I make less than $50 in a DAY!

If you don’t change the way you are doing things and learn the right way to get paid surveys  for money referrals,you will never have numbers like you see in the graph shown above. I can also tell you that those people  have not targeted the keyword “CashCrate” to bring in those referrals. There probably are hardly that many searches for the term in total for the month.

The people who know how to make referrals bring people in from the back door. By this I mean they are finding people who are searching for something unrelated to CashCrate but related to making money. You have to think to yourself: Who would be interested in making money and what would they be searching for? If you can find people who want to find ways to make money, you have found the perfect type of people who might be interested in signing up. Finding people who want to make money online is the exact targeted traffic you are searching for and trying to find.

Here are some possible types of web surfers and keywords that would make the perfect kind of targeted traffic for any paid surveys blog hoping to make referrals:

college students
just laid off
just lost job
need a job
make extra money
earn spending money
earn extra cash
part time jobs
night time jobs
seniors looking for jobs
how to make money

If you use your imagination, that list can go on and on into the hundreds of terms I am sure. In each case above, that type of person or people searching for those things would be potential referrals to CashCrate. Also, those people would probably have never heard of CashCrate before so they are just the ones you need to target. In short, you need to find people who are looking to make some extra spending money and have never heard of CashCrate. That is the type of targeted traffic you seek to explode your online survey referrals and start to make more money than you ever thought you could. Those are the terms you need to build your blogs around.

Before I talk more about the do’s and don’t of blogs, lets first talk about those of you that already have one. Thousands of people have blogs all promoting their survey links hoping people will sign up. The problem is that none of you with your blogs have traffic. And if you do have some traffic, it is not the right kind of traffic. What do I mean by the right kind of traffic? People who are searching for ways to make money online is the right kind of traffic. All other kinds of traffic are the wrong kind of traffic and won’t make you any money.

Starting a blog, whether it be a .com hosted blog or a free blog from Blogger, is just the first step. Having a blog is great but it accomplishes nothing unless you know how to get people to come to it. There are tens of millions of blogs out there. What makes you think people will come to your blog? How are they going to find your blog amidst all the other millions of blogs?

The saying “if you build it they will come” from the movie Field of Dreams does NOT apply to the Internet. Just building a web site or starting a blog means nothing other than there are a few more pages on the Internet which already contains billions of pages. No one is ever going to find your blog unless you know how to get them there.

Getting traffic to your blog or web site is the single most difficult thing you will have to do if you are going to be successful in making money referring people to any of the surveys for money sites including CashCrate. Take this blog for example. As I write this, my blog has been “live” for 3 days now. So far, not one person has found it or even knows it exists. In fact, Google doesn’t know it exists either because it has not been indexed yet. Right now, there is no possible way anyone could ever find this blog and that is the same position many of your blogs are in.

It is OK for right now that no one knows about this blog. I still need to get at least 5 more posts up before I care and I still haven’t received my CashCrate check proof that I will be posting once I get the check. Once I have a few more posts up I will start to do the things I need to do so that Google knows this blog exists and maybe then a few people will find it. By the time you or anyone ever reads this, the picture of my check will be up.

Getting this blog to the point where people can find it and want to read it is going to be a long upward battle that will require time and patience. But that is fine as I am in this for the long haul and so must you if you are to be successful. In future posts I will be explaining what I am doing to get this blog out there so that the right people can find it. By the “right” people I mean people that are interested in making money and learning how to get paid for surveys by referring. These are the same sort of people that you would want coming to your blog so keep reading.