CashCrate is something you can sign up for free and they will never ask for your money. Now, you can do paid offers that do require a credit card but THAT IS YOUR CHOICE AND YOU DON’ T HAVE TO DO THEM.

Look around my site to see that I have indeed made very good money on CashCrate. I have done it all for free and never once paid anything. You can read my blog here from start to finish to see how I do it but you have to read and learn before you can make the kind of money I have been able to make.

The bottom line is though that CashCrate is one of the totally legitimate websites where you can get paid for surveys and doing other things. If you want to make money online, you have to start somewhere and Cash Crate is a great place to start. It all begins when you get your first real check they will send you after you make your first $20.00. It is at that point that a light bulb will go off in your head as you realize that it is real money and that you can make more of it every month!

The CashCrate site is now easier than ever before to use and navigate and now is the best time to join as there will be 7 more days of promotions coming our way. And if you want to learn how to make referrals to CashCrate or any of the other surveys for money sites, just read my blog from the first post I made on March 3, 2009. Everything you need to know to get started making referrals the right way is in this blog and it is all for free. So sign up and get started reading how to make money with referrals on CashCrate.

You can see by the picture of my check below what kind of money you can make on CashCrate and you will get paid as soon as you reach the $20.00 mark. My check comes in the US mail like clockwork every month and for 3 years now, it has never been late. You can also choose to get paid via direct deposit to your bank account if you like and that is even quicker than the check.

There is a great forum on CashCrate that will help you with any questions you may have and everyone there, including the moderators are very positive and helpful. If you ever get stuck, the forum is the place to go to get all your answers and to see how others are doing.

You can make money by doing surveys, free trial offers, signing up for things, getting referrals, and by doing paid offeres (totally your choice). Additionally you can win points playing games and use those points to get gift cards from Amazon, iTunes, and many other retailers.

CashCrate is the very first place I ever got a check for anything I did online. I am still there today, as you can see, and they now have over 1 million members. When you try to make money online, there are a lot of choices and a lot of scams but in my opinion, CashCrate is the best survey site out there and I have the payments to prove it!

So, my question for you is: how much time and how hard are you willing to work? The answer you give will depend on many things of course but you should know that if you are not willing to put in the time, you will never be a success at making money online.

This is in addition to a great referral contest as well and of course all the money making you can normally do and you can see the potential at my CashCrate check proof page.

The free ten dollar gift cards promotion is just one of many they seem to have most every month and if you want to get paid for surveys, you should sign up for CashCrate and get busy making money. Signing up is totally 100% free.

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.

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.  

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.

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.

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.