Paid Online Surveys For Money Tips and CashCrate Referrals

This blog is all about how to get referrals and make more money from the paid online survey sites, especially CashCrate. If you stumbled on this post you really need to go back to the beginning and read all my posts along with looking at my $1,491.28 CashCrate check payment proof. If you want to learn how to make money by making survey referrals, this is the place where you will learn how.

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.

In my last post paid online surveys for money, I discussed how I picked the domain name for this blog. I then went on to mention the six or so keyword phrases that are in that domain name:

online surveys
paid online surveys
surveys for money
online surveys for money
paid surveys
paid surveys for money

When you pick your blog domain and plan out a strategy for your blog, keywords that you want to target are extremely important. Without a plan targeting specific keywords and keyword phrases, your blog will probably be ranked nowhere and  never found by anyone. Choosing your keywords and your overall plan of action is perhaps the hardest thing you will have to do to make CashCrate referrals online and make money on the Internet in general.

To pick keywords you have to get information about how many people search for specific groups of words. For that I use GTrends and the Google Adwords keyword tool which are both free. Listed below is a chart of 5 of those keyword phrases showing how many searches per month there are for each as well as what people are paying for Adwords for them.

So these are the main keywords I hope to target along with “CashCrate” and “referrals”. If I  can get this blog on the first page for those terms I will start to see some generic search engine traffic which is what every blog owner should want.

It should be noted that the numbers you see on this tool or any other tool you ever use might be incorrect. Even if you are using a tool you paid for the numbers may be wildly incorrect. Sometimes the only way to really know how many searches a term gets is to get into that number one position on the first page and see what kind of traffic results. This is not what you wanted to hear and sometimes it will mean you waste time on a term or blog thinking it will get more traffic than it acually does. There is not much to do about it other than move on to some other term. It’s all part of the Internet marketing game we play.

Now an important point I want to make, and I will write a whole post about this later, is that most people wanting to make Cash Crate referrals would only think to target the word “CashCrate’. That word does, according to the keyword tool, get about 12,000 searches per month but you need to expand your mind and think out of the box.

Bloggers build their whole blog around CashCrate hoping to get people searching for “CashCrate”. The problem with this is that some of the people, maybe even many of the people who search for “CashCrate” have already heard of it. You know they have already heard of it otherwise they couldn’t be searching for it. So, it stands to reason, that some of them have already signed up for it and are just looking for opinions or tips and tricks. You can’t make a referral with these people no matter how great your site is because they are already members!

You need to figure out other types of people who want or need to make money and are likely to sign up. You need to figure out what those people would be searching for and then target those terms. For instance, if you could get your blog to the top of Google for the words “make extra money” or “how to make money” then you would have people finding your blog who are very likely to sign up to CahsCrate and who have most likely never heard of it! Bingo! You would then have a great opportunity to make tons of CashCrate referrals and to sell them other things too. Again, I will cover this concept more completely in a future post.

The domain I bought for this blog is http://paidonlinesurveysformoney.com/. This post will explain why I chose that domain name. You might have heard that the shorter the domain the better or the more memorable the name the better. Well, the name I chose is neither short or memorable so what gives?

First of all, pretty much every short domain name that means anything has been taken. This is 2009 after all, and there are a lot of websites out there and most every name that is really good is gone. However, I am not buying a domain that I want people to remember. I want people to be able to find me in the search engines.

One of the first things that gets your blog ranked in the search engines is your blog URL. If you have a blog that has the name TomsBlog.com you have a big leg up on ranking for “Toms Blog”. But how many people are going to go to the Internet and search for “Toms Blog”? Absolutely no one is. So, the name tomsblog.com does you absolutely no good unless you want to rank for that term.

On a side note here, one of the few good things about a free blog from Blogger or some other free platform is that you can sometimes get a good name for exactly what you want in the URL. Now a Blogger blog will have the “.blogspot.com” after whatever name you choose but the important thing is that you can perhaps get the exact keywords in the front of it. For example, “howtomakemoney.com” would most assuredly be taken but “howtomakemoney.blogspot.com” might still be available (it isn’t but this is just an example). It would be advantageous to have the words “how to make money” in the URL because people actually search for that phrase.

This is the first problem with many of you that already have blogs and are hoping to get CashCrate referrals. You have blogs that are named for terms that will do you no good at all. When you named your blogs names like

http://casholic.blogspot.com/ or

http://whycashcrate.blogspot.com/ or

http://kingofdallas-cashcrater.blogspot.com/ or

http://ezzycashcrate.blogspot.com/ or

http://www.cratey.blogspot.com/ or

http://www.ilovecashcrate.com/ or

http://lifeofwaldo.blogspot.com/ or

http://jaoligirl.webs.com/ or
http://sydneyrocks18-cashcratemoney.blogspot.com/ or

http://www.crateofcash.info/ or

http://mulacash.blogspot.com/

none of those URL’s contain words or phrases that will help you in the search engines. They are fun names but they waste your first opportunity to help the search engines find you.

BTW, those are all real blogs and I am not calling you out or anything if you have followed the link here. I want to help you understand what you might have done wrong and what you can do to correct it so that you can get more CashCrate referrals (and by doing that learn how to make any kind of Internet marketing referral you want to).

If you look closely, the domain I have chosen has six combinations of words that people might serch for. They are:

online surveys
paid online surveys
surveys for money
online surveys for money
paid surveys
paid surveys for money

So, although the domain name is long and unmemorable, it has the search terms in it that I hope to use to get some targeted search traffic. Remember that I am not hoping to have people remember the name and type it in on their computers to find this blog. I am hoping to get traffic mostly from the search engines when people search for any combination of words I have targeted. The above 6 keyword phrases are just some of the phrases I hope to rank for.

If you start a new blog, make that WHENEVER you start a new blog, you need to have a strategy. That strategy involves how you are going to get search engine traffic to your blog and what keywords you are hoping to pull people in with. Without a strategy you will have nothing more than one of the millions of blogs that no one reads and are eventually abandoned by their owners because they give up. If you want to make money with surveys for money and CashCrate referrals, you need to have a plan from day 1 of your blog. The URL you choose is just the beginning.

The way to make money with CashCrate and any other online surveys for money site is through referrals. Doing the surveys for a .25 cents or .50 cents is hard work when you could be sitting back and letting other people do most of the work for you. Getting lots of referrals is how you get the money to pile up fast and win the referral contests for even more money.

Having your own blog that has your referral link on it is the first step to getting those much needed survey referrals as I have discussed in my last two posts. But in order to get those referrals you need people to be coming to your blog and you need them to be people who are willing to sign up. Those of you who already have blogs know how hard that is to pull off.

Most Bloggers Preach Social Traffic

When you first start blogging you will undoubtedly find other bloggers who will “teach” you how to get traffic. Some of those bloggers might be real popular bloggers such as ProBlogger or John Chow. These two bloggers and others like them will tell you how to become popular by submitting every post to Digg, StumbleUpon, Twitter, and any number of other Web 2.0 sites. They will write over and over that you have to get your message out there by networking, guest posting, commenting on other blogs, starting your own mailing list, and many other things like that. They will also try to sell you everything under the sun.

You might also find the popular forums like the Warriors forum and Digital Point forums that have hundreds of members all preaching that same crap. Did I say CRAP? You bet I did. The quickest and surest way to make no money is to follow the advice of these “gurus”. They will tell you all about getting tons of social traffic to your blog but will never tell you that you won’t make a dime from it.

Traffic from these social sites is worthless for making money or for getting referrals. Most of this traffic is comprised of other bloggers and people who surf the Internet on a daily basis. These people will never buy anything from you as they are there to read blogs and be entertained. They are not looking to buy anything or sign up for anything.

Targeted Search Traffic Is Different Than Social Traffic

What you need is targeted traffic that comes directly from the search engines. Targeted traffic means any kind of traffic that is searching for whatever you have to sell. For instance, if you have a fishing site, targeted traffic would be those people who find your site by searching in Google for “fishing” “reels” “bait” or any other of a hundred fishing terms. These people would be looking for information about fishing and fishing gear and your fishing site would be a perfect match to supply that information.

In the case of getting survey referrals, you need to find people who would be interested in signing up to CashCrate or any one of the surveys for money sites that are out there. You need people who are looking for ways to make money. People who are specifically looking for money making opportunities is the exact kind of TARGETED TRAFFIC you are looking for. They are the people who will say to themselves, “oh…. CashCrate, sounds interesting. I think I will sign up and see if I can really make some moeny”.

The only way to get targeted traffic is to pay for it (through Google Adwords) or to get it for free by ranking high on the search engines. Ranking high on the search engines is called SEO or search engine optimization. That is how I plan to get this blog visible to as many people as possible who are looking for surveys for money information and how to get referrals. If you ever want to make money by getting large numbers of referrals, you too are going to have to learn how to get your blogs up in the search rankings. Next time I will talk more about this blog and what my plans are for it.

In my last post, I discussed the best way to get referrals to CashCrate or any of the other dozens of surveys for money sites and that is by starting a blog. The reason for this is that you can put your referral link in your posts on your blog and get people to click through those links which will automatically give you credit.

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.

The question I get asked more than any other is “how do I get CashCrate referrals?’ In the last post I discussed the importance of understanding that the best way to get survey referrals is by having someone click your referral link on a blog or web page and get the credit that way. It sure beats having to have someone correctly enter your referral link manually into their computer after they found your message on a flier.

So how do you get your referral links out and about on the Internet so someone has a chance to click them and sign up? This is the big question and it is not easy to answer in one post. In fact, this whole blog will be about that very question. If you can successfully learn how to do it, you will have become an Internet marketer and will have the opportunity to make a whole lot more money than just the money you can make by signing up people to survey sites like CashCrate.

There are many types of Internet sites. You can see the differences in them by going to places like Ebay.com, CNN.com, YouTube.com, and a million other sites. Each one of them looks different as the Ebay platform is very different looking than the YouTube platform. One of them has auctons and the other has nothing but videos. This is what make the Internet so exciting: the fact that you can make anything you can dream of if you know how.

But you and I probably don’t know how to use Dreamweaver or other software to build this kind of site. So how can you, someone who has very little Internet knowledge, successfully get your link in different places online?

The answer to that question is a blog. Originally a blog was thought to be just an online diary. But now blogs have become way more than just diaries and if you know how to be an Internet marketer, they can be little (or big) money making machines. What you are reading is a blog. It is my blog which is dedicated to showing you how to get online survey referrals. I have paid about $9.50 for this domain name (paidonlinesurveysformoney.com) and I pay $9.95 per month for hosting.

Paying for a domain and then the hosting may be more than you want to invest or even have. Luckily for you, there are free blogging platforms where you can get your own blogs absolutely free. You will have total control over them except that you won’t own them. The most popular free blog platform is Blogger and it is owned by Google. Most people start with a free blog there and that is indeed a great place to begin.

Starting your own blog is the most important thing you can do if you want to learn how to make money online and get paid for surveys. A blog is where you can reel all your survey referrals in and have them sign up under you. A blog is where you can learn how money is made online and put it into practice yourself. A blog is where all the big boys get their CashCrate referrals.

Make sure you look at my CashCrate check payment proof in the amount of $1,491.28 first and then read my blog from the very beginning to learn how to make referrals to ANY survey site.
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When you join any online surveys for money site, you can usually make the most money by referring others. This blog is mostly about CashCrate as that is where I have had the most success but you can also make money by referring others to Inbox Dollars and many other paid survey sites.

If you poke around the CashCrate forums or the Internet in general, there are lists of different ways to get referrals. These lists have on them things like having business cards printed, putting up signs on grocery bulletin boards, handing out fliers on college campuses, and other ideas along those lines. In each of those cases you would have your referral link printed and hope that the person reading your note would put your referral link in when they go to sign up. If they don’t put in your referral #, you get nothing.

In reality, what are the chances that someone is going to remember to actually put in the whole link accurately with your referral number intact? Seriously, it could happen, but it is not going to happen often. Referring others to CashCrate or any other surveys for money site in this manner is just not going to make you much money.

Starting a blog or some other online website is the only real way to get survey referrals and to make moeny online. When you have your own blog, you can put your referral link on it and have people click through your link which will automatically record that you are the referrer. Did you understand that? This link right here —> CashCrate has my referral link in it and will record anyone who signs up through it and give me credit for the sale. I don’t have to worry about them writing it down correctly or typing it in correctly. It automatically takes them to the CashCrate site with my referral link intact.

That is how money is made on the Internet. Every link you click on any page on any website could in some way be making somebody money. Most people have no idea this is what is happening. If you can get your link in front of enough people who want to sign up, you will be in a great position to get some referrals and make some money. It’s that simple.

Tens of millions of people log onto the Internet every day. It might be hundreds of millions but you get the point. A lot more people are surfing the Internet looking for ways to make money than are at your local grocery store reading the boards. If you want to make referrals to CashCrate or any other paid surveys site, the Internet is the place to do it. You have probably heard claims of people making outrageous amounts of money online. Many of those claims are lies and are made up but some of them are true. People really are making money online and most of it is simply by getting people to click or buy things through their links.

If you want to start making referrals to any of the paid survey sites, you need to learn how to do it online. How to make online referrals is the one and only way to make money on the Internet that can be done for almost no initial investment. You can make money by getting referrals to CashCrate or any one of the other online survey sites. But you don’t have to stop there as once you learn how to do it, you can make money in the same fashion by referring people to Ebay, Walmart, Nordstrom, or any one of thousands of other companies. Are you interested in hearing more? Remember, I am not selling you a thing. Just keep reading and ask any questions you have….I will try to answer them.

There are so many online survey sites out there and so much confusion about them. Most people who want to get paid for surveys come to the conclusion that they are scams. The fact is, any paid survey site that asks you for money to sign up might be a scam and I would stay away but many survey sites are free to join.

But many of these paid online surveys sites are legitimate and you can make money from them. Actually, a lot of money if you know how. This blog is going to show you how to make more money than you ever thought possible when you started looking into doing surveys for money.

I am only going to talk about CashCrate at least for the start of this blog. The reason for this is simple: there are dozens upon dozens of survey sites but if you want to make money by referring other people, CashCrate is the best. Referring others is the single best way to make money with surveys. Yes, you can and should make some money by actually filling out the surveys, but if you want the big bucks, you need to learn how to refer other people.

Why is CashCrate the best survey site for referring people? At the top level (Elite) you will be getting 30% of what your 1st level referrals make and 20% of what your 2nd level referrers make. In addition to that, you will also get $1.00 every time any 1st level referral does their first offer. No other survey site gives that much money back to its participants. That is why CashCrate is the best paid online survey site.

Who am I and why should you believe me? In fact, why should you continue reading this blog? For the month of February  2009, I came in second place (as shown below) in the CashCrate contest and won an extra $200.00. As you can see. I had 675 referrals that completed their first offer or survey and that is in a short 28 day month. Only one other member did better than I did and he really kicked my butt.

The next screen print is how many referrals I have as of the date of this post:

Finally, the picture below shows my  CashCrate check for February 2009 in the amount of $1,491.28. That amount includes the $200.00 bonus. During February I did not do 1 survey and all that moeny was made from the people I referred. Do I need to say that again? All that money came from my referrals. Every penny of it.

So you could be thinking to yourself that these pictures might be faked. If you have spent any amount of time online I am sure you have come across dozens of faked “proof” pictures. It is easy to fake screen prints now days but harder to fake the picture of that $1,491.28 check. Anyway, I am not trying to sell you anything. I am just trying to show you how to take your surveys for money experience to the next level.

There is something you should understand right from the start. I did not get to the point of getting a check like that overnight. In fact it has taken me over a year to learn and understand what I needed to do to get that many referrals. If you do what I will be teaching you on this blog you will not make much right away either. You will have to be patient and keep at it knowing that the end result will be worth it. Is getting a $1,400 check in one month worth it? Only you can decide.

Let me sumarize by saying that not everyone is going to have the desire to keep at it and work at it until they get to the point where they can be making a $1,000 or more a month from paid surveys. Some of you will get bored and lazy and quit. But what I am going to show you can be done with other things as well and you can truly learn to make more money online than you ever thought was really possible. In times like these with the economy being what it is, it seems you might want to pull up a chair and pay attention.