For anyone that wants to earn money doing offers and surveys online, this “live” contest is a great place to get started as you can earn extra money. This month it takes place on January 23, 2012 during the hours of 7:00 PM and 11:00 PM Eastern Time Zone in America.

If you miss this month’s contest, there will undoubtedly be one in February as these have been going on every month now for awhile with great success. CashCrate continues to show that it is one of the premier survey and offer websites out there and it is in my opinion, the first place to get started if you want to make some extra money every month. The checks I get from them come regularly in the mail and I’m sure that will continue as they are extremely reliable.

The prizes you see above are the big prizes but they will give Amazon.com gift cards to all the other participants who make it into the top 50 spots. You don’t need to register for this contest as everyone who signs up with CashCrate is AUTOMATICALLY  ENTERED.

If you have any doubts about whether this is all real, please see my CashCrate check proof page to see some of the checks I have gotten. This is an amazing paid online survey site with over 1.5 million members and they ALWAYS pay on time EVERY month. There is lots of help in their forum and several getting started video tutorials to help you understand how everything works.

CashCrate is NOT a job but it is one of the few online surveys for money sites that allows people under 18 to sign up. With your parent’s permission, anyone over 13 and can sign up and start making some extra cash.

Lots of teenagers have signed up to CashCrate and make anywhere from $20 to $100 a month doing the surveys, offers, and referring others. If you can learn how to refer others to the site, you can make even more than that. Starting a blog (like this one) is the best way to refer people although there are lots of other things you can do if you think creatively.

CashCrate isn’t the only survey site out there but it is one of the most popular and reliable. After about 4 years with them, they have never missed sending me my monthly check and now I even get one every week. I have the proof to show that they pay real money to their members so take a look at that.

Student jobs in 2011 aren’t going to get any easier to find but that doesn’t mean you should give up looking. Always keep a positive attitude and keep applying for real jobs. On the side you can try things like CashCrate to make a little extra money and if you are good with computers you might even start your own blog and try to get some referrals to sign up under you.

I started 4 years ago knowing nothing about making money online and having never made a penny. Now I’m getting big checks from CashCrate and I am very thankful that I never gave up even when I wasn’t making much.

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.

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? 

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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.

If you want to make money online and with paid online surveys, you need to target audiences that HAVE NEVER HEARD OF CASHCRATE! Do any of you understand that?

Whenever I take a peek at the CashCrate forum, I see newbie after newbie bragging about their new blog which proudly has the name CashCrate in it and is a one or two page piece of spam blog. I guess their goal is to get lots of hits from people searching for CashCrate if they have any plan at all which they don’t.

I have proof that there is NO MONEY IN THE KEYWORD “CASHCRATE”. In other words, even if you are successful and get to the top of Google for that word (which you won’t), there are not enough people searching for it to make it worthwhile.

The proof is in this post from Broke Grad Student where he writes about having made $1000.00 with CashCrate. He shows his payouts for 2009 which total $594.70 and that is great accept that I sometimes make that in ONE WEEK and he did it in 7 MONTHS! (see my CashCrate check proof and note that very few if any of my referrals come from this blog)

Now if you do a Google search for the word ”CashCrate” you will see that Broke Grad Student is in position #3 (and #4)  for that term that everyone is chasing so hard. (see below)  His blog has been in that 3rd position for quite some time and all he has gotten out of it is $594.70 and that proves there are very few searches for “CashCrate”!

This blog has also briefly been on and off the first page for CashCrate and I have hardly gotten any hits at all. So, before you run out and make a new blog, figure out some other strategy and make a blog about people who need money. Make your blog about college students or out of work workers or any other segment of the population that needs some extra income. Target those keywords and when you start getting people who need money or want money, then you start selling them the CashCrate paid online surveys opportunity.

Have you ever wondered why money making online scams keep fooling people year after year? Have you ever wondered why there are so many scams online? It is a simple answer really: it is because they work. And why do they work? Because people are lazy and want the easy way out. They are convinced there is some miracle system of making money and they want it. They are willing to get scammed a handful of times before they give up.

I knew when I started this blog that very few people would catch on and realize that I was giving away good information that could really help them make money with getting survey referrals. Oh, I hoped I was wrong and that a picture of a real big check on the front page might motivate some but so far I don’t think it has mattered.

People look at the check, say “that’s nice”, and then move on to the next blog after reading a couple sentences of mine. In the end, they would rather work at MacDonalds making $8.00 an hour than try to get backlinks to a blog. They understand flipping burgers at MacDonalds while they just don’t give a rats ass about backlinks, blogging, article writing, and link exchanges.

Some of the other people who come to this blog are here purely to spam or to leave their CashCrate referral link. LOL LOL LOL. These jackasses don’t have a clue that the blog they are trying to spam (this one) can teach them how to make real money whithout having to comment spam. And they are too stupid to know that there is no chance in hell that their comment is going to get through. Do they really think I am so stupid to let their referral link through? No, they don’t bother to think about anything because spammers are stupid.

I always planned to make money with this blog. How? I know that most people won’t read much of what I write and they will want to leave. One of the reasons my posts are so long is to bore the hell out of people. For those who really care, there is good information in them worth reading. But for most, it will be a situation where they say “this is boring how do I leave?” and then they click on an ad.

Hopefully someday I will have Adsense on this blog and they will leave by clicking an Adsense ad. That is one way you can make money online. Bore people so that they click on your ads to get out. For others who are really interested in learning, maybe a few of them will sign up and try to learn.

Before any of that can happen though, I have to get some good targeted traffic to this blog and it has been difficult especially since I picked a few bad keywords to target. I think my keyword selection has been poor and there might not be as much potential in what I picked as I once thought. I will still keep plugging along with some of them though and I am close to the first page for “paid online surveys”.