Nine times out of ten there are newbies on it who get all excited because they put up a one page website on a free blogging platform like Blogger or Webs.com. They have copied and pasted the their whole page from the CashCrate website with some tutorials or tips and tricks. They then tell the reader they can make a lot of money by signing up.

On the forum this type of person is often complaining that their site has been up for a day, a week, or a month and it gets no traffic and no referrals. They are complaining because they don’t know what is wrong.

Well let me tell you what is wrong: You put up a stupid one page website that has the same regurgitated information on it that 1,000′s of other one page spam sites have. Yes, your site is spam and even if you could get someone to go to your site there is no way they would ever stay for more than 1 second.

You provide no picture proof. You provide no video proof (CashCrate payment proof). You provide no story. You provide no originality. Your blog has no character.  You provide no reason for anyone to sign up and your blog is nothing more than one page of spam. That is why you will never get any referrals even if you did know how to get traffic to your blog.

Making money from referrals for online surveys for money is NOT EASY like you want it to be. You need to learn how to get traffic to your blog and those people you get have to want to make money.

But before you spend any time learning how to do that, you need to learn how to write something that people will actually want to read. You need to learn how to sell things….it doesn’t just happen magically. Most of all you need to make some money with CashCrate yourself first so you can prove to people it is legitimate. If you can’t prove to them you make money on it, why on earth would they ever sign up?

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I know that many banners you see are cool looking and some they might even look good on your blog. How can people not click them, you ask? They look so…so…click-able. The fact is though, that there is something called banner blindness and it is very, very real.

If you are hawking any of the online surveys for money sites on your blog, you are probably tempted to put up the banners. If you ever get a blog with traffic you might even be able to sell the ad space. But data has always shown that banner ads are some of the worst converting methods of getting affiliate sales. People who pay for these banners are usually just giving their money away.

Once you get to the Silver referral level with CashCrate, you will have access to “CashCrate Pro” which has some additional tools to help you to create multiple referral links, monitor conversion rates, and it shows clicks and signups. What you can do is set up a special link for each of your banners and you can prove to yourself how useless they are. You will find that they hardly ever get clicks and almost never a sign up.

So then, if banners don’t work for getting referrals, how do some people get so many? Besides getting laser targeted traffic to their blogs (this means people who want to make money or need money), they get people to sign up for CashCrate through the texlinks in the sentences. People are much more willing to click text links than they are banners which they often totally ignore.

If you don’t believe this then I suggest you check it out on your own blog. Set up your banners so they have one or more of the custom links in CashCrate Pro. Then, set your text links to some of the other custom links and compare which does better. You will find that although your banners look great, they perform very, very poorly.

Another thing is to pay attention to your own habits online. Chances are that you click a lot more text links than you do banners. Most people totally ignore all banners just like they do while they are walking down the street. You know they are there but you also know they are an advertisement so you ignore them.

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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 concept is that you have a choice when you start a blog and write posts for it: you can try to make money with or without bullshit.

Most of you might know the “without bullshit” part which means you write the best blog posts you can in an effort to entice your reader to sign up for something. You want to sound credible and give a good review of the product or service in the hopes of convincing your reader to click through to sign up. Your blog is the written pretty much as well as you can because you want to sound professional. This blog, for instance, is pretty much “without bullshit” as most of the writing is done a bit deliberately and meant to be read and followed (even though most readers don’t give a shit and click away because all they want are quick CashCrate referrals the easy way because they are lazy).

The other way to make money online with blogs is by writing bullshit. For this you really need to use Adsense, Chitiqa, Yahoo publisher ads or maybe even some affiliate products but probably NOT CashCrate. You will be composing blog content that is not your best writing and quite general in nature. This works well for many niches like home improvement, gardening and many others where you can write very unspecific posts about a topic and never answer the readers question. The longer the posts the better and the more boring they are the better too.

The goal here is to write accurate yet long and boring posts that will bore the hell out of the reader and have them trying to get out as fast as they can. Many will hit the “back” button but some will click on an Adsense ad or an affiliate ad just to get out. Rather than wanting people to stay and read what you have to say, you WANT them to leave…preferably through one of your ads.

Most CashCrate blogs I see are not really either of these two options. They are just a page or two of copied verbage from the CashCrate site. Those will never get referrals which is why there are threads started everyday in the forum whining about “I can’t get any referalls, booo hoo hoooo”. Well if you got off your butt and started writing and putting some EFFORT into your blog and got anchored backlinks, you might get somewhere.

BTW even though I don’t care and there are not many hits to be had for the word “CashCrate‘, this blog is now often on the first page of Google for that term. And where are all the blogs that actually have “CashCrate” in the URL? Several people bragging in the forum about buying URLs with great CashCrate names. Where are you guys? No where to be found! Oh, THAT’S BECAUSE YOU DON’T HAVE ANY OPTIMIZED POSTS AND ANCHORED BACKLINKS! 

As I mentioned earlier, the bullshit strategy is probably NOT a good strategy to get online surveys for money referrals for sites such as CashCrate. For that type of referral you want to convince your reader through your honest writing or through payment proof in the form of check pictures and videos that good money can be made. CashCrate is legitimate and you can make a lot of money with them which is what you will be trying to prove to your reader. You can’t prove anything with bullshit so use that for one of your other niches.

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.

Newbies don’t know where to go to get Internet marketing information so they usually end up on forums where they can socialize and try to learn. They think it is a place where everyone can learn together and get free information. Unfortunately, forums are populated mostly by other newbies who don’t have a clue and it becomes a watering hole for the clueless.

You see, the people who know what they are doing spend little time, if any, on forums because they are working and actually making money – not just talking about it. Real Internet marketers, for the most part, don’t have time to waste on forums. Newbies on the other hand, have no idea how to get started making money and end up spending all day leaving messages and adding their two cents hoping to find the golden nugget. They ask questions that are answered by other newbies who want to pretend they know what they are talking about or think they know what they are talking about and most of the time the info they give is either flat out wrong or partially wrong. 

The CashCrate forum is really NOT a good place to any kind of make money online or SEO information. The people who hang out there, for the most part, make very little money and don’t know how to make money online. Thats why they hang out in the forum: it is a place where they can bond and be part of a community and maybe, just maybe, learn the big secret. Mostly though, they have time to socialize and spend on the forums because they have nothing better to do and they don’t have any idea how to make money online. (there are a few exceptions as a couple of people there do know what they are talking about)

The worst forum of all the forums is the Warrior forum. Lots of experienced marketers do hang out there for the one reason of fleecing the constant parade of newbies. Some marketers actually make their living selling Warrior Special Offers to beginners who don’t have a clue and get tricked over and over again into buying ebooks that contain the next fool proof system for making money. If you want to make absolutely sure that you are overloaded with confusing and conflicting information that will guarantee you never make a dime online, I highly recommend the Warrior forum. Maybe you can get scammed and duped out of a $100 or so while you are there too.

Below are some of the statements and anwers to questions I could find that were made on the CashCrate forum that are just not correct. These are great examples of the blind leading the blind:

Question: Does your site move up the google search listing by how many visitors you get?

Forum answer: I think it depends on where the ppl come from. If you get like 2000 ppl from a ‘no follow’ backlink they pretty much ignore it. That’s from my expirience anyway. If you get ppl from following backlinks from highly rated sites then seems logical you’d get noticed & earn rank.

Real answer (short version): No, your site DOES NOT move up Google by how many visitors you get. Period. Your site moves up based on how many anchored backlinks you have and the quality of those backlinks.

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Statement: I’ve read that if your site suddenly goes from say 40 hits a day to 400 a day that Google suspects somethings not cool, investigates & you can lose some rank you’ve built up as well. Just somethin I read somewhere, don’t know if it’s true.

The truth: That statement is not true. Sites go from 40 to 400 a day all the time when they move up the SERPS. All of that statement is false.

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Question: how do you submit your blog to search engines like Google and Yahoo?

Forum answer: Lots of advice was offered on how to submit your blog to the search engines

Truth: NEVER submit a blog to any of the search engines. Get some backlinks to your blog by article marketing, a Squidoo lens, or a HubPage and your blog will be indexed sometimes within a couple of days.

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Question: Where can you get lots of referrals?

CashCrate forum answer: Go to about 100 different forums sign up for each one. put your link in your signature. Make sure its allowed. Make about 6-10 relevant post per forum. repeat that every day. that will give you about 600 to 1k posts with your link in signature. is there each day. Do that every day. probably will take you 10+ hours a day but may be worth it.

Real answer: LOL LOL are you kidding me? 600 to 1,000 forum posts a day? Who is going to do this? This answer came from a person who has seen my blog but is too lazy to learn how to make referrals the right way. If this person wants to spend 10 hours a day leaving posts on 100 forums they can but meanwhile I spend a lot less time getting backlinks to my blogs and the referrals come in on autopilot. This is an example of what I have been saying all along, that 99% of the people who try to make money online will fail because it is too hard.

Ok so I’m not the type to bother people, but I need help!

How the hell do you do it?

I’ve been constantly reading up on this site, and now when I search google for certain terms, you’re already on the first page! If I remember well, I’m one of the first people you gave that link. I just had a few postings to read “backwards”.. so it’s pretty recent compared to mine I think.

I’ve been doing this “seo” thing for 7 months or so now and I’m still no where close! I manage to get just about 10 hits a day or so from google or yahoo but nothing big.

I’ve been doing everything that I’ve read up on… anchored backlinks, etc, etc,

Just please tell me where I’m going wrong, or what I’m “missing”. I’d really like to see my site raise in the rankings on Google.

And just to clarify, I’m not the type that sit around and wait for people to do stuff for me. I’m a pretty hard worker, but I just don’t understand where I’m going wrong.

Thanks for any kind of reply. I know you must be super busy.

First lets talk about this blog that has not been as productive as I had hoped. It’s that way with this sort of thing and you just have to accept it. This blog is about 2 months old and it only gets between 10 and 20 hits a day so it is not a big a success as the question leads you to believe. Unfortunately, many of those hits are not necessarily what I want either.

Paid online surveys for money .com now ranks on the first page of Google for things such as “CashCrate referrals” and a few other terms like that specifically about how to get referrals for CashCrate. I have been getting backlinks for that term so that has been a success but I had hoped to be higher up as that is not a very competitive keyword phrase.

This blog is also on the first page of Google for “today.com scam” (which does me no good) and for “comment blog demon review” which could make me a sale of that software someday maybe. All in all, not too impressive actually. For those two keyword phrases, there is little to no competition so that is why this blog ranks on the first page.

My blog doesn’t rank anywhere for the terms I have really targeted which are “surveys for money” and “paid online surveys“. Those are the two terms I want to rank for in the long run and I am not even in the top 100 for either of those. That is very disappointing and I had hoped to at least show up in the top 100 by now.

Blogging and getting traffic and making money is frustrating. Period. It is also something that takes time and lots of it. Again, that is why 99% give up and quit. Any blog I start I assume I WILL NOT make any money with for at least 6 months. 6 months!!! That is too long for most people right there.

THE TWO MOST IMPORTANT THINGS

The two most important things you can do is pick keyword phrases that have low competition that you will be able to rank for and then get anchored backlinks for those terms. Maybe my choices of “surveys for money” and “paid online surveys” have too much competition and I will have to give up and switch gears. That could happen but I will give it at least another 4 months before I make that kind of decision.

You can always find keywords that have little to no competition (like “Today.com scam”) and then you will get some readers but they won’t be TARGETED and won’t sign up for CashCrate. You need to spend time with the two free keyword tools and pick some keywords that you can target that have medium to low competition.

After you pick some keywords you want to target, you have to go get backlinks. Then you have to get more backlinks. And then when you have gotten more you need to still go out and get more. If done correctly, you will spend 80% of your time getting backlinks. You get CashCrate referrals and make money by getting your site on the first page of Google. You get on the first page of Google by getting anchored backlinks. Therefore, the act of getting backlinks is what ultimately makes you money.

How many backlinks do you need? I hear that question asked all the time. You need more backlinks than your competitors have and better ones. The sites with the most anchored backlinks coming from the highest quality websites are the ones who make it to the top of Google. So, if you are in a niche that has very little competition, you might need just a handful of anchored backlinks. But if you are competing for a keyword phrase that has a ton of competition, you may need THOUSANDS of backlinks and you might have to keep getting them to stay ahead.

That is how the game is played. He (or she) who has the most anchored backlinks wins. You also want to vary your backlinks so they are not all for the exact same terms. For instance, your links may be “make money with surveys”, “money with surveys”, “how to make money with surveys”, and so on. You want your anchored backlinks to have some variety so that it looks more natural to Google.

USING HUBPAGES FOR LINKS

On a side note, when you make some  HubPages to link back to your sites, you have to have an author score of 75 or over to have them be “do-follow” backlinks. I just started doing HubPages myself and that is what I have learned. I am not sure how you get and keep your author score above 75 but that is a drawback of using them. Also you are only alowed to link out to the same site twice in any Hub as I understand it. I see tons of HubPages authors with authors scores in the 90′s so it may not be too hard to keep it above 75.

MAKE FRIENDS AND TRADE LINKS!

How do you get more backlinks? That is always the million dollar question. You can buy links which I will not discuss on this blog and there are other services that cost money. In the end, one of the best ways to get links is to MAKE FRIENDS WITH OTHER BLOGGERS AND TRADE LINKS WITH THEM! The more blogs you have, the easier it is to arrage 3 way links and the more friends you have the easier it is to exchange links.

I have thought of and perhaps will start a page here on this blog in the future where you can list your name and contact info if you are willing to exchange links. If everyone who is in the CashCrate community got together and understood what they were doing and exchanged links, it would help everyone. Unfortunately right now, there are many people that have very poor 1 page blogs which are pretty much spam blogs. So that is a bit of a problem as I would never want to link to a spam blog.

That’s all for now.