The truth about making money online

It is very hard to get a legit online website to make money because a lot of people are desperate for an income and end up falling prey to many online scammers who take advantage of their need. The online money making adverts make you feel like you'll either be financially stable in no time or become a millionaire over night, but the truth of the matter is that most of them will leave you disappointed. In this blog we are going to look at some of the legit online money making sights but with the truths behind their offerings. First thing first, it is very important to know that most of the online work use digital banking formats like Skrill, Payza, Neteller and PayPal, so be open to idea of not getting paid into your bank the traditional way. The most popular ways of making money online are through PTC's (Paid to click), paid surveys, data entry jobs, affiliate programs, paid to read emails, trading, micro jobs and freelancing and we are going to discuss them individually in detail.

PTC's (Paid to click)

These sites pay you to click on ads that they publish from various advertisers. The most popular and successful PTC sites are Clixsense, Neobux and Grandbux. It sounds easy that you could just earn money from just clicking their ads but how much does it cost you to click those ads vs the income you get from the activity. I have calculated what it takes to click those adverts and to be honest at the end of the day you lose more of your data money as compared to your income. People who might benefit from these websites are those from countries where internet is free or very cheap. Unfortunately it is not enough to get good income from clicking ads because you could get about $0,05 per day from doing this and I don't think there is anybody who is that patient. Fortunately, these PTC websites also offer many other ways to make extra income like renting or buying referrals, completing tasks and offers and even completing surveys. They may even offer other means to boast your earnings which I have not mentioned here. To make money out of these sites you have to make sure you keep up with the daily checklists provided in order to earn more from their checklist bonuses. The PTC sites claim that you can earn more by recruiting referrals whom you can get commission from their activities. Well if you are very good with recruiting referrals it sounds like a good way to make money but I can testify that although I made money from other activities provided by these sites, I have never got a single cent from the referrals. On average I managed to get about 40 referrals a month but none of them where ever active and thus I realized that I was wasting my time and that I was not going anywhere with my efforts. Perhaps if had tried a little harder to get more referrals I would have gotten lucky but at what cost. Maybe you could be lucky and refer active participants but I actually lost from my referrals because I was paying to advertise my link yet I never got any active referrals. This also applies with the rented or purchased referrals, there is no guarantee that they will be active. Other ways of getting more earnings on these sites is by competing in the contests to see who has obtained more points for the day or by clicking the grid which consists of ads to see if you can land on the winning grid. Completing tasks is rather challenging at first and requires a lot of practice before you can get the hang of it, but once mastered you can broaden your ability to receive more tasks. Yes you can make money from these sites but make sure you participate on the activities frequently.

Paid Surveys

These sites offer you money for your opinions through completing surveys. In order to get reasonable income from these sites I advice that you sign up to as many online survey websites as you can at the same time. Make sure you keep active everyday by checking for surveys in their websites cause you will realize that there are surveys that you do not get invited to through your email. One of my favourite survey sites are Paid Viewpoint, Vivatic, Toluna, Global Test Market and SurveyWell Premium. All these survey platforms give me an average of about $18 a month combined and I bet if I joined more sites I could increase my income. The income is better than not getting anything especially when they don't consume much of my data to complete the surveys. The downfall for using these sites is that you don't automatically qualify for every survey and thus you will be screened out. Sometimes it feels as though I get screen out more than I actually qualify for a survey and I am not the only one because I have seen reviews of people claiming that the paid surveys are scams becauseof their frustrations of getting screened out. I prefer Toluna more because it compensates you with points even though you are screened out, it's a win-win situation. Toluna is also a great site because you can make additional income from creating your own survey contents, commenting on your peers' content and for merely participating in their weekly challenges. There are also paid survey sites that require you to pay them first in order to be a member. I have attempted one and was disappointed because it was only a list of survey companies which you can join and make money from. If you give your self time, you can research the list of survey companies on your own without losing a single cent to memberships. My advice though would be to check out these survey site reviews before you commit your own personal finance into them. People who have been scammed do warn others about their experiences so listen to their pleas through their reviews. Overall there is cash to be made out from filling out surveys but there is no guarantee that you will get surveys everyday; you can go for days and even weeks without getting to complete a survey. To stay in good standing with the Survey sites, always answer truthfully, read every question before you answer because there are trick questions designed to see if you are paying attention and don't enter false account details in order to get surveys or make false/many registrations because it can result in your account being blocked. For example I was desperate for surveys in one site that I used my other email address to appear as somebody who had never taken the survey, I didn't get screened out from the survey but unfortunately I got blocked from future surveys even though I got the earnings for that particular survey. With paid surveys, patience is needed to see results.

Data Entry Jobs

I don't know why but this feels like the best and easiest way you can make money online and to be honest this is where if you are not careful you will get a lot of sites scamming you. There are products that generously give you a list of companies that potentially offer the real data entry jobs. Having this list doesn't mean that you are just going to get the jobs. You have to be determined and really interested in doing the jobs because there is a process of submitting your resume online to many companies and completing your own website(not free) that you will use to apply for those posts. Beware of the data entry scams that promise easy money through their packages. Most legit data entry jobs also advertise on freelancing websites like People per hour , Work at home ads and Freelancer and the key is to look for the post advertising as $15/hr in their offer. Unfortunately I speak from experience and have been scammed by the data entry websites because it felt like the easiest way of making an income online. The scam in one particular site was that I was set for failure through their harsh policies that honestly did not make sense. So to cut the story short I failed to log in and complete my copy and paste work within 48 hrs and then I lost all my work and I also lost the $2 I invested to do the work in the first place. As I am a very persistent person, I re-registered and to my amazement I realized that I was given the exact same job as I was given previously in my different email login details. During my second attempt things where looking ok for about ten days into my work, but then I got an announcement that the $ 2,5 a day payment  was going to be reduced to $1 dollar a day. Again I also lost all my work but this time I was cautious as not to pay them cause I decided to stick to one job (one job is free) in case they deactivated my account again.

Affiliate Programs

The Affiliate programs are all about selling a product on behalf of organizations like Clickbank, eBay Partner Network and Amazon Associates. This is one of the easiest ways you can make more money online but it comes with hard work. Unfortunately it is becoming too saturated and you will realize that you end up advertising the same product with many other affiliates on the same site. This means less chances for getting customers. I was disappointed when I realized how many people where advertising my kind of product on the classifieds all at the same time. The other downside for this online job is that it takes a lot of impressions and clicks to eventually get a sale. For example, there is a product I have been advertising for about ten days now and it is being advertised on 911 sites, it has had 145033 impressions, it only has 7 clicks and no sale to date. Maybe I am advertising the wrong product and in the wrong sites but the idea I am trying to put across is that this is not a get rich quick scheme and needs more time and patience. If you are starting the affiliate program without any advertising costs it is very difficult to reach to the successful level of your business because you will solely be relying on the free classified or free advertising websites to make your product known. The free websites might not expose your ads as much as a paid advertising site would but it is worth a start if you have no source of income to start your affiliate advertising. You know that every-time you search a product or just plainly browse through the web, there is a bunch of ads popping up everywhere from good reputable companies. Well these companies are in your face all the time because the they invest in digital marketing. Without marketing they won't survive. Therefore it is important to know that if you intent to succeed with the affiliate program, you will have to put aside a certain portion from your sales profits into a marketing budget. Still on marketing, you could make use of AdHitz starting at a low budget of just $2 and if you have enough to invest over $50 then you can work with BidVertiser and Google AdWords. Be aware though that big advertisers like Google AdWords are very strict when dealing with affiliate ads. They require landing pages from the product website and this may be a disadvantage as some products are not ethical and may not be willing to comply. Another disadvatange of affiliate marketing is the fact that there are many products to chose from, but few which are worth selling in the already saturated market. If you are completely clueless about initiating an affiliate business, you can join websites like Wealthy Affiliate or Affilorama to get you started with the vital lessons, tools and information on succeeding with affiliate programs.


Paid To Read Email
The Paid to read email are as their name specifies; being paid to read emails. Examples of these sites are Cash4Offers and Paid-to-read-email. They do send emails to be read every weekday but it is only one email costing about 0,01 per view. Do the maths figure out how many more days you will have to open these emails in order to reach a $15-$35 target which is the minimum withdrawal amount. These sites also consist of surveys, shopping vouchers and offers to help you boost your income. You should note that these sites provide the same offers as those of other online jobs like PTC's which some are not entirely honest with you. Some offers require you to play games in which you have to obtain a certain amount of points in order to get an income, it is impossible to get anywhere with these games (I don't think they are designed to make you win) and you spend a lot of time clicking through the ads before you can even start any game. The most popular offer is entering competitions in which through the application process you have to maneuver through the sign up ads in order to complete the process; competitions are attractive but the odds of winning are very slim. Some of the offers require you to just download apps for points, think back to the PTC's above about the amount of data you will be losing downloading whilst trying to make an income. If you are not careful, some of the mobile apps sign you up into a site where they will be deducting your money everyday which overtime is not even worth the small points you get from the offer. The job alone of just trying to redeem your offers is tedious and sometimes they turn out different from the way they made you expect them to be. I was deceived by an offer that indicated that I could get up to $8 in rewards for an offer but in reality I ended up getting $1.5 for that offer; had I known that it was going to be that low I wouldn't have wasted my time on the offer and I find it unfair to be mislead like that. One way to accelerate your earnings is by referring more people to the site because you get a commission on the basis that your referral completes just one offer.

Micro jobs

These sites offer small jobs in the form of tasks and the most popular sites are Clickworker, Microworkers, Jobs2shop and CashCrate. These websites provide you with small tasks such as mystery shopping, sending photos for particular tasks, writing comments, writing various blogs/articles, reading through website contents and many other small jobs. You may find that you will have to be screened in order to qualify for some of these tasks and it's obvious you will not qualify for all the tasks. Some tasks are looking for social media frenzies, so you'll have to be somebody who is truly active and have a certain number of friends on social media to make it.

Forex trading

This is the most appealing way to make money online because the advertising always promises lumps of income daily. There are countless websites that offer this service like IQ Option, Financika and Markets which have been around for many years. Some platforms have advanced to the point where they have created programs that maximize your changes of gaining profit. I have attempted trading three times and sad to say I lost all my investments each time. What I hate most about trading forex is the fact that you actually succeed at first but then before you know it you find you have lost everything; just like gambling. You have to be really mature and self controlled to manage trading and my brothers advised me not to think with my emotions when it comes to trading. I am glad that the websites do warn  you about the risks beforehand and the greatest risk indicator before you join any trading platform is knowing the fact that it has been proven that 90%-95% people do lose their money in trading.  I have no doubt that there are people who actually get the hang of trading and actually succeed but I am even more sure of the fact that it came with a lot of practice and not something that happened overnight. There are courses, videos, lectures, workshops and books offered on the internet that have no other purpose than to teach you how to trade, so the problem comes when you don't train and expect to get the same results as the successful traders. I do advice those who have interest in trading to go slowly, make up what you initially invested and then withdraw it so that if you don't succeed then you'll have the satisfaction that you didn't lose your investments. Maybe the that money that you withdrew could help you increase your pocket for better trading strategies or simply help you start again once you've lost and are now confident that if you started again you'd be better off from the lessons you learnt from your loss.

Freelancing

The above listed online jobs methods are amongst the most popular ways you could do to make money online; however, there are plenty more ways you can make a living on Internet without doing what they require you to do. Freelancing is the most honest way I recommend you could share your interests or advertise your skills on websites like Fiverr, Upwork and Freelancer. What better way to make an income by doing what you love. Do know though that there are many more people with your skill so do your best to make yours outstanding and also work well with your clients so that they could give you are good review. A good review ranks you higher for more potential customers.

In these tough economic times I know it is your priority to put food on the table and meet your needs but be careful about the online jobs scams because they all advertise in a magnified way  but the end result is mostly disappointing. Be alert and know that there is no such thing as getting rich over night unless you win the lotto. Real progress and income comes with hardworking, patients and most importantly finding the legit online job sites. Circumstances may be forcing you to take the short cut in making money online but ones you lose enough money you'll eventually slow down and do things the right way. Don't let that happen to you, do the right thing the first so that you won't lose money trying to make money. My closing advice is that you get proper research, review, training and practice before you pursue your desired choice of online money making.