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100indecisions's Profile About me ... |
Member since: 8/22/2009 Last login: 2/27/2010 |
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Location: N/A Interests: N/A My site: http://lostquiteclassically.today.com My blog: http://duskthroughnarrowstreets.today.com Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/100_indecisions |
100indecisions has posted 31 comments with an overall 92.2% helpful rating...
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100indecisions's comment on Twollow ...
Great little program
Twollow is very, very easy to set up and use; even with the free trial, it's a matter of setting it and forgetting about it (aside from all the DMs you get from people thanking you for following them, anyway). The keyword-targeting is way better than any free alternatives, and the fact that Twollow offers a free trial at all is really helpful. I doubt I'll pay when my free trial's up just because I don't have a business to market (just some blogs I don't update often enough), but it still seems like a very good system.
100indecisions's comment on AutoHits ...
Big waste of resources
I've used a number of traffic exchanges and I tend to get tired of them pretty fast--they don't bring that much extra traffic to my blog, and clicking through random sites that are usually hawking scams or crappy e-books is a big waste of my time. A program that would do this for me sounded great. Really wasn't that fantastic--I ended up having to babysit it more than I expected because the frames broke so often, and even when it was running well, it slowed everything else on my computer to a crawl. I did see a small bump in traffic, but it wasn't worth the frustration of a constantly slow computer.
100indecisions's comment on Key For Cash ...
Hard to get into
I heard when I first tried Key for Cash that it could be difficult to rate high enough on the tests to get offered any work--and it turns out that's absolutely true because I got very high scores and still got nothing. You can come back and re-try the tests every day, but that is a significant chunk of time doing something that might not have much payoff, since it's hard to say what score will actually get you hired--and even then, whether you'll get jobs that pay much of anything.
100indecisions's comment on Internet Payday ...
Absolute scam
Like every other site that makes the kind of claims Internet Payday does, this site is nothing but a scam, and an especially bad one at that. I figured I'd try it since it was only $1.97 and there was always a tiny chance I could make something off it--plus I could cancel if it turned out to be a scam, right? Yeah, not so much. The program itself is totally worthless, asking you to pay for the kind of "get paid to sign up for trial offers" thing you can get for free at gobs of other websites, and I went to cancel as soon as I realized that. Their contact info was hard to find to begin with, and I got no response when I tried to call them or when I e-mailed them. When the ridiculous charge finally came through, I had to have my credit-card company dispute it, and they were great. Because of that, I didn't lose anything more than $1.97, but I could have lost a lot more.
100indecisions's comment on BidFuel Auction Success Kit ...
Not remotely worth the cost
It's a little disingenuous to talk about the FREE KIT they're offering and then charge two bucks for shipping, but okay, a lot of places do that. Same for the promises about how much you can make through eBay, I suppose, although that veers closer to scam territory. I had some problems getting the site to accept my credit card in the first place--not sure why--but it eventually did go through fine. The actual materials took longer to reach me than they should have, too, although that could be blamed on where I live; like the reviewer, I didn't have much time to go over the ebooks. That didn't matter a whole lot, though, because while the information was useful, it wasn't anything I couldn't have found elsewhere for free--and more importantly, the membership in BidFuel was absolutely not worth $40 a month. That includes some ebooks, which I guess is helpful but still not worth the money; access to a warehouse where you can buy supposedly discounted stuff to sell (which will only make you a profit if you can actually sell it at the retail price, and I doubt it); and a listing wizard that just makes your listing a little fancier than eBay normally does. Again, that's fine... but for $40 a month? No way. At least they do state right up front how to contact them to cancel; some companies really make you hunt for their phone number.
100indecisions's comment on Cashlagoon ...
Eh, it's okay
The fact that there's no payout limit like with most sites is fantastic, because waiting until you reach a certain level gets old really fast. The site design is pretty clean, but I found it irritating to navigate--the flashing "Complete Offers" is annoying and kind of scammy for a site that isn't otherwise trying to hype itself, and it's not organized very well. There are plenty of offers to complete and get paid for, too, but almost none of them pay out very well--right now the highest is 30 points, and the next highest is $1.50. I keep getting e-mails from them, too, that look pretty spammy just the way they're set up, and mostly they're just advertising recent offers, all of which are--again--pretty low-paying. Granted, mostly these are free offers, but the vast majority of free offers get enough info to inundate you with spam and force you to wade through pages of "survey", so by the time you get your fifty cents, it's just not worth it. I far prefer other GPT sites with higher payouts, even if those require credit-card info and cancellation.
100indecisions's comment on adCause ...
I'm... confused
AdCause seems like a great concept--the option to donate proceeds to charity, such a big part of the site, is a fantastic idea and a very easy way to give back, especially for people who have been very successful at Twitter marketing.
Problem is, the site is very new and while it looks good, anything more than a cursory inspection shows what it's lacking. I signed up over a month ago and so far haven't been notified of any advertisers wanting to run ads on my account, which I attributed to the site's newness: too many users, not enough advertisers. That could be part of it, but actually it's because I didn't understand how the site works--and I'm still not positive. I had no idea that you had to create an adSpot to get any advertising, because there isn't much to tell you what to do right off and no explanatory text anywhere to say "This feature does this. " I thought, for obvious reasons (and nothing told me otherwise), that an adSpot was the ad--the sort of thing run through Magpie, say--and assumed that it was something the advertisers created and then sold to Twitterers whose keywords matched their ads' focus: an already-created ad I'd be paid to run. The feedback forum shows I'm not the only one; it looks like a lot of users are totally confused on what they're supposed to do, and the support on the site isn't very well organized ("How it works" and "FAQ" are two different names for the exact same thing, and "Help" and the feedback forum are always accessible, but why shouldn't I be able to understand how the site actually works from a link called "How it works"? Apparently not).
The process is relatively straightforward, once you know what to do, which I do now that I've watched the tutorial video--but the fact that I had to go watch a video just to understand the site's most basic functionality isn't a very good sign. I'll be keeping with my account and experimenting with it more, because it seems like a good site; I just hope they clean up some of these issues soon and make it a lot more intuitive.
100indecisions's comment on Banko mails ...
Oh my God, not another one
That was my first thought when I came across this site--it's just like every other PTC scam out there, except it's claims are even more absurd. $100 for every single e-mail you open? A $3,000 signup bonus? A minimum payout of $20,000? Really?
But I figured, what the heck, they'll probably pay me something, and there's always a chance the payout will actually be higher than at other PTC sites. So I gave it a shot. It was fun seeing my earnings pile up, even if I knew I wasn't going to get the thousands of dollars I was supposedly earning. I did look around on Google to see what others had said and found out it was generally considered a scam, but I thought I'd keep trying. And yep: I finally passed the $20,000 threshold, and... no payout button. Nothing. I got no response at all when I e-mailed support. Banko is one big scam, and I wasted a whole bunch of time for nothing.
100indecisions's comment on ReadySite ...
Easy way to monetize your blog
I've wanted to earn more money from blogging for a while, but I've found AdSense and similar programs pretty confusing. ReadySite isn't perfect, but it was a lot easier to figure out and set up. And since it wasn't straight-up advertising the way other programs are, putting the one widget on my page didn't clutter things up as much. It did take me a couple tries to get approved actually, because at first my blog didn't have a whole lot of traffic, and I had to work at it a bit to get it up to the level where I could get approved. The other nice thing was, that unlike when I've tried other programs that pay you when readers click on ads (and how likely are people to click on AdSense ads, really?), ReadySite isn't really shilling typical stuff; instead, it's offering useful freebies. Because of that difference, I actually got a halfway-decent amount of revenue from people clicking on the widget.
100indecisions's comment on ChaCha ...
Looks fantastic---now if only I could get in
I'm a grad student and a teaching assistant, so I'm both incredibly busy and incredibly poor, and picking up something like this on the side where I could earn easily whenever I want to would be awesome. Too bad ChaCha never seems to be hiring. That's understandable, since loads of people probably want to sign up for reasons similar to mine, but it's a little frustrating anyway the way the site's presented. Click on information about becoming a Guide, and it says "Wanted: Brainiacs" and similar taglines, but of course when you click "Get Started!" the site tells you that no, actually, they don't want you: they're not hiring right now. I couldn't find an option to be e-mailed when they do start hiring again, either, which seems like an easy and useful feature to add.
100indecisions's comment on Valued Opinions ...
One of the better paid-survey sites
Valued Opinions comes across as extremely professional, which is rather refreshing if you've looked around at all the other survey sites available, many of which are little more than scams. I'd prefer Valued Opinions to send out more surveys, but unlike many of the other sites I've signed up with, I almost always try to qualify for the surveys that I do get offered--the ratio of payment to time spent tends to be much higher than that of other sites, and it seems a bit easier to find surveys you do qualify for. It can take a little while to get your earnings credited to your account, but the site does keep track of them well, and it's not too hard to reach the payout level.
100indecisions's comment on Hellish Dollars ...
I'll come out and call it a scam
And I suppose I'll restrain myself from making the obvious puns about the site's name, although I do have to wonder just why anyone would pick a name like that. Oh yeah--because people are gullible and won't care about stupid names if they think they're really getting paid $1 to click a link. I knew when I came across the site that it was likely to be a scam since there's no way they could maintain that high level of payout, but I decided it was worth a shot, just in case this site was different.
It wasn't. I put in way too much time clicking to get a pretty good way toward the insanely high payout threshold (I mean, really, even if they actually paid what they say they do, $2,000 is incredibly high, especially considering the number of ads sent to free members) before I discovered the site listed on a bunch of different scam sites and wised up. I can't even imagine shelling out $230 to upgrade, but apparently some people have done it.
100indecisions's comment on Big Money PTC ...
Incredible waste of time
I came across this site before I knew much about PTC sites or about much about internet scams in general, and although I thought it sounded too good to be true, I figured I'd give it a shot anyway and see if it paid out. Nothing to lose, right?
Yeah, not quite. I wasted a massive amount of time clicking on the ads, for one thing, and it was fun seeing my "earnings" pile up; I started to get excited about my earnings, actually thinking I might actually be able to make some really easy cash this way. Naturally, they never paid out--I requested payouts several times and tried to contact them, but I got no response. Aside from the waste of my time, I started getting inundated with pop-ups while surfing these ads, many of which apparently left spyware behind on my computer, because it took a long time and a lot of virus scans before I got my computer back to the way it was before I fell for Big Money's claims.
100indecisions's comment on LinkReferral ...
More work than it's worth
I started using Link Referral when I first wanted to try monetizing my blog and getting more traffic, and my results were... fairly mixed. It was okay at bringing in traffic, or at least it did bring in some, but it's not even close to a one-to-one traffic exchange. I found the site really clunky and hard to navigate. There are half a dozen different things you can do to earn credits or traffic or something, it's kind of confusing, and some are better than others. The fact that you can choose to surf sites in your niche is helpful, since that puts you in touch with site owners in your field, and the review feature is kind of nice. However, I found that I always put more work into it than was really worth my time, considering the small bump in traffic I got. It was only that, too, not anything that held steady over time. I know I didn't get any lasting readers from the site.
The actual functionality of the site is iffy at best, too. Using tabbed browsing would make it much easier to go through a page of links and get credit for them, except it doesn't work to control-click or right-click through a bunch of links and open them in tabs, and only some regular clicks seem to register. That was one of my bigger reasons for eventually giving up on LinkReferral: it was just too time-consuming.
100indecisions's comment on Opinion Outpost ...
One of the better survey sites
Opinion Outpost is cleanly designed and straight-forward, and very easy to navigate. It's got a very low payout threshold, one of it's best features, and sends enough surveys that you can reach that threshold pretty easily. None of the surveys are very long, they don't do stupid things like offering sweepstakes entries as survey incentives, and they pay without a problem.
I do find the point system a little confusing; 10 points to a dollar is simple enough, although it's a bit of an odd breakdown, since other sites tend to give more like 100 points to a dollar or something similar. That's not much of a big deal, though, because it's much better than a lot of the survey sites I've used.
100indecisions's comment on TrafficSwarm ...
Seems like a good way to get spam
I found the sign-up process and overall site concept confusing. It seemed like a straightforward traffic exchange at first, but it requires a fairly significant outlay of effort to get it going, setting up your start page--and to be honest, the requirement that you set your start page to TrafficSwarm made me uncomfortable. It's a good system in theory, since that very feature means people will automatically visit your page with no extra effort, but I found it irritating. I like my home page as it is.
The biggest problem for me, though, was that it got me almost nothing in the way of traffic. Mostly I was trying to direct more traffic to my blogs, not to actually sell something, but the vast majority of users seem to stay on the sites long enough to earn credits but not to actually click through. I can't really blame them--that's what I did. My bounce rate was pretty awful and I wasn't even meeting other bloggers, like I did with some other traffic-exchange sites. So I stopped using it. Months later I'm still getting spammy e-mails from TrafficSwarm (though I suppose it would help if I bothered to unsubscribe, but my junk folder is already catching them).
100indecisions's comment on YouData ...
Not your average PTC site
Yeah, you're not going to get rich off YouData, but that isn't the point--it's to sell advertisers your valuable time and attention and get some benefit from it, rather than clicking through gobs of paid e-mails or ads that pay you less than a cent each but still demand several seconds of your time. YouData asks you to download a small app, which you can check whenever you like to visit ads if you have some, and you get paid pretty much instantly through PayPal. There's no minimum level to cash out, so while that extra 75 cents you get through PayPal isn't going to pay any bills, it's still nice to get it right up front.
Other users have commented on a lack of ads, and that much is true; I don't check my stack very often because there usually isn't anything on it. I suspect that will change, though, as they get more advertisers. Right now they have more people signed up than they do ads to sell to them, apparently. But it takes almost no effort on any user's part, and it's a fantastic concept with a well-designed site. They're very, very up-front about what they're doing, too, and there's no irritating "survey" or spyware or banner ads or any of that garbage during the sign-up process, just other human beings as fed up with spam as you are. Overall it's a great little site--I just hope it grows.
100indecisions's comment on Survey Savvy ...
Not bad, not great
I actually don't have much to say about Survey Savvy because it occurs to me, writing this, that--despite reading other reviews (not so much here, but where other people have recommended various paid-survey sites) that raved about Survey Savvy, I really don't have much experience with it. This is largely because I don't get survey e-mails from them very often and I'm not sure if I've ever qualified for a survey. No, I take that back--I just checked my account and it turns out I have a whopping $2.50 in there, $1 of which was for a survey I completed (the rest from referrals--I had no idea I had any successful referrals). Their referral system must be good, based on that--I earned $1.50 from two surveys by my referrals, which isn't bad as such things go. The site's fairly well organized, but I haven't earned much from them, and that's the important part, isn't it?
100indecisions's comment on MySurvey.com ...
Good site, but not enough surveys
I keep hearing people rave about how good this site is, and I keep wondering if we're using the same site. It's good as survey sites go, but I get survey opportunities from them so seldom I have no idea whether they pay promptly or anything, since I haven't even had a chance to get to the point where I could cash out. I'm not talking about not qualifying here; there just never seems to be any surveys available. Those that do occasionally get e-mailed to me tend to be bizarrely specific, requesting "52-year-old males" as the demographic or something, and I don't really know what to make of it.
I wish I'd get more surveys from them, if for no other reason than that MySurvey is one of the few sites that rewards you whether you qualify or not: you get 10 points just for trying a survey even if you don't qualify. I think that's great. I'd just really like more survey opportunities.
100indecisions's comment on Traffic Witch ...
Not that great
The reward system is good, but when other sites start you out at 1:1 traffic exchanges, putting in the effort to creep up to a better ratio at Traffic Witch seems fairly pointless. Did very little for me in the way of actually bringing in traffic, and my bounce rate was even higher than with similar sites because you're only required to stay there for 10 seconds (although that particular feature is nice if you're the one doing the surfing). Not worth the time and effort.
100indecisions's comment on StoresOnline ...
Not much you haven't heard before
I found out about this site when I was invited to attend a seminar here in town on selling online; the main hook was that everyone who attended would get an mp3 player. That sounds fishy right off, just because places that have to promise you something like that to get you in the door probably don't have anything all that fantastic to sell in the first place. My scammer alert went off again when I saw the mp3 player pictured: it was clearly an iPod Shuffle, but the tiny text beneath the picture said that you would not be getting anything by Apple. I decided to go to the seminar anyway, because they couldn't scam me if I didn't buy anything off them, and it was a free lunch.
They did deliver on the free mp3 player, sort of; it's a tiny little 512 mb thing that's probably worth less than $10, but at least it was something. The actual info in the seminar was nothing new, certainly not if you've done any research on internet marketing before, and I was right: it was pretty much just a pitch to sign up for their stuff, which of course means a much-vaunted free trial with huge fees in the fine print.
100indecisions's comment on Hits2u ...
Promises more than it delivers
Hits2u isn't much different from most of the other sites out there that promise gobs of free traffic--it's mostly an attempt to get you to pay for better service, and it doesn't give you that much to begin with. At least I didn't get spammed submitting to this site like I have with some (signed up with TrafficSwarm, for instance, before realizing it was going to be more trouble than it was worth, and kept getting e-mails), but it didn't get me any traffic, either. The fact that the Hits2u system is poorly explained didn't really help.
100indecisions's comment on Darren Rowse ...
Loads of useful advice
I signed up for his "31 Days to Improve Your Blog" project when it was already partly over, and I didn't keep up with it enough to implement all of the suggestions. But just looking briefly at the e-mails sent out each day, I could tell it was fantastic advice to make your blog more SEO-friendly, more popular, and more useful. He's got lots of other similar advice all over his site, and in fact it's a little overwhelming--there's so much to read and try to implement, I can't possibly do it all. Which... is actually a good thing, despite how it sounds. >_< If you're a blogger, take a look at his site.
100indecisions's comment on Survey Spot ...
Not the best survey site out there, but not bad either
Pluses:
-If you don't qualify for a survey, you get to play an instant-win game for chances to win some bigger prize. I've never won the actual prize, of course, even though I usually win 25+ entries into the drawing or whatever it actually is, but it's nice to get something instead of just "sorry, you don't qualify. "
-Regular e-mails with survey opportunities; if you're like me, there are a lot you won't qualify for, but you get enough chances that you'll be able to make something. Plus you won't forget about the site since the surveys come right to your inbox.
-Cashout threshold is only $5, one of the lowest I've ever seen, so it's very easy to make enough to cash out. Can't remember if there's a sign-up bonus, although with a payment threshold that low, I'm guessing there's not.
Minuses:
-A lot of the surveys aren't for money but only for the instant-win thing, which... I mean, that's great if you win, but are you really going to slog through a 20-minute survey for the same "prize" you'd get for disqualifying on a paid survey? I'm sure not.
-Overall site setup is kind of clunky.
-Can take a long time for payments to show up in your account, and you have to keep track of them yourself, since there's no place for pending payments.
100indecisions's comment on LinkBucks ...
Good idea but too distracting
It's a good way to bring in a little extra income. But when I've used it in blog links, I've had several readers confused by the ads--the frame LinkBucks uses means it's not all that obvious what you're even being linked to, and more than one person couldn't tell that I was linking to something besides the ad. My readers are more valuable than the tiny extra income I was getting from LinkBucks, so I stopped using the site. It's not overly useful if you don't already have a large readership, either--if I already did have a significant number of followers that I could trust to hang around (and who knew I had good content and would take the extra few seconds to get through the LB ad frame), it would have worked better for me.
100indecisions's comment on Free Traffic System ...
Maybe I'm biased, but
Right off I'm seeing red flags--the home page looks fairly professional, but the one that comes up after you register, offering you ONE TIME ONLY, OMG DON'T LEAVE THIS PAGE BECAUSE YOU'LL NEVER GET THIS AMAZING OFFER FOR PRO MEMBERSHIP AGAIN!, looks just like every other scam out there. The fact that I started coming across slightly mangled syntax that almost certainly means English isn't the writer's first language did more to put me off, too. "We understand that this price is better than anything on the market today. We understand that this is "too good to be true" - it really is. That is why think very nicely before you close this page. " Um... okay. The shift between clear diction and weird errors is jarring enough to make me a little nervous about the legitimacy of this program, actually, and the simple fact that it's advertised--even in it's name--as free but is then revealed to cost quite a bit for a better membership is disingenuous at best, too.
100indecisions's comment on Sponsored Tweets ...
Looks great; now lets see if it pans o ut
The site is set up really well, attractive and easy to navigate, so that's a big point in it's favor--worthless and scammy sites are often easy to identify just because of the way they look, and Sponsored Tweets is at least professional in appearance. Letting tweeters pick right away what their keywords are, what category ads they'd like to post, and whether they or the advertisers write the ads is also smart, putting Sponsored Tweets a few steps above Magpie (the only other similar site I've used). Now, of course, I just have to wait and see if I get any offers.
100indecisions's comment on Adgitize ...
Great service for bloggers
I'm a grad student without much money, so I'm pretty hesitant to use any service I have to pay for, but Adgitize is an exception--not only can you earn out what you pay, getting you your money back plus a little extra, you can bring in significant amounts of traffic to your site. The high bounce rate is a little concerning, but like with Entrecard, I think you get enough people who stay long enough to read rather than just clicking on.
100indecisions's comment on Entrecard ...
Great way to meet other bloggers
I used this site for quite a while back when today.com allowed it, before Entrecard started accepting paid ads (they've since stopped), and while it took up a lot of time, it was still a relatively easy way to drive traffic to my blogs and meet other people writing about similar things. Today removed all of the Entrecard widgets and is only maybe going to allow them back, so it's been a while since I've done anything on Entrecard, but I'm still in touch with some of the other bloggers I met. For that alone--aside from what can be a one-to-one traffic exchange or more if you use the widget--it's a worthwhile service.
100indecisions's comment on Magpie ...
Good concept, great site, iffy execution
Magpie is really well designed, which I'll admit is one of the first things I look at when I'm wondering whether a site is a scam. This one definitely isn't, but there are a lot of qualifications you'd have to meet to make much with it, and that seems to have gotten a bit worse lately. I didn't make any money with it at all when I started, because I was only getting "per lead" or "per sale" ads, which would probably work better for people with large follower groups who would actually buy from their links. The "per view" ads are the best, because they pay every time your ad runs, sometimes as much as a euro per ad. I've made about 18 euros almost solely on per-view ads.
The main problem is that lately, Magpie seems to have changed things so that more advertisers are allowed to check you out and approve you after you've approved their tweets, and for my part, that's slowed things to an absolute crawl. I'm still running the exact same ad I approved a couple months ago, probably, because despite approving at least a dozen coveted per-view ads in the meantime, none of them have run: two or three of the advertisers decided (for reasons I wasn't told) that I didn't fit their target advertising or whatever, and several others are still sitting in my account, marked "waiting for approval," weeks after I approved them. Actually no, I just checked, and only a couple are still "waiting for approval"; the others all disappeared without being run, whether from maybe timing out or from me being excluded by the advertisers (including at least one that was a blatant scam, and you'd think a scammer wouldn't be picky about his target demographic), which probably represents, I don't know, at least 5 euros lost? That sort of thing is terribly frustrating for me as a user, so I sure hope Magpie fixes it soon.
On the plus side, although their implementation of new features in response to feedback can be slow, they definitely do listen to their users, and they're pretty responsive to questions.
100indecisions's comment on NPD Online Research ...
Not bad, but there are better sites
I tend to lose track of the paid-survey sites I sign up with because anything that doesn't e-mail me survey invitations or stand out in some other way tends to get forgotten. NPD is one of those--they have a halfway decent number of survey opportunities, and they do send e-mails, but their e-mails (and subject lines, just as importantly) don't mention a reward. No way am I slogging through a survey only to find out that I won't be getting paid for it.