Three Terrible Ways to Earn Online
I have been trying to earn a living online for a while now and I can tell you that there are some methods which will get you to your goal, slowly but surely, and there are others that simply are not worth wasting your time on! To help newcomers avoid making the same mistakes I did, this article will go over the three worst ways to earn money online.
1. Reading Emails. Ok, I know some of you are going to jump on me for this one, but really, if you are getting paid between half a cent and 3 cents per email, how much can you truly earn? The fact of the matter is that you will simply fill up your inbox (hopefully you set up a separate email account or your regular emails will be buried!) with emails that take hours to look through each day.
Even if you are with a legit company, of which there are plenty, you will still be earning pennies per hour. And many people don’t realize that you cannot simply read the email, you must click on the link to view the advertiser’s website. This is time consuming and there is usually a certain amount of time you need to stay on the site in order to get paid. It simply is not worth the time and effort.
2. Performing Human Interactive Tasks. Also known as HITS, these are tasks that a computer is incapable of doing, such as answering questions, marking objects in photos, etc. One example of a website that offers jobs like this is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Trust me, these are so not worth the time you put into even reading the instructions!
I spent a day on Mechanical Turk just to see if I could actually earn anything. I did several different types of HITS, one was marking drainage channels in a series of photos. There were 50 photos and the entire set paid me 5 cents! Another HIT that I tried was marking the relevance of search engine results. You had to tick a box saying that the result looked very relevant, not so much or very unhelpful. It was easy, but I still spent about 30 seconds to a minute on each HIT and these ones paid 3 cents.
At the end of the month, I got an email telling me that I had earned a whopping 31 cents for my day of hard labor! That site got crossed off my list pretty fast! Don’t even attempt it, they might pay, but it is so little that you won’t be able to buy anything with your earnings!
3. Signing Up for Offers. This might sound like a good way to go and maybe it is for some people, but I have had nothing but bad luck in these areas. Places like TreasureTrooper and SWATcash are all about signing up for offers and then they pay you what appears to be a very nice amount of cash, anywhere from a dollar to fifty bucks. Sounds great. But there is a catch. You will find that many of the offers actually require you to do more than simply fill in your email address and name.
Some require complete personal information that you might not wish to give out online, so you have then wasted several minutes looking at the offer and half-filling out the form! Others require that you do something in order to get paid, like apply for a credit card and get approved. For some people, approval is just not going to happen, so you have spent all that time filling out a form for 0 cash!
Yet others are for trial offers that might be free, but you still have to fill in your credit card info. If you forget to cancel the trial, you will be charged the full membership price, which is usually several times the reward you received for signing up. And many, many of these trial offer sites have actually made it impossible for your to cancel your membership, so they can continue charging your card month after month. Not a very good deal after all!
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