Monday, July 17, 2006

How to fill out forms for fun and profit!

I've been spending a lot of time filling crap out on the internet for money. And since I'm a full disclosure kind of person, I'm going to tell you where I did it and how to do it like me cause it's great! I bet you're sold now. I thought these sites were such a great idea that I've even started my own!

Anyway. For the basics check out Money Dummy's guide - the importance of clearing cookies, multiple email addresses, etc etc. In general, what I did was to go through different sites, fill out the easiest offers and move on to the next site. I was bemusedly pleased to find out that I won a contest on one site by being the person to make the most money in the previous 72 hours - an accident of timing, but one that got me an extra $15 anyway. Woot.

My suggestions:

Have a lot of credit card numbers. I have a Stockback MBNA card, which is really the best kind of card to have for doing these kinds of things since MBNA has a program called ShopSafe which will generate one time use credit card numbers which are only good for a few months and you can set it to have as low as a $1 limit (so if you forget to cancel a trial or something, it'll simply bounce. See if your credit card issuer has a similar program - I know I've seen others but I don't know what issuers have them specifically.

Definitely use two different browsers - I use Firefox and IE - so that you can clear the cookies repeatedly in one, while still having your email open and what not in the other. (I have a link to download Firefox on the sidebar - it's a neat little beastie.) Make sure to block pop-ups.

Check DealBarbie's forums - people will often pay you to sign up under them, or swap referrals with you. However, I think for the sites that DealBarbie has listed, where you get money from DealBarbie directly for signing up, you need to sign up with her referral.

Of course, I think my own is the most wonderful. CashDuck's philosophy is that offers shouldn't cost you more than you get back - I aim for any spendy offers to pay at least twice what you spent, and I have a LOT of freebies. Also, nothing costs more than ten dollars. There's also a cool prizes program where you earn feathers (aka points) in addition to money and can get gift cards and what not for your feathers.Go look at CashDuck! Yay!

Here's what I think of the other sites:

DealBarbie: This was where I started. It seems to be the best-run site and certainly has the most offers. Cashout minimum is $20 which you can get pretty easily by filling out a bunch of the $1 surveys. Clearing cookies is key here. Also, check out the forums if you have any questions - they're very active. There are also a lot of $2-3 offers for information on various schools, health insurance, car warranties, home loans, etc.. just make sure not to use your real phone number. But you can definitely make cashout (and much more) simply on the hundreds of free offers.

MyHotCash, RockHardCash, HoorayMoney, InstaCashVault, PocketCashGPT, MadCash4U: Very similar sites to DealBarbie. There are standard software packages for the sites and once you have done a few you will be able to quickly tell them apart. There are not quite as many offers as DealBarbie but the sites are not as old, so after you complete your first round of offers, check back in a few weeks. I won the $15 on RockHardCash. I recommend RockHardCash, MyHotCash, and MadCash4U.

InstantProfitz, FusionCash: Similar packages. They are entirely cookie-based - the best way I found to do this without losing my sanity was to do all of my regular web browsing in Firefox, and all of the offers in IE so I could repeatedly clear IE's cookies. There are a decent number of free offers, but I kind of got fed up at the cookie-ness since you have to keep better track of which offers you completed, so I did a couple offers and cashed out. If you have more patience than I, InstantProfitz seems to have higher payouts, but MoneyDummy says they have a worse record of actually delivering the payout for the offer.

DontCostAnything, AnyGift4Points: These sites are a different software package entirely - they are based on "offers" which is kind of a unit. You need to do one offer before you can start accumulating money. There are fractional offers - generally the more of an "offer" it is, the more likely that it costs money.(Note: if you sign up for one of these, I'll split the bonus I get for a referral with you. Send me an email if you do sign up.) DontCostAnything and AnyGift4Points have systems where you fulfill a certain number of offers and get a certain prize (ie do 3 offers after the first one, get $130.)

Prizebook: I did 3 tickle offers and the entertainment.com offer on Prizebook, and it's a really beautifully designed site. They credit in dollars and cents. Don't be tempted by all the pretty things you can buy with your prize money, just get it by Paypal and buy it on sale!

9 comments:

Andi @ udandi / Lunch It Punch It said...

just out of curiousity, how much time do you spend on this type of work a week/month?

Kira said...

A lot, lately, but only because I have nothing to do at work. I could probably have made half the money in about 5 percent of the time if I weren't so bored. If you go right for the high paying offers, as opposed to filling out freebie ones, you can definitely make a VERY nice hourly rate. ;)

Kira said...

Well, if you consider the Tickle offers I was talking about, that takes about 10 minutes to fill out the test (which after the first couple, I merely clicked random answers to get through it faster) and then you wait for it to be cleared, and when it clears you go in and delete your account which takes about a minute. So 11 minutes for a $23-28 profit.. that's pretty good. :)

For the freebie offers, you can do a $1 survey in about five minutes, so that would work out to be about $20 per hour. More if you do the car warranty forms, life insurance quotes, refinance quotes, and other things which take less time and are $2-3.

Anonymous said...

I have heard about these a million times, but didn't realize they are this easy to do!

My job requires me to travel and stay in a hotel Sun-Thurs nights. I could easily rack up some side cash at night from my boring hotel room!

Anonymous said...

Hey Kira,

You should check out www.kachinga.com!

They offer cash payments instantly via PayPal the minute you sign up for offers. All you need is a $10 balance and you can withdraw. Also, if you refer your friends and family, you can earn 10% of their earnings for life!

Check it out! It's a great site with a lot of easy offers.

Anonymous said...

These sites look like they have alot of wonderful offers. Unfortunately none of them have paid survey offers that are applicable to people not living in US/Canada (like me)... Are do they?

Bajionline said...

Thank you everyone for leaving this information. I am really looking for some make money things that actually work.

Bajionline said...

Thank you everyone for leaving this information. I am really looking for some make money things that actually work. Kachinga is not a website now?

Kira said...

Sic transit gloria Internet. That comment about Kachinga was left five years ago.