One way to pick yourself of by the bootstaps and make a little bit of extra money is by using GPT sites or Get Paid To sites. Get Paid To sites, or GPT as I will continue to use, are sites where you sign up and then complete different offers. These could be entering your email address at a site or signing up for a free trial of Netflix or taking a survey. In return for signing up or completig an opportunity, you get paid. Now, the payment can range in amount from 25 cents to $20 or more. There are many websites out there that you can use to do this, but one of the best that I have had only amazing experiences with is CashCrate. CashCrate has been absolutely awesome for me.

Here is how it works.

CashCrate has a very wide range of offers and opportunities to participate in. Many are 100% free to participate and some have a cost associated with them. Those that have a cost may be around $1 – $5 which would cover the shipping of a product or sample to you. However, in return for signing up and paying the shipping charge, you could get paid $15 for completing the offer. Here is an example: because I use eBay a lot, I’m always looking for new product sources. CashCrate was promoting an opportunity to sign up for a free trial at a website that offered tips and resources for selling on eBay, including a wholesale product area. The cost to me was $1.95 to sign up for the “free trial” but in return, CashCrate deposited $15 into my account. The trial period lasts 7 days and I will call today to cancel my account so that I do not start getting charged the monthly fee. $13.50 for 5 minutes of work, I’ll take it. The great part is that there are tens of offers like these that you can sign up for. You could easily sign up for 5 of these offers that have a similar payout ($15) and make around $60 for a half hour worth of work.

There are also TONS of completely free offers. The payout is not as large, somewhere from 25 cents to a couple bucks. However, if you have the free time while at home or at work and take 20 minutes to participate in a few of them, you can easily add an addtional $10 to your account in one night.

Here’s a hypothetical situation added up:

• 5 offers with payouts of $15, cost of $1.95 each. Earnings = $65.25
• 10 offers with payouts of $0.30. Earnings = $3.00
• 5 offers with payouts of $0.50. Earnings = $2.50

Total time spent at most: 2 hours
Total earnings: $70.75
Hourly Rate: $35.37

I’d say that is a pretty good hourly rate! Now, the best part is, you can do this everyday! CashCrate pays out monthly as long as you meet the minimum earnings of $20.00. Repeat the process just 5 times a month and you drop an extra $350+ into your pocket.

There are people who earn a full time living from sites like CashCrate! All you have to do is spend the time to continuously complete the offers and wait for them to get cleared and deposited in your account. Then at the end of each month you collect a check for your time!

Now, here’s another added bonus to the site.

CashCrate has a great affiliate program. You can refer as many people as possible to the site. If they sign up and start earning money, you also earn money! The first level of commissions for 1-50 referrals is 20%. You’ll also earn an additional $3.00 per referral that signs up and earns $10.00 through the site, ON TOP OF the 20% commission. So even if all you do is promote the system and refer your friends and people to sign up for the site, without completing any offers yourself, you can still make money. I’ve read about some other small bloggers who have referred a couple hundred people and make over $1000 a month in JUST referral commissions.

So, if times are tough for you or your just looking to put a little extra money in your pocket, I suggest you sign up for CashCrate and give it a shot. I mean you really have nothing to loose if you participate in the free offers and within 20 minutes you could reach your $10 mark and an hour you can get to the $20 minimum payout.

At the end or beginning of each month when I do a montly income report for Dorm Room Biz, you will start to see CashCrate popping more more and more and being a part of the income. That’s because I am going to be utilizing the site more and taking advantage of the opportunity! “There’s money to be made in them there hills!”

• ReviewMe: $15.00
• AdSense: $15.69
• Private Ads/Posts: $20.00
• Text Link Ads: $5.51
• CashCrate: $22.79

Total: $78.99

ReviewMe – ReviewMe is a great way to make some extra money from your blog by writing sponsored posts. Even though I did not have any high paying offers from ReviewMe to be posted on Dorm Room Biz, I utilized a couple of the different campaigns that came across my RSS feed reader. Had I jumped on more of them and spent time to write more posts on different websites and topics, this could have amounted to at least $50 for the month. However, when I consider different reviews to take on through ReviewMe’s campaigns, I try to keep the content relevant to Dorm Room Biz and the topics that you all are interested in reading about. This helps the paid posts to not be as obvious and to not be obtrusive to you all.

Google AdSense: Although it is not a major earner for me, it does bring in a few bucks here and there. I am going to be working on better optimizing the site to utilize AdSense in a couple different ways which will hopefully result in a higher CTR and a higher payout to me!

Private Ads/Private Posts: This is usually the category that is the biggest earner just because different businesses and bloggers are more interested in working directly with another blogger as opposed to working through a third party service. It also allows the blogger writing a sponsored post or putting up a private ad to make a higher amount rather than totally relying on a service like Text Link Ads. With the installation of OIOPublisher, I hope that I will be able to increase my private ad sales by offering other areas throughout the site that you can advertise in. For the current rates, please email me, but you can get an idea of where they are at right now by visiting the Advertising page. If you are not using OIOPublisher to manage your private ad sales, I definitely suggest you check it out!

Text Link Ads – I didn’t even realize that I had sold any for the month! I got my TLA integrated with my regular links sections and for some reason didn’t receive notification that I had sold one and never noticed it. Anyway, its nothing to quit a job over or even get paid for the month, but will eventually get paid out as more sell. I already had $25 worth of TLAs sell on another site of mine, so the end of June I should receive a combined payment.

CashCrate – I know I have said it before, but I really do love the way CashCrate works and the great system they have set up. CashCrate is a constant money maker for me and I can always rely on it to generate some extra money. If you haven’t already, take a look at the different reviews that I have done on CashCrate here and here and then sign up for the program so that you too can start making money! Once you get your account established and you make your money from completing surveys, get referrals signed up underneath of you so that your earning power continues to grow.

Besides these money makers, I have also joined up with Market Leverage to bring my readers different offers that will hopefully benefit you all, so look at for these different offers around the site. If you are looking to get into affiliate marketing and more serious advertising revenues, I strongly suggest you take a look at ML and sign up. Bloggers such as Zac Johnson, Ian Fernando, John Chow, and Shoemoney have had great success with them and they are a great group of people willing to help you out!

There are just so many ways out there to make money online from blogging that it is hard to test them all out. I am interested in any experiences that you all, my readers, have had from working with any of the companies that I have mentioned above or any others. Now that I am getting into putting more advertising on the Dorm Room Biz site, I am contemplating ANOTHER redesign (I know, I know – I just had it redesigned not too long ago). But, I would like to change up the side bar some and make it into a 2 column sidebar to utilize the space better as well as make for less scrolling just to see the sidebar items. We shall see!

I also have some other cool ideas planned for Dorm Room Biz over the next couple months, so be on the look out for some new releases of different items in the near future!

Here’s to blogging success!
Chris

CashCrate is a great system because you can make money without even filling out the surveys. Although filling out the surveys means that you can make more money, it is time consuming and can be a bit of a pain. The problem with these surveys and offers is that to complete one you will definitely have to give up your email address and will most likely have to complete other offers for it to go through. However, there are some great ones that pay well, if you pay. For instance, I completed the Netflix offer which was a 15 day free trial and then costs like $8.99 a month after that. I joined through CashCrate and submitted it as being completed, and although they waited the 15 days to make sure that I actually joined the service and made the first monthly payment, I was then paid $15.00 – so I essentially made $6.01 for joining Netflix which I had been wanting to do anyway. If you take some of the higher paying offers that you may spend a couple bucks on, you can make even more money back. Some offers will cost you $2-$5 to complete (usually for shipping of something like a book or DVD) and then you’ll get paid say $15-$20.

However, surveys are just the tip of the iceberg with CashCrate. They have a great referral system which allows you to promote a referral link on your website or in forums. When people sign up through your link, you get paid. When the person completes their first $10 worth of offers (the minimum payout), then you as the referrer get paid $3.00, these are your first level referrals. You then also make money from your second level referrals. This means that when you refer someone to CashCrate and then they refer someone else, you make money that way. Starting out, you make 20% of what your referrals make and 15% of what their referrals make; yet as you refer more people, this percentage gets adjusted and can increase.

So, if you can continually refer people to CashCrate, or any similar service that has the same kind of referral program set up, you can be making money without even having to fill out the surveys. This is the point that I hope to get it. So far I have 13 first level referrals and a second level referral. As these people continue to refer others, I will continue to make money.

Here is the important secret though – you need to complete your first $10 worth of offers to really take advantage of the program. So, spend 30 minutes when you sign up and just keep completing offers. If you reach that $10 mark, great, but you could always keep going. For my first check, I only had one referral payment of $3 and the other $20 some was from referrals. For April so far, I am making about $10 from my referrals. So if you join and complete that first $10 mark and then refer people, you can really make some money with the CashCrate program.

Now, this is a great side income generator so, I encourage you to join CashCrate, complete the $10 worth of offers, and then promote the hell out of the program. It is great to watch your monthly earnings continue to rise and receive emails saying that you have earned more money for not doing any work.

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Are you already a member of CashCrate? How are you promoting the service and earning money? I’d love to hear other people’s success stories from using the program!

Yesterday, I got another check from CashCrate for participating in surveys and for referring new members. My pondering began because I thought about how when I signed up for the program, they asked for my Social Security Number for their records and their own reporting.

So, to any affiliate program users and money makers out there, I want to know if you report your blog income. I can understand if you are making more than a couple hundred dollars a month and how it may look a fishy if you do not have a business entity set up to report it as income to. But for the average blogger who may make say $30-$100 a month off of affiliate programs such as Commission Junction and CashCrate, do you report that income with your income tax?

I figured this would be a good time to pose the question since the deadline for taxes just passed…which was also my birthday!

This month so far from only doing a couple offers last night, I am up to $16.61 so I’m looking to cross over the $50 mark for this month if not more.

I have a post coming up on Wednesday about a different technique to managing your time and getting your priorities done efficiently. This concept will play into making money from CashCrate and dedicating so much time a week to put towards earning more and more from their system.

Has anyone else signed up for CashCrate and found it as a good money maker? From the little bit of time I put towards it after joining, I am liking it so far.