Ework 411

Fast Ebay feedback method

2009-10-24T20:44:00.000-07:00

I was discussing Ebay with someone the other day, and they were talking about how frustrating they found it that they could not open up their Ebay store yet because they did not have the minimum number of required feedbacks. They were only a few short but they were really wanting to move forward and get the store opened over the weekend when they had the time to fix all of the postings up, and were disappointed that they had not sold enough items that week to be able to do so. This is when it occurred to me that other people may benefit from learning how to use a simple tactic that will solve that problem immediately. I used this method a long time ago when I needed to have a feedback rating at a certain level in order to get work as a merchant’s official Ebay poster, and I myself was lacking only a few points.

Note that I am NOT condoning that you do this on a large scale, or in order to try to inflate your numbers so that you can defraud anyone. People often check your feedback and items bought and sold before dealing with you, and if it is mostly generated in this way you will look really bad. Doing it only for a few extra items to get you to a near goal sooner will not cause any comment or concern with anyone, and should be okay. If you find yourself in this situation, here is how to immediately fix it.

Go into search and look for Ebooks that you can purchase for one or two cents using buy it now, and buy however many you need. It does not really matter what the topic is, you are buying the feedback and not the Ebook. Since it is a buy it now item, you should be able to get immediate feedback as soon as you pay for the items. You can now move forward with your Ebay goal, and begin buying and selling normally again.

Note about real work at home employers

2009-10-23T16:38:00.001-07:00

These real life companies that pay people to work from home are just like any other employer, and may not be hiring at all times. They can only hire enough workers to cover their flow of business. This is actually to your benefit. If the company hired you when they did not have the work to support you, nobody would make anything from them due to lack of enough work to go around. If you apply, please be patient as it can sometimes take a while before they contact you back. Pestering them will not get you hired faster, and may cause you to not be hired at all. My advice is to apply for all of them that are applicable and be patient, just like searching for a real job. Also, since these are real life jobs working at home; be prepared for the fact that some may require resumes, certain amounts of experience, proficiency tests, and special equipment.

Adgitize generates traffic and income to blogs

2009-10-23T15:07:00.000-07:00

Adgitize is an advertising and traffic generation program that helps you promote your blog, and pays you for being an active user. They have programs available for people who would like to advertise, earn money being a publisher, generate affiliate comissions, or all three. You do not have to participate in all of the program types, just the ones that appeal to you.

Adgitize for Publishers

If you will look to the left in my "Traffic Widgets" panel, you will see a series of 125x125 ads, with the words Adgitize me on the bottom. This is one of the many different types of panels that publishers can use to gain revenues from their blogs. You can earn points for writing new content (one article a day), page views generated to your site, and any ads that you click from other participating sites. Clickling on ads is optional, so even if you choose not to do this you will gain earnings just by posting regularly and having people read your blog. The points awarded for pageviews do not require that your readers click the ads, simply view them. Unlike some other ad programs, adgitize will work with publishers of newer and smaller blogs as well, which makes using them very nice. The rates may be a little lower than what you can get on some of the other ad platforms, but you do not have to have or maintain a set trafic rating or click through percentage either. Adgitize for publishers is a truly hassle and worry free method of monetizing your blog. There is no cost to be a publisher or an affiliate, and it is great to be able to earn revenues from doing nothing more than simply posting your content and having your readers read it.

Adgitize for Affiliates

If you place the adgitize for affiliates box (above the ad strip in my widget) or banner (located above this post) on your blog and someone joins the adgitize program and becomes an advertiser, you can earn ongoing commissions from that member. For each new advertiser, you will earn from $2-5 signup bonus, and a $1 commission for every month that they continue to advertise with the adgitize program.

Adgitize for Advertisers

Adgitize is a great way to get traffic to your blog. For a cost of $24 a month, your ads will rotate across the entire network of participating blogs. Every time someone views a new page (even within the same blog) the ads rotate; so you can be assured that your ads will appear on a vast network of blogs and will be seen by a lot of readers. In addition, the publishers themselves may click up to 100 ads per day for points, and must do so by travelling to 100 different blogs; because you can only click one ad per blog. This means that you may get your blog noticed by other bloggers as well, who may want to subscribe or exchange links with you.

Beginner PHP tutorial collection

2009-10-22T17:48:00.000-07:00

One of the things that I have always found to be very difficult to do when attempting to build a website is PHP. While I have no trouble with HTML and CSS, I am far from what you would consider to be a professional web designer or programmer. The problem is that most of the really cool functions that you would want to have on a site require you to have some knowledge of this program. In the past I have found this to be very frustrating. Many times I have searched for online tutorials on PHP, but most of them seem to assume that you have at least a basic starting knowledge of the program.

If you need to get the basic skills to get you started, you should really check out this collection of beginner tutorials. This page was built by a guy I know who was facing just that very obstacle; the necessity of being able to run a site built with PHP when he had absolutely zero PHP knowledge. By assembling them into a collection, he is allowing his time spent in hunting down those few tutorials scattered across the web that would actually make sense to a total PHP newbie to help out with your frustrations. Don’t waste your money buying a PHP for Dummies book, these beginner PHP tutorials will teach you the basics you need to know for free. Thanks Franklyn, for making this available.

Dungeons and Treasures pays you to play their RPG game

2009-10-21T09:23:00.000-07:00

Dungeons and Treasures is a great game that you can get paid to play. My first impression of it was that it reminded me of one of the very old school Role Playing Games, because it is a bit cheesy compared to modern RPG’s. After you really start playing it though, it is oddly addictive. I actually look forward to playing it every day now. The instructions are a little difficult to follow, because the game is operated by non-US citizens who have written the instructions in English. The rest of this post will provide you with a set of basic understandable instructions and tips to save you a headache and a learning curve from having to figure most of it out on your own.

Your task is to visit a dungeon every day, kill or catch the monsters, and collect the gold. You can only clean out one dungeon a day; unless you win star credits and use them to buy more dungeons, or purchase them with gold from other players that have won them. When you first start the game, you have nothing except 500 gold. You need to buy a decent weapon, and at least one health potion with this. The best way to do this if you do not start the game on the first of the month is to buy a used weapon that is broken in the player marketplace and repair it at the weapon shop. You then go to the tavern to find out about your dungeon, and proceed inside to kill the monsters.

Once inside, the game play is very basic. Your movement is patchy and is done by moving through chunks of space into the next frame using the red arrows. Watch for stuff lying on the floor. Once you meet a monster, you get a menu asking if you want to fight, dodge or run. Unless you are almost out of lives you want to fight, because that is how you get gold and keys. You have six hit points before you die, which can be healed with health potions. You get three lives per day, so if you get killed it restarts you at the entrance to the dungeon. If you die all three times, you cannot finish your dungeon for that day. The monsters do not respawn; so if you know you are almost finished with your dungeon, it may be best to just die and save your potions for the next day. While you are clearing out the dungeons you may also find items like potions and weapons. If you do not need these you can sell them for gold. There are two different kinds of keys that you will find while searching, dungeon keys and treasure room keys. Dungeon keys are needed to open doors in the dungeon, and treasure room keys are used to open chests full of bonus gold after you are finished.

There are other ways that you can gain gold also, which vary. You should check out all of the options as far as contests, etc. You can gain experience points and/or gold doing some of those things as well. The contests change all of the time. I will say that I have found the games/skills contests such as shooting arrows and jousting to be very difficult to control; so you may want to stick with the non-skills based stuff unless you can get very good at those skills during practice sessions. One of the current contests right now is something to do with tribes of barbarians. It took me a while to catch onto what I was supposed to be doing, which I figured out by accident. The very bad instructions say to click the pictures on the website to win artifacts. I clicked all over the place, and could not figure out what they meant, so I said forget it. Then when I was in my dungeon, I noticed an odd flickering helmet that was hovering around to the left side of my screen by my menu. I clicked it, and lo and behold, artifacts! Lol the bad thing is, I had several weird Chinese star looking things go across my screen too, and had just stared at them, wondering what the deal with that was. They are generally towards the top of the screen. Anyway you are not looking for actual pictures on the website, you are looking for these weird flickering objects that appear very briefly and may fly around like UFO’s.

Once you click all 12 of them, you can turn in tickets for reputation points. How many tickets you get is dependent upon how many artifacts you recovered. Some of your attempts to get artifacts will create an event if you fail. Events are small tasks you can pick team members to perform with you, based on their skills and the requirements. You click a few buttons, and it gives you a success or fails result. If you succeed, you also get reputation points and may gain skills. Reputation points get added up, and they are what determine if you win a prize or not at the end of the contest. This may either be gold, or a star credit you can redeem for upgrades of your choice. I usually bypass the jousts and the other current contest, which involves trying to shoot semi-uncontrollable arrows at fast moving hot air balloons. However, the barbarian thing you can actually have a very good shot of picking up some extra gold on.

When you are done with all of this, be sure to stop and pray at the temple for gold every day. You should also make sure to open your treasure chests. If you forget to do so, you will lose your keys when the game resets for the next day. Speaking of resetting, this is a very important point. Each “adventure” only lasts one month, and then EVERYTHING resets and changes. You will once again start out with nothing in your inventory and 500 gold. This is important because it is unlike most other RPG’s in that you don’t want to upgrade everything and buy good equipment for future growth, because there IS no future. You need to really think through what you buy, and when. Purchases make a lot more sense the closer you are to the beginning of the month. Level upgrades, etc also reset. Everyone starts out equal again on the first of each month. Due to this; on the last day of the month you should sell everything you own, trading in any weapons and armor you may have bought or found for gold. If you do not sell the items, you will lose them anyway. The only things I ever buy due to this are two decent but not expensive weapons (in case one breaks while in a dungeon and I have not yet found a better one), a couple of health potions, and a net. Nets can be used to catch monsters instead of killing them, and the monsters can then be sold for gold. This is often better than killing them, and how difficult they are to catch depends on your level and their ranking (low, med or high).

When the monthly adventure ends all contest points are tallied, prizes of gold and star credits awarded, and then all gold in your account is converted into DT dollars. DT dollars are a virtual currency that is like a holding account. DT dollars are actually where your gold has been credited into an equivalent of US currency. You can request payout anytime after you have earned $10 US. What rate the gold converts at varies from month to month, depending on how much they take in. Some people get very involved in this game, and many seem to actually buy upgrades for various things with real money. You will get a percentage of those profits, based on how much gold you have earned. While you can certainly buy an upgrade yourself if you get that into it and want to, I have never spent any real money on this game. Anything I have bought has been with in-world gold I have won. To me it is nothing more than a fun way to earn some spare cash, and you can easily make money from this game without purchasing anything.

If you can get referrals, you will also earn a percentage of the gold they win as well; up to three levels down. The game is honestly fun to play, is totally free, and has no annoying ads; so this is not too difficult to do. (You can complete offers for gold if you choose to, but you have to specifically visit a section of the site to do it). The cheesiness of the graphics is more than made up for by the excitement of finding a big chest of gold that you know is going to convert to real cash lol. If you have an hour or so to spend on making some extra money, this is a very fun and cool way to do it.

Short Task pays you for completing microjob tasks

2009-10-20T20:24:00.000-07:00

Short Task is a Microjobs provider, similar to M-turk and Microworkers. There seem to be a good variety and large amount of tasks to complete on this service, and I have been impressed with it so far. This one seems to combine the numbers of listings that Mechanical Turk offers with the easier payment options that Microworkers provides. You can request payout by Paypal when your account reaches $10.00. The only thing that I do not like so far is that tasks do not disappear once completed, and there is no option to make them do so if you have already done them or are not interested in them. This can create some confusion when you are talking about 36,000 tasks that often have similar titles such as “follow a Twitter account” lol. I have sent a comment in to the site about this suggestion, but they are probably already working on it because the logo says “Beta” on it. I am still in the process of testing Short Task out, so I may have a further update on this program later. I have not been paid yet, but it does come highly recommended by a good friend so I am posting it as legit.

Earn with Lulu self publishing platform

2009-10-20T19:45:00.000-07:00

Lulu is a self publishing program where you can write and sell your own materials. Unlike many self publishers, Lulu does not require that you pre-print a large number of copies in order to get going. You simply create your content and post it on the site. You can sell books, musical albums, photographic collections, and more. You can choose to publish in eBook format, or as printed material. When publishing a printed book, you simply upload the contents, and add the cover. Once you have done that, you selcet what sizes and styles of book you would like to offer it in (hardback, trade paperback, coffee table book, etc). Lulu will give you a price per book for what it costs to print the item.

Once you know what the cost is, it is up to you to set the selling price. Keep in mind that Lulu does keep 20% of your royalties. This is a little bit higher than some places; but the fact that you can get your work into print without having to pre-purchase thousands of copies makes it very worth it for publishers who are just starting out. Ebooks do not have any printing costs, and can be sold for any price, including free. If you have a price on an Ebook, it is 100% royalty, less Lulu’s percentage.

Now that your book is ready, it is up to you to market it. Lulu does display it very nicely on their site, which will generate some traffic and sales for you. You can even set up your own storefront with templates that you can change. They also allow people to review your work on the site, which is a great feature. When someone decides to purchase a copy of your book, Lulu will take care of all of the packaging and shipping for you too. Lulu is a must use program for anyone who would like to publish their own book, but cannot afford the high fees associated with the large print houses.

Here is an example of a book distributed by Lulu that was written by an Ework411 reader and my online friend. Chelsea Hoffman's Lulu page. Let’s show her some link love and check it out on our way to scope out the great service Lulu can provide.

Get paid for promoting your content at Shetoldme

2009-10-20T15:45:00.000-07:00

Shetoldme is a combination program that is part traffic generator, part bookmark/backlink service, and part moneymaker. Once you sign up for Shetoldme, you can post links to blog or website articles you find useful (including your own). Be sure to vote up your own posts, you can and should do this once by clicking the up tab next to the icon that looks like a world. Your post then goes into a queue, where it is reviewed by other users of the system. They will read the short summary of the post; and if they find it of further interest they can then click through to read the entire post. This helps you get traffic to items that you post on this program. Once they have read it, they will rate it up or down. Once it gets to be above a certain ranking, it becomes a permanent backlink and stays within the database. This will help increase the pagerank of whatever you have posted.

Every post made on Shetoldme has three Google Adsense sections. One is yours, one belongs to the person who referred you, and one to Shetoldme. Due to this, you will have an Adsense ad on every post that you make; as well as on every post made by your referrals. Not a guaranteed money maker by any means because it is unknown how often your referrals will post; or if anyone reading will click on an ad located on either you or your referral’s posts. But the fact that these remain out there permanently and get good Google search rankings, and you do have potential to make money using something that is benefitting you anyway is neat. I have made Adsense earnings from this program, which I consider to be a nice bonus to a great service.

Get paid to be a juror at Online Verdict

2009-10-20T15:22:00.000-07:00

Are you a US resident that finds legal matters interesting? Are you able to remain open minded and review situations individually before making up your mind? If so, you may be a good candidate for working at Online Verdict. Online Verdict is a program where lawyers who currently have legal cases awaiting a jury verdict who will pay you for your individual opinions, in order to get a good idea of how the case is going to be decided. E-jurors complete a detailed profile, and are then invited by email to participate in cases when they meet the demographic a lawyer has requested. You will only be able to review cases occurring within your county or Federal district, and they are only offered as they become available as a match with no guaranteed rate of work. You may not participate if you have any felony convictions.

If you get invited by email to participate in a case, you have the option of accepting or passing on it by not taking action to accept the case. Not taking or abandoning a specific case you find disinteresting or offensive does not penalize you in any way aside from not being paid, and you will still be invited to participate in any future cases if eligible. If you do decide to accept the case; you just click through the link, and review all of the evidence and legal arguments presented by both sides. Reviewing a case takes anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes or so, and pays between $20-60; depending on the difficulty and amount of material you have to review.

Once you have reviewed everything, you will be asked a series of questions about the case, and your opinions of it. After your participation in the case is finished, you will be mailed a check to your home address. Online Verdict pays monthly for any cases you have participated in that have closed in the previous month.

Get paid to be a juror at Online Verdict.

Ejury will pay you to act as an ejuror to pre-try legal cases

2009-10-20T15:17:00.000-07:00

Ejury is a program where you can participate in pre-trying a legal case before it goes to a jury. Having the case pre-tried allows the lawyer presenting it to find holes in their side of the case, improve jury selection, and discover how good their legal case is according to public opinion. You are only eligible to participate in trials going on within your county, and must be a US resident who has not been convicted of a felony. Once the case is fully closed you can view the results if you like, which consist of a summary based on responses from all of the participants in that case.

A case generally takes 30 minutes or less to review, and pays between $5-10 each. You are more likely to get cases if you live in a larger metro area. This jury program does not pay as much as Online Verdict does, but the reviews are easier to do and take less time. This is because you only get the basic facts and info that you would learn from opening and closing statements, and not the entire process of a full trial with testimony and official evidence. Occasionally you may get invited to actually physically attend a mock trial, and those pay fairly well (plus they feed you lol).

Click here to find out more about being an Ejury e-juror and pre-trying legal cases.

Pixprofit pays for typing out captcha images?

2009-10-20T15:02:00.000-07:00

Pixprofit is a site that pays you to type out the letters and numbers in a captcha image. You get 30 seconds per image to type it correctly. You must type it in case sensitive, and include any symbols or spaces just as it is in the image. I am still testing this program, and am not really sure what I think of it. I have heard from many sources that it does pay and is legit, and the site states that they process payments daily. I have also heard that if you make too many errors your account will be suspended, so if you do use this program accuracy is a must. You earn $1.00 for every thousand captchas processed. I like the fact that the site pays out daily, so you can get paid as soon as you have reached the $3.00 payout amount.

My biggest issue with this would be to wonder why someone needs thousands of capchas decoded in the first place. Also, this has got to be the most mind numbingly boring work from home task I have ever attempted. I did not even get to the point of having made a dollar before my brain felt like it had turned to Jello, and I had to stop doing it. Since then, I have found it difficult to feel motivated enough to go on another captcha rampage, so it may be a while before I can verify if this pays or not. In the meantime, it is believed to be legit (but possibly unethical if being used to spam?), and I will leave it up to you to decide whether or not to use it.

West at Home is a top rated CSR work from home employer

2009-10-13T17:55:00.000-07:00

West at Home is a company that hires representatives to do customer service jobs for their clients. This generally involves data entry and telephone work. You can set your own work hours, which are totally flexible to your life schedule. West at Home even has an optional medical and dental benefit package available through an outside provider! This could be a great solution, if your regular employer does not offer any insurance benefits. You can either be compensated on a per minute rate, per call rate, or a guaranteed hourly rate. No matter which plan you choose, you are guaranteed to earn at least your local minimum wage for the hours you have worked because they will always pay you the greater of the two amounts. You can be paid biweekly; either by direct deposit, or by a Paycard. You will be required to go through some training, but they pay you to do so. The requirements to work for West at Home are: a pc with Windows XP or Vista, Pentium 3 or better with 1GHZ or better processor, a high speed internet connection, and a feature free landline phone with a headset.

West at Home has one of the best reputations of any work at home company that I have ever heard of. Everyone I know who has worked for them has liked doing so. To work for West at Home, you must fill out the online application and take a skills assessment test. If you pass the test, you will move on to an automated virtual interview. If they decide to accept you, they will email you an offer acceptance with paperwork to fill out. It can take some time for this process, because this company is in high demand as an at-home employer. Be advised that if you apply here, they will check your background and criminal records prior to the job beginning.

Click here to find out more about being a West at Home customer service representative.

Important note about real work at home employers

Learn how to recognize work from home opportunity scams

2009-10-13T11:33:00.000-07:00

One of the most difficult things for people new to trying work at home programs is learning how to tell which opportunities are legitimate. The best advice is that you should use a combination of critical thinking, and information obtained by researching. Familiarize yourself with the common types of scam formats; which are Ponzi schemes, Pyramid scams, employment and job training scams, reshipping programs, and phishing. If you know how the most common scams work, you are much less likely to be taken in by one.

You should also learn which types of programs tend to have high scam rates. A few examples are Pay to Click sites, MLM opportunities, autosurf exchanges, paid cyclers, envelope stuffing, jobs that require the purchase of a training program, and assembly work. Once again not all may be bad; but there do tend to be a very high percentage of scams within those programs. Learn to examine those types of programs even more critically. Find out how the ones that are known to be scams have operated and taken people in, and what patterns they have followed.

Chances are that you will not be the first person who has heard of the program you are interested in, so take advantage of that. Google it both by name, and then again by adding the word scam to the end of the name. All programs may have a small amount of negative feedback even if they are legit. This can happen because some people may not have applied themselves, did not understand the program, or are disgruntled that they have been tossed from the program for violating rules. It could also be a shady competitor trying to cloud the image of a good program. The presence of a negative posting does not always mean the program is not good, but there should never be a large number of negative postings on any legitimate program. Look for proof of validity and good ethics in the program of your interest before pursuing it.

When analyzing a work from home opportunity, it is important that you think about it not from the aspect of the worker, but from the aspect of the employer. Learn to ask yourself “If this were my program, where would most of my money likely be coming from?” If the answer is from selling training programs, members recruiting other members, products or supplies that have to be purchased by employees, or membership fees; it is probably not legitimate. If the program is promising very high payouts, and when looking at it from the prospective of the employer you cannot see where they are definitely making more than enough money to cover it; it is always a scam.

How is the program presented? If it involves a product or service; but more focus is paid to recruiting members or the amazing amount of earnings potential than it is to the product or service they offer, it is not a good sign. If they are an employment site such as a “Get paid for doing data entry” program, are there sections advertising that service to clients, or just the sales pitch about the incredible job opportunity? How are they getting clients if all they are advertising is employment?

Are they using the greed factor by presenting the larger than life American dream? Does the advertising feature pictures of Lear jets, imported sports cars, huge homes, and beautiful people sipping umbrella drinks by the beach? Unless it is a job selling luxury items; these images are to distract you from the nagging feeling you probably have suspecting that this is not a legit opportunity, by directly appealing to the greed and desire that all people have to live well. But that is all it is, is an image; not a reality.

Learn to see through the slick sales pitches. Keep the following in mind: If you really have managed to find the secret and elusive method that will make you thousands of dollars a day online while you are asleep; how many people would you tell about it? Most likely, you could count the number of people on one hand who knew all of the details and have fingers left over. You would not want tons of competition; because if everyone started doing it, then it would be copied to death and would not work anymore. The last thing that people or companies with hot business ideas do is sell eBooks with their business models in it to thousands of other people. I am not saying it can’t be done, just that those that do it don’t ever market it in that way. Google makes a ton of money with their internet program, but NOBODY knows exactly how it all works. Even the people that work for Google only know a small portion of the bigger picture.

Recognize that anyone can write a testimonial, and they are often written by the founders of the programs themselves. Testimonials should only ever be considered real if they contain verifiable contact information and/or you are 100% sure that they come from a reputable source. An endorsement of a product or service from a reputable company, with the name and/or email of a specific person is likely to be legit. A picture of some random person with the endorsement Joe Smith, Anywhere USA could be written by anyone. Unless you live in Anywhere, USA and Joe Smith is your neighbor; you really have no way of knowing if it is a real endorsement or not. Also, many reviews or testimonials are paid advertisements; so the people writing them have incentive to make it sound good so they will be paid. Many times, they have never even tried the product.

Get into the habit of checking into the Whois listing for an employer’s website. Companies that are legitimate will usually have that information publicly available. If it is privately listed, that may indicate this program feels that they have something to hide. Also, programs that are legit tend to have real websites, and not just flashy “splash pages” trying to sell you something. A forum attached to a site’s program adds some validity, because they are obviously not overly concerned that disgruntled users are going to trash them on their own site.

Often, companies will have a “front man” that is the head of the program. You should try to find out who the person running or advertising the program is, and Google them as well to find out what their reputation is. Running a good scam that works takes a lot of thought and effort. People do not stumble into it accidentally. Usually they will run scam after scam, and not just do it once as an isolated event. Once they have gotten “easy money” by scamming they will generally continue to do so until it catches up to them and they go to jail for it. It is not unusual to find that the front men of current programs have run questionable programs before. They may even be wanted in one country and have moved to another to start a new scam and escape prosecution.

Not all programs that have startup expenses are bad, but you need to learn to analyze what the purpose of the fee is for in order to make an informed choice. Ebooks and CD Roms containing information do not have a high production cost, so there is no reason to think $79.99 is a reasonable price for such products. Learn to ask yourself if the price for the product really seems reasonable for the value it offers. Many times this type of information can be obtained elsewhere for free. You should also ask yourself who benefits from this startup cost, and if it is really a reasonable expectation. Employers that have legitimate work to provide don’t need funds from mandatory training programs to earn revenues; they make money from the clients providing the work.

Training programs that are free but not paid for your time, or are offered as optional in order to increase your proficiency are not as likely to be scams as someone who is requiring you to pay them to learn to do their work. Training programs not directly attached to jobs with low one time or monthly fees are more likely to be legit than ones that charge large amounts up front. While the information may usually be learned on your own free, these are not necessarily always scams. Some people may find more benefit to having the information given to them in a way that they can easily and immediately access it, than they do in taking the time to hunt it down from the net on their own. Just be aware that anything you need to learn about how to make the most out of online earnings programs or work from home ops can be learned for free someplace.

I have never purchased any training packages from anyone. However I will admit that it has taken a lot of time spent on cruising the net for information, and long experience with using these programs to gain the knowledge I currently have about how they all work. Some people may prefer to skip that, and get the info for a fee. I do not really view this as being any different than buying something from a convenience store at a higher price. As long as you know you can find out almost anything for free, and you don’t mind paying for the convenience, then you may find some benefit to these programs. You will still want to check them out to make sure they do have valuable information, though. As this blog grows, I intend to try to include as much of that type of information here as possible as free tips and training in order to benefit our readers; so you may want to check here first before buying any training.

Companies that require equipment to be purchased may or may not be legit. If the equipment is reasonably priced and seems to make sense as a job requirement that is one thing. Having to pay large amounts for supply packets, demo kits, etc. upfront is another. Someone requiring you to buy a demo kit is asking for you to cover the costs of their advertising materials. Equipment that could be used to work at another business or employer is much more likely to be legit and is a safer bet than anything specific to that employer only. Opportunities such as a major insurance carrier requiring you to have a dedicated landline phone to take CSR calls, or a transcribing company that is requiring a foot pedal you can purchase anywhere are usually legit. These are items that you would reasonably expect to need to be able to perform the work, and they are not benefitting any by requiring you to have them since they are not demanding that you buy it through them.

Another good resource is using review or information websites about work at home opportunities to help you make decisions. You should be aware that not all of these are accurate or legitimate either. Almost all work from home info sites, including this one, will gain some benefit if you sign up from a program using an affiliate link. That is normal and acceptable; we are all here and doing these things to make money. What is not acceptable is when sites are heavily promoting programs that seem fishy, have hard sales pitches for signing up to programs instead of presenting information in a factual manner and offering a link, and do not focus on giving good information on avoiding scams. Some sites may recommend programs they believe to be legit, but have actually been taken in by a scam themselves and are unknowingly promoting it to other people. Even the best of opportunity reviewers can get fooled at times, because scammers can be very slick. There is also the possibility that a program that was formerly legitimate may go bad. It does happen, which is why I recommend you always check into a program for yourself in multiple places to make sure you are getting a full and current picture of its performance and habits.

You should also be aware that some schemes, like Ponzi and Pyramid scams ALWAYS start off appearing to be legit, and have tons of glowing reviews from early participants. If they did not, they would not gain enough momentum to draw enough people into the scam to benefit the scammer. However, they are both doomed by design to fail down the line, and will always do so. I cannot stress enough to learn to recognize them. Fortunately, this is easily done if you know how they work.

When it comes down to the end of things, all you can really do is use your best judgment based upon the information you have available to you. Remember that you are dealing with the internet; and it may not be a company with a known physical location, or a person you can talk to if you are unhappy with something. If you decide you want to participate in a program that has expenses and you are not sure that it is legit; the safest bet is just to make sure that you never invest anything in any opportunity that you cannot afford to lose.

Direct Quote Printers- new MLM Pyramid scam

2009-10-11T14:10:00.001-07:00

I recently had a very interesting discussion with the owner of a company called Direct Quote Printing, who was looking for a marketing manager. While I do have resumes posted online a couple of places and do accept some consulting work in the marketing field; I am very selective what types of companies I work with, and this is NOT it. There is no way I would be the head of marketing for a company whose sole purpose seems to be to run a scam. He stated that he is a reputable, professional magazine printer located in Sarasota, Florida. I myself am located right outside of Tampa. The scary thing is that he is trying to run this promotion as a nationwide MLM program, and is attempting to aggressively advertise for reps nationally using Craigslist. Unfortunately for him, I heard that a little birdie is now flagging all of his ads for sales reps….. how sad.

The program seems to follow the usual MLM pyramid scam. You are expected to pay $149 for supplies, which are business card samples. I was assured that this was fully refundable. (If you look at the opportunities section of the site; it is refundable for exactly 48 hours and only under certain unspecified conditions). You are then expected to go door to door trying to direct sell these business cards to businesses. The problems with this program are as follows:

1. There are no examples available of his work, outside of these samples you must purchase to view. For all anyone knows, the “custom designs” could be a staff of illegal immigrants hand writing the info in very poor English using crayons.
2. The products are way over priced compared to competitor’s products, and are unlikely to sell even if they are top notch.
3. Anyone who really needs a business card is already aware they need them, and is probably already ordering them elsewhere. Nobody is going to be suddenly floored by the revelation that they desperately need a business card from a door to door salesman.
4. This website looks like it was slapped together in 2 hours by my 7 year old son. For someone who has “Custom design” experience, they are sure not showcasing their capabilities. They have not even bothered to design a company logo for this site, which is a stock template from Website tonight and has no pictures or product examples.
5. This guy wants to hire as many sales people as possible, which will flood the market with a ton of people selling a product that few people (if any) will want to buy.
6. From the way it sounds, most of your commission is expected to come from recruiting new people, which makes this an illegal pyramid scam. He claims it is because you will receive a portion of their sales; but since I don’t see much potential for sales it is likely your sole purpose will be to sucker the $149 out of others for the supply kit of “Custom designed” business cards.

When I got finished laughing at this guy, I decided that I would be more than happy to market him. Unfortunately for him, I will be doing so by placing him on my Ework411 Scamwatch list as a suspected Pyramid scam. This is the cheesy Direct Quote Printing website. Would you hire these people for custom design work? LMAO

Interesting side note- I did a reverse lookup on this phone number, but it was not published. So I Googled it, and did come up with some results. Here is one where this same number is listed as a professional handyman and contractor service: $Sav-a-lot Handyman. Apparently that has not been going well for them because I also found a bunch of active auctions for tools being sold on various classified programs from the same number, which does lead me to think it is the same people and not a case of the number having been re-assigned. Also, the same name Elle appears on both ads for tools for sale, and ads for printing work in classifieds. Maybe if their money gets tight and they can't afford to pay you; you could ask to be paid with used sanders and paint sprayers, and start your own handyman service? I also found this article in the Herald Tribune which states (towards the bottom) that they are a fictitious business: Transactions, foreclosures, etc Charming list to be on, hmmm? I see no evidence anywhere that leads me to think this is a professional printing company in any way.

NOTE- While I strongly suspect the DQ Printers program is a classic example of a Pyramid scam due to the reasons above; I have no legal proof or evidence that it is a scam and am only stating my personal opinion on this matter. Do not base any decision to use or not use the program strictly on this review; conduct your own research and arrive at your own conclusions.

Working Solutions is a great work from home employer

2009-10-11T12:48:00.000-07:00

Working Solutions is a work from home customer service job where you can be paid to assist clients via the telephone, online chat or through email. There are no application fees or any costs paid to the employer. However, you may have certain expenses to perform this job. You will need to have a reasonably updated computer, high speed internet connection, 32 bit Windows XP or Vista, and a landline telephone with a plug in headset. You should also have a quiet working environment, and an organized workspace. Pay rates vary between $7-30 per hour depending on the project and you will be paid by direct deposit or check. They do not guarantee any certain amount of work, but they do really make an effort to not over hire and keep their reps busy. You can schedule your own work hours, but once you agree to work a schedule you should consider it a solid commitment.

Click here to apply to become a Working Solutions customer service representative.

NOTE ABOUT REAL COMPANY HOME-WORK EMPLOYERS: These real life companies that pay people to work from home are just like any other employer, and may not be hiring at all times. They can only hire enough workers to cover their flow of business. This is actually to your benefit. If the company hired you when they did not have the work to support you, nobody would make anything from them due to lack of enough work to go around. If you apply, please be patient as it can sometimes take a while before they contact you back. Pestering them will not get you hired faster, and may cause you to not be hired at all. My advice is to apply for all of them that are applicable and be patient, just like searching for a real job. Also, since these are real life jobs working at home; be prepared for the fact that some may require resumes, certain amounts of experience, proficiency tests, and special equipment.

Ver-A-Fast hires work from home CSR's

2009-10-11T12:37:00.000-07:00

Ver-A-Fast hires people to make service calls to the customers of their clients. You can either pursue work from home or contract work opportunities. You should have basic typing skills, a Pentium 3 or newer Windows computer, a printer, a CD Rom drive, and a high speed internet connection. Hours available are stated to be mostly evenings and weekends. You can either apply online or by telephone. While I have heard that this is reputable from a couple of sources, nobody I know well personally has ever worked for Ver-A-Fast. If you give them a try, please make sure to come back and tell us about your opinion of them.

Click here to check into working for Ver-A-Fast as a customer service representative.

NOTE ABOUT REAL COMPANY HOME-WORK EMPLOYERS: These real life companies that pay people to work from home are just like any other employer, and may not be hiring at all times. They can only hire enough workers to cover their flow of business. This is actually to your benefit. If the company hired you when they did not have the work to support you, nobody would make anything from them due to lack of enough work to go around. If you apply, please be patient as it can sometimes take a while before they contact you back. Pestering them will not get you hired faster, and may cause you to not be hired at all. My advice is to apply for all of them that are applicable and be patient, just like searching for a real job. Also, since these are real life jobs working at home; be prepared for the fact that some may require resumes, certain amounts of experience, proficiency tests, and special equipment.

Mechanical Turks earn money doing small tasks

2009-10-11T11:22:00.000-07:00

Mechanical Turk by Amazon has been around for quite a while, and is a very popular program. You can perform small tasks for payments which can either be transferred to your bank, or applied to your Amazon giftcard. You can also add tasks to M-Turk to be completed by others. One thing I prefer Microworkers for over M-Turk for is that monies earned get paid by Paypal, or can also be applied to tasks. M-Turk does not allow this. M-Turk does seem to be a lot more advanced as a program. They allow you to set qualifications that people must pass in order to be eligible to perform some tasks. An example of this would be if you want to review an adult website, you must be qualified as a verified adult. Some more advanced tasks may require you to pass a proficiency test before being eligible to perform those types of tasks. Tasks on M-Turk seem to have a much wider range of payment amount, and there are a lot more of them to be completed due to the age of the program. However, there are also a lot more people competing for those tasks. M-Turk is an established and well trusted program. It does not have an affiliate program for marketing.

Mechanical Turk is the place to be if you want tons of small and simple tasks to complete in order to earn money.

Microworkers; the new kid on the block for making money through microjobs

2009-10-11T11:18:00.000-07:00

Microworkers is a program where you can either post or get paid to perform simple tasks. Microworkers seems to be less rigid on the types of postings than Mechanical Turk does, with one exception: Microworkers will not handle any adult content, whereas Mechanical Turk will accept it as long as it is specially tagged. At Microworkers you can either post or perform such tasks as: signing up for a website, following someone on a social media, posting a comment on a blog or forum, writing a short article or blurb, review and backlink a website, social bookmarking, etc. The tasks all usually take just a few minutes to do, and payments accumulate in your account until you have reached $25.00 when you can be paid out. You can also optionally use your earnings to post your own tasks and promote your own web activities as well. You can earn $1.00 per referral, once that referral has earned the minimum payout amount. Work is available to international participants, but tasks can be assigned to specific countries if desired.

I have not been personally paid out by Microworkers yet, I tend to use my earnings to promote my blogs. The friend who referred me has been paid by them though. Both of us are pleased with their service, which is very simple to use. This is a fairly new program so it has a lot fewer jobs and users than Amazon’s Mechanical Turk does, but it is growing quickly and has great potential. Amazon, hold on to your Turkish hats; here come the Microworkers!

Join Microworkers here and start getting paid to perform small and simple tasks, or post tasks to promote your blog or website.

About Legit Money Makers vs Positive Listings

2009-10-10T22:34:00.000-07:00

Due to a question someone asked me, I would like to clarify the purpose of the "Legit Money Makers" category. Any program that is posted with this tag I have either been personally paid by, or someone whom I know personally well enough to trust has been paid by. Any program listed here on this blog that is not on the Scamwatch list is here because it is believed to be legit after researching it, but if they do not have this tag I cannot give a personal recommendation on them. The lack of the tag does NOT mean they are not legit, only that I cannot personally vouch for them. All other opportunities believed to be legit are tagged as Positive Listings. As always, we encourage our readers to comment on their experiences with any programs listed, and provide any additional info they think others may find helpful when choosing an opportunity.

Please excuse the lack of new postings

2009-10-10T21:07:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to drop you guys a line and let you know that this is not an abandoned blog. I have been away for a little while due to some health issues, but I am now up and back at it again. For those that don't know me personally; I will state that one of the reasons I began pursuing work at home opportunities is that I have Lupus, and will probably eventually have to stop working "normal" jobs. It is usually under pretty good control, and causes me few problems beyond feeling tired easily. I plan to be posting a lot of good new opportunities soon, so check back often. Thanks for understanding and bearing with me when posts get a little spotty.

Daybreak Traffic is a great Traffic Exchange to use to get more hits to your website

2009-09-12T10:21:00.001-07:00

Daybreak Traffic is a manual traffic exchange where you can earn a large number of credits and increase traffic to your website. Due to the progressive surfing system and the large number of bonuses and contests Daybreak offers, I have found that I can accumulate credits there at a much higher rate than most other traffic exchanges. I have had my rate up over a 1:3 ratio there on more than one occasion, which is almost unheard of. You also have an opportunity to win a lifetime Gold member upgrade, which will allow you to earn credits even faster. To win the free upgrade, just surf enough sites to be the top surfer for the month. There is a handy standings page so that you can keep track of your progress.

Daybreak is a great place to meet other webmasters and blog owners and network. I have learned about a lot of other great programs and tools from talking with the other members in the built in chat room. Everyone is very friendly and helpful, and the owner takes a very active interest in the site and the members.

You can also earn cash using the Daybreak traffic exchange through random surfing bonuses, or through ongoing monthly commissions of up to 45% if people in your downline upgrade to paying memberships. Payout limits vary from $10-30, depending on your membership level.

Commission Junction is a great affiliate program to make money with

2009-09-12T01:37:00.000-07:00

Chickens with high class lifestyles

2009-09-11T18:35:00.000-07:00

I know that this is not my normal topic line; but in a sense it fits, because you can legitimately save a good amount of money by doing it. Besides, having grown up spending a lot of time at my grandparents farm, it kind of struck a chord with me. From the time I was very little, it was my job to go collect the eggs from the henhouse whenever I would visit. I loved the fresh eggs, and playing with the chickens themselves and especially the baby chicks; but I despised doing this job. The farm had been in the family for ages; and they had an ancient, halfway rotted, ramshackle looking henhouse that terrified me. It smelled horrible and I was always afraid that it would collapse on me, and I would be trapped under the stench until I suffocated from the weight of the building. I would try to gather them as fast as I could and scurry back inside with them, so that we could have a delicious breakfast.

The thought of having a henhouse of my own as an adult has never appealed to me due to this until today. I have now found proof that in these modern times there are indeed product innovations for everything. These
Chicken Houses from Posh Chickens are actually really adorable. I especially love the green one. It is definitely not a scary eyesore in any way, the eggs look very easy to collect, and they are designed to look nice in a yard or garden and be easy to clean. This is the kind of henhouse I could see myself having. You can even get some chicks to live in your new henhouse at the same place.

Tempting; because fresh eggs are delicious, and you save a ton of money long term by not buying them at the store. Plus, chickens are very easy to care for, and when they get older they make a scrumptious Sunday dinner. Wonder if my condo association would object? You can even add a cute little run so that they don't wander around all over the place and bother people, my back yard is fenced, and it does say small pets are allowed.... Sigh. I should probably not count my chickens before they hatch. Maybe in a few years when I get the cute little house with the picket fence and a nice garden that I have been saving for.

6dgr is a Pyramid scam that may cost you bigtime

2009-09-07T17:32:00.000-07:00

Please excuse the length of this post, but the information I discovered while researching 6dgr raised serious concerns in my mind that go way beyond whether you will be scammed out of your affiliate payments, and may venture into territory where you could seriously wreck your credit and finances. If I can save this from happening to only one person from the detail of this post, it was well worth the extra time spent researching and typing on my end, and hopefully the reading end on their part. This is not your average “I didn’t get paid” scam issue.

I was recently asked by a friend to look over and review a program I had never heard of called 6dgr, or 6 degrees of separation. 6dgr claims to be a social networking site where you get paid to be social. I went to their site, and registered for what they claim is a free account. You do not become an active member immediately; you must add payment information in order to be eligible to earn anything using this service. Due to their policies and their terrible payment plan system, I would not consider this site to be “free to join” or a good opportunity in any way.

Free to join to the average person is being able to join and use a service without any mandatory cost to them at any point. It may be free to sign up and be "inactive" at 6dgr, but that does you zero good. If you want to make money using the 6dgr service, you will have mandatory fees from someplace due to the demands of their payment system. 6dgr does NOT accept any of the common free payment systems such as Paypal or Alertpay for anyone in the US. Unless you don't mind paying fees on financial products just to be able to promote this site to someone else that will also have to pay the same fees; you may want to rethink using 6dgr. The only three options for US residents to be paid by this company *at this time* are:

* Sign up for a loan with a minimum balance of $1000
* Apply for a prepaid debit card that has a cost of $9.99 a month
* Apply for a credit card 6dgr selects, and pay the fees and interest rates on it
* (Does this seem free to you?)

Unless you are already looking to get another credit card or loan and don’t mind them choosing which one you need to have, this is not a good deal. If you really need a credit card or loan you would do much better to shop around, and pick the one that has the rates and terms you need; and not what will pay the most commission to 6dgr. Chances are that these products have much higher interest rates and worse terms than what you could get through other means.

The prepaid debit card will not only charge you $9.99 a month to remain a member; but you will also be charged a onetime fee of $5 for being issued the card, and they will further take an additional 5% of every transaction you make with the card from your balance for each purchase. This is definitely the way to go if you do use 6dgr; because it is the only option which you are not tied to long term and does not impact your credit score. If it isn’t working out, you can cancel the card and cut your losses with no long term consequences. Of course, you will also have to be recruiting a ton of people to be able offset your fees for it to be worth what the card will cost you.

Chances are very high that you will end up paying out much more on fees and interests for these financial products than you could ever hope to earn back. Like most Pyramid schemes, there may be a few people who are legitimately making a little bit of money at this time using this system simply because it is new. But this is not sustainable income over time, and that money will soon dry up and come to an end. What will not come to an end are the fees and interest you will paying on your new credit cards and loans.

Why do I say that this is not sustainable? Let’s just speculate for a minute that you have referred me to 6dgr and I have signed up, and applied for a loan or card I probably did not want or need just so I could participate too. Great, you just earned a few bucks. But how many more loans and credit cards do you think I am going to want to get down the road? You have now made all that you are going to make from me, and to make any more you will have to find another mark for this scam. That may be much harder than you think.

Most people will flat out not be interested in something like this at all. How many people do you know right now in this economy that are in the market for new loans and credit cards? And if they are, why should they get one online from 6dgr, instead of someplace else? I have all the credit cards I need; and if I want a loan I will go to my local credit union that I can visit in person, where I have a line of credit and a personal history. I do not want a loan from some online company that I have never heard of. Selling financial products like this is tough, because many people are very picky regarding their credit, and what credit products they will use. Additionally, most of the people that are interested in offers like this just won’t qualify for credit offers because they will tend to be the less informed users of credit that probably have low scores due to poor choices.

As far as those that may be taken in as marks for this scam offer, the competition to recruit them will be intense. The longer this program continues; the more reps there will be that are seeking to recruit new people for it. Because the number of those people is limited and they probably don’t get new loans and credit cards every week; there will quickly come a point where there is nobody left to recruit, and nothing left to be done but pay your new fees and interest rates.

Another huge issue for me is that if you will scroll back up you will note I marked the words *at this time* when talking about the ways to be paid with asterisks. I would like to touch on that a little bit further, as it gives me biggest reason to be very wary of this program. While doing research on 6dgr, I found that the systems that different people had stated were available for payment did not agree with each other, or with what was posted on the website currently. After reading the 6gdr FAQ, I found my answer. They can and do change what payment systems they will allow you to be paid with.

Let me repeat that just to be sure it sank in. They regularly change what systems you can be paid with. Now, if the consequences of that were not immediately apparent to you, let me fill you in on how they may be using this to scam you for money big time. I join and get a loan simply because I want to be able to be paid by 6gdr as an affiliate. 3 or 4 months go by, and they change their payment plans; and I can now no longer get paid through that company. I must now apply for credit card A or financial service B to be paid. So I sign up for financial service B. The next time they change plans, I will have to apply for cards C or service D. I attempt to sign up for the new card C, but I now have so many financial products that my debt to income ratio stinks, and I am declined. Now not only can I no longer get paid by 6dgr; I am still paying fees on these financial products that have negatively impacted my credit score, and may trash it for up to 10 years if I cannot keep up with all of my numerous new payments.

An interesting note: When I sent 6dgr a message through the contact feature about these concerns, it went to an account profile that had no visible name, personal or company information, or profile photo on their “social network”. This was evidenced by looking at my mailbox on that system, and seeing who it went to. Visit the site and try it for yourself if you like, by signing up with some garbage info and then sending them a message through the "contact" at the footer of the site. Then check your sent items on your mailbox, and you will see that you have just sent mail to a totally blank profile that is supposed to be their admin. Feel free to tell them I sent you if it amuses you and you can’t think of another message to send. I registered as me and I told them I was reviewing them as a scam and why prior to closing my inactivated account, so it won’t come as a shock to them. This lack of info on their admin account prompted me to visit whois.net and look up the company registration info for 6dgr. As I suspected, that information is also unlisted. Whoever these people are, they don't want you to know anything about them. Companies generally don’t try to hide their identities if they are reputable.

6dgr also follows the common claims that all scams of this type make, by telling me that if I can just sign up 5 people who each sign up 5 more people, I will make $20,000! Not only is that probably not realistic, it is likely not a good deal even if it were true. If I worded it the way 6dgr does it sure sounds good, but let’s think long term here. If I came up to you on the street and told you that I would put $20,000 cash in your hand right now if you allowed me to put notation items on your credit bureau that would affect your credit score and interest rates for up to the next ten years; anyone in the know would run the other direction screaming. Let me get out my mortgage calculator, and I will gladly show you why so you don’t make this terrible mistake.

We are going to use siblings Dick and Jane Smith as our examples. Let’s say that both Dick and Jane have fairly good credit with about the same track record, and are buying the exact same home on different streets in one of those cookie cutter housing complexes because it is close to mom. The houses cost $425,000 each. Each of them received an inheritance of $150,000 from their grandma which they plan to use as a down payment, and are looking to finance $275,000 on a 30 year fixed mortgage based on 12 monthly payments. Jane has a slightly higher debt to income ratio, so she has a slightly lower score than Dick does; and she gets a 7% rate instead of his 6.75%. At the end of the loan, her repayment amount is $658,649.47 with a monthly payment of $1829.58. Dick’s repayment is $642,112.12 with a monthly payment of $1783.64.

This means that Jane will pay an extra $45.94 every month for the next 30 years, and will end up spending $16,537.35 more for the exact same house. This is what even a very minor drop in your credit score could do by causing an interest rate on a single loan to be one quarter of a percent higher. If you trash your credit by getting too many cards and loans you don’t need, you can forget about a 0.25% increase. You may be looking at paying up to an 18-21% interest rate for purchases, if you can get a loan at all. Your credit is nothing to play with, and anything you do can and will follow you for a very long time.

Still want to try to collect that $20,000 by getting it $2 or $3 at a time as a 6dgr affiliate? I didn’t think so. And if you do still want that $20,000 regardless of what it may do to your credit or interest rates, come see me. I’ll be more than happy to finance it for you myself and give you the entire $20,000 all at once, and you can skip using 6dgr.

NOTE- While I strongly suspect the 6dgr program is a classic example of a Pyramid scam and may also be hazardous to a user’s long term finances due to the reasons above; I have no legal proof or evidence that it is a scam and am only stating my personal opinion on this matter. Do not base any decision to use or not use the 6gdr system strictly on this review; conduct your own research into 6gdr and arrive at your own conclusions.

Make money using Gomez Peer

2009-09-03T17:46:00.001-07:00

Gomez Peer is a program that will pay you to leave your computer turned on. It uses a tiny fraction of your computer resources to test website data for clients. To start making money and getting paid by Gomez Peer you just install the client, and then leave it running on your computer. It can take a little while after joining to get approved, but you will still accumulate potential earnings. Most people do get approved, but occasionally some will be told there is no demand for someone with their location and connection speed.

You can make money in a couple of different ways. You will get paid up to $0.10 per day just for being logged in, even if your computer recieves no work tasks. When you get a task, you are paid $0.0005 for every minute they are using your computer. Between these two factors, you can earn up to $45 per month. You may make less, and they do not guarantee any specific volume of work tasks. You can also earn $1.00 for every new user that you refer to the program. Not bad earnings for doing absolutely nothing, if you let your computer run a lot anyway.

Online Time Payments (per day) $0.10
Processing Time Payments (per min.) $0.0005
Referral Bonus (per Active Referral) $1.00
Min. Monthly Payment $5.00
Max. Earnings per month $45.00

Get paid to post content to Bukisa

2009-09-01T21:45:00.001-07:00

Bukisa is a paid to write article database. It is pretty open as to what you can publish there. You do not have to participate in rating other articles, and anything you post there does not have to compete with other content. There is not really as much of a social aspect to this program. You do not get paid for adsense ad or other affiliate revenues at Bukisa, you get paid strictly by your traffic and referrals. Traffic is based upon unique pageviews per every 24 hours from qualified sources. Bukisa will weed out the views that come from bots and traffic exchanges. Bukisa makes a great place to post things that you have not written specifically to target ads, but may be of interest to readers. You have the potential to make quite a bit of money on Bukisa if you can get a lot of referrals and generate a lot of traffic to your content.

How to SEO your work from home opportunity website

2009-08-29T23:30:00.000-07:00

Everyone talks constantly about SEO these days, to the point where you would think that everything hinges upon being search engine optimized to the max. But while all components of SEO are important, underdoing it is generally preferable to overdoing it. Less than scrupulous web designers and bloggers have caused search engines to frown upon sites that have been overly optimized, or have been optimized in a less than honest way. Here are a few practices you will want to make sure to avoid:

Keyword stuffing is the practice of overloading either the meta tags or a page of content with keywords. It is true that a search engine may consider words like "car" and "cars" to be different, and it may be a good idea to use variations at times. However, using "car", "red car", "blue car" etc in order to repeat tons of words will cause you to get very poor rankings. Limit your keyword usage to only using the top keywords that you think are most relevant to your topic, and are most likely to be entered into a search box. Hidden text/Html codes designed to puff up your keyword content are extremely dishonest, and should never be used.

Overtagging is basically keyword stuffing using blog tags. Keep your tags per post limited in number, and relevant to your topic. You should name your tags using relevant keywords when possible; but your blog tags should be used to help direct your blog traffic, not as an Seo tool.

Get the most out of your titles and headings by using a relevant keyword as close to the beginning of your title or heading as possible. Headings can be helpful in breaking up long posts with a lot of information, but they should not be overused. You will get better results with quality vs quantity.

Spam-like behavior of any kind can cause serious problems. Using popular keywords that are not relevant to your topic to try to game traffic is considered keyword spamming. Link spamming is a bad idea too. You should only post links when and where appropriate. Backlinks are best when from a site with a good reputation and relevant content.

Overdoing your Seo or using it in a dishonest way will hurt your page rankings, and can even cause you to be penalized with a page ranking of zero. Search engines may stop crawling and listing your sites, leaving you dead in the water. It can be difficult to recover your reputation after some actions. An ounce of prevention will definately prevent a pound of cure. Keeping your Seo relevant and at a moderate level will produce the best results.

Using SEO Meta Tags for Blogger

2009-08-29T21:10:00.000-07:00

As much as I love using Blogger, it is not the most search engine friendly system going. You can vastly improve the results you get through the search engines by manually adding in meta tags into your Blogger template. Meta tags are bits of data that provide information to the search engines about the types of content on your blog. In order to create meta tags, you should first make sure you understand how to create good keywords for the overall theme of your blog.

Once you know how you would like to tag your main page, go to Layout-> Edit Html and then click the box that says "expand widgets". Select all, and copy this into notepad. Use the find feature to locate the following entry in the code:

Once you find it, put the following information directly underneath it.

When changing anything in your Blogger template you should always leave the quote marks intact, and only change whatever is inside of them. Be sure to change the "Your email address" to your contact email if you wish to provide that information. If not, you may simply remove that line. Paste your keywords list over "Keyword List", using a maximum of 200 characters and separating each word or phrase with a comma. Add a description of your blog in 150 characters or less where it says "Blog Description".

Change "Your name" to the name that you are using as your publishing byline. For example I am using Ework411, and not my actual name.
After you have made all of your changes; select all and copy, and then replace the text in your Blogger Edit Html field. Do not worry about making a mistake, Blogger will not save the changes if you accidentally mess up the code. If that happens, you can just cancel and start over again. Once you sucessfully save, you have added meta tags to the home page of your blog.

We have added the meta tags to the main page only, because it is never a good idea to generically tag all of your pages the same. For example: You write a cooking blog, but yesterday you included a post about the cute puppies your dog just had. If every page in your blog were tagged as "cooking", the search engines would view your post about puppies as irrelevant and improperly tagged, which can hurt you. For this reason, we have so far only tagged the main page of the blog.

If you want to meta tag your individual posts, it is possible to do so. This is really only worthwhile if you write about a wide variety of topics, and the keywords for the posts dont match the meta tags for the overall site. I would also only recommend doing this if you are fairly comfortable editing your template Html, because over time this will make your template code enormous. The following text will go into the heading section, and needs to be edited to reflect the proper page url and associated information:

Creating meta tags for posts is time consuming, because they have to be added individually for each post you want to tag. It will also greatly add to the size of your template. As always, we recommend that you use the following system to help keep your template Html organized any time you make changes:

/* Insert note about changes made */
Place code here for changes
/* end note */

This is very handy because the template will not read anything in between the symbols, so you can make all the notes you need to. It helps you to define sections of code, and what they are being used for. This is important if you make a lot of changes to your template code. It will help you easily find and change any sections of code quickly in the future.

Generate traffic and increase pagerank using blog directories

2009-08-23T03:00:00.000-07:00

If you are a blogger, you should definitely take advantage of blog directory sites in order to bring traffic and new readers to your blog. Blog directories allow potential readers that are interested in the type of content that your blog contains to find your blog easily by assigning it to a group of searchable categories. Most of the blog directories listed alphabetically below offer a free listing option.

I would advise that you register for every free blog directory possible. It may seem like overkill to register for a ton of the same types of directories, and the registration process is boring and time consuming; but in the long run it will be time very well spent. Not only do blog directories allow people who are physically looking through the listings on that directory to find you, they will even help people not using that directory to find you more easily as well. Even if a blog directory does not appear to be a big, popular directory it is still worth registering for.

The reasoning behind this registration frenzy is Google pagerank. Every blog directory that you register for will link back to your site, and this will directly increase your pagerank because the links will all be relevant. If you are not familiar with how Google pagerank works, the Dick and Jane version is that your site will be ranked by how important other people on the web think it is. That is gauged in large part by the number of people who create links back to your site from theirs, which Google views as one site "recommending" another, with every site that you can get to link back to you equalling another "vote". The voting site's pagerank and popularity will determine how strong of a vote they can cast, not all votes are created equal. For example, it would be much better to have only one single backlink from a mega-site like Ebay or Amazon than it would to have dozens of backlinks from sites like Joe-Bob's hobbies with no pagerank or traffic.

Blog directories tend to be great backlinks because they are often browsed, well backlinked themselves, and usually tend to get fairly decent traffic. This means that most of these directories should have fairly good pageranks, and will therefore provide moderately powerful votes. By getting these sites to link back to you and increase your pagerank, that directory will still help people find you even if they are not browsing it. This is because the higher your pagerank is, the higher your site will rank in search; which means that more people will see and click on your inbound links directly from Google Search or other search engines.

By registering for every free blog directory available you will gain a respectable starting pagerank, even if your blog is really new. Many people will skip registering for all of these directories, and then spend a lot of time and/or money later trying to create backlinks that are not nearly as relevant or powerful; or will waste a lot of money on advertising trying to get traffic without achieving these same results that they could have recieved for free.

Most of the sites below offer free registration for blogs, and I would stick to that. There are so many free blog directories available that it is really not necessary to join any that require payment. After you become more familiar with the directories; you can always go back later and select one or two favorites from the bigger ones and upgrade to a more prominent listing if you decide that you want to boost traffic further. A few of the directories listed below are fee based, we have included them to give you the option of reviewing them and deciding if you feel the service is worth the fee. That being said, below is a huge list of mostly free blog directories that would be happy to link back to your site.

We recommend that you print this list out and just cross each directory off as you register for it. This will help for two reasons. The biggest it that you probably will not want to sit through a long and boring registration marathon, and having a list lets you keep track of your progress. The second is that after you get registered for all of the directories, you will most likely not be able to remember all of the ones you have signed up for because there are so many. Having a list makes a great reference for later. In case you later find a directory that you think you may not have joined and are not really sure, you can just check your list.

If your blog has a live RSS feed, you may also want to check into our RSS feed directories listing HERE. Do you know of a good blog directory that we have missed? Please use our recommend a listing feature and let us know. We will be happy to have it added to this list.

5 Star Blogs
A1 Weblinks
Add Your Blog
Best Blogs
Bigger Blogger
Blawg Republic
Blloggs
Blog Announce
Blog Burst
Blog Catalog
Blog Collector
Blog Directory
Blog Explosion
Blog Folders
Blog Intro
Blog Listing
Blog Rankings
Blog Scholar
Blog Search Engine
Blog Toplist
Blog Universe
Blogadr
Blogarama
Blogaz
Blogbib
Blog Directory - Directory, reviews and more. Your one-stop blog spot!
Blogfinds.com - Finding the Best Blogs
Blogflux
Bloggapedia
Blogged
Bloggerhq
Bloggeries
Bloggernity
Bloggernow
Bloggers Choice Awards
Blogging Fusion
Bloghints
Bloghop
Bloghub
Blogio
Bloglines
Blogmob
Blogobbler
Blogotion
Blogpoint
Blogroll
Blogs by Women
Blogs Canada
Blogs Rating
Blogs.com
Blogs-collection
Blog-search
Blogtree
Blogz
Blurtit
Boing Boing
Browse Blogs
Chefs Blogs
DFW Blogs
Directorybest
Dmoz
Do Follow Blogs
Eaton Web
Eponym
Ezilon
Findingblog
Fuel my Blog
Fybersearch
Geeky Speaky
Genwi
Globe of Blogs
Go Big Network
Google Blog Search
Gozoof
Grokodile
Her Blog Directory
iBlog business
Jewish Blogging
Bloglinks
Lefty Blogs
LS Blogs
MozDex
MyBlogs
My Blog 2
My Blog Directory
My Blogging Area
Nitle Blog Census
Poddop
Quick Blog Directory
Rate It All
Regator
Scienceport
Search4blogs
Spicypage
Spillbean
Sports Blogs
Submitblognow
Super Blog Directory
Technorati
The Blog Resource
The Lefty Directory
The Seo King
The Vital
Top Blog Area
Top Blogging
Total Blog Directory
Weblog Directory
Weblogs.com
Webloogle
Yahoo Blog Directory

Ework411 work from home opportunity Scamwatch list

2009-08-22T20:51:00.000-07:00

Please be advised that we are not guaranteeing that any program listing here is definately a scam, or that the absence of a listing here means that any program is legit. This is simply a list of programs that we believe in our personal opinion to be scams.

General Info
Learn how to recognize work from home scams

Affiliate Programs
6dgr is a Pyramid scam that may cost you bigtime

MLM Program Scams
Direct Quote Printers MLM scam

Recommend an Ework411 Listing

2009-08-22T20:50:00.000-07:00

Fill out my Wufoo form!

Make money writing for Hubpages

2009-08-19T22:54:00.004-07:00

Hubpages is an article database program where you can write individual webpages that are called "hubs" about your topic. Hubpages is very free form in style. Unlike some of the other article database programs; there is no specific format you must use, or topic system that your writing must fit into. You can make money by writing on Hubpages through revenues generated by people who click on the advertising that is in your hubs. Hubpages supports Adsense, Ebay affiliate, Amazon affiliate, and Kontera ads within your hubs. When these ads are placed, it is on a revenue sharing system that works by placing your ads 60% of the time, and Hubpages ads 40%. Hubpages does not pay for traffic rates.

Some may argue that this method is one that you could use on your own webpage or blog and keep all of the ad proceeds, but Hubpages does still have a great value to publishing writers and site owners. One benefit is that Hubpages is very social, and has an actively involved set of writers. I have met some great people there, and that has helped with my overall reputation and exposure within the online community. That means that writing for Hubpages is generating traffic to my main blogs, as the friends or interested readers I have found there visit to see what other words of wisdom or folly I may have published. In addition; being a new blog writing under a new pen name, I am more likely to get immediate traffic to my writing through the networking available on Hubpages than I am by posting anything here at this time.

I also tend to get bored writing about the same topic all of the time, but this blog is pretty specific in purpose and planned content. When I feel like publishing something that is not a good fit for my blog here, Hubpages allows me to do so without having to worry that it seems out of place. I do not have to set up any other blogs or pages, excessively promote it for traffic, or anything else. I can write about anything I want to when the mood strikes very quickly and easily; and still obtain the benefits of having it on a high traffic, well marketed site with a good reputation. By providing this benefit, Hubpages allows me to generate ad revenues on articles written about topics that I would not normally publish were I only writing in my blog.

Make money at the Helium article database

2009-08-19T22:54:00.003-07:00

Helium is a paid to write, article directory type of site. Helium has a set of specific channels and titles that you can write to. You may request a new channel or title, but since you only get paid for competitive titles it is probably best to stick to requesting topics others will also be interested in writing about. If Helium adds a new title and you are the first to write an article about it, you even recieve a bonus! Once you submit your article, it is placed into rating status. Other Helium users will then read your article, and compare it against another article on the same topic. Once they have read both articles, they will rate which one was more valuable on a scale system.

Getting paid by Helium is based upon your participation and performance. This may really appeal to good writers who find it difficult to generate enough traffic on their own to make money based strictly upon pageviews. You will get scores for both the quality of your writing, and for rating other people's articles. The more you participate, the more you can earn at Helium.

Helium does allow you to post the articles you send them to other locations. Once you achieve a certain rating, you can qualify for up front payments on articles, as well as making money from ad revenue sharing. Helium will also take offers for you from publishers if they are interested in licensing your content for a fee. Helium also frequently offers writing contests for cash awards. You can request payments from Helium through Paypal at any time after you have earned $25, and it will be sent no later than by the tenth of the next month.

Helium has an email invitation system as opposed to an affiliate link. You will recieve a commission of 5% of the earnings from any member that you invite. If you would like to join Helium as an Ework411 invite please send us an email, and we will invite you as soon as possible. We always add our downline invites to our incoming RSS feed, and will read every new article they post to help increase pageviews. If you would like to get started at Helium right away, visit the link below to register.

Register for Helium and start getting paid to write.

eHow writers earn money for creating how to guides

2009-08-19T22:54:00.001-07:00

eHow allows you to make money by writing how-to articles, or creating how-to videos and posting them on the eHow website. This is a great program for people that like to teach others to do new things. eHow articles must be in an educational format that provides clear step by step instructions. eHow does allow you to post non-exclusive articles, as long as it is your original content.You will be paid through Paypal for the articles that you post, based upon how useful they are to eHow readers. The minimum payout amount is just $10.00, and payments are automatically sent monthly. eHow does require that you provide them with your tax information, and will send you a 1099 if you make more than $10 per year. You must be at least 18, and either a citizen or legal resident of the US to get paid.

eHow functions somewhat similar to a social network, in that it allows you to add friends. This is a nice feature, because it will allow you to increase your pageviews due to your friends checking out your postings. Another neat feature of this site is that there are requested articles, which you can earn additional credits for if you can provide the desired information. eHow does not have an affiliate program.

Join eHow and start getting paid to write how to guides.

Save money on a graphics program, use Gimp

2009-08-19T22:24:00.001-07:00

Gimp allows you to enhance or retouch photos, change image file formats, and create illustrated graphics. If you do not already have a fully functional graphics program and you do a lot of stuff on the web, I would highly recommend clicking the banner above and downloading Gimp. Gimp is a totally free program, but they would appreciate a donation if you find their product useful. The Gimp program has all of the main functions found in Photoshop or other similar paid programs that are very pricey. Gimp may not have as many fancy high end features, but this program will get the job done perfectly well for the average user. The program is well documented, and offers a Faq, books, tutorials and mailing lists for support and information. Gimp operates on Gnu/Linux, Windows XP & Vista, Mac OSX, Sun OpenSolaris, and FreeBSD platforms.

Download Gimp for free.

Essay Rater is a great tool to improve your academic or professional writing

2009-08-19T14:35:00.001-07:00

Essay Rater is a program that you can use to increase the quality of your writing. Just copy and paste your text into the Essay Rater screen and click Start Review, and it will grade it for you. Imagine having your own personal English Professor on call 24 hours a day to review your writing. The program appears to be very thorough and we have heard great things about it, but we have not personally used it. Scoring your text is free, but getting the specific details requires a membership. A one month membership is $19.99, or you can get three months for $39.95.

Essay Rater is an academically focused tool, so the results it produces may be too formal to be suitable for blogging or casual writing. It would make an ideal tool for anyone who has a need for creating grammatically correct professional documents or essays.

Get paid for writing reviews at Reviewstream

2009-08-19T11:47:00.000-07:00

Reviewstream is a program where you can get paid to review almost anything. There are no set topics or categories that you must write about. Payment rates are currently $2.00 per review. Reviews that do not qualify for the regular payment get paid at the bulk rate of $0.40. How do you get paid the higher rate? Make sure your review is well written. It does not have to be a literary masterpiece, but it does need to give the reader information they can't just go look up on a product home page. It should include your opinion of the product, and details about your experience with using it. It should be a minimum of around 400 words plus to get top payment, and be written in understandable English. It can sometimes take a while to get your review approved because they read them all first, but be patient and they will get to it. Once you have cashed out a few times, you may be deemed eligible for your reviews to autopost if you have a consistantly good quality.

I have only ever published one review at bulk rate, and I did that voluntarily because I wanted it posted immediately. If you do not want to publish at bulk rate, just make sure you do not click the "bulk rate" box. If they decline you for a standard payment, you can always resubmit at the bulk rate later if you choose to. I have only had one review declined as "Not of interest", and it was for a popular free software program that I later realized had already been reviewed numerous times.

You can cash out at any time once you have earned $50, and payments are recieved pretty quickly via Paypal after requesting them; usually within 48 hours. You can also earn money from any reviews posted by your referrals. It is a pretty small percentage but it ads up, especially since those who use Reviewstream tend to post fairly often. There is no limit to the number of reviews you can post. Also, if you get someone that votes that your review is useful, you get $0.10. I have earned a whopping 20 cents that way. That is probably my own fault because I don't promote my content there at all, and it is written under a pen name specifically used for Reviewstream; and not a name I am known by anywhere else. Sometimes it is nice to be able to just say what you really think about certain things anonymously :)

Anything posted to Reviewstream must be totally unique, you cannot reuse that material elsewhere. You get credit for your writing up front, as opposed to having to generate traffic and accumulate earnings. This can be either good, or bad; depending on the type of content it is. Articles that have a long term readership interest written to article directories will earn slower, but will continue to earn over time. For this reason, I tend to put things on reviewstream that I do not see fitting in with my postings on directories or on blogs. Examples of this are the experience I had with a local company whose price and features sales pitch kept changing, or the waitress at the mom & pop restaurant who was outstanding, or the fact that I am am irate because even though I bought a lifetime warranty a certain company no longer wants to replace my product because this is the third one that has not worked properly. Were I to start posting these things on a directory like Hubpages my readers would probably stop reading, because these things most likely don't interest them. These are the things that Reviewstream is made for; things that make an impact in your day in the here and now, that others who are specifically looking for reviews may find of interest when deciding to use that product or service. If it is likely to be useful information to a lot of people over a wide geographical area or has potential for good ad revenues you may want to consider using one of the article directories or a blog instead, because over time you will probably earn more than $2.00 from your content.

Click here to Join Reviewstream and start earning money writing reviews.

Top online personal payment programs

2009-08-19T02:11:00.001-07:00

Note on payment processors- We have not included the transaction fee information on these programs; because it often varies according to the type of account you have, where you are located, what your payment/sales volumes are, and may be subject to change. We would also recommend that you check into the TOS of any program that you use, and research them yourself for validity before deciding to use them.

Paypal is probably the most commonly used payment processing gateway on the internet today. Paypal allows you to process payments for buying or selling online goods or services. Paypal has a pretty wide variety of merchant services, and is integrated with Ebay and other popular programs. Anyone who is interested in making money online should definately sign up for a Paypal account, because it is the most widely used online payment system.

Many people report good results with using Moneybookers, which is available for use in countries that Paypal is not. Similar type of program to Paypal, allows sending and receiving payments.

Liberty Reserve is another payment processor similar to Paypal.

Perfect Money is a payment processor that also has some added features, such as a currency exchange and the ability to hold funds as actual gold.

About Ework411

2009-08-15T01:04:00.000-07:00

Our focus at Ework411 is on providing information about legitimate ways to work at home on the internet that allow you to make real money with very little or no cash investment, and on ways of increasing traffic to any existing internet presence. We will also be highlighting some great tools and resources that may help you with your efforts. You will never find any get rich quick scam sites or useless collections of highly priced ebooks and videos promoted on our blog, and we will never try to sell you anything. We will always try to focus on the many great free programs and tools as much as we can. We may even post various programs that help you save money as well.

It would be impossible to personally test every program, tool, or system that we have listed here. Information about any program or tool that we post here on Ework411 is believed to be accurate, and we encourage our readers to leave additional input in the comments. We have posted all of our Ework411 listings either based upon our own personal experiences with them, or because they meet our listing criteria.

Criteria for a positive listing:

1. Any work at home or money making opportunity must either be free, or have reasonable costs only. We do not consider ebooks or large registration fees paid to the opportunity provider to be a reasonable cost. We will make a rare exception to this rule only if any costs are very minimal, and the program has a history of being well known as extremely reputable.

2. It must be feasible that any money making opportunity is stable, self sustaining, and capable of generating enough revenues to actually pay the participants for their time and effort.

3. Any tools or programs that we have included here that are not free have been added because they are highly reputable and perform well, and may be extremely useful to some home workers or people using the internet professionally in our opinion. These programs must be reasonably priced according to the value they provide.

4. All programs, tools or products will recieve negative feedback at some time or another, we recognize that to be a fact of life. We do require that programs recommended here not have what we would consider to be excessive complaints that indicate that it may be a scam or ripoff.

Criteria for a posting to our Ework411 Scamwatch list:

1. Any program having an unusually high number of complaints on the internet, or that has been reported to be a scam by one or more sources we consider reputable.

2. Any program previously listed here that has recieved an excessive number of negative comments from unique users will be moved to the Ework411 Scamwatch list.

3. Any program that we have been unable to obtain payment from after meeting all requirements.

4. Programs that do not appear to be self sustaining, are suspected to be a Ponzi/Pyramid or other type of scheme, or are not following good business practices.

Recommend a program or tool:

If you would like to recommend that we list a site, tool, or program here on Ework411, visit our Recommend a Listing page. Any listing must either qualify as a positive listing or as an Ework411 Scamwatch according to our criteria. We will not allow any postings that pertain to or promote any adult or illegal content, products, or substances. Yes, I am aware that you can make money working online as a webcam operator, but this is not that type of site. Please do not send us information about these types of programs.

Disclaimer

We make every effort to insure that the information we provide here is accurate as of the date it was posted. We do not guarantee that our positive listings, Legit Money Maker or Ework411 Scamwatch listings are accurate; these listings are our personal opinion based upon available information. We highly recommend that you take the time to check into any opportunity yourself completely prior to committing to it. We cannot guarantee any specific result or benefit from using anything listed on Ework411. Any of these programs may experience changes in their terms, behaviors, or performance at any time without our knowledge. We have no personal interest in or involvement with any of the programs or services listed in this blog; and we cannot be held liable for the actions or policies of these outside companies or your experiences with them.