A little extra money UK

Top Cash Back launches in the USA - The best cashback site jumps across the pond

2011-12-13T16:05:00.000-08:00

As you may all know I am a firm believer of cash back sites and have previously written about two from the UK - Mutual Points and Top Cash Back. Top cash back has since become my favourite cashback site based on the fact it promises to return 100% of cashback earnings plus sometimes bonuses on top, with no fees. This is in stark contrast to many other cashback sites which charge a fee, either monthly/yearly or as a percentage of cashback.

Up until recently topcashback has only been open for people shopping on UK sites. However, they have recently opened a site called topcashback.com which caters to US audiences. If it is anything like the Uk version of the site (which it appears to be) I would strongly recommend signing up to it.

For those who have no idea how cashback sites work it is simple. Online retailers pay 'commission' to other website owners who refer individuals to their store (think of it as an advertising payment). What cashback sites do is return a portion of this money to the consumer. Top cash back is unusual in that it returns 100% of this cashback to the consumers and doesn't charge any fees. In the UK they actually offer more than 100% cashback (meaning that they pass on more commission to the consumer than they get from the retailer). Many people will wonder how this is possible - Top Cash Back say they are able to earn enough money from advertisements on site to cover their costs. They also make money from bonus payments from retailers when certain targets are met, as well as probably making interest on unclaimed money.

There are several other advantages to Top Cash Back. It is the largest cashback site in the UK and has been running for many years and so there is a degree of confidence that it is unlikely to go bust with all the money. There are also generous refer a friend bonuses available - at the time of writing on the USA site this is currently $5 but on the UK topcashback it is £10 ($15). There are also often no purchase cashback offers which are always welcome.

Overall I would recommend topcashback in the UK and now it has launched in the USA I would also recommend this site. As can be seen from my earnings update to the right I have made a lot of money using topcashback in the UK (approximately $1000); so if you are in the US why not sign up for topcashback and if you already have why not post a review/share your opinion in the comments section below!

How much money can be made using Youtube?

2011-09-24T14:00:00.000-07:00

You may have heard of the stories on massive incomes being made from Youtube. Some of these stories include people who have made large amounts out of money from multiple views having built up a large following, but others are due to one off videos making it big. I noticed that Kidgas had written a piece a while back on making money from Youtube, so I wanted to see if I could do similar and possibly get some residual earnings, but up until recently I had no decent videos.

However, I recently got the chance to see a Sea King helicopter at very close range whilst out walking near the coast and so I uploaded the videos to Youtube to see if I could make any money.

See the videos here:

Despite the name of the videos, I feel I should point out that I believe the 'rescue' taking place was purely an exercise.

Well as can be seen from the videos, they have been up for over 2 months now and they have had very low traffic. In fact, combined the traffic is only about 60 views and considering that many of these views came right at the beginning it would indicate I will be waiting a very long time to make my first million from Youtube. There could be several reasons for this. Firstly, each Sea King video on Youtube seems to have only a small number of views (aside from a couple of videos of these helicopters crashing!). Secondly, I have done little by the way of backlinking etc to drive traffic to these videos over the alternative Sea King videos. Thirdly, I appreciate that these videos are of a rather poor quality. Therefore my experiment so far to see whether it is possible to make any money from Youtube has so far indicated that without traffic it isn't possible to get any earnings (rather like the web in general). However, I am not completely deterred and so I have uploaded a couple more videos, one of the Bristol Balloon Fiesta nightglow and one of a panoramic video of Falmouth, Cornwall.

Monthly Update - April 2011

2011-06-18T09:23:00.000-07:00

As this post is a bit late I shall keep it brief!

Aside from a few posts on this blog, I did very little online work during April and as a result the majority of my earnings are residual, so I suppose I am in no position to complain whatever the result! You may remember that for the last few months I have seen decreases in my earnings linked to the Google Panda update - I wonder if this will continue?

Webanswers: £14.79 (11% increase from March 2011)
Infobarrel: £0.48 (67% decrease)
She Told Me: £0.07 (600% increase)
Xomba: £0.07 (99% decrease)
Hubpages: £50.56 (29% decrease)
Total: £65.97 (28% decrease)

This was the first full month for which the Panda update had been in effect and so I expected to see some decrease in earnings. Whilst I am disappointed about the earnings decrease it is not as bad as it could have been and so I am not too disappointed. Whilst there was once again a large decrease in my Hubpages earnings, it is encouraging to see the Webanswers earnings having a slight rebound. Hopefully the decreases in earnings for Hubpages and total will stop now that Panda has fully taken effect and my Webanswers earnings will continue their rebound.

First Hubpages ad program payment

2011-04-27T14:56:00.000-07:00

I have recently received an email from PayPal to inform me of a payment by Hubpages and when checking my account sure enough my earnings for March 2011 have now gone into my account. These are my first earnings under the Hubpages ad program scheme, which in theory should be better than purely Adsense, but with the Google Panda update it is hard to tell whether it really is.

This is good news and a timely boost as I was starting to become demotivated (did I just invent a new word?) by the decrease in traffic to various articles etc I have written, in particular Hubpages but also other sites like Infobarrel and She Told Me. My various blogger blogs are continuing to see good traffic though, so I will continue to expand on these - I am considering putting advertising on those which don't already etc. I also mean to follow Kidgas in making money from videos on Youtube as soon as I have got a decent one as I feel this would be an interesting new source of revenue.

Further good news is I have already reached the payout amount for April 2011 and so hopefully, unless there is another update to Google, I should be able to make payout on Hubpages ad program every month which is good news.

Annoyingly though, March 2011 was the first month in a very long time in which my Google Adsense account didn't reach payout (this is partly as a result of the Google Panda update but also likely due to the Hubpages ad program ads instead. Once again it looks like I won't earn enough solely in April to reach payout, with monthly earnings likely to be around 70%-80% of the payout requirement. In addition, Amazon earnings have dropped massively.

I have recently, as in the last couple of days, also noticed something of a resurgence in Hubpages traffic. As it is so recent I am yet to discover whether this will be sustained, but there do appear to be some improvement in my search engine rankings and so I hope it will be sustained. If the traffic does start to increase it will be good news as Hubpages is a massive percentage of my earnings, but I won't make the mistake I previously made of becoming too over-reliant on it regardless of regular Hubpages ad program payments! Now I must really get on and produce some more articles so until next time...

What Google giveth panda can taketh away...

2011-04-14T15:53:00.000-07:00

You may have seen in my March 2011 earnings update I mentioned the effect that the Google algorithm update, known as the 'panda update' had on traffic to my online income streams in particular my Hubpages traffic. At the time I mentioned that it appeared that this was only affecting the US at this time, but that Hubpages traffic to the US had decreased by 50%.

This decrease in traffic from US users to my hubs actually accelerated slightly at the beginning of April, resulting in traffic from the UK exceeding traffic from the US, with Canada and India only being slightly behind. Well a few days ago the panda update was rolled out internationally. Whilst this is only a short space of time, I am already seeing decreases in traffic from most countries in the world of between 20% and 60%. The one exception to this is in America where I have actually seen a slight increase. This has obviously had a knock on effect on my earnings, both from Google Adsense and the Hubpages ad program. However, at this stage I am unable to quantify it.

Since Hubpages is an external site there is not much that I can do as an individual to improve the Google rank of my pages, other than backlinking. I believe Hubpages have recognised that there is a major problem and to a degree the company has been backlisted by Google and other sites, such as Infobarrel, have fared better because of their stricter controls on content (a reason I mention in March 2011 that I would concentrate on Infobarrel and Excerptz for posting articles at least in the medium term). Therefore Google are starting to crack down on overly promotional hubs and those which have excessive Amazon/eBay affiliate links. Whilst this is admirable, the checking process is not as thorough as those on other sites where all articles are approved before going live, at least to newbies and therefore I can see Hubpages struggling to bounce back as quickly as the alternatives have.

In addition to posting on Infobarrel and Excertz more, I will attempt to post more on Blogger blogs, eventually leading to starting my own hosted site. I mention Blogger blogs because this blog and another one which I haven't posted on in a long time, on Renewable Energy in the UK, both seem to have done well out of the Panda update and this will fit in with the research done here on how different websites are affected by the Google UK update. I may also post more on Webanswers although the degree I do depends on how traffic there is affected by the Panda update.

A side effect I have also noticed is that accompanying the fall in Google traffic there has been a corresponding fall in the amount of traffic which comes from Google. Previously 85% of my traffic to Hubpages was from Google, now it is nearer 70%. It might be time to figure out SEO techniques for Bing!

Redgage and She Told Me comparison - which site is best for making money on the internet?

2011-04-08T00:41:00.000-07:00

As regular readers of this blog will know, it is primarily about making money on the internet. To make the money on the internet I use a wide variety of sites. Primarily my income has come from Hubpages and Webanswers, but I am trying to diversify my income. Two sites I have been using to diversify my income for a while are shetoldme.com (She Told Me) and Redgage.com (Redgage) and every month I provide monthly earnings updates which include earnings from these sites. These sites also have another benefit - it is possible to backlink to my other sites using both Redgage and She Told Me, meaning improved search engine rankings (good SEO) and direct traffic.

I initially started using these two websites for the purpose of providing do-follow (dofollow) backlinks, since these are best for SEO purposes, with the added advantage of earnings potential. They both work in slightly different ways and so I feel it is worth explaining this for new readers before going into detail on which one I think is best, so if you are already familiar with both sites I recommend you skip the next couple of paragraphs.

Redgage is webpage where an individual signs up. Once they have signed up is possible to upload a blog, photo, video, document or link. Whichever option is chosen, there is the possibility that Redgage will earn money from adverts shown alongside the content. Redgage then recycle a proportion of this money to an individual. In addition, they may give bonuses when they consider a piece of work to be particularly good. Earnings from Redgage are earned within the site, and are paid through a Visa debit card once the amount in the account reaches around $25.

She Told Me is primarily about creating links to other sites and other content, primarily for SEO purposes. Links have to be accompanied by a minimum volume of text. Money is earned on She Told Me through Google Adsense revenue sharing and so there is a need to have a Google Adsense account before it is possible to make money from She Told Me. On each She Told Me page there are a number of Google Adsense blocks, on all links submitted the submitter gets 100% revenue sharing on one particular block of ads. She Told Me keeps the earnings from the other two blocks, unless an individual signs up through an affiliate link, in which case the referrer gets one of these blocks (meaning the content writer has one block, the person who introduced to them gets one block and Shetoldme.com gets the final block). She Told Me also makes money from private adverts and Chitika adverts.

As can be seen, if initially starting out, Redgage may be the best site for making money as there is less need to sign up for external companies such as Google Adsense. However, assuming you already have a Google Adsense account and are looking to use Redgage or She Told Me to increase income from additional sites which site is better?

I have signed up for both sites well over a year ago and have approximately the same number of links on each site. Therefore I feel I can provide a reasonable overview of the quality of the sites. Put simply, I have earned slightly more directly on She Told Me than I have on Redgage (about 30%). Obviously this is in the form of Google Adsense revenue though and since I already earn money using Google Adsense elsewhere it is also much more likely I will get my She Told Me money before Redgage money (at the present rate it will take me about 2 years to reach each payout using Redgage).

There is another source of income which can be directly measured and that is the traffic from each of these sources to my other sites. My Redgage.com links have provided about three times more traffic to my Hubpages articles as have my Shetoldme.com links. Also assuming a typical earnings rate for each Hubpages impression, this will result in Redgage earning me more money.

Another source of traffic is much harder to quantify. I mentioned that I used each of these sites for backlinking and SEO purposes. It is very hard to measure how well each of these sites affects the search engine rankings of the linked to page and so I won't even attempt to. The only thing I will say, is that for short, important keywords Redgage seems to rank higher than She Told Me for a given phrase (I assume this amongst other things is an indication of relative pageranks). However, since links on She Told Me are accompanied by much more text, it is worth remembering that She Told Me generally ranks for longer tail keywords and a lot more.

So which one would I recommend using for making money on the internet, in particular in gaining backlinks. Direct earnings are very similar between the two, but Redgage links are much quicker to create and so it is possible to create many more Redgage links in a given time. However, there are definitely advantages to using She Told Me - earnings are paid using Google Adsense and so if you are already at/near monthly payouts with this system you will see the rewards much quicker than likely with Redgage where you will need to build up to $25. All in all, I would recommend Redgage should be the first site to use (mainly due to it being much quicker to create links), with She Told Me being a good second.

If you want to get ongoing monthly updates on how much I earn from each of these sites (as well as a large number of other online money making sites) keep heading back here, or why not subscribe using the links on the right.

Have you used Redgage, She Told Me, or both? If so what sort of experiences have you had? Which one do you think leads to the highest earnings. Use the comment box below.

Hubpages versus Infobarrel - Comparison number 2

2011-04-04T12:45:00.000-07:00

Those people who have been following my blog for a long time may recall that about a year ago I decided to carry out an experiment to compare Infobarrel and Hubpages to see which one would get the best results financially. I wrote articles for Hubpages on a number of subjects and then wrote articles on the same subjects and submitted them to Infobarrel. At the time it was clear that the articles in Hubpages had much higher Google rankings for all keywords (although Infobarrel seemed to rank higher in Yahoo!) and so my conclusion was that it was better to concentrate my efforts on Hubpages. I have every so often revisited this, but at all times Hubpages has come out on top, although Infobarrel seemed to be closing the gap.

I recently decided that with the recent Google algorithm changes it would be wise to review these conclusions to see whether they still held, particularly since Alexa seemed to show a decrease in Hubpages traffic, but if anything an increase in Infobarrel traffic.

Once again to assist with the comparison I used the Firefox add-in Rank Checker, which can be used to see how highly a particular website ranks in search engines for a particular keyword. The results were quite surprising and showed that a complete reversal has happened over the last year - now Infobarrel seems to rank much higher in Google and Hubpages ranks higher in Yahoo! I am not sure why the Yahoo! ranks have changed around but I have at least a theory as to why the Google results have changed. Since writers on Infobarrel are pre-approved, this results in much higher quality content and the site having articles of a higher quality whereas on Hubpages substandard content is removed as and when it is discovered by Hubpages saff which probably results in a lot of dodgy pages slipping through the net. As I say, this is only a theory, but it appears to tie in with the theory Kidgas came up with for why eHow may prosper.

Whilst I am impressed with the potential of the Hubpages ad program, it can only be successful if there is the traffic and at the moment I am thinking there is the potential to get more traffic on Infobarrel and so I shall start to concentrate a little bit more on Infobarrel and a little less on Hubpages and I suppose it is always good practice to have a diversified income stream.

If you are on Infobarrel and Hubpages have you noticed any changes in the earnings between the two? Is it similar to my findings? As always do let me and other readers of this blog know by commenting below.

Monthly Update - March 2011

2011-04-02T01:31:00.000-07:00

In March 2011 I have been relatively busy, however I have still managed to create a few articles. I wrote several articles on this webpage (a Tickles review and a Hubpages ad program review review) as well a Webanswers review on Hubpages. I also carried out a bit of backlinking. One site where I did considerable backlinking is on the new website Excerptz. It runs in a similar way to Infobarrel - articles can be written and these are checked before being posted to the site, which should hopefully result in less spam and substandard content resulting in higher Google rankings etc. Money is made through Adsense revenue share and the percentage is 80% for the writer. At present the site is just starting but it is growing. It was set up by the Hubber Ryankett and I would recommend that you go and check it out.

Now on to the bit I am sure you want to hear, my monthly online earnings for March 2011. Remember most of these earnings are once again residual.

Webanswers: £13.37 (46% decrease from February 2011)
Infobarrel: £1.44 (12.5% increase)
She Told Me: £0.01 (the same)
Xomba: £6.02 (147% increase)
Hubpages: £71.29 (5% decrease)
Total: £92.13 (11% decrease)

As can be seen, I once again had a decrease in total earnings, primarily driven by a large drop in Webanswers earnings and a slightly less extreme drop in Hubpages earnings. I was expecting a drop from Webanswers and Hubpages, since traffic to these is down both individually and site wide (according to Alexa) linked to the Google algorithm changes.

As Hubpages is my major revenue source I thought I would review this, especially in light of the Google algorithm changes and the launch of the Hubpages ad program. I was actually worried that the decrease in earnings would be much greater than this and so I am in a way quite happy with a 5% decrease in earnings. At the moment (as far as I am aware) the Google changes have happened only on Google.com from the US and obviously US traffic is the major earner for Hubpages. Despite March having more days than February, overall I saw a 11% decrease in views to Hubpages. This was entirely driven by views from the US decreasing by approximately 50%. At the same time, views from all the other major countries actually increased by between 5% and 20%. This saw the share of traffic from the US dropping from over 35% to less than 15%. As I have already suggested American traffic is some of the highest earning traffic, so considering I had a 50% drop in this traffic, resulting in a total drop in traffic of 11% and yet only saw a 5% decrease in earnings I am very happy. I believe that the main reason for earnings holding up is the Hubpages ad program, which I believe at the moment is north America only. In fact, despite American traffic dropping to account for less than 15%, the Hubpages ad program accounted for a similar percentage of earnings as Google Adsense, which is obviously still shown in America as well as the rest of the world.

As can be seen, I have had a drop in total earnings this month. However, thanks to the Hubpages ad program it is a lot less worse than I was expecting and in fact I consider that the worst of the drop is over and in fact over the last week or so I am starting to see a recovery in traffic with a corresponding increase in earnings. Hopefully this will continue over the next month and so I hope to see my earnings for April 2011 to at least equal the earnings in March 2011.

Tickles.co.uk review - Is it a scam?

2011-03-15T14:46:00.000-07:00

In the UK there is now a website called tickles.co.uk. It is like many other sites such as Groupon, in that it is a group buying/coupon site. However, unlike Groupon and other companies it is based in the UK, in the East of England. At the time of writing it is only in Norwich, Ipswich and Cambridge and since I don't live in any of these areas I am unable to give a first hand review - however I will collate information from elsewhere to explain the concept of the site and welcome you to add your own personal thoughts below.

First a bit of history - Tickles.co.uk was set up in 2010 in the city of Norwich and has since expanded to Ipswich and Cambridge, with plans to launch in London. In January 2011 half of the company was sold to a regional newspaper publisher and so it is expected that there will be a degree of advertising for tickles on local newspaper websites, particularly those in the east of England.

Tickles is like many other similar websites - it is a group buying service. Basically Tickles establishes links with companies in the cities/towns in which they operate. The company agrees to give discounted services to Tickles (which Tickles pass on to the customers) as long as enough people purchase the service. These discounts are often well over 50% and potentially up to 90% and on a range of items as diverse as spa treatments to discounted smoothies to driving lessons. The company works by offering each deal for a specific length of time - normally this is a day but it can be a weekend or even a week.

Tickles is currently advertising that it will be launching in London, where there are already many different such websites including Groupon, Keynoir, Living Social and KGB Deals. Once this happens I should be able to give a first hand review. Until then though all I can say is I think the company is reputable. It has been going for almost a year and is part owned by a large regional newspaper company. Furthermore, many people think that such website must be scams, but Groupon etc have proven that this isn't the case.

Have you used Tickles.co.uk? How would you rate it? Would you consider it to be a scam? I welcome your comments as I am sure other visitors to this site will.

Hubpages Ad Program - My initial thoughts and earnings

2011-03-09T15:05:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned in my February 2011 earnings update, Hubpages have recently launched their own personal ad program. For a long time Hubpages have been showing their own banner adverts on their share of page impressions, now they have given the option to Hubbers to take part in this scheme on their 60% of impressions. Hubpages will deal with the advertising networks and will just pass on the revenue to individuals through PayPal (presumably after taking their cut). The scheme was recently trialled with a very small number of individuals (I believe it was 7 who get very high traffic to their hubs) who on average saw a 60% uplift in earnings. Now a further 500 people have been invited and it is planned to invite the remainder of hubbers by mid 2011 (so if you haven't heard anything yet don't despair!). I was fortunate enough to be one of the lucky people to be included in this initial 500 so here is my views on the scheme.

If you are yet to sign up to Hubpages why not do so now? I continue to earn in excess of £100 (over $150) most months from Hubpages from about 40 articles I wrote a year ago, so it is true passive income.

I am unable to comment on the Hubpages ad program and it's effect on the page layout, since I think I am yet to see any such ads either on my own page or anyone else's when browsing Hubpages. I am not sure why this is, unless it is the Hubpages ad program only currently distributes ads to those viewing Hubpages from specific regions, such as USA or North America.

Whilst the Hubpages as program isn't in response to the 'Google farmer update' it definitely will help with keeping up the earnings if the traffic does continue to remain at the levels which are lower than previously. So far I have been a member of the scheme for almost a week and whilst not long enough to provide a definitive answer for the exact effect on earnings, it should provide enough of an indication of earnings rates.

Initial indications for myself are that it has resulted in about a 20% increase in earnings per thousand impressions (CPM). I have come to this figure by adding the CPM for the Hubpages ad program to my Hubpages Adsense CPM, which has dropped (as one would expect since there are now less Adsense ads per hub and more competition). In total I would estimate I have since a drop in Adsense revenue of about 10%-20% since starting the Hubpages ad program.

I would attach a couple of caveats to my figure of 20%. Firstly, there is only a very small amount of data I am basing this on (my own personal rather limited Hubpages traffic over just 5 days). Secondly, it is hard to tell exactly what this uplift should be is since it has happened at a similar time to the Google Farmer Update which as far as I can tell has affected traffic from Google.com more than from the rest of the world (and obviously USA traffic on average has a higher CPM). Therefore, I reckon that this estimate of 20% increase in earnings may actually be an underestimate and the Hubpages ad program is returning better returns than the numbers themselves would indicate.

Have you used the Hubpages ad program yet? Have you seen any increase in earnings? As always feel free to comment using the box below!

Monthly Update - February 2011

2011-03-05T04:39:00.000-08:00

During February, as per many recent months, I did little in the way of online work and building a residual income. Furthermore, like many other people, I have been hit by the changes to the Google algorithm. Whilst it only affected the very end of February, I have already noticed a 10%-20% fall in traffic to my Hubpages, which pretty much chimes with the Alexa chart for traffic to Hubpages. I would expect that I will see a similar decrease in earnings and whilst this may seem like a high amount I have only dropped (in traffic at least) to where I was in the latter half of 2010, and considering I hadn't spent much time on hubs in the time between it wasn't too bad.

Well now on to earnings:

Webanswers: £24.71 (30% decrease from January 2011)
Infobarrel: £1.28 (1729% increase)
She Told Me: £0.01 (97% decrease)
Xomba: £2.44 (1062% increase)
Hubpages: £75.44 (18% decrease)
Total: £103.88 (19% decrease)

As can be seen I had a decrease in earnings. Initially this would seem like a bad result. However, as I have already mentioned, I did little online work and so this is pretty much true residual income. Furthermore, February has approximately 10% fewer days than January and so I would expect to see a corresponding drop in income. Furthermore, there have been the Google algorithm changes which probably knocked a bit more off of my earnings. There are reason to be positive though.

Firstly, whilst Google traffic to Hubpages and Webanswers may have fallen particularly due to the changes outlined above, I have noticed massive increases in traffic to Hubpages at least from Bing.

Secondly, and possibly more considerable to my short term earnings is the fact that Hubpages have opened their own ad system. At present there is a limit of 5 Google Adsense ads per page, but for some larger hubs there could easily be more adverts and so Hubpages will display adverts from other sources and will pay hubbers through PayPal for these adverts. A number of hubbers carried out a trial and they saw an average increase in earnings of 60%. It has recently been rolled out to a further 500, of which I was lucky enough to be one, and so I am hoping to see the benefits of this soon. If I see a 60% uplift in earnings this will more than make up for the earnings lost from the Google changes (and more!). I have signed up, but believe I am yet to have these adverts shown as my details haven't been process, but when they are you can see them on my hubs such as Great Dance Party Songs, Top 10 Most Expensive Cities in the World, Motorola Xoom Screen Protectors and How Do I Find my WEP key?. Furthermore, I will provide an update on how I find the Hubpages ad program, either in the next update or if the news is considerable in it's own blog post before then.

Monthly Update - January 2010

2011-03-04T11:56:00.000-08:00

So, a bit late, but you know what they say - better late than never! You may recollect that in the final month of 2010 I moved across to GBP earnings, and so my earnings are once again in GBP. You may remember that I had a good month in December 2010 and although I was close to earning £200 and wanted to hit this in January, realistically I knew this was highly unlikely. So here are my earnings:

Webanswers: £35.42 (11.5% decrease over December 2010)
Infobarrel: £0.07 (93% decrease)
She Told Me: £0.31 (61% decrease)
Xomba: £0.21 (not in Dec 2010)
Hubpages: £92.20 (31% decrease)
Total: £128.21

As can be seen my earnings definitely took a hit in January 2011 compared with December 2010. However, it is worth noting this was after Christmas when many advertises cut down on budgets and a couple of my high performing Christmas articles dropped out. It is still disappointing, but this is what you get if you don't work at it for months!

Monthly Update - December 2010

2011-02-17T11:11:00.000-08:00

Following on from my November 2010 earnings, once again I haven't done any work to expand my online income, other than writing this aforementioned blog entry and responding to comments on my Hubpages/Infobarrel/blog articles and so my income is once again practically passive. It will be interesting to see whether my earnings will continue to improve. There is a change this month though, regular readers of my blog will know I normally put increase from previous months. However, I have switched over to getting my Adsense earnings in GBP and since Adsense is my main revenue stream I will switch to making these reports in GBP, with conversions from other currencies to GB where necessary, using Wolfram Alpha.

Hubpages: £133.29
Infobarrel: £1.07
Shetoldme: £0.79
Webanswers: £40.05

I am happy with this, especially considering once again I did no work, and will be keen to see whether these increase continue into January 2010.

Monthly Update - November 2010

2010-12-01T14:54:00.000-08:00

As you may have remembered, my last update was less than a month ago and was for the months of August, September and October 2010. Once again I haven't done any work to expand my online income, other than writing this aforementioned blog entry and responding to comments on my Hubpages/Infobarrel/blog articles and so my income is once again practically passive. It will be interesting to see whether my earnings will continue to improve.

Hubpages: $182.74 (6% increase over October 2010)
Infobarrel: $0.17 (94% decrease)
Shetoldme: $0.21 (80% decrease)
Xomba: $0.34 (57% decrease)
Webanswers: $76.65 (10% increase)

As can be seen, in November, whilst more individual streams fell than increased, overall my online income grew due to great growth from Webanswers and Hubpages which are my two highest earning sources. Considering I haven't spent any time trying to increase my online income since August, for my month on month online income to still be increasing is very good news for me. Hopefully I will be able to carry this forward, although I imagine that my increase is partly due to the season and so come the new year my income will drop because of this - but we shall see......

Monthly Updates - August, September and October 2010

2010-11-22T14:20:00.000-08:00

You may have noticed that I haven't updated this blog in a long time (3 months in fact!). This is because I haven't had any time to dedicate to online money making activities. In fact, I did absolutely no work on these activities since August (at the time of writing it is almost the end of November) and so I feel this will give a good overview of the possibilities for true a true passive income. I deliberated whether to bunch my earnings reports for August, September and October together, but have decided that whilst I will have just one blog post, it will have the earnings reports for the three months separate. The only exception to this will be Redgage, where I have been unable to break down my earnings by month.

So firstly, my earnings for August:

Hubpages: $97.16 (21% decrease over July 2010)
Infobarrel: $0.36 (100% increase)
Shetoldme: $0.01 (98% decrease)
Xomba: $1.17 (No earnings last month)
Webanswers: $72.84 (No earnings last month)

As can be seen there was a decrease in Hubpages earnings during this month, but this was more than made up for with Webanswers earnings. In my July 2010 earnings update I aimed to get earnings of over $150, which thanks to Webanswers I managed.

Now on to my earnings for September:

Hubpages: $154.34 (59% increase over August 2010)
Infobarrel: $1.17 (225% increase)
Shetoldme: $0.32 (3100% increase)
Xomba: $0.06 (95% decrease)
Webanswers: $74.64 (2% increase)

As can be seen, in September my earnings increased yet again. My Webanswers earnings stayed broadly similar to the previous month, which shows that this wasn't a one off (but is it a two off?). Also I was pleased to see my Hubpages earnings rebound to where they were a few months previously. Remember, that I did no work during September and so this is purely residual income.

Now my October 2010 online earnings:

Hubpages: $172.80 (12% increase over September 2010)
Infobarrel: $3.01 (157% increase)
Shetoldme: $1.06 (231.25% increase)
Xomba: $0.79 (1217% increase)
Webanswers: $69.5 (7% decrease)
Yousaytoo: $0.99 (No earnings last month)

As can be seen my earnings continued to rise in September 2010. Whilst my webanswers earnings fell, this was more than made up through earnings increases from Hubpages and other sources. Again it is worth noting that I did absolutely no work cultivating my online income in most of August and all of September and October and so this is purely passive income - which still increased! For this reason I am very happy and hopefully I can continue these earnings in November and December 2010 to make 2010 a massive year and beat my 2009 earnings.

Monthly update - July 2010

2010-08-01T08:49:00.000-07:00

Time for my latest update on what I have earned in July 2010. I can't believe it is that soon already, but it is.

This month was another month in which I created very little new material, and also I did very little in the way of backlinking and so my earnings this month can once again be pretty much classed as residual. I did a very small amount of backlinking but that was it. So here are my earnings and as usual only those sites which earned me something are included.

Hubpages: $122.61 (8% decrease over June 2010)
Infobarrel: $0.18 (69% decrease)
Redgage: $0.11 (57% increase)
Shetoldme: $0.53 (No earnings last month)

As can be seen from the above, I had a decrease in earnings, with some sources of income such as Webanswers and Xomba having exactly no earnings during July. This was disappointing, but hopefully the numbers will increase over the coming months. I am hoping that due to the small amount of traffic that I get this is just a statistical swing. I also have a long standing aim now that my earnings are increasing to have a month where every day my Adsense earnings exceed $1 - this month was the closest I have come yet with the only day when I earned less than $1 from Adsense was 31st July where I only earned $0.97!

You may remember my targets from my June 2010 earnings update - well as you can see I didn't reach $150 combined and neither did I reach $5 from Xomba - in fact I was as far aware as I could possibly be. This is disappointing, but considering I did no work in July 2010 to still manage to keep my decrease in earnings to under 10% is uplifting and I feel this shows the true potential of residual income. I hope to be able to do more work during August and so I hope to reach earnings of $150 and also keep daily Adsense earnings above $1 every day! I am also getting very close to having lifetime Hubpages earnings of $1000 and so I hope to hit this amount during August 2010.

Were your July 2010 earnings more successful than mine? Have any tips on how I am going wrong? As always use the comment box below!

Groupon UK - save serious amounts of dosh

2010-07-27T15:15:00.000-07:00

This post is about a website which helps you save money, not earn money and so it is a bit different from many articles I have on the site but I hope it still proves to be useful (however there is the potential to earn money as a Groupon affiliate - see more information below).

Groupon, also known as Group On is a company which specialises in bulk buying to bring cheaper deals for consumers. This is a brief overview of how the website works, a quick review and information on whether Groupon is actually a big scam. These deals can be anything from spa treatment sessions through to meals through to bowling; but they have one thing in common - they offer massive percentages off (over 90% in many cases) but what is unique is each deal lasts a maximum of a day.

For example, recently Groupon have offered tickets to the cinema for £1 instead of £12, £20 instead of £90 for an hour long massage and manicure and £12.50 instead of £66 for access to the Streetcar fleet (as an aside it is possible to get 10% cashback on all Groupon purchases by using TopCashBack, further increasing earnings!).

How do they manage to get such good deals. The company line is they manage to get discounts through bulk buying - which must be true up to a point but I think there are other reasons as well. Many companies probably see it as a good way of getting advertising and new clients - think of it as them offering a discount now in the hope of getting repeat business at the normal price. Also I think that the Groupon business must also make money from no shows due the unusual way in which the scheme works.

There are a large number of websites which promise discount vouchers. However, Groupon is slightly different. Instead of giving you a voucher to print off it asks you to pay the price upfront and then book an appointment or whatever later. Often there can be limits on when vouchers can be used etc so I would imagine that many people forget and so don't take advantage of what they have purchased.

When signing up, you are asked for details on where you live - this is for administration purposes and to make sure you are shown the correct deals as most deals are location specific. As such there are many Groupon sites available, including large cities like London, Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow but also smaller places like Falkirk, Oldham and Telford and one can only imagine that the scope of these will increase.

Having said all of this, I believe Groupon is a great idea. It has been around in the USA for a while and has recently launched in the UK to great acclaim. Already many people are using the site and I can only imagine this will increase further as people discover the excellent deals on offer. I can only provide my own personal experiences in my own review and I have found Groupon to be excellent.

There is also the potential to earn credit for use on purchasing items by using referral links to encourage other people to sign up for Groupon. At the time of writing, for every person who signs up to Groupon, the referrer gets £6 into their account and for this reason all of the links above on this website are affiliates (meaning i earn £6 for every sign up). However if you don't want to use this affiliate link click here to go straight to the Groupon website.

If you are interested in Groupon sign up here.

Have you used Groupon? What were your experiences of it? Use the section below to give a review - and don't be afraid to call it a scam if you think that is what it is (although I certainly don't think it is!).

Increasing the Alexa ranking

2010-07-22T15:03:00.000-07:00

This is an idea for a topic for an article I have had in my mind for quite a while (over a month in fact) and have just got around to writing it! The initial idea came from a blog post by Kidgas, in which he explained about his aim to get into the top 500,000 websites as listed by the company Alexa.

For those of you who are unaware of Alexa, they are a company which measure the usage of webpages to see what people are looking at and provide metrics for each webpage. Unlike other such services, such as Google Analytics, with Alexa it is possible to get an overview of any webpage worldwide, without the need to be an admin, albeit it in much less detail. As such it is very popular tool to be used when people compare webpages - for example it is possible to find out that visits to Facebook.com exceed visits to Yahoo.com and that Facebook.com is the second most popular webpage worldwide. One key thing is the Alexa ranking - put simply the lower the ranking the more traffic a website receives with Google being at position 1.

Many people with websites, Kidgas included, use this the Alexa ranking as a useful target to see how their webpage compares with other webpages. This can be a good thing, and in fact it is something I have done myself.

The reason I question the use of Alexa ranking when trying to measure achievements in making money online is it gives very little information and so it is important it is used wisely as a target setting tool. Some people check daily and becomes a sort of obsession - this can result in time being wasted. Many people become disheartened when they fail to rise quickly - it can take time to rise in the Alexa rankings!

Perhaps the biggest problem with Alexa rankings though for small sites is the statistical problems. Since it only samples a percentage of web traffic and then extrapolates there are many chances for errors to occur. For websites with large traffic sampling errors are mitigated by the massive number of samples taken, however with smaller webpages such as mine sampling errors can be major. Over the last month Alexa shows the traffic to A Little Extra Money UK as being up 300%, yet using the true figures from Google Analytics the growth has only been about 50%. As such there is a discrepancy of 250% which is a massive amount (a swing of 250% the other way would have shown my traffic falling by 200% month on month!).

Along with inaccuracies, another problem with Alexa is it doesn't give information which is as broken down as that created by Google Analytics, for example. With Google Analytics it is possible to see daily/weekly/monthly/yearly traffic sources, bounce rates etc and it is even possible to find out where abouts on the website earnings occur.

These are some of the reasons why I think it can be foolish to closely examine Alexa rankings and getting too hung up on them. Still, if used, as I do and Kidgas does, to set longer term aims Alexa rankings can be a useful motivational tool for an online income seeker!

Do any of you use Alexa rankings to assist you in making money online? How? As always if you have comments use the box below!

Top Cash Back Review - The best cashback site?

2010-07-05T15:35:00.000-07:00

Top Cash Back (aka TopCashBack or Top Cashback) is an online paid cashback site which I have used very successfully and so this is my own personal review of UK Top Cash Back. The amount I have earned from Top Cash Back is shown to the right, along with my earnings from some other online money making/saving schemes which you may want to try out.

Feel free to add you own comments on Top Cash Back at the bottom of this review in the comments section and hopefully it will be similar to my opinions, including if you have experience of the US version of this site.

Top Cash Back is a cashback site many others, such as Mutual Points which I have reviewed previously. I will eventually compare the pros and cons of each, but before then I shall give an overview of what cashback sites are and how they work.

Cashback sites, as the name suggest, are websites which allow you to earn cashback on purchases made online. Imagine there are two online companies: Company A which sells shoes online and Company B which is a fashion trends website. Company B may choose to place links to the website of Company A and in return Company A will pay Company B a percentage of the income earned from selling shoes to customers who came from the fashion trends website. Cashback sites take advantage of the commission which is paid by many online retailers, such as Tesco, Play.com, Phones4U, eBay etc and hand on a portion of it to the customer. Cashback sites can come in many shapes and sizes, but at their most basic they are just a site full of links to retailers. Now a description of Top Cash Back has been provided, let's get on with the review along with pros and cons of Top Cash Back.

Top Cash Back is a very easy website to use. Make sure you complete the registration process for Top Cash Back when first starting out on Top Cash Back. Once registered, find the merchant which you want to purchase from either by browsing by category or by using the handy search box. On the page of the merchant there will be various information. One is the cash back amount. On Top Cash Back this can either be a fixed amount regardless of amount spent, or a percentage of the total cost of the product. Top Cash Back also add some information which explains how much certainty there is of getting the cash back and the time frame for this, along with reviews from others who have used this merchant through Top Cash Back. Many Cash Back offers require a purchase to be made, but some just require an action to be done for example visiting a certain website and signing up for a newsletter.

On Top Cash Back the payment is made by PayPal, cheque or BACS after a certain period of time has elapsed. This delay in payment is to ensure that you don't return the goods prior to payment etc which could potentially leave the retailer out of pocket.

Most of these actions mentioned above can be carried out on many cash back websites, so what sets Top Cash Back apart from the competition. Put simply, the rates on offer. Most cash back websites make their money by taking a fee out of the commission offered by the retailer - Top Cash Back does not. As a result the cash back is always at least 100%. I say at least because it is possible to get a multiplier effect on Top Cash Back, up to 110%, depending on the cash back received in the previous month. Top Cash Back makes money from advertisements, not cash back, and so this ensures that the company offers the best rates. What's more, if you do somehow manage to find better rates on another cash back website Top Cash Back promise to match these - which is more good news!

To make this review slightly easier to read here are some bullet points of the pros and cons.

Pros:

Highest cash back available
Range of options for being paid
Top ups can increase cash back to 110%
Easy to set up and manage
Over 2000 retailers and counting

Cons:

Can take a while to get paid
Some companies do not take part in such schemes eg at the time of writing Amazon
Can be confusing to work out the best deal especially when there are different cashback amount across a range of merchants

In summary I find Top Cash Back to be a very good website and definitely worth using if you live in the UK. If you do live in the UK, please use the comment box below to give your own review of Top Cash Back as well as providing feedback on this Top Cash Back review.

Update: Since writing this review Top Cash Back has launched in the US using the address topcashback.com. Obviously, being in the UK I am unable to use this American version of the site. However, it looks identical to the UK site and so I should imagine it works in the same way. I would welcome feedback if you are in America and have used this USA version of the site (http://www.topcashback.com/ref/Bristolboy) or if you are going to join this site from in the US based on this review.

Monthly Update - June 2010

2010-07-01T10:38:00.000-07:00

Is it really already that time of the month again? It only seems like a week ago that I did my last monthly update. Time really does fly when you are watching every game of the World Cup, even when your team plays absolutely awfully! No point in making excuses about dodgy linesmen etc - all of the performances were rubbish. Anyway enough of the footie - I am sure most of you only care about the figures (if you want to know about the World Cup find yourself a different blog!).

During the last month I have done very little in the way of trying to increase my online income beyond a quick little bit of backlinking using the sites mentioned in previous months (Redgage, Xomba, SheToldMe etc) but even this was in very small amounts. I did however receive money in my bank account from TopCashBack - over £230 which is in excess of US$350 which is not too bad considering I was going to take out that exact mobile phone contract anyway!

You may remember that my target set in my May 2010 Monthly Update was to try and keep my earnings above $100, and if possible push on to $150 (although this was dependent on time and the World Cup took up the majority of my time during June 2010). So here are my earnings for June 2010, again with an indication of whether it was an increase or decrease.

Hubpages: $133.75 (6% increase over June 2010)
Infobarrel: $0.58 (16% decrease)
Xomba: $2.55 (50% increase)
Webanswers: $0.33 (65% increase)
Redgage: $0.07 (63% decrease)

This month I actually managed to increase my total earnings slightly, with an increase in Webanswers, Xomba and most importantly Hubpages more than making up for a decrease in Redgage and Infobarrel income. This meant I exceeded my conservative target of earning $100 from residual income sources and actually was less than $15 within my target of $150 which is impressive considering I did little to nothing this month with my online activities so this can truly be called residual income.

My targets for July 2010 are to increase my earnings further - I would like to make a minimum of $150 from all sources combined and try and get Xomba over $5 if possible (although this will require a near doubling of income from this source).

I also hope to manage to make a few more posts on this site to see if it results in more traffic (I am driven by the excellent traffic to My Money Making Experiment, Residuals and Royalties and My Online Income By Kidags to name just a few blogs which also do monthly online money making updates and if I could achieve just a fraction of their traffic I would be very happy).

Monthly Update - May 2010

2010-06-08T16:18:00.000-07:00

I wrote a few articles over the past month for Hubpages, Xomba etc and continued with my backlinking using sites such as Xomba, SheToldMe etc. I also set up a few more free blogger blogs to try out new ideas.

Another large income source for me this month was TopCashBack (I earned in excess of £200!). I intend to write a full blog post on this in the next few days but basically it is the most generous cashback scheme in the UK. However, since this isn't strictly a source of residual income it isn't included below. In addition, if you sign up through the link provided here before mid June then you will get a bonus of £2.50 when you reach £5 in your account.

If you remember from my April 2010 update my aim was to hit $75 with Hubpages and $5 with all the other sources combined, with an ambitious target of $100 in total. Without further ado here are my online residual income earnings for May 2010:

Hubpages: $125.81 (62% increase over April 2010)
Infobarrel: $0.69 (78% decrease over)
Xomba: $1.70 (133% increase)
Webanswers: $0.20 (25% increase)
Redgage: $0.19 (94% decrease)
SheToldMe: $3.33 (New this month)

As can be seen from this I easily exceeded all my targets. Hubpages, which makes up the bulk of my earnings, had a massive increase and by itself took me over the magical $100 level. The best news about this was that teh increase was due to increases in traffic to most of my Hubpages.
Infobarrel unfortunately fell quite sharply and was passed by SheToldMe and Xomba which is probably a result of all the work I have spent on these sites with backlinking articles etc.
Redage had a sharp fall, but this just reflected the fact I didn't use the site as much in April and I didn't get a $3 bonus like I did in March.

My targets for June 2010 are quite modest, mainly due to me being pre-occupied with the World Cup in South Africa. As a minimum I would like to keep my online income above $100 although I will be aiming to push on to $150 if I get the time.

Adverts on Hubpages Mobile

2010-05-10T11:23:00.000-07:00

Hubpages is an online revenue sharing website which earns money partly through adverts at the time of writing does not show adverts on page views from cell phones.

I have recently purchased a brand new phone, the amazing HTC Desire and so I decided to read a hub my someone I follow. One thing I noticed straight away was there was no adverts shown. I did a bit more research and it turns out no hubs have adverts on them, although where there are eBay and Amazon referral links these DO show up. As a result, from mobile impressions eBay and Amazon are the only sources of income at the present stage.

This issue only occurs on sites such as Hubpages where there are mobile versions of pages. Other sites such as Infobarrel and Xomba do not appear to have mobile sites as such and so when viewing these sites through mobile devices the normal desktop version is displayed and so there is still the potential to earn through Adsense clicks.

I did a bit of research using Google Analytics and discovered impressions on my hubs from mobile sources amounted to about 1000. As a result, I could possibly earn more if adverts were shown on Hubpages when accessed through a mobile device such as the iPhone, Blackberry or Android device such as the Motorola Droid or HTC Droid Incredible.

Hopefully in the future adverts will be shown on hubs when displayed upon a mobile device. A main reason for me hoping this will happen is Google Adsense are hoping to take over the major mobile ad network, Admob and if this happens Admob would be incorporated into the Adsense system.

Monthly Update - April 2010

2010-05-01T02:35:00.000-07:00

So it's that time again when I publish my earnings for the previous month. Over the last month I haven't written many articles. What I have done, however, is do a lot of work creating backlinks, especially using Redgage and She Told Me. In total I wrote four new hubs. The first was a little experiment I intended to run and so was entitled Hubpages Login. I then decided that I had too many earnings from Adsense on Hubpages and so I wanted to diversify my portfolio to include more Amazon sales. I have recently purchased a new mobile phone and so I decided I would concentrate on pages specialising in cell phone accessories (as I had to do lots of the research myself). As such I chose to write an article on HTC Droid Incredible Screen Protectors, HTC Droid Incredible Chargers and LG Ally Screen Protectors. I had previously written an article on Motorola Droid Screen Protectors which saw moderate success so hopefully these will follow in the footsteps. I do see one problem with this though - there is likely to be a big surge in traffic when the phone first comes out and will slowly decline until after a year or two there will be nothing (even if I manage to rank top in the SERPS).

Aside from these four Hubpages I didn't write anything else on Xomba, Infobarrel or any other websites (but these continued to earn). Once again I managed to earn from Webanswers and also for the first time I have included my earnings from Redgage. You may recall that my aim from the March 2010 earnings update was to exceed $60 from Hubpages and earn $5 from all the other sites combined.

Hubpages: $77.40 (26% over March 2010)
Infobarrel: $3.09 (124% increase over March 2010)
Xomba: $0.73 (135% increase)
Webanswers: $0.16 (64% decrease over March 2010)
Redgage: $3.20 (new for this month)

As can be seen I got very good earnings this month. There was an increase on all of the article writing websites (Hubpages, Infobarrel and Xomba). What is important to note is that this increase was due to an increase in the number of people visiting existing sites, which I would put at least partly down to the backlinking which I had done over the month. In fact, I had written only four new articles for Hubpages which contributed little and no new articles for Xomba or Infobarrel so all in all it wasn't a bad return. Webanswers probably dropped to inactivity by myself on the website during April 2010. I also earned quite a lot from Redgage, however this was partly due to getting a bonus $3 for my one of my pictures being featured.

These results mean I exceeded my target of $60 from Hubpages (in fact I earned over $75) and also exceeded my target for $5 from all other websites after earning $7.18 although $3 of this was a Redgage bonus for being featured and when this is removed I earned only $4.18 which is disappointing.

For May 2010 I hope to be able to keep Hubpages above $75 and the other websites above $5 (without bonuses!) and who knows, if I am lucky I may even be able to break through the magic $100 barrier!

Paid Online Survey Income and the UK Election

2010-04-18T15:26:00.000-07:00

Apologies for those readers from outside the UK and those who don't take part in paid surveys - this article deals specifically with the UK election and it's effect on my survey income (although for those of you outside the UK it may still be relevant if you have elections where you live).

As you probably already know, I am a user of online paid surveys and have even written reviews on online paid surveys to assist others.

You may (or may not) also realise that, at the time of writing, there is an upcoming election in the UK. This is the first election since 1997 when at such a late stage there is still uncertainty over which party will win the election, or indeed if there is a need for a coalition government. As a result, it seems that every day every major national paper releases another opinion poll which gives an idea of the voting intention for the UK. One such poll company, Yougov, releases at least one poll every day of which over 1000 people are polled in each which results in over 7000 survey responses per week. Assuming that a number of people don't respond to survey invitation for whatever reason we could almost assume that Yougov sends out over 10,000 survey invitations a week just related to the upcoming general election. And this is just one polling company - there are a many active so since the election had been called I wouldn't be surprised if each and every week there are over 50,000-100,000 online paid survey invitations which are linked to the UK general election.

I myself have taken part in several such surveys - some which are directly asking which party I would vote for and others asking other questions which are nonetheless linked to the election eg Would I feel more or less financially secure if the result of the election was a hung parliament?

Considering all the facts, I would estimate that the election has increased the amount of online paid survey invitations by at least 20-30% which would be a fair amount if I filled in every survey I was invited to (due to time constraints I tend to pick and choose my surveys). I would estimate I receive enough survey invitations to earn £30-£40 a week and so the election would be responsible for about £5 per week.

I am assuming this is a national trend for those who complete online paid surveys although I do live in an unusual area in so much as anyone of the three main parties potentially have a reasonable chance of winning in this seat and so this may have resulted in me being more significant in the eyes of the polling companies. Whatever the reason I don't mind as it means I should manage to earn a little bit extra over the next few weeks from online paid surveys.

Backlinking using Redgage

2010-04-14T14:07:00.000-07:00

As I am sure you are all aware the only way to earn from an online website depends on getting traffic. The earning potential of this traffic can vary but possibly the best way to earn a residual income online is by getting good quality search engine traffic. To improve search engine rankings backlinks are required. I have previously mentioned several such websites including backlinking using She Told Me.

I have recently discovered a new website called Redgage. This is another website where it is possible to create backlinks and earn at the same time. Unlike She Told Me though earnings aren't done through Adsense revenue share. Earnings are instead accumulated through views to posted content on the site and it is this which earns the money. Payment is made using a pre-paid Visa card and happens once the accumulated amount reaches $25. Unusually Redgage posts how much every user has earned and some people have earned hundreds and I think I saw someone with lifetime earnings in the thousands.

Many different things can be posted to Redgage, but for the purposes of backlinking we are primarily interested in links, which are fortunately dofollow. However, I have experimented with submitting photos, which whilst not necessarily the best have still earned a couple of cents in the couple of days they have been on the site (one of the Honda Balloon at the Chateau d'Oex Balloon Fiesta and another of me on Astakos Beach).

In terms of submitting backlinks it is very quick. There is no need for long descriptions and I reckon the entire backlink could be done in under 30 seconds. I think it is even possible to set up automatic backlinks using RSS readers etc but I haven't done this myself. The best bit is there is earnings are made from these backlinks which is double earning potential (not only does it hopefully increase earnings on the linked to site it makes earnings on Redgage). Whilst so far I have only earned a few cents from my links I have only posted about 6 links and hopefully over time they will earn more (links posted so far include what time does evening begin?, Amazing Dance Party Songs and Cribbs Causeway).

Another way of earning money is by getting paid bonus amounts for submitting good content. Whilst the bonus amounts are often only a couple of dollars, it all adds up!

So far I have only begun to scratch the surface of Redgage but I have found it to be a very comprehensive site which has the potential to contribute to my (and your!) online income.

Have you used Redgage? What are your experiences of it? If you are a member feel free to add Bristolboy (me) as a friend.

The importance of adding trackers to all Hubpages links

2010-04-03T11:53:00.001-07:00

Hubpages is my primary online revenue source at the moment. Hubpages is an online revenue sharing site - you post articles on whatever you want and in return your adverts are shown 60% of the time (giving you a chance of earning 60%) of the total profits. Hubpages also run a scheme where it is possible to earn money from referral trackers and this is what this blog post is concerning.

As has been said 60% of adverts are attributed to the writer of the article, with the remaining 40% going to Hubpages. However, it is possible to get you adverts shown by setting up trackers, which are small pieces of code which can be set up in links to any pages on Hubpages, whether they be the web addresses for individual hubs or the Hubpages homepage. The earning comes in two ways:

1) If you signup a new member to Hubpages your Adsense, Amazon etc code is shown 10% of the time on all of their pages automatically.
2) If you link to an individual page your code for Amazon, Adsense etc is shown either 12% or 9% of the time. It is automatically 12%, but if the hub author signed up through a code and is therefore subject to 1) it becomes 9%.

In both of these cases the person who wrote the hub continues to get 60%, the 12%/10%/9% comes out of Hubpages share of the earnings!

I have been adding trackers to all of my links on Hubpages, and up until now I have sort of ignored the earnings from trackers. However, using Adsense I track every individual hub URL and recently noticed that the sum of all of these individual hub URLs was only 95% of my total Adsense earnings from Hubpages. There are two areas where this remaining 5+% could have come from. Firstly it could have come from slideshow views (since I don't bother setting up individual trackers for each image in the slideshow this could be the case). However, I investigated further using Analytics (I have linked both accounts) and it appears that slideshow views only account for about 2% of my total hubpages earnings - which means that 3% has come from trackers. Whilst this may not seem like much at all, when you consider my total earnings, it is a not insignificant figure.

In addition, I am continuing to get people to click through using one of my trackers and so I am still getting the chance of earning from one of the two ways mentioned above. I decided to look at the traffic going to hubs of the people I have signed up to Hubpages, and over the last three days it has averaged out at approximately 70 page impressions per day allocated to me. If this trend were to be continued this will lead to just over 2000 page impressions a month, so with $1eCPM I would earn $2 per month, a $2eCPM I would earn $4 a month etc. This may seem like small change, but this is truly income for practically no work - other than inserting a small tracker (which takes literally five seconds) in every link I did nothing. For this reason I would definitely recommend everyone else uses trackers wherever possible.

Does anyone else use trackers on Hubpages? Noticed any serious traffic/earnings?

More information on Hubpages trackers and how to set them up

Monthly Update - March 2010

2010-04-01T16:04:00.000-07:00

During March I continued the work which I started in february with regards to backlinking my articles using sites like SheToldMe. I was unable to write as much as I would have liked, but still managed to write one article on Infobarrel on the UK transport company First Great Western, an article on Hubpages also on First Great Western and a further article on Hubpages on The English Defence League (EDL).

I also discovered a couple of new online money making websites. The first is called Webanswers which works in a similar way to Yahoo answers, but those who answer get finanically rewarded for answers in the form of revenue share. The second website I have discovered is Top Cashback which claims to be officially the most generous cashback site in the UK. I reckon I am likely to earn quite a bit from this.

Here are my earnings for March 2010, for Hubpages, Infobarrel and Xomba as well as the new revenue source: Webanswers.

Hubpages - $61.35 (24% increase over January 2010)
Infobarrel - $1.38 (7% increase over March 2010)
Xomba - $0.31 (78% decrease over February 2010)
Webanswers - $0.44 (New this month)

I expected to see a slide in Xomba earnings since last month I was relatively active on Xomba, especially compared with this month when my activity on Xomba has been zero. There has been a modest increase in earnings from Infobarrel and a larger (both in percentage and amount) increase from Hubpages. This may be due to my backlinking. However, a large part of the Hubpages increase is due to getting lucky with the selling of items using the Amazon affiliate scheme - hopefully my first payment will be coming up soon.

I did hit my targets which I set in my February 2010 monthly update, which was to earn $50 from all sites and if possible earn $50 from just Hubpages and I have achieved both of these goals. For thc coming month I would like to keep my earnings from Hubpages above $60 and get the combined earnings from all other sites combined above $5. Whilst this may seem ambitious, I hope I can do it.

Hubpages versus Infobarrel - Comparison number 1

2010-03-17T15:44:00.000-07:00

In my February 2010 monthly update I mentioned that I would do a comparison of Hubpages, Infobarrel and Xomba. I created an article for Infobarrel and an article for Hubpages on the same subject but was unable to get enough information to create a third article which was on the same subject but still slightly different (but not too different) and as a result I decided to just leave it at an Infobarrel article and a Hubpages article. The article in question is very UK based and so I felt this would give a good comparison of how the respective websites coped in a foreign search engine (I believe both Hubpages and Infobarrel are based outside the UK).

These were both published about a week ago now, and so this is a quick update on how the Hubpages article has rated against Infobarrel. To start off with the Infobarrel article was published slightly ahead of the Hubpages article, but they appeared to both appear in Google results at the same sort of time (certainly it wasn't large enough to make a difference unless the article in question is a breaking news story). Neither got very high in the Google SERPs and in fact both articles were struggling to stay in the top 200 places, although the Hubpages article was positioned slightly higher. I placed a single link to each site on She Told Me (a great backlinking site) and this improved the search engine rankings. Again the Hubpages article is much better - in Google it is higher than the Infobarrel article for the chosen keyword. In addition, this difference is even more pronounced when using the British version of Google - with Hubpages far outranking Infobarrel. For both Hubpages and Infobarrel though the articles rank higher in the Google US than Google UK. The difference between the two sites in Yahoo is even more interesting. On the US Yahoo the Infobarrel article ranks 50% higher for the chosen keyword than the Hub. When using the UK version of Yahoo this is repeated - only the Hubpages article is even further behind the Infobarrel article.

So far this has been interesting - Infobarrel appears to rank higher in Yahoo and Hubpages higher in Google. At the moment this would suggest Hubpages is the better choice since Google is used more than Yahoo - particularly in the UK where Google accounts for about 95% of the total search engine usage!

Over the next few weeks I hope to increase the number of backlinks which I have to each article to see whether I can increase the point at which each article sits in the search results to a level where I can get decent traffic. From this, I hope to be able to do a comparison to see whether there is any vast difference in earnings (eCPM) and click through rate between Hubpages and Infobbarel - although obviously as per Google Adsense TOS I will have to be very vague!

Monthly Update - February 2010

2010-03-06T10:50:00.000-08:00

During February I did a lot of work to try and assist me making more money online. I published two new hubs, one on The Helford River in Cornwall and another on buying Motorola Droid Screen Protectors Online. In addition I joined Xomba - which is a site which allows both bookmarking of existing sites and new articles to be written. As a result I wrote five articles on Xomba - We7 Music, Work from the beach with Google Adsense, Amazon, eBay and Hubpages, Get A Hotel in Falmouth, Cornwall, What time does evening start? and Valued Opinions. As you will notice several of these articles are linked to articles I already have in Hubpages and Infobarrel etc and so it was a chance for me to see how well Xomba compares in terms of the search engine rankings which will be something I shall do more and more in the future so keep checking back to this page to see how I get on.

Hubpages - $49.62 (70% increase over January 2010)
Infobarrel - $1.29 (2% decrease over January 2010)
Xomba - $1.41 (New this month)

As can be seen, I did sort of hit my targets from the January 2010 update. I managed to stop the slide in total earnings and in fact posted a large increase. However, this was mainly due to excellent performance from Hubpages and there was still a slight fall in earnings from Infobbarel which is worrying. I was also pleased with the earnings from Xomba, especially as I only started using Xomba during February 2010 and only wrote five articles.

In March 2010 I hope to keep my total earnings from all sites over $50 and hopefully manage to push the earnings from Hubpages alone over $50 and with that I shall round up my monthly earnings report for February 2010.

Monthly Update - Janury 2010

2010-03-01T13:55:00.000-08:00

In January 2010 I did very little work on my online sites etc and so it would be expected that I would have a similar income to last month. I still felt I should be able to meet my targets from December 2009 for my income.

Hubpages: $29.24 (6% decrease)
Infobarrel: $1.32 (6% decrease)

Once again I have had a fall in my earnings. However, it is no-where as big as the fall in December 2009 and so hopefully I have reached the bottom and it will start to increase. As such my target for February 2010 is to at the very least avoid my earnings from Hubpages and Infobarrel falling any further.

Annual Earnings Update - 2009

2010-02-10T14:00:00.000-08:00

So it is the end of the year and I guess it is time for me to look at my earnings for the whole of 2009. At the beginning of the year my only experience of making money online was through paid survey sites and the like, but now I have much more experience and have moved on to much more profitable things like Hubpages (and hopefully in the future other similar schemes).

It appears that creating websites, or articles for websites is a good way of making money and if the right keywords are selected it is possible to earn a lot of money. However, there is some hard work and quite a bit of a learning curve to understand how to earn the money. Even after a year I am in no way an expert, in fact I would say I am not even moderate, yet I have still managed to earn quite a bit from Hubpages (and latterly Infobarrel) using only 34 Hubpages and 6 Infobarrels. So without further ado here are my annual earnings:

Hubpages: $303.00
Infobarrel: $11.95

As can be seen, despite not spending much time etc it has still been possible to earn a bit of money. Even without work (surely the true definition of passive income) it should increase in 2010, since I didn't write many of these hubs/infobarrels until mid 2009. However, it is my intention to write many more hubs and infobarrels during 2010 as well as looking at other ways of making money. As such my 2010 target for earnings from Hubpages is $600, $50 from Infobarrel and $50 from as yet unidentified online sources.

Monthly Update - December 2009

2010-02-07T14:47:00.000-08:00

I did no work on either creating new online articles or backlinking in December 2009. In November 2009 I had a target to earn $5 from Infobarrel and $30 from Hubpages so here are my results.

Hubpages: $31.14 (33% decrease)
Infobarrel: $1.40 (100% increase)

As can be seen there was quite a considerable decrease in Hubpages earnings - this despite my page views staying quite similar to November 2009. However from research I know that my page views are coming from different hubs in December to November and these happen to be ones with lower earnings per impression.

In January 2010 (a new year already!) I hope to halt this slide in Hubpages earnings. I also hope to create an annual review soon.

Monthly Update - November 2009

2010-02-05T06:47:00.000-08:00

Once again this month I did not create any additional content. In fact, other than replying to a few comments on hubs etc I did no work at all.

Earnings for November 2009.

Hubpages: $46.65 (11% decrease)
Infobarrel: $0.70 (18% decrease)

Needless to say I am disappointed with this decrease but it is not unexpected considering how little work I have done on my online work this month. However, it does show that income from Hubpages and Infobarrel truly is passive, that is to say an income is made even with little (or in my case no) work.

For the coming month I shall have the same targets as I set out in my October 2009 monthly update due to lack of work being carried out in the November.

Monthly Update - October 2009

2010-02-03T12:58:00.000-08:00

During October I was unable to produce any new hubs or infobarrels due to new work commitments. However I did some work on creating backlinks to improve the rankings of my hubs in the search engines (particularly Google).

Earnings for October 2009:

Hubpages: $51.31 (94% increase on September 2009).
Infobarrel: $0.85 (86% decrease)

Compared with my targets set in my September Monthly Update, I have easily met my Hubpages target, but missed out on my Infobarrel target. Since I have not created any new hubs, I don't plan to increase my targets for my November earnings so they shall remain $30 from Hubpages and $5 from Infobarrel.

Monthly Update - September 2009

2009-10-25T02:45:00.000-07:00

I realise this is a bit late - but you know what they say, better late than never!

During September I wrote 6 hubs, but no new infobarrels. The hubs I wrote were on Negative Calorie Foods: Celery, My top 10 songs, answering the questions What is the longest river in England?, What is the highest mountain in England? and How do I find my WEP key? and Jack Wills Clothing. There was no financial reason for why I chose to put these 6 articles on Hubpages, I just felt that it would be easier than putting on Infobarrel since with Infobarrel all articles need to be approved.

So here are my earnings for September, along with the change from the previous month:

Hubpages: $26.40 (10% increase on August earnings)
Infobarrel: $6 (138% increase on August earnings)

You may recall that the targets I set in my August monthly update were to earn $5 from Infobarrel and $30 from Hubpages. As you can see, I met my target for Infobarrel, but didn't for Hubpages. As such I shall keep the same targets for both, since I did not publish anything on Infobarrel in the last month, so there is the possibility my earnings from this site will be down.

She Told Me - A great new do-follow backlinking tool and earn money from Adsense

2009-09-08T11:10:00.000-07:00

As those of you who frequent the Hubpages forums may already know, a new website has launched. This is a social bookmarking site, which provides do follow links and takes part in Adsense revenue sharing. This new website is called She Told Me. The revenue sharing is relatively high, and there is the option of earning even more through referrals!

One downside is at the present time the pagerank is only 3, but the website is undergoing a massive explosion in traffic, so this will probably increase. In addition, as there are less users than Digg etc it will probably be easier to get your articles on the front page.

All in all this seems to be quite a good website and one which I intend on exploring further. I have provided a link above, this is a referral link and so I will earn some from your posts, but I believe you lose nothing. In addition, if you sign up as my referral I will keep an extra eye out for the links you submit, with the option that I will vote up your submission, taking it one step closer to the front page.

Monthly Update - August 2009

2009-09-01T02:51:00.000-07:00

During August I have written a further three Infobarrels. These are one on reviews of paid survey sites in the UK, one on shopping areas in Bristol and one on how to unlock a UK mobile phone. As they were all longer than 1000 words, I have achieved 15 points, which means that I will get 80% revenue share. Put simply, this means my Adsense code will be used to show adverts 80% of the time on Infobarrel. What is more, I could have had a revenue share of up to 90% by writing more articles.

I also managed to write one hub on the website Hubpages on the basic rules of soccer.

I continued to earn money from Adsense earnings throughout this month from both Infobarrel and Hubpages, as shown below.

Hubpages: $24.09 (22% increase on July 2009)
Infobarrel: $2.52 (525% increase on July 2009)

As can be seen, there was a considerable increase in earnings from both sources. I exceeded my targets for earnings which I set in my July 2009 Monthly Update. I saw a very high increase in earnings for Infobarrel, however, this is to be expected since I produced my first Infobarrels in July and they are still maturing. The 22% increase in Hubpages earnings is also very good and shows how hubs earn more money as they mature, since in August I increased my total number of hubs by less than 4% and yet saw an increase in earnings of 22%.

I am pleased with my earnings for the last month, but intend on setting further targets for earnings in September. I wish to earn $30 from Hubpages and $5 from Infobarrel. Whilst these targets are relatively hard, particularly the Inforbarrel one, I hope it can be reached and will write articles to help me do it.

Changes to OpinionWorld

2009-08-18T03:33:00.000-07:00

I have used a paid survey site called OpinionWorld many times. I liked the site because they previously paid per survey directly into a PayPal account, unlike other companies which would give points for each individual survey, and once a certain level of points had been achieved these would be exchanged for some sort of reward. However, despite recently receiving a further £1 into my PayPal account, I have noticed a change to the OpinionWorld surveys. Now, many surveys are given points. Whilst there is no difference to the amount earned for each survey as far as I can tell, there is the need to save up to £10 (so ten surveys need to be completed). I should imagine the company has done this to save on administration costs, as well as many people never reaching the payout level.

I personally feel that this is a disappointing change though and as a result I will be much less likely to complete OpinionWorld surveys in the future.

I have also adjusted my OpinionWorld review accordingly to take account of these new changes.

Monthly Update - July 2009

2009-08-03T09:06:00.000-07:00

During the past month I have started using Infobarrel properly, and have written my first 3 articles - are they called infobarrels or barrels?. They were primarily used to compliment some of my existing hubs, so one was on summer events in Bristol, one was on how to become an avon representative in Canada, and the final was on Cribbs Causeway.
I also published five new hubs. These were, as with most of my hubs, on random topics which came to my mind. As a result I wrote a hub on the hotels in Falmouth, Cornwall, a holiday in Flushing, how to become an Avon representative in the UK and becoming an Avon representative in the US and buying the best rubber teachers stamps.

Aside from these I have discovered that Homepages-Friends, where I got paid for searching the internet, is no longer running the service as of the 1st August, and so July will be my last set of updated figures.

Hubpages: $19.74 (59% increase on June 2009)
Homepages-Friends: £0.83 (12% decrease on June 2009)
Infobarrel: $0.48 (New for July 2009)

I was hoping that I would break through the $20 barrier for earnings from Hubpages for this month, but in the end came very close. However, I should hopefully make it in August. I have also made a smaller amount from Infobarrel, I will aim for much more modest earnings of $2 from Infobarrels over the coming month. To help me achieve these goals over the next month I hope to create a few more hubs/infobarrels as well as improve my existing ones.

Monthly Update - June 2009

2009-07-01T01:40:00.000-07:00

Once again this month I have not spent a lot of time on online money making activities. However, I have written five hubs. With the exception of one on the top 10 countries with the largest population, they have performed relatively poorly. The other hubs which I have written are ones on the best places to get opening times for businesses in the UK, shopping in Falmouth, the online jukebox We7, and audioboo - the audio Twitter.

June 2009 earnings:

Hubpages: $11.69 (87% decrease from May)
Home-pages Friends: £0.93 (42% decrease from May)

From other sources, including paid surveys I earnt nothing, which is to be expected since I have been unable to complete any for the last few months. Hopefully I will be able to complete more soon though.

As can be seen my earnings, especially from Hubpages, experienced a massive drop in the previous month. This was mainly due to the good fortune which I had in May when a link to one of my Hubpages appeared on the front page of Yahoo! (see page on massive Adsense earnings surge). In addition, for the vast majority of June several of my hubs, including my most constantly performing one financially, seemed to drop right down the Google rankings, resulting in a massive drop in traffic. However, these have now started to appear back in the Google rankings, and so my earnings from these should hopefully increase in July.

Monthly Update - May 2009

2009-06-06T06:30:00.000-07:00

During this month I have been rather busy and unable to commit too much time to my online money making activities. I wrote two hubs at the beginning of the month, on on Great Dance Party Songs and one a review of the online survey site OpinionWorld. I have also written a Knol on Biochar. This writing of the Knol was an experiment to see if Knol's would gather traffic, although unfortunately so far it has been extremely disappointing. Apart from this I have carried out a few paid searches using Homepages-Friends, but that is about it.

May 2009 earnings:

Hubpages: $88.73 (658% increase from April)
Home-pages Friends: £1.73 (258% increase from April)

From other sources, including paid surveys I earnt nothing, which is to be expected since I have been unable to complete any for the last few months. Hopefully I will be able to complete more soon though.

As can be seen there has been a massive increase in Adsense earnings. This was mainly due to the good fortune I faced with a link to a search result page being placed on the Yahoo homepage. For this Yahoo! search one of my hubs appeared top of the rankings, and so I achieved a lot of traffic from this with an associated surge in earnings. I also had a great increase in the amount I earnt from paid searches, although this may mainly be due to having carried out very few last month.

I hope to increase my number of hubs as well as exploring various other money making opportunities.

Infobarrel and Tagfoot - two new ways of making money online

2009-05-20T06:13:00.000-07:00

I have recently discovered a couple of cool new websites which I plan on making more use of when I have more time.

The first is called Infobarrel. It is another site where it is possible to submit articles, with the potential of earning money from it. As with Hubpages, it works on revenue sharing using Adsense. There appears to be more freedom to experiment with different formats on Infobarrel, and so this leads to more possibilities. I believe links from Infobarrel are Do-Follow, and so it is a good resource for getting backlinks. Also, revenue sharing is 75% for the author and 25% for the company, but if enough articles are written in May then this becomes 90% for the author and 10% for the company. This website definately seems very promising, and I would appreciate feedback on it. Sign up here.

The second webiste is one which I have slightly more experience with. This is called Tagfoot and is similar to Digg and other social bookmarking sites, with the only difference it is possible to earn money using Adsense. Practically anything can be tagged, from videos and pictures to articles. Revenue sharing is 50/50 between the tagger and the company, but in the case of the referrals the company's share is split. I also believe they give backlinks, and so it is a relatively easy way of getting backlinks, and possibly more traffic and revenue. This is definately something I would recommend using. See the tag of this page, and sign up here. Once again I would appreciate your feedback on Tagfoot, and why not add me as a friend and start sharing the articles you tag with me!

Thanks for reading and I wish you luck if you sign up with either of these schemes.

Wolfram Alpha

2009-05-18T08:00:00.000-07:00

Recently a new website has launched, called Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram Alpha is a search engine like no other, you type in a query and it gives you an answer in the results page, without the need to click through to another website. As such it is possible to loads of cool things, such as find out the weather in a particular location on a particular date (in this example the weather in London on Sunday 8th June 1997). However, the page does have some limitations. More detaisl on this new search engine can be found on a hub I wrote called simply Wolfram Alpha.

The feeling I have though is sites like this cause problems for internet businesses and those who rely on the internet to make some extra money. The reason being they get a lot of traffic from conventional search engines, and sites like Wolfram Alpha negate the need to direct traffic to particular sites to get their information. Even if Wolfram Alpha doesn't take off, it is worth noting that this is a factor which is starting to spread more and more into Google etc, and one can only expect such answers directly provided by Google to continue.

Hubpages increase Adsense ads

2009-05-16T07:24:00.000-07:00

In the last week there has been good news for those people like myself who publish on Hubpages. Generally with Google Adsense there are limits to the number of adverts which can be displayed per page. However, recently Hubpages have been given permission to increase the number of adverts on each page. This will hopefully result in more income per page, especially when coupled with the update to the page layouts which was announced by Hubpages a few weeks ago. It will be interesting to see whether this is the case. It is only a shame it didn't happen when I had my massive traffic spike!

Surprise surge in Hubpages earnings

2009-05-13T12:41:00.000-07:00

I was checking my Adsense account on Friday night and noticed that I had an abnormally large amount of traffic and clicks. At first I thought that this may have been to one of my two new hubs at Hubpages which i had written in the previous few of days (one was on great dance party songs and one was an opinionworld review). However, through the use of Channels I was able to see where the money was coming in and it was all to one particular hub, and all from one particular search term on Yahoo!. I was unsure as to what this was, but quickly discovered that it was due to the search term appearing on the Yahoo! homepage.

By Saturday night I was about $80 better off mainly due to this one hub, and so I was a very happy chap!

Monthly Update - April 2009

2009-05-02T02:37:00.000-07:00

Over the last few weeks I have been out of the country, and unable to get internet access, and it is this which accounts for my lack of activity, including weekly updates. I apologise for this. However, I am now back in the country and will hopefully be able to update this blog more regularly.

During this time I have been unable to complete many online surveys, or many paid searches through Homepages-Friends. In addition, I have only been able to find the time to write one new article on Hubpages.

From now on I also intend to include percentage changes in income from all of the various sources, to see how they change from one months earnings report to the next, an idea I got from The Brainy Money blog.

April 2009 earnings:

Hubpages (Adsense): $13.49 (420% increase)
Home-pages Friends: £0.67 (75% decrease)
OpinionWorld surveys: £8 (400% increase)

Obviously the payments from OpinionWorld lag slightly, and so I would expect that it will take a while before I see the decrease in earnings from this due to lack of activity in April. My lack of activity on Home-pages Friends is very apparent, although hopefully my searches will once again start to increase now that I am back using my computer more. I am most pleased with my earnings from Hubpages though, since I have had a massive organic increase in earnings despite spending relatively little time on the site, and hopefully this is something that will continue.

Weekly Earnings Update - 6th April 2009

2009-04-06T14:14:00.000-07:00

Over the last week I have carried out a few surveys. I have also been paid into my PayPal account for two OpinionWorld surveys. I have continued to use Homepages-Friends where I get paid for searching the internet. I am most pleased with my Hubpages Adsense earnings which have grown considerably. This is most impressive considering that I have not submitted any new articles, and such I am getting an increase in income despite writing no new hub.

OpinionWorld: £2

My Homepages-Friends: £0.53

Hubpages: $3.05

Earn money from selling

2009-04-04T05:19:00.000-07:00

An additional way of making money is through selling items to family and friends and earning commission on the items sold. There are a number of home based selling options available. These generally rely on brochures, which are also known as catalogues.

Possibly the most famous of these is the Avon company. It is possible to earn commission of about 25% on everything which is sold, to family, friends and anyone else. After becoming an Avon representative in America, it is possible to not only make money from sells generated through the brochure, but also through a website. This is a useful hub on how to become an Avon representative in the US. This gives an outline of the benefits of being an Avon representative, as well as a brief outline of how to become an Avon representative.

Monthly Update - March 2009

2009-04-03T10:53:00.000-07:00

This is my first monthly update for the additional money which I have made this month. The only online earnings which I have actually recieved are those associated with OpinionWorld. In total I receieved deposits into my PayPal account for doing two OpinionWorld surveys. I also earnt a small amount for the paid searches I did through Homepages-Friends. Finally I earnt some money from Adsense adverts which are displayed on my articles which I have submitted to Hubpages. Whilst at the present time these are very small, I hope that is will increase in the future.

OpinionWorld surveys: £2

Hubpages (adsense): $3.21

Homepages-Friends: £2.68

OpinionWorld Payment Update

2009-04-03T04:15:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I recieved an extra £2 into my PayPal account for carrying out two OpinionWorld surveys, and I believe I also have more money to come in the future from surveys which I have completed.

Weekly Earnings Update - 30th March 2009

2009-03-30T09:01:00.000-07:00

Over the last week since my last weekly update I have been unable to spend as much time on my online money making activities as I would have liked. I have however signed up for a new service called Tagfoot, and this seems to be a social bookmarking site a bit like Digg or Delicious, only Tagfoot has the added advantage of teh possibility from earning from the bookmarking. I intend to create a post explaining this in the near future when I have a better knowledge of the site.

Apart from this I have taken part in a couple of surveys, and have also published a new hub on hubpages on Falmouth beaches. I have also carried out a number of searches using Homepages-Friends, where I get paid for searching the internet. Whilst my earnings continue to be low, there is some increase on last week, and this is particularly encouraging considering I haven't really spent a lot of time on hubpages, and yet my earnings have more than doubled over the previous week. I am also getting very close to earning a total of £10 from Homepages-Friends, which is half way to pay out.

Hubpages adsense weekly earnings: $1.00

Homepages-Friends weekly earnings: £1.63

My Homepages-Friends Compatibility with Google Chrome

2009-03-25T08:58:00.000-07:00

It was asked by The Analyst in the comment section of this post whether it was possible to use a Homepages-Friends search box with the Chrome browser. For those of you unfamiliar with Homepages-Friends, this is a company which pays a small amount everytime you carry out a search, either through the dedicated search box in a browser or through a personalised web page. More information on this can be found here.

I contacted Homepages Friends via email, and they have now got back to me. The response was at present the service is not compatible with Chrome.

It is my opinion though that it would be prudent for the company to make their browser compatible with Chrome, as whilst at present it only has a market share of just over 1%, one would expect that this percentage will climb. As a result I would be surprised if the company doesn't bring out a search box for Google Chrome within the next few months. Until then though, those of you who use Google Chrome will have to make do with your personalised webpages if you wish to get paid when searching the internet.

Weekly Update - 23rd March 2009

2009-03-24T06:02:00.000-07:00

In the last week I have been relatively busy, and so have had little time to fill out online surveys or work on the other money making schemes. However, I have continued to be relatively active on Hubpages, which is what is responsible for all of my adsense earnings this week. I have made a few searches through my Hompages-Friends.

Adsense earnings: $0.43

Homepages-Friends earnings: £0.29

Weekly Update - 16th March 2009

2009-03-16T07:08:00.000-07:00

This is an update of my earnings within the last week. Since my last update, I have taken part in a couple of surveys, but at the time of writing I had not received rewards for any of these. These included getting £2 for a Harris Poll Online survey. I have however earnt some Adsense earnings from my writing at Hubpages, and further money from carrying out searches through Homepages-Friends. These are summarised below:

Adsense: $0.91

My Homepages-Friends: £0.24

Updated Privacy Policy

2009-03-16T07:03:00.000-07:00

To help you make decisions about the information you provide anywhere on this site, this notice has been provided to outline our practices. You should know that we respect your privacy, and that I will never sell your information to anyone. Also, we hate spam as much as you do, so you will only ever get email from us that you have asked for and we have personally approved for distribution to the list.

We use secure hosting accounts and other security measures to protect our database and any information provided.

Any e-mail you receive from this site will contain the option to unsubscribe at the end of the e-mail. You can unsubscribe at any time.

If and when we offer products on this site, when you order a product, the information you provide will only be provided to outside parties if it is necessary to complete and deliver the order. Your information will never be shared or disclosed to other parties for any other reason.

Non-identifying information may be used to improve the site or shared with advertisers. For instance, information that is collected regarding traffic to the site or specific pages may be shared, but this will never include any identifying information.

Tracking

We don’t directly track your presence on this website. Your IP address is logged and we look at the server logs on occasion, but this is in an aggregate fashion for the purpose of determining why people come to visit us. What we are most interested in specifically are two things: The websites that link to us and send traffic here, and what keywords people use to find us via search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
Cookies

We don’t directly set cookies, but we do run a number of scripts from providers such as Google. Some of these set web browser cookies. Google in particular quietly collects a tremendous amount of data on your browsing habits, and we participate in that data collection.

“Cookies” are data sent to your web browser from a web server (such as Google) that can uniquely identify your computer and store information about user preferences. Most web browsers will accept cookies by default, but they can be set to reject cookies, either from all websites or from specific sites. You can also manually delete cookies from your web browser. These options are generally set through a “Privacy” setting in your browser setup.

Content

Some material was used as the original copyright holder could not be contacted and I assume this content to be available for public use under public domain. If you are the party who owns the copyright to this material, please let me know and I will gladly comply right away and remove any copyrighted material you may object to.

9th March Update

2009-03-09T09:26:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend and today I have attempted to take part in a number of online surveys. Two of these, one for OpinionWorld and one for Valued Opinions I made it through to the reward stage, so hopefully I will recieve the reward in due course (and of course I will update here when I do).

I have also carried out searches using My Homepages-Friends where I get paid for searching the internet and so the amount in my account is now up to £7.68

OpinionWorld Payment Update

2009-03-06T02:26:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I recieved a further £1 from OpinionWorld into my PayPal account for a survey I have previously completed.

The money in my Homepages-Friends account is now up to £7.48.

I also completed a couple of surveys yesterday, one through Valued Opinions which I was screened out of and another from Home of Research which will hopefully lead to a second, paid, survey.

My hompe-pages friends update

2009-03-04T01:39:00.000-08:00

The amount in my Homepages-Friends account, where I get paid for searching the internet, is now up to £7.46 although I still only have one referral. Click the banner on the right to get more information and to sign up.

OpinionWorld

2009-03-03T11:12:00.000-08:00

Today I recieved a further £1 into my PayPal account for a survey which I have done through OpinionWorld/Survey Sampling International. This takes the amount in my account up to £9.

1st March

2009-03-01T07:51:00.000-08:00

I have decided that from now on I will cease posting daily updates. Instead I shall post weekly updates, but also updates when I request rewards or recieve rewards.

27th February

2009-02-27T00:29:00.000-08:00

The amount I have earned from My Homepage-Friends is now up to £7.28. I didn't receive any money yesterday, but I took part in paid surveys for both OpinionWorld and Valued Opinions so hopefully I will get payment for those soon.

26th February

2009-02-26T02:32:00.000-08:00

Since yesterday the amount of money in my Homepages-Friends account has reached £7.18. I was sent a number of emails inviting me to surveys, but as often happens I was screened out of all of them. Hopefully more luck today.

25th February

2009-02-25T02:16:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I mentioned that I had sent an email off to Homepages-Friends. I received a prompt response, and it turns out that my searching patterns were flagged up by the computer and so my account had been terminated. However, they have given me a second chance so this time I will have to search better.

I also received two £1 payments into my PayPal account from OpinionWorld so I am happy about that as well.

Update

2009-02-24T05:36:00.001-08:00

Once again I have made nothing extra from online surveys. However I have sent an email off to Homepages-Friends asking about the problems which I have had with my account. I tried last week but the message got returned back to me as Homepages-Friends email inbox was full, but I decided to give the benefit of the doubt and hopefully this time it will get through. Obviously I will post the results whatever way on here.

New update

2009-02-22T07:13:00.000-08:00

I have not made an update for a while and this is due to not making much money. I have had a few issues with my Homepages-Friends account as it has been suspended although I am not sure why although I am trying to find out. I have also made no money from any surveys.

Today's update

2009-02-18T01:38:00.001-08:00

Today when checking the money in my Homepages-Friends account it has increased to £6.93, including 2p from a serarch by friends. I know have 1 friend so I will be interested to see how it grows.

Update

2009-02-17T01:45:00.001-08:00

Once again I have earned nothing from surveys. However my Homepages Friends account is now up to £5.77.

New update

2009-02-16T02:55:00.000-08:00

Once again there is nothing to report other than an increase in the amount of money in my Homepages-Friends account. The total now stands at £4.89.

Latest update

2009-02-15T03:35:00.000-08:00

Once again I have earned no money from surveys. However the money in my Hompages-Friends account is now up to £3.51 off of 167 searches, but I still have no friends.

Latest update

2009-02-14T02:36:00.000-08:00

No surveys were filled out yesterday and I did not reciev any payments for any online activities. However my Hompages-Friends account, where I get paid for doing my normal searches, is up to £2.71 from 129 searches.

Harris Poll Online Review

2009-02-13T07:16:00.000-08:00

Harris Poll Online is another paid survey site. Established by Harris Interactive it works in the same way as most other survey sites in that it requires registration and then invitations to the carry out surveys are done via email, which I have found come approximately twice a week. The surveys themselves are generally easy to follow and aren't as boring and as repetitive as others which I have come across.

Reward is made via HiPoints. Generally completed surveys qualify for 200 HiPoints, and even if screened out 30 HiPoints are earned. This is a good bonus as with other survey sites 5 or more minutes can be spent filling in surveys before being screened out, and there is no reward for the time. It is also possible to get bonus HiPoints when signing up, completing set numbers of surveys and for introducing a friend who also completes a survey.

HiPoints can be transferred for entries into various prize draws, or into a PayPal transfer at a rate of 1 HiPoint being 1p. This PayPal transfer I found to be relatively quick, taking less than a week from when I requested them.

I have been a member of Harris Poll for about three months, and have already been paid £25 into my PayPal account and am currently building up my HiPoints ahead of my next payment.

Harris Poll is definately a survey site which I would recommend, as it is one of the best I have come across.

Todays news

2009-02-13T03:28:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I must have done a lot of searching as the amount within my Homepages-Friends account increased from 53p to £2.08, with a total number of searches of 99 (and I am yet to get any affiliates). I intend to post a bigger blog about Homepages-Friends (www.myhpf.co.uk) when I have more experience of the site but until then I shall continue to post these basic updates. However, it is worth pointig out the money is earned for searching the web using the serach box like I would normally do so it is well worth it in my opinion.

Opinion World Review

2009-02-12T11:07:00.000-08:00

Another online survey site which I sometimes use is called OpinionWorld. Like most survey websites, to start off registering is needed, which from memory took a little while. Once registered, the email invitations to surveys commence relatively quickly.

I receive on average about 1 invitation a day. However, the majority of these are for small surveys, in which nothing is earned and instead a donation is made to a charity. This charities do change, and I assume that the donations are actually made. In addition there is an entry into a prize draw, but as of yet I have not won anything in one of these.

Approximately once or twice a week, however,emails are sent out which have surveys accompanied by a cash reward. In my experience this cash reward has always been either £1 or £2 but I believe that other rewards are available for different surveys. Unlike other sites there is no need to wait for a limit to be reached before the cash can be accessed, with OpinionWorld the money is transferred for each survey separately. However, like Valued Opinions which I also have experience of, there is a delay before the reward is accessible, which can be up to 6 weeks, but I have always received my cash in the end.

The cash is sent via PayPal, so there is a need to have an account for this (which has to have the same email address as the one you use to register to OpinionWorld. Whilst this is easy, it can be frustrating getting paid £1 and not being able to use it, since PayPal has withdrawal charges which I for one am loathed to pay!

All in all though I would recommend OpinionWorld and have definately not found it to be a scam as I have always been paid on time.

Update: As of August 2009 I have started to receive emails which instead of offering £1 per survey which is deposited automatically into a PayPal accoutn 100 points are earned instead. These points are accumulated until 1000 are reached. Once this is achieved, it is possible to get £10 sent to a nominated PayPal account. Whilst this means that each survey is worth about the same as previously, there is the need to wait for this payout level to be reached, the lack of which was one of the biggest advantages to OpinionWorld. Apart from this all OpinionWorld surveys remain the same, including the option to support a charity after every survey is completed.

Great online survey site review

2009-02-12T05:48:00.000-08:00

Valued Opinions is one of the best paid online survey sites I have come across. Sign-up is quite simple, taking me only about 10 minutes, and from then on it is possible to get emails which contain links to the surveys.

These emails are always very clear, they contain a general overview of the survey about to be undertaken and as such include the cash reward, subject area and length of time. The email also contains a link to your own unique survey.

The surveys themselves are generally relatively well phrased and not to repetitive, and the surveys I receive cover a wide range of topics. I generally find that the surveys are slightly shorter than the advised time, but maybe I am just a fast reader!

As for the cash reward this is generally a decent amount. It can range in value from about 50p up to £5, although there are higher values for specific tasks sometime available but as of yet I have been unable to get this. The rate of pay is approximately £5 an hour using the estimations within the email, so that a 30 minute survey will pay out £2.5, although this value varies and as I have already mentioned the time estimates are in my experience slightly longer than it takes to do the survey in reality. Once the amount in the online account reaches £10 it is possible to change this for a voucher. Whilst it may be preferable to have it in cash, for people in the UK there should be a voucher for everyone, as the list is very long and includes household names such as Amazon, Tesco and John Lewis. I have always gone for Tesco vouchers, and whilst the website warns it may take up to 28 days for delivery, in my experience the delivery has always been under a week.

There are a couple of negatives though. When a survey is completed the money is in the account under 'pending' and it can take a month for it to be OK to withdrawal the money. Secondly, it is not uncommon to answer a couple of questions, only to be told that the website is after a certain group of people, and nothing is earned for this. However, I personally find this to be a very minor fault and so would recommend using this website for a little bit of extra cash if there is spare time.

Link

Good cashback site!

2009-02-12T02:23:00.000-08:00

One of the first sites I used to make my money go further online was Mutual Points. Like all cashback sites, it is possible to earn back a percentage of the money which is spent purchasing items online, with the added benefit that unlike many cashback sites there is no fee for doing so. This can vary in amount, from simple percentages to one off values. For instance when purchasing items on HMV through the website 2.5% of the total spend is earnt as cashback, yet by signing up to Betfair earnt me 3750 points, as soon as £10 had been staked. Since 3000 points is worth £20, it is worth doing this, provided you are disciplined enough not to bet more than £10!

Whilst so far this is like any other cashback site, it is possible to earn money for other activities. These include earning cashback when shopping at a number of high street stores, including Superdrug and JJB sports. There is also a section where it is possible to get money off vouchers, and these are often accompanied by points as well! It is in addition possible to earn money from what are known as free rewards, although the downside to this is it often involves signing up to a company's mailing list. The final way of getting points, which can later be converted into money is by opting to recieve emails from the company. This is an optional extra, and I choose to have a maximum of 3 emails a day. These often have bonus offers on them, or incentives to click through to a particular website. Typically this would be 5 points, so with 3 emails it is 15 points. Whilst this might not seem like a large amount, it is 10p a day for doing very little.

The payment process is very simple. When 3000 points have been attained, it is possible to request a cheque for £20 to be sent out. In my experience this was a relatively quick process, taking less than 2 weeks.

All in all this is a website I would thoroughly recommend, and it can be accessed here.

Introduction

2009-02-11T17:45:00.000-08:00

This blog will include many ways which I have found of making and saving money, both online and offline. Whilst it is likely that not all posts I make will be relevant to everyone, I hope that at least some will be.

Updated Privacy Policy

2009-01-08T11:57:00.000-08:00

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