Well, I don’t mean to say that you should walk away from every single one of these sites. Some of them do, indeed, pay — and are, indeed, legitimate. And at the end of the day, more importantly, it’s your decision what you do with your time.
But here are five things to keep in mind. Technically, Associated Content publishing guidelines specify that we shouldn’t be discussing or encouraging you to enroll at specific “get paid to do something”-type websites, and I’m not going to. In fact, I’m going to explicitly tell you not to. First, never pay up front on a promise that you’ll make money later – for any reason. Second, if it sounds too good to be true, it definitely is, so as a first step you should always take the amount of money they claim you can make and divide by between 10 and 100. Third, remember that you will never get rich online by working for somebody else. Fourth, recognize that all multi-level marketing, even when it isn’t an illegal pyramid scheme, mathematically can’t work except for those at the very, very top (and if you’re reading this, you’re not one of them). And finally, if you’re not doing any productive work, don’t be surprised when you aren’t given much money for it.
Personally, usually when I feel like one of these rules is coming into play, I walk away. Unless there is a very good reason not to. The bottom line is, no matter what you may hear elsewhere from people who have some stake in getting you into the business for their own bottom lines, you will never get rich by being paid to click and fill out forms online. In fact, unless you stoop to some very dubious practices yourself, you will never be able even to make any kind of living off this work. You’ll be lucky to make enough to even consider it a serious source of extra spending money, although that, at least, is theoretically doable.
1. Never pay up front for anything — The only two things you always have going for you is your common sense and the money already in your wallet (or in your bank account). Don’t give up either of those things too quickly. There are, for example, innumerable websites that claim that for some minimal fee, they will give you access to a database of top-paying survey opportunities, or to some secret “money-making technique” that the author has invented and is selling as an eBook.
Even on the off-chance that this isn’t a scam, you’ll almost certainly be getting nothing of value. If someone had in fact become fabulously wealthy by doing some simple marketing trick online, do you really think they’d be selling it to you in such an underhanded and unaccountable manner? They’d either be giving it away for free (and not asking for your credit card number in the process!), or they’d be disseminating their knowledge in some more reputable and profitable form, like publishing a real book. (Not that you should believe everything you read in a book, either.)
If that doesn’t convince you, think one step further (and this leads to my comments on multi-level marketing below). The absolute best-case scenario is that by learning this person’s technique and copying it, you’ll be able to duplicate their business success. Except that you won’t make as much as they did, because they were doing it first. And everybody else who is copying that original person’s idea will be involved, too, so your opportunities will be even fewer. Even if there is an opportunity to get rich quick online, odds are it will be saturated by too many other interested people before you even learn it exists.
2. If It Sounds Too Good to Be True… — Well, you know the rest of that saying. But I would add: if it sounds too good to be true, divide by 100. Or maybe by ten, if you’re feeling particularly charitable. If a particularly flashy online site promises you can make $75 per month by filling out daily surveys, for example, count on probably making somewhere between $0.75 and $7.50.
Legally, they can’t make up claims about money willy-nilly. Of course, companies that have moved their base of operations to a Third World island or are flying by night and simply ignoring the law will feel no such compunction anyways. And companies that are following the law, for example, may contrive such numbers based on completely unrealistic situations. To use my above example, that site probably would let you earn $75 if you qualified for and completed every single survey listed. But as anyone with experience with survey sites knows very well, you don’t actually qualify for every survey. Most of them, you don’t qualify for.
3. You can never get rich working for someone else online — Well, maybe sometimes you can’t. But not as a general rule. Ultimately, virtually no online “get paid at home” opportunity is doing any sort of useful, productive work of any great value. And even that work which is somewhat valuable (like filling out surveys, for example) doesn’t require any particular training, qualifications, or education. Plus, there’s an enormous demand for this work from all kinds of people just like you, eager for an opportunity to get a little bit of extra spending money. So, is it any surprise that there won’t be a lot of money in this?
There are two basic ways to get rich quickly, in any situation: make a product that no one else can make either as well as you or as quickly as you, or provide a service that no one else can provide either as efficiently or as professionally as you. Obviously neither of these options applies to most of the “paid to” stuff online. The only people who are getting rich in these schemes are the people sitting at the top, getting the survey contracts and doling out the small cash rewards to the rest of us. And frankly, given how many online survey companies there are and just how many resort to various underhanded tricks to stay in business, I doubt even they are getting all that rich.
In my experience, by casting a fairly wide net and working for a considerable number of survey sites, you can usually earn around $4 per hour, maybe $5, by filling out surveys online. You can fill out surveys more quickly, but you’re at risk of being banned by companies that conclude that you are filling them out so quickly you must be cheating and not reading the questions carefully. (Remember: the surveys might just be worth a couple bucks to you, but they’re crucially valuable market research for whoever is paying for them.) Or you can choose to work just for the highest-paying survey sites, but then there will be less work. And even if you work for all of them, you’ll be lucky to get a couple of hours of work per day.
4. Multi-level marketing is mathematically unworkable — This one can get a little technical. Essentially, all multi-level marketing works on the same principle as a pyramid scheme: every level gains income based on its own work, plus the work of those on the level below it. This is what makes MLM fundamentally flawed. In fact, it’s what makes it unsustainable.
Consider that if you’re learning about some new income opportunity today, you’re not the first person to hear about it. You’re probably not the tenth, or the hundredth, or even the thousandth. So if you enroll, or enlist, or subscribe, or buy in, or whatever, you’ll be getting in on a lower level as it is.
Now, in an MLM operation, most of your money isn’t going to come from your own productive activity, like filling out surveys (although you can still do that and get money from that, too). The “real money,” every insider will tell you sagely, comes from convincing others to come in as referrals, or network members, or whatever fancy word the MLM company is using to describe the lower tiers in their scheme. And then you take a cut every time they do something for themselves.
Now, there are two problems with this, one mathematical and one economic. First is that there simply aren’t enough people for the scheme to work for everyone — or, in fact, for more than a very small number of people. Let’s say you need to personally find and enroll twenty people to become a serious player in an MLM game. (And actually, if you really wanted to make a living off this, you’d need to find many more.) Well, each and every one of those people will expect to do the same thing. And so will all the people that they go out and enroll. Now, right there – in the time it took you to find 20 people, and for them to find 20 people of their own, and for each of those people to find 20 people of their own — there have to be no less than 8000 interested people. Eight thousand!
And I’ve only run through the scenario three times. If the next level wants to find people to buy in, they’ll need to go out and find 160 000 people. The next level is 3.2 million. I could go on, but I think you get the picture. Unless you get in on the ground floor of an MLM scheme (and if you’re reading this, you’ve probably already missed that opportunity), then you’re too late. The scheme is already hitting up against the outer limits of the number of people who are actively interested in it. And, in fact, even if everybody on Earth was interested in getting involved, I would only have to add a few more levels to this particular pyramid, before I literally ran out of human beings altogether.
The second problem is an economic one: what opportunities are there really going to be for all of these people joining up? Let’s say that the MLM in question is a survey site — paid surveys is actually a legitimate industry (unlike some), as well as one that frequently operates on an MLM basis. But the companies who are paying for the surveys aren’t interested in having millions of people submit answers. Most surveys require at most a few thousand genuine respondents. There are statistical reasons for this: the point of a survey is that you try to generalize about what lots of people are thinking by asking a small, representative sample. It’s too expensive, and pointless, to go out and actually ask everybody in the country. Or on the planet.
So, you and a lot of other people jump on the MLM bandwagon and start getting friends, relatives, and anyone who reads your blog to sign up through a referral program. But the number of survey opportunities isn’t actually going to go up at all. The same number of questions will still be asked, to the same number of people. All that is going to happen is that now there is an exponentially larger number of people competing to qualify for that same group of surveys. Which means less for them — and less for you.
5. Online “Paid to Work” sites (almost certainly) won’t pay — Technically, Associated Content publishing guidelines specify that we shouldn’t be discussing or encouraging you to enroll at specific “get paid to do something”-type websites, and I’m not going to. In fact, I’m going to explicitly tell you not to. Think seriously about what you’re getting into here: either there is mildly unethical behaviour on the part of your paying company (and by extension, by yourself), or you are exposing yourself to potentially serious unethical behaviour by the “advertisers” and “offer”-makers.
Here’s why. You know perfectly well when you join a “paid to click” website that you’re really not at all interested in the advertising you’ll be paid to watch, or the sites you’ll be paid to surf, etc., etc. And presumably the advertisers know that as well. So the ones who are seriously interested in a good, satisfied business relationship with you aren’t going to be interested in advertising through that sort of channel: they know you’re just in it for the money. (Or else they’ve been lied to themselves and don’t understand what kind of advertising they’re paying for.) Or, more likely, you’re going to be dealing with companies who know you’re only in it for the money and are making the offers anyways. Statistically, there’s no way this system can survive if everybody is profiting from it. Don’t let yourself get sucked into something that’s actually going to cost you money in the long run.
The ultimate reason to beware here, however, is that at the end of the day you can’t actually make any real money from these sites by doing the work yourself (see Rule Number 3, above). There’s just not enough money here to be worth counting — once you get past a few seemingly lucrative “bonus” and “introductory” opportunities, that is, which usually win you at least a few dollars in your online “credit” account. No, the real money almost inevitably comes from multi-level marketing: commissions from work done by others. As soon as you encounter any such “referral”-based scheme, remember Rule Number 4, above.
I think that pretty much covers it for this little lesson. If you feel I’ve missed something obvious or been unfairly harsh in criticizing online income opportunities, feel free to debate me in the comments section below.
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Above is a random extract from Associated Content, visit Associated Content for its author.