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Category One: Clickers

The easiest way to begin earning online is with ‘clicker’ sites, the most basic of which are PTC. That stands for ‘Paid To Click’ and covers all the sites who pay users to click ads and view the advertiser’s site for 15-60 seconds. It’s simplicity itself to work on PTC, but this is also the reason for the down-side: the sites pay an absolute pittance. You’ll be lucky to get $0.01 per click. Given that you can only register four clicks a minute, that makes roughly $2.40 an hour, which isn’t much at all.

So how do PTC sites and users survive? They rely on ‘referrals’. Referrals are people who you invite to join the same site and who sign up ‘under’ you. The site pays you a percentage of their PTC income and some sites will pay for several levels of depth (i.e. if one of your referrals refers someone, you get a smaller percentage of the new invitee’s income as well). The only users who make decent money online from PTC sites are those who have thousands of referrals or who spend many hours a day clicking ads for very little income.

PTC sites also have a very high scam rate. That is, they encourage people to sign up to earn money online by clicking their ads, to upgrade their membership or buy referrals to increase their earnings, then – when their members reach the payout amount – they suddenly stop responding and disappear. Of course, they take their online earnings with them and users are left with a deficit of a lot of clicking-hours and no cash. It is vitally important to research the reputation of a PTC site before joining if you want to make money online by this method.

Continuing in the same vein, there are PTS sites – ‘Paid To Surf’. These generally require downloading a plugin for your browser, or browsing from the pay site. Advertisers’ web pages are presented for a minimum amount of time and you are expected to view them to be paid. It’s pretty much the same as PTC, but in real time.

Moving a step up the evolutionary chain, the next way to earn online is by PTR – ‘Paid To Read’. More often than not, these are email-based systems where, instead of going to a PTC site and clicking ads, the content is posted direct to your mailbox. Of course, you still need to click and visit the site for 15-60 seconds, in the same way as users make money online with PTC, but there’s something that just feels easier when the link is delivered direct! Again, payment rates are extremely low, often even lower than for PTC, but the volume of email can be quite high depending on the source.

Scams are prevalent in PTR, although marginally less so than in the PTC arena. With no real upper limit on the number of emails that can be received, potential earnings could be viewed as better than for PTC, but in reality it’s much the same. It can take an awfully long time to make enough money to hit the minimum payout amount.

PTC and PTR are the basic ‘building blocks’ of making money online. Few people will use them as a primary source of income, simply because the returns are so low. They tend to have a place as an extra, just providing a few extra cents for little effort. Having said that, they can be extremely good earners if you excel at social networking and can bring in hundreds or thousands of referrals. If this is the case, reliable sites will effectively pay you for doing nothing, assuming your referrals are all happily clicking away.

At the top of the ‘clicking’ sites food chain, we come to those that pay people to sign up with advertisers’ services. This idea is often combined with PTC and PTR to provide a user with one centralized location to make money online. It also gives the advertisers flexibility in their publicity methods and, consequently, the sites have better income and tend to be more reliable.

In general, ‘paid to sign up’ offers give much better returns than PTC or PTR – often several dollars per signup – but there is the added requirement of a valid credit card in some cases. Each signup is limited to a one-time use, as well, rather than a daily click-to-visit. Users based in another country to the signup site should be aware that earning online in this fashion may not be possible for them: the advertisers may only want clients in their home country.

Making money online by signing up for offers is the first truly viable possibility for the new earner who wants an income of more than a couple of dollars and who doesn’t have thousands of friends to refer. It’s entirely possible to make upwards of $100 a month in this way, assuming you live in the right country, have a credit card (or even if not, though earnings will be lower) and can find reliable sites. A certain amount of organization is also very useful, to remember to cancel any offers that you are not particularly interested in before they begin any regular debiting of your card!

Category Two: Participation

The next group of sites is designed less around clicking or performing basic form-filling: they require more active participation on the part of users. In return, they offer better opportunities to make money online, either by better payouts or by regular or residual income.

The first of this group is the survey site. There’s an awful lot of companies out there who need market research done in various segments of society and, rather than pay to have real people standing on the streets trying (and probably failing) to ask passers-by a bunch of questions, they hand the job to an online service. Depending on which demographic you fall into, this can be a nice way to make money online regularly: surveys can pay as little as $0.10 for a few minutes’ work, but can rise to nearer the $100 mark for telephone participation in a focus group.

Between those two extremes there’s a lot of ground in which normal people can earn money online: a couple of dollars here and there for fifteen minutes of questions can add up quickly over a week. Many survey sites are well-established, reputable and have new content daily, although it is unlikely that any one individual would be eligible for absolutely every survey. As one would expect, the higher-paying surveys tend to get filled very quickly or require some very precise requirements of age, location, participation or other factors. Payout minimum is usually around the $10 or $20 mark, so most people can hit the required amount within their first month of participation and see actual cash for their efforts.

Continuing in the participation vein, we come to PTP sites – ‘Paid To Participate’. This is a very wide definition and includes forums where users can make money online by posting responses, video and photo sites where earnings are made by posting original content and even such things as health sites that pay for members to track their diet and lifestyle. Although the amount of money earned for each individual participation is often very low, for many online earners this is a very popular option: since they’re already discussing similar topics in similar locations elsewhere on the Internet, the possibility of combining that same enjoyment with making money online is a real bonus!

PTP sites are becoming more common, which means there is a greater variety of options open to a new earner. A little research can go a long way on this one: finding a PTP site that pays reliably and happens to cover subjects dear to your heart can mean that your earnings maintain a nice, regular level. However, it is unlikely that PTP will bring in more than a few dollars each month unless you are an obsessive poster. Much like PTC and PTR, this is generally viewed as a method of adding to other income online – in this case, a very pleasant method.

At the top of the participation list comes PTB – ‘Paid To Blog’. Here, we’re bordering on the next category of sites: writing to make money online. For the uninitiated, a ‘blog’ is common parlance for a ‘web log’. These are online journals, where an individual posts regular short entries. Blog subjects cover just about everything in the world: news, celebrities, sport, health, making money online (there’s thousands of those), jobs, gadgets and personal diaries. The list goes on and on. The advantage of a blog is that each entry is generally short – 100 to 200 words or so – and thus does not take a huge amount of time to maintain, even on a daily basis. Many bloggers own several different blogs, each covering an area of interest.

PTB sites also come in different flavors. Some will pay a certain amount per post, usually with an upper limit on the number of paid posts per day and certain quality requirements. Others will pay a percentage of ad revenue gained through the blog. Yet others provide the basic blogging framework for free and allow the user to ‘monetize’ (that is, try to gain revenue with) their blog.

However it is set up, blogging to make money online can be very profitable. There are plenty of stories of people who begin blogging and, after a while, become so incredibly popular that they give up their day job and retire to a huge house in the country. They apparently spend the rest of their days drinking sangria and typing a hundred words a day. Now, while this may be true for the chosen few, it is unlikely that a new blogger will become rich from their work unless they are already famous, extremely talented or extremely lucky – or, for that matter, all three of those.

The two important points with PTB sites are that it is a long-term prospect and that your chosen subject can greatly affect your income. Studies show that most new blogs perform badly for the first six to nine months. If you can hold on and produce good content on a popular, commercial subject for that long, you will have a much better chance of starting to earn money online with it. Why so long? It all depends on traffic. The more visits your blog has, the better the chance of people returning, of more ads being clicked, of your reputation passing on through word of mouth and of your site rising to the top of the dozens of blog directories on the web. There’s more about traffic later in this guide.

On to Part Three: Work and Marketing

Jump to Part Four: The People We Meet, Traffic, Resources and Final Thoughts