Hugon's guide to making and saving money on the net (Online Perks in general)

Member Name: hugon

Product:	Online Perks in general
Date:	24/08/00 (102 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Free money, saving money

Disadvantages: Not very much, takes time to get real rewards

With the advent of 24/7 unmetered access, the internet user with a bit of spare time on their hands can finally make a little bit of money from the internet. The get rich quick schemes have all fallen flat on their faces, but the user with a bit of savvy and knowledge of the right places to go can get a little bit extra. Admittedly, it won't buy you a Ferrari, or even a second-hand Skoda, but you might get enough to get yourself a lovely new CD or DVD.

Paid for writing opinions

Dooyoo.co.uk
You're here already - you should know the score by now - 10p per opinion you write, 5p each time a dooyoo member reads your opinion. You can get a bonus £1 on top of that if your opinion is sufficiently good to be awarded a crown. Opinions must be at least 75 words long. However, if you constantly knock out poor quality opinions barely above the word limit, you will find yourself earning very little money as few people will value your opinions to any extent, and stop reading them. To make any sort of headway on the site, you should be prepared to invest quite a lot of time and effort both reading other people opinions, and commenting to make yourself known around the site, and also a good amount of time writing and researching your opinions so they are of the greatest use possible to users of the site. Obey those rules and you should see the reads ticking up nicely and soon you should be able to claim a payment. Once you collect £50 in your account, you can request a cheque to be sent out, and you can claim vouchers for as little as £10 in your account. Anytime I have requested payment, I have received it within a week.

Ciao.com
Another variation on the paid for opinions site - this time you get paid 10p per opinion you write, and 2p each time a member reads it. However, Ciao has a greater referral scheme, where you get 30% of any new member's earnings added to your account, so if you can get a few friends to sign up and actively wri
te, you could make a nice little sum. Ciao has a premium fund to reward it's top opinions, whereby the select top opinions in a certain period can earn as much as an extra £15, down to an extra £1. Obviously the more time you spend on the site reading and writing, the better chance you have of collecting the money. I rarely use Ciao these days, I feel that to actively write and rate in both you need to have a great deal of free time, and to do it to the best of my ability, I only use dooyoo, but have a look around both sites and see which you prefer. Ciao pay out after £10 is earned, and they only pay out at certain times of the month (usually the end I think). Payment goes straight into your bank account, provided you supply the details.

Infront.co.uk
Not strictly a specific opinions site, Infront is an online retailer of CDs, Videos, DVD, Games and Books. If you open an account with them, you have the opportunity to write reviews on anything that they sell. The reviews only need be short, between 400 and 800 characters. There is a limit of three reviews per day that you can write. Each review that is accepted earns you 5 points (equivalent to £1), and once you collect 25 points you can get £5 off your next order at infront. You can build the points up in your account, there is no maximum that you can have, and I generally wait until there is a CD/DVD coming out that I want and then but it with the maximum amount of points I can - you can use the points in multiples of 25 up to or below the value of your order - you can't ever get change from your vouchers. There are other ways of earning points as well - once you reach three orders with them, they will give you 15 points, and further landmark orders will also earn you extra points. They also award points for referring users to the site; you will earn 25 points when they complete their first order. A few minutes every day writing a couple of reviews can soon start the points added up. In experi
ence, they are pretty streetwise and can tell if you actually have experience of a product of not, and reject reviews accordingly. A word of advice though - points for reviewing videos don't seem to be added to your account - this has happened to me on a few occasions and it might be worth leaving for a while until this is rectified.


Reward Schemes

There are a few decent reward schemes on the net for UK user. These schemes reward you for visiting their sites, clicking on banners, signing up for various sites and lists and using their affiliates for shopping. If you shop there already then you'll add a few points to your collection for using them. The different sites operate different points systems, and can be claimed in different methods. It's worth mentioning that by signing up to various sites and lists you are leaving yourself open to plenty of spam, so it's well worth opening up a new web-based mail account to collect all this without cluttering up your normal inbox.

Ipoints.co.uk
Ipoints are probably my favourite UK based reward scheme. You get points for signing up to various lists, completing surveys, clicking on advertisements and using their affiliate shopping links from the likes of BOL and 101cd.com. It's easy to use; you can get 5 ipoints per day simply by visiting the site and clicking on two banners at the bottom of the page. Doesn't sound like much I know, but 80 ipoints will get you a £5 voucher from the likes of Marks and Spencer or Dixons - that's less than a minute each day and within 16 days you'll have a £5 voucher. The vouchers take around a week to come.

Beenz.com
You can earn beenz in a similar way to ipoints, although getting beenz back when you shop is limited as most of the online retailers offering beenz for shopping with them are based in the US. Up to 25 beenz are available every day by visiting the site, and various sites will reward you with beenz for vi
siting them or signing up for their mailing list. Rewards for beenz start at around 850 for a cinema ticket, so it'll be a bit longer before you get anything from beenz. Check out sunbeams great page at http://dooyoo.community.everyone.net for details of where you can go for the latest beenz deals.

Webrewards
In my opinion, the poorest reward scheme - you can earn three webrewards per day by using their text messaging service, and with rewards starting at 1000 for a book, it'll be about a year at that rate before you get anything. They also offer very few deals in the way of webrewards when you shop of for signing up for schemes. There is a lottery where you can win webrewards, but your chances of winning are pretty small. Webrewards might be worth keeping an eye on, but it isn't really worth it at the minute.


Paid for email

Mailround.com
Mailround is different from the many other pay to receive email programs. Rather than sending you spam, you sign up for the scheme and download a program, which adds small stamps to you emails that you send and receive. The stamps are quite colourful and actually add something to the email, but should you not wish someone to receive the stamps, you can select them not to receive the stamp when you send the email. At the end of each month, it works out how many stamps you have clicked on and sent, and rewards you with earnings accordingly - there are three levels bronze to gold, currently from £2 for Bronze to about £10 for Gold. These levels change every month. Payment is similar to dooyoo, once you reach £10 you can request vouchers, and when you get to £50 you can request a cheque. Not a lot of money to be had admittedly, but if you send email, it's worth having. The program doesn't affect your email client at all (except making downloading mail slightly longer).

Net-4-Biz.com
Net-4-biz is the other type of paid for email - you supply them with your email a
ddress and your interests and they send you targeted email according to what you specify. In each email is a link, which you must click to visit the site and collect payment for your email. These schemes are notorious for hardly sending you any mail, although net-4-biz doesn't send much (in my case about 5-7 per week), it is at least regular. Putting it bluntly, it'll be a long slog to get anything out of them. You'll get 5cents for every email you read, and 3cents for a referral read. Once you reach $20 you'll be paid, so by my reckoning that's 400 emails per $20! Again, it?s one of those schemes where I send it all to an online account, then pop in about once a week and read the mail all in one go. In my opinion, it's the best of a very poor bunch.


Paid for surf

In a word, no! Paid for surf is dead as the dodo. With many of the companies having gone under or paying an absolute pittance, it's no longer worth your while running these surf bars.


Paid for surveys

The other main source of income on the net is paid by surveys. Basically, you sign up for these schemes and give your details, then these companies ask you to complete surveys for them, provided you meet the requirements of the survey (e.g. surveys for mothers etc). They haven't really got off the ground, but there are a few worth having a look at. The surveys can be filled in in a matter of minutes and the return is usually a pound or two, it's a question of getting enough surveys to get paid!

Euro-panel.net
A new one, endorsed by dooyoo. You are paid in euros, which will be automatically transferred to your bank account once you have 40 euros (apparently about £25). Hey email you with surveys as they become available, I have only completed one so far, but I'm going to stick with it and see how it goes. They do award 5 euros for signing up.

Visitor Friendly.com
Another site where surveys are few an
d far between. I've been a member for two months now and I'm still waiting for my first survey. Again, you'll get about £1-2 for a survey, and be paid when your account reaches £12, it's getting there that's the problem.

I think these schemes will start to pick up as companies realise they can target their surveys to a much more specific audience rather than by stopping random people in the street, so I think it's worth giving them a go for a while at least.


Paid for text messages

MrAdGood.co.uk
With the advent of the mobile phone and the SMS message really taking off, it was only a matter of time before this sort of service started. Almost like a paid for email service using text messages instead of emails, you get paid 3p per text message you receive, and when your account reaches £5 you receive a cheque. I've had about 10 SMS messages in two months; so don't hold your breath for payment quickly! Still, it's in the early days, so it may just take off, who knows.


Price comparison sites

Save yourself the time and hassle of searching through all the online retailers to find where the item is cheapest - simply use either shopsmart.co.uk or kelkoo.com, enter what it is you're looking for and they will go off and return the results, including postage costs, and delivery times. These are very useful sites as the difference in costs of a CD can vary by as much as £5, and with different sites running different offers, you'll quickly see where the cheapest option is.

And finally, use www.ic24.net if you're looking for a free dialup for no cost. Running an 0800 number between 8pm - 12am, 7 days a week, IC24 might be difficult to log into, but you can save yourself a little money on the phone bill while you're on. Cut-off is after 1 hour's surfing, but you can log back in again (provided you can get connected). A tip - disconnect at 11.55 and then log i
n again, and you'll get free surfing until your hour runs out.

I hope this helps you save and make a few pounds on the net. It's nothing spectacular, but these are the schemes I use regularly, so I know they work and pay out. You're not going to make much, like I said, but the occasional CD or Video for free is well worth a few minutes of your time each day.

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