Ugh, Paid Surveys?

I know that was my first reaction to Cash Crate. This isn’t the fault of Cash Crate; it’s because we’ve been bombarded with so many scams that most of us are automatically turned off by any of these kinds of websites. There are several common issues to paid survey sites: they could be phishing scams in disguise, you could get bombarded with junk mail, and the payouts are typically way lower than what they advertise. Realistically, do you think you can make thousands of dollars each month filling out surveys? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

With this paid survey service, however, they seems to be much more up front and particularly honest with what you can expect to get. Each day, you will have the opportunity to complete a maximum of two surveys for 80 cents each. This translates to a monthly income of less than 50 bucks, assuming you do two surveys each and every day. I tried doing one survey and it took me nearly 10 minutes. That works out to an hourly “wage” of $4.80. Pretty abysmal.

Thankfully, there are tons of other offers to pick up the slack and you can find these in the member’s area.

As you can see, many of these pay out more than 80 cents each. Offers that require Credit Card information or money up-front (e.g., shipping and handling) are indicated as such. I’d stay away from offers that ask for money.

No Cost To You

Also unlike other paid survey services, Cash Crate will never ask you for any money whatsoever to become a “member.” In fact, it’s quite the opposite because they have a referral program in place. When you first sign up, you get 20% for first-level referrals and 10% for second-level. This is the “bronze level.” Here are the rest of the levels:

• Silver: 50 active referrals, 25% first level, 10% second level
• Gold: 150 active referrals, 25% first level, 15% second level
• Platinum: 300 active referrals, 30% first level, 15% second level
• Elite: 500 active referrals, 30% first level, 20% second level

It takes quite a bit to move up on your membership status and even when you do, the difference in the payout is fairly minimal. You would think that with 500 active referrals, they’d be willing to fork out a little more. I should also note that when any user you refer makes his or her first $10, you get a one-time bonus of $3.

Low Payout Threshold

Cash Crate sends out checks every month so long as you made at least ten bucks. This should be very easy.

So, How Much Can I Make?

Let’s have a look at how much is showing up in my account:

Yup, one big goose egg. Considering that this is my first day, the zero can be expected, but I did complete one survey and fulfilled one of the offers, so I would have hoped to see some instant gratification. They say that they need to receive confirmation from the vendors first.

In the end, you can’t possibly expect to make a full-time income by filling out surveys and completing promotional offers, but with an odd survey here and a membership signup there, you could make a little extra pocket change to blow on some Adsense-optimized Wordpress themes or something.

On a side note, most of the offers are catering to people in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. While people from other countries can sign up, they won’t find nearly as many offers.

Sign up for Cash Crate

Write for people, not for Google

We all know how much Google can be helpful in bringing traffic to your blog. If you do SEO optimization so well for your blog, Google will rank you No 1, but visitor won’t. A visitor will not come back if your page makes no sense to him/her. However, if you have something that makes you stand out, not only will you attract more visitors (read more traffic), but you will also be more present on Google because Google follows people. Always try to write thought-provoking articles ‘cause they’ll be more commented, and comments are the best thing your blog can have.

Increase number of comments

The best way the show-off with growth of a blog is by the average number of comments. If you see a blog outhere with well-written posts, and hardly no comments it is a win situation. However, if you see a blog with bad and copy/paste posts and tons of comments, you will notice that most of them are spam or “Great post, man!” comments. My blog currently has very small number of comments, but I don’t mind. I try to write my posts the best I can (English is not my first language), and it makes me happy. I don’t want to become popular over night. I also don’t wanna stop being popular, once I start being…

My advice to you is: Don’t worry about having few visitors, worry about keeping them!