I’m sure you’re raring to get your money earned, so lets get started right away. You’ll need to register with SearchCactus (http://www.searchcactus.com/)While you won’t make $500 in 5 minutes like the website claims, you can make about $400 in profit for just a little effort.
Just fill in your contact information like you’d do for any other website on the net. I suggest getting a new email address just for using this website, as most of the money making will involve a certain amount of spam and advertisements. This part is very straightforward.
SearchCactus is a website that collects a number of try-before-you-buy type products, but unlike many you’ll see on TV where you just get a product, this site pays you for trying them out. What you’ll be doing is signing up for many of the services you see listed on this site, collecting your bounty money, and canceling the service. Get those credit cards handy!
In order to use this service you need to sign in and click on the “Quick Cash” link on the top right of the website. Choose an offer, and sign up, using the same information you gave to SearchCactus, including that special email address I had you create. Make sure you read the user agreement to find out if you need to pay for any length of time for signing up, and then sign up, writing down the phone number and any membership or transaction numbers you get for doing it. Now, within the next two days, call up these services and cancel your membership. That’s it. You’ll get between $5 and $30 per offer for doing this. Make sure when you are collecting these bounties that you leave your SearchCactus account running!!! You’ll get a pop-up window from SearchCactus that will tell you exactly what you need to do to get the bounty, and Isuggest leaving the pop-up and the regular SearchCactus window up, just in case.
Now, do not just go ahead and do every offer. I tried this, and it’s full of headaches. You don’t want to sign up for anything involving phone calls, like people who offer health insurance quotes, no matter how much money. You also should avoid any trial offers where they force you to return the product, because it costs you time and money to ship the item back, and it often requires you to call and authorize a “Special Return Number.” Occasionally, you’ll find websites that force you to pay $10 for the first month of service, but the bounties are only for $8. Obviously, there is no money to be made there. The sites that you are looking for are trial offers of services.
Usually on these services, you’re going to take a hit of a $1 for a processing fee. In the end, you’re getting a big return on your money, and it’s very worth it. The first site you should check out is one of the Credit Card Protection services, because you will be giving out your credit card number to almost all of these sites. I kept the first one I found, and canceled it only after I had gone all the way through this website and collected all the good bounties I found. Doing so within a one-month time period meant that I didn’t pay them anything more than that $1 processing fee, and I collected a $17 bounty for my trouble.
One of the best that I found was a service called “Great Fun.” I got another $10 bounty from this site, and was able to save about $50 with their online coupons during the trial period. Of course, I canceled it right away since it was terribly expensive for the service, but I got plenty of benefits from it. This goes to show you, even though the majority should be canceled ASAP, you can get some benefit from using many of these services while you’re there.
There are also some sites where you will need to actually purchase something from the website. Usually, this negates the benefit you’ll be getting from the bounty, but there are a few that more than make up for it. One website sent me a CD for $5.95, which I later sold on eBay for $7, and I collected a $9 bounty on the offer. Another website offered 45 songs to download for $10 a month, but the bounty was only $5. I collected that bounty because it basically let me buy 4 CDs for $5, a deal if I’ve ever seen one. There are other sites, typically those created by Internet providers, where you need to subscribe for a month, but you get twice that money back in your bounty. Beware with these, and check with the user agreement to ensure that you’re not having to sign up for more than one payment. Most are still money makers though, so don’t just eliminate them based on this warning.
Remember the key to the whole process is to write down your cancellation phone number and your user id or confirmation number. I typically call to cancel my subscription within 3 days, although there are websites that only give you a 24 hour trial period. These I cancel within 5 minutes of subscribing.
I understand that one of the biggest problems that people have with this idea is having to call and cancel all these subscriptions. Personally, I’ve never had a problem with this. The people on the other end of the phone are about as interested in you as you are in the lives of Siberian Guinea Pigs. They don’t care on whit about whether or not you stay with the service or not, and will almost always read you a preprogrammed script in the most monotonous tone of voice that they can. If they ask you why you’re canceling, say “I like your competitors better” or “It’s just not what I hoped it would be.”
Most of them will have no problem canceling your membership, but will then ask you about a secondary offer that their service is offering. You always say no. If they talk to you too fast and you can’t understand them, simply say “Cancel my membership please.” After that, all you need to do is get paid. I suggest waiting for one big check at the end, but if you want to request two or three checks, that works just fine too. The unfortunate part is that it can take a few weeks to get your check in the mail, as Search Cactus needs all requests for payments a month ahead of time. There are two things to remember. First, you can only request one check per month. Once you hit that request button, you’ll get your check for that amount the next time Search Cactus sends out checks. If you make any more money during that time, you’ll have to wait until next month. The other thing to remember is that Search Cactus doesn’t send out checks for less than $20.
Towards the end of the time when you’re collecting bounties, make sure you have all your bounties credited to your account before you request the check. Typically it takes two to three business days for each of these sites to report your membership to Search Cactus and for them to credit your account, but it can take up to 7 days. The way to avoid this is to do all your bounties at once, then wait two weeks, then request a check. In fact, you don’t even need to request a check once you exceed $20, as one is automatically sent during the next billing period
So, how about some more? This next site, SendEarnings (http://www.sendearnings.com/) is almost exactly the same, though they require you to have made $40 before you can cash out. From your SearchCactus experience, you should know that this means little, as you get $40 after doing only 2-5 offers.
After you sign up, you’ll notice that there are a lot of the same exact offers that you see on Search Cactus, plus a whole lot more. Guess what? You can sign up for the same offers once from each website. Many of the offers will not process your membership if you’ve signed up or canceled a trial offer within the past 60 days, so you’ll need to wait a bit before using this site. You’ll also want a different email address to be used, as some offers will recognize your SearchCactus email address and forbid you to take the trial period over. All the same rules for SearchCactus apply, and remember, you can do the eBay offer even if you already have an account, as there are no rules on eBay against signing up for another one!
There are some quirks about this site though. First and foremost, you need to read one of their special solicited emails once a week if you want to stay a member, and when you do, you’ll get a whopping 2 cents. To avoid having to do this, I did all their offers within a two day period and cashed out. Again, use your a special email to get all these spam messages so you don’t have to bother with getting them in your regular account. After about two months or so, they will no longer send you any of these ads, so it’s not something you need to keep track of.
There are also a lot of offers that are “100% free” and this means that you simply have to put up with some junk mail once or twice a week for about a month, and you get about $25 for completing all those offers. Check to make sure that they aren’t asking for a “Best time to call” or anything like that, or else you’ll start to receive a lot more calls than you bargained for!
Treasure Trooper (http://www.treasuretrooper.com/) works much the same as the others, albeit with a few less incentive offers.
There’s one more that I can recommend. Cash Fiesta (www.cashfiesta.com) is a trial offer site that doesn’t pay you directly for the offers you sign up for. Instead, they pay you based on the number of advertisement’s you’re “viewing” each hour. This involves downloading a “Fiestabar” which runs along the top or bottom of your screen and flashes advertisements at you. It’s easy to ignore after a while, and not as cumbersome as you might imagine.
You typically earn around 600 points per hour, and it takes 1000 points to make a dollar. I’ve tested it with spyware and virus software, and it uninstalls cleanly and easily. While it doesn’t sound like much money, if you read carefully into their policy, this can be a decent way to make money as well.
It’s not going to earn you a massive amount of money like Searchcactus, SendEarnings or TreasureTrooper, but hey, money is money right. Sign up for 6 deals in a given month, then use the cancellation method I described in those sections. As long as you have done these 6 offers early in the month, you’re earning $1.66 per 1,000 points, and this more than pays for the electricity you’re using.Now, make sure that you’re leaving your computer on all night and all day. If you have a screensaver, hibernate mode, or turn off monitor enabled on your computer, shut them off (It’s under “PowerOptions” on the Control Panel if you use Windows). Then, whenever you’re done using the machine, move the cursor on top of the Fiesta bar to make it look like you’re considering offers.
Now, you can watch the cash roll in…slowly. Yes, much like PPC clicking, this site doesn’t exactly make you rich. However, using the two in combination, you can get a few nice checks after a month or two. This site does take referrals, and I implore you to search them out. They pay you immediately 15% of whatever your first referrals earn, and then down from there. As with PPC sites, this can augment the money you’re making and get those checks sent out sooner. While this one isn’t going to be for everyone, again consider that you’re getting something for nothing, you simply have to ignore a slight inconvenience.
I get a lot of questions concerning these websites, most specifically, why not continue membership with them, why does this work, and is this legal. Let me mention right now that I have no affiliation with either of them, other than being a member.
First of all, I discontinue my membership with these sites because offers very rarely get updated. In fact, during the 6 months or so since I’ve signed up, there have been no new offers at SearchCactus, and only 2 at SendEarnings. While you can remain a member forever at SearchCactus, there’s really no point if they never update their offers. And of course, SendEarnings has that annoying email policy.
Why does this work? This works based on a simple philosophy the offer sites have. They hope that you’re going to forget to cancel your trial period membership. You’ll notice that all of these sites charge ridiculous amounts of money for their products and services, and that’s because if they hit you once with charges, they’re happy as they can be. They do not refund your membership fees if you miss the experation period, even if it’s only a single day late! I think that deep down, they know that they offer crappy stuff to you, and that’s why they sign up for these bounty websites. At $99 a year for membership to a website or $130 a month for diet pills, if they get only a few customers who stay on past the free trial, they’ve made a lot of money, and that’s why these offer websites exist. The offer sites, like SearchCactus and SendEarnings get paid by the advertiser for each person who signs up, and for hosting the ad, and then they pass some of that money on to their customers.
And this of course means that doing these kinds of things is 100% legal. No bones about it. Hope you have a lot of fun and make a lot of money.
