Get Paid To...waste my time

If you've Googled making money at home, you've probably run across GPT and PTC/PTR/PTS (paid to click/read/surf or sign up) sites. I did some research, admittedly maybe not enough, but what I found was enough to convince me I'd make money faster scouring parking lots for change. And end up with a far more manageable headache.

I'll be fair to anyone who wants to give this a try. Most of these sites have the same basic format and rules. Some have a very low minimum for payout, such as $2 at Cash Lagoon, others pay monthly or weekly. They have free offers which are generally surveys and sign ups that pay anywhere from about 20 cents to up to a couple of dollars. There are also trial and credit card offers where you pay a small fee at first to get a much higher return. And of course there are referral systems for building residual income. I'm not going to go into all the details here - there are sites galore dedicated to explaining this, even down to how many pages you should do on the survey/sign ups like here. I'll let them do it.

I started with Cash Crate. I jumped right in without having any real idea what I was doing. I figured the FAQs would be enough. In a word, no. I signed up and immediately started a free offer, a survey. Ten pages later in this apparently never-ending survey from the place none of us wants to go I just closed the browser window. I submitted it for payment and decided I needed to learn more about this. Surely not everyone would think this was so great if every offer was like that, right? But while I'm browsing, I'm suddenly buried in pop-ups and redirects. I've done tech support, I know my computer's been infected with something. Long story short, it took 2 hours to clear all traces of spyware, including a backdoor trojan, that had suddenly appeared on my system. I'm not saying it's Cash Crate's fault (actually it's my own for not being more careful), but that's a coincidence I'm not going to chance occurring again.

So I researched GPT sites, how people are making money using them. Here's a very basic list of things you should do:

Sign up for multiple email addresses to handle the flood of spam you'll get. Keep track of all these, because many offers require an email with a verification link being sent to the address you provide in order to get credit. Also, if you do too many offers with the same email address you won't get credit at all (I found this out at Cash Lagoon, I had about $20 worth of offers disapproved).

Sign up for a free voicemail number to handle the flood of telemarketing calls. A good site is Private Phone.

Get a prepaid credit card to use for the higher paying trial and credit card offers. Note, though, that many GPT sites are no longer accepting them. Here is a blog with a list of sites that still allow them, along with information about other recent changes in GPT sites.

Download an autofill program like Roboform to take care of the tedious surveys and sign ups. It is free with no spyware or adware.

Download CCleaner to delete your cookies and cache and make sure you're cleaning both after every single offer so that you're properly credited.

That's more effort than I personally want to go through. If you want to try GPT/PTC (etc, ad nauseum) sites, I sincerely wish you the best of luck. Me, I'm just going to hope I find some dropped change in parking lots.