Likes:

1. Fast approval of your application
2. Not very harsh conditions for blogs approval:
   • Your blog must contain at least 10 posts with 200 words of unique content each.
   • Your blog must not be completely automated or appear to be created solely for search engine traffic.
   • Your blog must have at least a 3:1 ratio of non-paid to paid content.
   • Your blog must have a minimum number of incoming links and traffic to qualify.
   • Your blog must have a professional appearance.
3. Possibility to submit more than one blog from the very beginning
4. Possibility to set your price per post as you wish
5. Seven days timeframe to submit a review after your inquiry has been approved by the advertiser
6. Very fast approval of posts
7. Payments are done bi-weekly, so you never have to wait more that 14 days from the moment your post has been approved until you get paid

Dislikes:

1. Advertisers seem to be sleeping (at least most of them), as very few actually answer to bloggers’ inquiry to write reviews
2. The fact that once enrolled in the system, a blogger still has to apply for each individual opportunity and wait for the advertiser to approve or reject the application

Despite the fact that there are so many positive things to be said about SponsoredReviews, the negatives make overall earnings with this program to be quite low, and highly uncertain.

There is also an affiliate program which pays you $5 for each blogger enrolled under your ID, and up to $175 for each advertiser which joins the program via your referral.

Today, looking through the campaigns list at Neverblue Ads, I’ve got an idea I will share with you. I could have done it as well with other affiliate networks, such as Shareasale or Commission Junction, or Clickbank. I’ve chosen Neverblue Ads because their list of programs is very easy to use, and once you get approved to become a member, you don’t need to apply for each program in particular (only a few programs are exception to this rule).

Idea: why not look for those “work from home opportunities” which offer free information or a free trial period? I suppose 14 days would be enough to decide if it is working or not.

So I did, and this is the list of free leads for home based business I’ve compiled (including absolutely freebies and programs for which you have to pay a small amount for shipping & handling):

1. eAuctionExpert (or Home Workers Needed)

• What you get:

• A 2 CD toolkit which will teach you:
  • How to become an eBay PowerSeller!
  • How and when to list your items.
  • The best methods of collecting payment.
  • How to find below wholesale product sources.
  • How to promote your business through eBay.
  • The Auction Check List for eBay.
  • How to create repeat online customers.

• 14 days free trial membership to the TradeWorks product club and eBay auction software

• Countries of availability: USA, Canada

• What you pay: the kit itself is free, you only have to pay a $4.95 handling & shipping tax

Attention! After the 14 day trial you will be billed $59.90 monthly for the continued service of the website, eBay auction software and for the membership to the TradeWorks product club. Make sure you remember to cancel your membership before you get billed.

2. Say Goodbye To 9 To 5 (or Would you like to be your own boss?)

• What you get: the promise that you’ll be contacted by 5 companies which offer work from home opportunities
• Countries of availability: USA, Canada
• What you pay: nothing, all you have to do is fill in a form with your contact details where you wish to receive the free home based business opportunities

3. Earn At Home Part Time (or Get your free training package)

• What you get: a free training package
• Countries of availability: USA
• What you pay: nothing, all you have to do is fill in a form with your contact details (it is not clear if there are any shipping & handling fees)

4. Passive Internet Profits (Get the Free Money Making CD Today)

• What you get:

• A CD toolkit which will teach you how to make passive Google profits using Google AdSense and other techniques

• Countries of availability: USA

• What you pay: the kit itself is free, you only have to pay a $1.95 handling & shipping tax.

5. Home Business Connection (Need more income? Do it from home; don’t leave the kids. See How)

• What you get: after filling in a form, you get matched with companies offering work from home opportunities
• Countries of availability: USA
• What you pay: nothing, all you have to do is fill in a form with your contact details

6. Increase My Margin (Increase Your Margins on eBay)

• What you get:

• 14 days free trial for IncreaseMyMargin eBay auction software
• instructions on how to make profits with eBay auctions

• Countries of availability: USA, Canada

• What you pay: the first 14 days of using the auction software are free, you only have to pay a $4.95 handling & shipping tax

Attention! Monthly service fees will commence 14 days from the date of the order, and will be billed monthly thereafter. After the 14 day trial you will be billed $49.90 monthly for the continued service of the website www.IncreaseMyMargin.com, so don’t forget to cancel your subscription in due time.

7. FusionCash (Need cash? Get paid to take surveys)

• What you get: complete online surveys and get paid (all members get $5 bonus at sign up)
• Countries of availability: USA
• What you pay: nothing

8. CashCrate

• What you get: complete online surveys and get paid
• Countries of availability: Members from the United States and other English speaking countries will have the most offers available to them, but members from other countries are welcome as well (I’ve actually tried this one, and offers for outside US are rather scarce).
• What you pay: nothing

9. SurveyTeam (Receive cash for participating in surveys and also gain access to a whole lot of freebies and sweepstakes.)

• What you get: complete online surveys and get paid (all members get $3 bonus at sign up, plus they can own the products they review)
• Countries of availability: USA
• What you pay: nothing

10. Inbox Dollars

• What you get: complete online surveys, read email or play games online and get paid (all members get $5 bonus at sign up)
• Countries of availability: USA
• What you pay: nothing

11. Beach Bum Systems (A Beach Bum - Made $237, 000 from His Laptop)

• What you get: information about the “reverse funnel system” (actually all I got was an email in my inbox, but I was not able to understand what’s this reverse funnel system - probably that’s because I’m not from the US - if you manage to get more info than me, please leave a comment here, so I know what I missed)
• Countries of availability: USA
• What you pay: nothing, you just fill in your name and email address

12. John Beck Free and Clear (Own a foreclosed home for pennies on the dollar)

• What you get:
  • information about how to find, purchase and resell extremely cheap homes right from your home computer - homes most people don’t know exist - over 1.8 million in the US and Canada.
  • one month free membership in John Beck’s Tax Sale Property Vault and Advisory Hotline
• Countries of availability: USA
• What you pay: $14.50 handling & shipping (this seems quite expensive to me, but maybe it’s worth trying, if you want to try your real estate skills)

Attention! After the trial month you will be billed $39.95 monthly for the continued service membership to the Advisory Hotline. Make sure you remember to cancel your membership before you get billed.

13. MySpace Wealth System (Earn 150 dollars per day on MySpace)

• What you get:
  • information about how to use MySpace to earn money online (it seems that the author developed a system in this respect)
  • 3 days free membership in “Business Edge Network” ( I’ve never encountered such a short trial period)
• Countries of availability: USA, Canada, UK
• What you pay: the kit is free, you pay only $1.97 for handling & shipping

Attention! 3-day risk free trial membership to “Business Edge Network” of $39.97 will be billed with the initial $1.97 shipping cost (I think this sucks)! If you cancel the membership within 3 days they will refund the full $41.97. So, don’t forget to cancel in case you are not satisfied.

14. Grant Consultant (Govt. Grant Money Available- Act Now)

• What you get:
  • The Grant Consultant training and resource CD. This quick start program gives you the info you need to know about grants, how to apply for them, and how to put you ahead of others in the process.
  • Access to the www.GrantConsultant.com directory which provides a database of available grants, both federal and private grants.
  • Extensive advanced training for specific types of grants, including starting or expanding a business, education, personal needs, housing and more.
  • 10 days full access to the online training and directory
• Countries of availability: USA
• What you pay: $4.87 handling & shipping

Attention! After the 10 days of trial you will be billed $49.95 monthly for the continued service membership to the online training and directory. Make sure you remember to cancel your membership before you get billed.

15. Earn $3000 a week from home (You Could Be Making $5,000 to $10,000 a Month!)

• What you get:
  • free home business match up services (although these guys seem like they skipped Math classes in school, who knows, maybe they are better in business )
• Countries of availability: USA, Canada
• What you pay: nothing

As you can see, almost all opportunities are addressed to USA and Canada, thus preventing other countries’ residents (including myself) from trying them.

However, everybody can earn something from bringing referrals to these programs. All of them convert per lead, and the affiliate program is available via Neverblue Ads.

If you are not a member yet, find out that joining is easy, but before getting accepted, they would give you a phone call, so make sure you provide them a number where you can actually be reached (they rejected me in the first place because I did not answer my phone - their call was set to display “private” and I seldom take private calls).

Enjoy the list and please forgive affiliate links (it took me 4 hours to put it together after all )

If you are a blogger and you use PayPerPost, you probably know what I’m going to tell you now. If you didn’t join them yet, you may find this story interesting, in terms of expectations and amount of time required for the money you are going to get.

Before going into details, I want to tell you a story about Perestroika, the Russian reform initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev, Russia’s former president.

In Gorbachev’s time, in Russia, there was this eagle, flying backwards, very relaxed, very satisfied with his new way of flying. The fox sees him and asks him why is he flying backwards.

“I’m doing Perestroika”, the eagle replied, “and it feels so good, that you definitely should give it a try, too!”

The fox thinks it’s a good idea and starts running backwards. Unfortunately, she gets stuck with her butt in a bear’s shelter. The bear was at home, and without too much thinking, he started f…ing the fox, until she fainted.

The next day, the fox meets the eagle again.

“Hey, foxy, did you try Perestroika, as I told you yesterday?” asks the eagle, smiling.

“Please go away! This Perestroika may be a good thing there, in your heights. Here on Earth, we still call it a f..k!”

Now, about the time required to make $5 with PayPerPost:

Step 1 (5 minutes): I signed up. The process was easy. I also submitted my blog.

Step 2 (2 minutes): I get an e-mail informing me that my blog was rejected, because it does not have an “Archives” page in cronological order, so they cannot determine how old it is.

Step 3 (20 minutes): Although I don’t wanna have an “Archives” page, I make it, I include it and mess up my menu bar items, then I resubmit my blog.

Step 4 (30 minutes): A couple of days later, my blog is accepted, and I choose an open opportunity to review, not because of the $5, but just because I was in the mood to review something that night. Besides, I really liked the products those people were selling on their site. With this occasion I discovered that with PayPerPost opportunities you cannot rely on the Timestamp feature too much, because you have only six hours from the moment you accept an opportunity, until submitting your entry.

Step 5 (2 minutes): Three days later, I get an email informing me that my post was rejected, because my blog’s homepage displays only an excerpt of it, and this is not OK.

Step 6 (5 minutes): Although I wanted my homepage to display only excerpts of my last 6 posts, I change it to display full posts, only for the sake of PayPerPost, and I resubmit my post.

Step 7 (2 minutes): The next day, I get another rejection e-mail, informing me that my post cannot be accepted because I have Google AdSense ads between the post title and the content.

Step 8 (2 minutes): Although I want that AdSense block to stay exactly in that position, because it is the result of 6 months of playing with placements, I remove AdSense from that post and resubmit it again.

Total time until this step: 1 hour +.

Total time frame: 2 weeks
Did I make the 5 bucks? Not yet. It seems that you need some skills I lack, to be able to fly backwards, the PayPerPost style.

Why do I feel like the fox in my story?

Later update: I was just informed that my post has been approved. The most funny part of the message was something like “now tell your friends how quick and easy it was”.

I’ve been approached by one of the newest links broker, TNX.net, to review their services. So I joined the network, and these are my first impressions.

Differences between TNX.net and other similar programs:

• the points system: links are traded for points. Currently, 1000 TNX points =$1.2 and it is “increasing every week by at least 2%” (according to TNX.net website)
• flexibility: the points earned by selling links on your site, or from the refferal program can be used to buy links on other sites.
• low links price: for example, you can buy PR5 links at the price of $3/month, which is lower than I’ve seen so far in other programs (and lower than I ever thought I’d accept for any of my PR5 pages); however, this is the minimum price; the maximum price can be 20 times higher, according to the number of Yahoo backlinks.

Buying Links With TNX.net

Advertisers will enjoy an attractive offer, but they won’t be able to choose the sites the want to advertise on. The choice is done by the number of backlinks (according to Yahoo), by website category and by geo targeting.

These are the minimum monthly link prices, per month:

PR 0 = 1 TNX-Point = $0.002
PR 1 = 50 TNX = $0.06
PR 2 = 100 TNX = $0.12
PR 3 = 200 TNX =$0.24
PR 4 = 500 TNX =$0.6
PR 5 = 1,000 TNX = $1.2
PR 6 = 2,500 TNX = $3
PR 7 = 5,000 TNX = $6

As you can see, it is easy for webmasters to quickly set up impressive link campaigns at low costs. It took me about 10 minutes to set up a small campaign with the 2000 bonus TNX points I got for joining the program, according to this thread in DigitalPoint forums. I ordered a big bunch of PR0 and PR1 links. If I was to spend time to find all those blogs and to leave comments on the do-follow ones, it would have taken me several days. If I like the outcome, I’ll go for bigger fish next month.

Selling Links With TNX.net

The good news is that you can sell links at individual post level (this works on any sites and you can sell up to 4 ads on every page. At Text Link Ads you can sell only 1 ad and it works only on Wordpress sites). There are some entry barriers for a site to be accepted, not so high as in other cases, but still:

• number of visitors: at the present time there are no restrictions!
• PR: It is preferable to have pages on the site with PR at least 1.
• domain: preferred are second level domains with paid hosting registered over 6 months ago
• site selection by search engines: at least once per month
• number of pages: at least 30 (with regular ranking)
• presence in a major catalogue, DMOZ: preferred
• PHP: a must

I don’t believe there will be too many people who will get rich from TNX.net, but one can see it as an easy, convenient way of exchanging one-way links. Not to mention that if you have a talent in building affiliate networks, you can earn a passive income from your referrals, via the affiliate program:

When you refer webmasters to TNX.net, you get 13.3% (as long as your account is active) of all TNX-points that are generated by their websites. In addition, you will receive 5% of all payments, made by referred advertiser (this option will work after paypal payments will be automated).

Joining TNX.net is free and very easy to do, as you are not required to activate your account. However, submitted sites’ approval is not done instantly. This can be a sign of quality of the sites in the network (as nobody wants to place their links in bad neighborhoods).

Where’s the money?

You can redeem your points from TNX.net at the price of $0.62 per 1000 points, or you can sell them to other members for any price you wish. It will be interesting to see a new virtual currency developing.

If you are not afraid of the big bad g….woolf, you are invited to give it a try!