My investment portfolio

My initial investment with autosurfers is around $5000. I am totally prepered to loose this money without starving. You should also make sure you invest only the amount of money you are prepared to loose. I decided to divert that sum to 5-6 sites to keep the risk at a minimum and the same time do not have to surf all day. Here is the list of sites I invest with and why I choose them. Check on the right of this blog to find links to them.

12DailyPro
I checked all (humanly possible) autosurf forums and threads about this one and decided that was a reasonable invest candidate. It claims a 12% return of your initial investment for 12 days.
You can use egold and stormpay to upgrade your account from the free membership level. Upgrading is necessary to keep your account activated. Note that the actual return on investment is not 12% because you loose your initial upgrade amount (thats the case for almost all autosurfers). Also, the initial deposit takes a few days to reach your account – usually 5 to 7 days. So, your actual return per day is around 2,3% - not bad actually.

Currently, I have upgraded using StormPay ($900) and eGold ($1080). My initial upgrade was with StormPay until I could I find a way to fund my eGold account. My experience with StormPay is a positive one. They do look like knowing what they are doing and they have a lot of options. However, their fees really suck – 3% to fund your account with credit card and a whopping 6,9%+$.30 to receive money from another StormPay user. EGold charges much less but it is much harder to fund your account. Commonly, you have to fund it using a bank money transfer.

DadNDaves
I had seen DadNDaves autosurfint site a few times during my first days with autosurfers. My initial reaction was negative. Oh boy, it really looks like as an amateur work regarding design. However, I soon realize that at least at this stage of autosurfing industry, the appearance of the site has little to do with the owner intentions. I soon found from other post all over the web that DadNDaves is owned by an old and very reliable webmaster that also runs the http://autosurfinfo.com site. Check his site, he surely knows how to be directa nd he does not afraid to speak his mind.
I put $1000 to DadNDaves.

Auto-surf.biz & eProfitSurf.com
These two are run by Dan and Collete. They also do not look professional but came highly suggested by everyone. So, I started regularly to visit their forum. Soon got convinced that they are dedicated to their community and deserve a position in my portfolio. Auto-surf.biz offers a 1% return but upgrades never expire and eProfitSurf.com offer 2% with upgrades that last for 2 years.
I put $1000 to auto-surf.biz and $500 to eProfitSurf.com.

StudioTraffic
This is the oldest one, the autosurfing site that shaped the industry as it stands today. They offer 1% per day with upgrades that last for one year. You need to surf 100 sites per day which is the upper maximum I have come to. However, they do look professional and have big plans. They introduced several smaller sites that can take advantage of the vast community that has been build around the mother site.
I put $100 to StudioTraffic - I may upgrade there soon.

PaidResponse
This is the first one I put money to. Paid Response is operated by Aaron Bowering, founder of the Junkies Network and author of several marketing based eBooks. In a place full of anonymously owned autosurfing sites this one seemed to be a very good bet. The terms are similar to StudioTraffic - 1% for upgrades that last 1 year. Also, it allowed for paypal upgrades, a very flexible option for me during the first days with autosurfers when I didn't have an egold or stormpay account. However, my experience with PaidResponse is rather mixed due to a few ever lasting technical problems (including a very annoying maximum connections issue) and several reports about delaying payments. Aaaron promised that all payments will be processed until end of November, so I will keep you informed if he keeps his promises.
I have put $1000 to PaidResponse.

Pixel advertisments? A new crazy idea that works...

Before the post about my current investment status with autosurfers I felt like posting a bit about this new trend about pixel advertisment. If you don't know anything about it here is what wikipedia says about this concept and his originator:

'The Million Dollar Homepage is a website conceived by Alex Tew, a 21 year old from Wiltshire, England to help raise money for his university education. Launched on August 26th, 2005, the website has (as of October 24th) generated a gross income of USD $474,400 and has a Google PageRank of 7.
The index page of the site consists of a 1000 x 1000 pixel grid (one million pixels), which he sells image-based links on for US $1 per pixel. A person who buys one or more of these pixelblocks can design a tiny image which will be displayed on them, and also decide a URL which he or she wants them to link to. The aim of the site is to sell all of the pixels in the image, thus generating one million dollars of income for the creator.'

You can check the Million Dollar Homepage at: http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com

Well, I can not hide that I feel a bit depressed I have not come first with this idea - it is so simple that makes it briliant. It is so good that you erase it from your mind the same monent you conceive it because you (falsely) believe it will never work or that someone else would already have think about it. I guess that the moral of the story is to think possitive and always try ideas that need a minimum investment and have the potential of making a difference to your life.

I am certain that the next years a few more person will come up with such brilliant ideas and the determination to give them a try. This will change their lifes for ever. Why not become one of them?

Autosurfers - An Introduction

Autosurfers are one of the easiest way to accumulate money online. I will deal with them in great extend during the next weeks so make sure you visit this site for more info on them.
The idea of autosurfers has evolved through time. Their basic principle is to get paid for viewing other peoples’ sites. At its initial steps people were surfing for hours to gain extremely small amounts of money. I did try it once, it was 4 or 5 years ago, but I decided it was not for me. My main incentive back then was to gain traffic for my own site, by viewing sites of other people. That mutual exchange of traffic is on the core of autosurfers even today.
However, the whole concept has become a lot more alluring. Most current autosurfers offer people a daily percent of money, depending on their membership level, for every day they surf a predefined number of sites. For example, if you have a membership level of $1000 and your autosurfing site offers 1% for every day surfing then you can make $10 each day. You can use them even as a free user – usually they feed your account with $5-$10 just for joining- however, if you want to make some serious bucks you need to become a paid member and invest money to a membership. Although a few will treat them as gambling I rather prefer to treat them as an investment. A risky one, but still an investment.
Risky? Why, you would ask. Well, first of all, the return of investment you are promised is extremely high. For a 1% daily autosurder –which is the absolute minimum today- and an initial investment of $1000, you make back $3650 every year.
Note that you loose your membership fee which means that after one year you have actually gain $2650, a return of 265%. Still, no real world investment can match this offering. No one I am aware of at least. So, the question that rises naturally is where the money that we are promised comes from and if it is guaranteed… and there is no simple answer to that (I will make another post on the “where-money-comes-from” subject soon). Another risk factor is that most autosurfers are not legal entities and they offer no address and phone contacts – in other words they can vanish in thin air whenever they feel like. Still, most of them offer public (although heavily moderated) forums where members can meet and exchange opinions.
Even under these conditions there is much room to make money with autosurfers. If an autosurfer vanishes after 6 months you can still make back your initial investment in approximately 3 months (for sites that offer 1%) and then be on the safe side by trading only your earnings. Also, you can diversify your investment to several autosurfing sites and minimize the risk of loosing everything at once on the expense of extra work.
I have personally decided to invest some money on them and see how this works. There are a few sites that can help you make a wise decision and offer public forums that are not heavily moderated like the forums of the autosurfing programs. My favorite information site at the moment is http://www.autosurfcentral.com/. It is run by Jim Polak and is full of interesting readings. On my next post I will describe what sites I peaked for investing and why I choose them.

Goals!

The first thing we have to determine is our goals. My personal goal is financial freedom. What financial freedom means is rather open to discussion but for me it means this: "Do not relly on a daily job or anyone else to sustain a good standard of living". This does not mean having the car you dreamed about or having the exotic house at Greek islands you saw in an advertisment. It means to remove the daily anxiety of surviving... to have enough money to sustain a level of life-quality that a daily job could provide but without the job.

From that point on, many possibilites are open to make even more - a lot more to be precise. I imagine that most people never utilize their potential just because their every day survival burden does not allow then to get one step further. It is important to relieve this basic burden first and then concentrate on more ambitious goals.

To make things interesting, I will "device" an ambitious goal - I will try to duplicate the following years an initial sum of spare money strictly by online investing. I will keep you informed about where I invest and how my investments are doing. While investing, keep in mind that there are no certain path one can follow or certain (if at all) returns to expect. The nature of internet make it much more difficult to trust anyone and ofcourse, it gives spare room for villains to target your money. However, as long as one diversify and play smart, there is much room to grow money faster than traditional real-world investments.

For the sake of stimulating this discussion, imagine the scenario of investing $10000 at either:
a) an account at your local bank (they offer around 2-3% annual return)
b) certificate of deposit (CDs) at bank as well (they offer around 3-4% annual return)
c) mutual funds (depending on the type of mutual fund you can expect 8-10% annually)
d) stocks (since 1920's stocks return an average 13% annualy. Ofcourse there are much better and much worse years)
e) online schemes that offer between 80-100% ROI (ROI=Return of Investment)

Ofcourse the bigger the return the more the risk, but just for a moment, lets exclude the risk factor from our calculation. What would be the total nested-egg we would have aggregate after just 7 years of reinvesting the accumulated money with any of the above forms of investments? Here is the maths:

a) Bank account(3%) = $12300
b) CDs(4%) = $13159
c) Mutual Fund(%10) = $17138
d) Stocks(13%) = $24562
e) Online Schemes(80%) = $612220

Well, the figures talk by themselves. Many will tell you that the online scheme is not possible, or that the involved risk is too great. I will tell you that if you have some spare money that you afford to loose, then the goal deserves the risk. If you like to be in the safe side thats fine. Otherwise, get prepared for the journey ...

Hello and welcome to my blog

Hello and welcome!

This is a blog about online opportunites for making money. I've spent the last 5 years working and making a living strictly from web related activities and decided to share my experience with all of you. This hopefully means to help you make some money online. I will mostly deal with opportunities... opportunities to make, with small or bigger risk, enough money to feed yourself and your families. Opportunities to grow your nest-egg and retire early. Opportunities to withdraw from your borring daily job and spent more time with friends and family.

Internet is like a gold mine. As it speedy evolves, it produces new money making territories. They are out there, we just need to find them. This is an itterative process... I will keep you informed about any new money making idea I have tried and how (if at all) successful I've been. I will even publish my investment portfolio and discuss strategies for making money quickly and effectively. You are welcome to post your comments or your own experiences.