Break Studios

I've decided that I really need to force myself into writing for more content sites on top of my client base so that I can fall back on something when my clients go AWOL or are short on funding.

I took the first step and applied with Break Studios this week and got my acceptance letter from them as well.  I'm excited because the rate of pay is pretty decent compared to other content mills, but I'm a little reluctant to start.  I'll just have to force myself jump in and hope for the best...  I should be fine and I've never gotten bad feedback on my writing, but I'd imagine that private clients are easier to please than content sites that have 1000s of writers begging for a chance.

One Time Opportunity for $25

Do 10 reviews and earn $25!

This was originally posted on the WAHM boards, I wanted to be sure it was legit before I posted it.

It was a bit of an ordeal for me to actually hear back from them because apparently they manually respond to people who fill out the job posting and they don't respond on weekends - so fill this one out ASAP and if you don't hear back from them visit AroundMe.com and email them through the contact link.

Once I actually got directions from them on what to do, the process was simple. Just write 10 original and detailed reviews on different types of places of 60+ words. Then follow the rest of the directions in the email they send you.

It's a quick $25, the only thing that I don't like is that the reviews actually show your FaceBook picture which makes me a little uncomfortable. I mean seriously... who wants to give a bad review (in a tiny town like mine) when their pic is attached to it? You can remedy this problem, by going to your Settings page and selecting not to show your picture though.

(Proof of Payment)

Update on IMShopping

So yesterday I posted that I thought my pay amount from IMShopping was off by a couple of dollars right? Well, I wasn't overly concerned, but when I logged in yesterday I found that it had been corrected! Their community manager had actually gone in and updated the information so that I'll get it with my next deposit!

How great is that?

They really do go above and beyond to help their workers out and I'm looking forward to things settling down at home so that I can start doing more on their site.

What I really love are all the little bonuses that they offer, like $5 for the best answer in a certain time frame, or getting paid to ask questions etc... it's really great.

If you haven't signed up you should definitely do it now - the sooner you do, the sooner you'll have a chance to become a paid Guide. Remember to ask or answer a question after you register to get the ball rolling also :)

(Proof of Payment)

Bukisa

I just signed up with Bukisa. I've heard a lot of positive things about them lately, and they seem like they could be a decent residual income source...

They don't offer any upfront payments which is a bit of a draw back, but they do pay your for page views and also for your referrals page views as well which is an interesting twist. They also don't require original content, you can use content you have posted on other sites with them as well. (Meaning you can republish your blog content there if you wanted to. I'm not sure if I'll do that, but it's an interesting idea.)

I'm planning to give it a good looking over in the morning, for now I'm just wrapping up a few of my night time projects!

KGB, iRazoo, Shopping.com

I heard back from KGB, apparently because they felt two of the questions I answered "could have been answered better" I have to redo the simulation. It is good that they give you that option, and it didn't actually take me long to do the sim, but I'm still a bit annoyed haha

I'll redo it tomorrow most likely, and update on my status after that!

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Unfortunately I missed my first day ever on iRazoo on Friday! I realized it at half past midnight and I was so annoyed. I'm still just a couple of days away from another card - but I'm not pleased that I forgot to do my searches and set myself back a day. It's because I moved from a morning task to evening, and was still adjusting. Hopefully that won't happen again!

I'm still waiting on both of my gift cards from them as well.

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I came across a nice little egg on the WAHM forums the other day as well. It's another review writing project, but the pay is a little lower that I'd like. That's more so because I tend to be a bit wordy though, but I'm sure you all know that by now!

The site is Shopping.com and the general pay layout is below (the full information can be found here):

Reviews written between November 1, 2009 - November 30, 2009, will be deposited in your PayPal account on or before December 16, 2009.
Reviews written between December 1, 2009 - December 31, 2009, will be deposited in your PayPal account on or before January 16, 2009.
Payment Table for Reviews
First 5 Reviews will earn $5
No additional payments for 6-14 Reviews
15-29 Reviews for $10
30-44 Reviews for $20
45-59 Reviews for $30
60-74 Reviews for $40
75-89 Reviews for $50
90-104 Reviews for $60
105-119 Reviews for $70
120-134 Reviews for $80
135-149 Reviews for $90
150+ Reviews for $100
To qualify: Your Reviews must be submitted on a product or service in Shopping.com's database and comply with the Shopping.com User Agreement.

Overall, for $100 I'm willing to shell out 150 reviews, even if the per word rate will be poor for me personally I feel that overall it will be worth it since I do reviews really quickly.

As far as I've been able to tell there are no clear cut requirements for length on the site either, so for folks who don't have overactive, long winded fingers, the per word rate would probably end up much better ;)

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I've also decided to tinker with the layout here a bit (as previously mentioned) so I downloaded some free graphics software by the name of Gimp that I'm going to be testing out.
If you see images and posts popping up and disappearing, don't be alarmed, it's just me trying out different things!

November Goals

Phew, what a day! I haven't even made my goals post yet, and I've already accomplished some of them - that's what I call a good start to the month. This month my goals are more multifaceted than they were for October since I was just starting out at the time. I'm still taking baby steps though to make sure I don't bite off more than I can chew.

So here they are, my goals for the month of November:

1. This is the obvious one, predetermined at the birth of this blog - to earn $300 worth of spendable cash by the end of the month. That means that only money that makes it to my bank account or PayPal account will be included in the tally.

2. Create (and consistently utilize) a daily schedule. I've taken on a lot of little eggs, and now it's time for me to focus more on nurturing them while still adding a couple to the stash. Each egg requires a certain amount of attention and it's time to find out how much so I can maximize my earnings.

3. Sign up with a freelance writing site and write at least 4 articles during the month to start getting my feet wet. Technically I've already started working on this one with Textbroker - I signed up and was accepted yesterday and I submitted my first article. I'm waiting to see if it makes the cut or not. I'm toying with the idea of setting up with a residual income sight like Associated Content as well though.

(Oh! They accepted my article - the acceptance email mentioned something about revising and rating the article in 2-7 days, but they seem much quicker than the estimates they give from what I've seen. Regardless, I've gotten $4 in my account for my 400 word article, which is great since they allow you to request payouts at as little as $10.)

4. Find a new private contract freelance gig. Technically I've accomplished this as well and am doing a trial run today, but I don't think I want to count it for this goal because even though it was already on my mental goal list, the job came into existence before I officially made this post.

All right, I think that was all of my goals for the month, or at least I hope it was! Time to get busy working on that schedule - too bad I'm better at making them than I am at sticking to them hehe

What are your goals for November?

TextBroker

TextBroker is one of the sites that I've seen that comes highly recommended to new writers. As part of my goals for the month (coming later) I decided to go ahead and apply with them yesterday to see what would happen.

I applied in the late afternoon, was accepted and told to write a sample for them. I did that and figured it would take 3-4 days to hear back but I actually heard back from them within a few hours which was a nice surprise.

Their pay varies by the ranking they give you as follows:
2 Stars = .7¢ per word (yes .7¢ which means less than 1¢)
3 Stars = 1¢ per word (this is where I got rated)
4 Stars = 1.4¢ per word
5 Stars = 5¢ per word

Clearly, unless you're ranked at 5 stars, the money is minimal, but I'm ok with starting out at 1¢ a word to get some experience under my belt.

I will warn anyone who is considering signing up now though, that there really don't seem to be a lot of 3 or 5 star articles. As a matter of fact I'm going to have to stalk the page to even find a subject that I'm comfortable writing on at the 3 star level. (Right now the only articles up are about rifles!)

I was really excited but now I'm a little iffy.

More feedback coming as I have it!

Update from Wanelo

Wanelo (Want Need Love) is a website for mothers (and parents in general) to review products that they have personal experience with. Whether it's baby products, toddler toys, PS3 games or margarita mixers.

Now that they've reached their goal, they're putting a limit on the number of paid reviews that can be done by each paid reviewer weekly. The limit will be 10 per week and you still have to meet the requirements that we've been working under already:

-Personal experience with the item
-110 words or longer (they say for a new item review that's 8 lines of text, for a review of a product already on the site it's 11 lines because the form is more narrow).
-Good spelling and grammar
-No foul language

They also have weekly contests with prizes ranging from $5-25. I won $5 last week for "Favorite Collection" which was pretty exciting.

If you haven't started writing paid reviews yet, I'd recommend finding one of my earlier Wanelo posts and checking out the job postings that are linked for them to see if you can still get on with them. I'll update my payment proof later tonight with the $5 prize as well as my second review payment once it comes through.

$40 a month is equal to 10% of my end goal for December - how much of your goal would it be?

Updates!

PeopleString: I got my post card today, so for those of you who have signed up, it took about 3 weeks for me to get it. Now hopefully I'll start getting more mail!

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Cloud Crowd: They've got tasks up again! Hopefully that means things are almost all straightened out. Not all tasks are available, but some is better than none.

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GreenField Online: Turns out I got approved for the second $30 interactive survey! I found out this morning that I was accepted for the afternoon session they had today. I had a few technical difficulties that caused me to miss a few minutes of questions (read that as my son turned my hard drive off while playing!) but their tech support said that as long as I was there for most of the survey I would still be paid. I'll update when it posts (if it posts).

That's two $30 interactive surveys in a month that I've qualified, and one $50 that I missed out on. One on the 5th and one on the 20th - which is pretty awesome. I still haven't managed to qualify for one of their regular surveys, but I'd still recommend them just for these interactive surveys.

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Wanelo: They're up over 2000 reviews right now but I'm not sure how many of those are "qualifying" reviews so I'm going to keep writing until I hear otherwise. Hopefully they'll keep paying. Either way I did over 60 this week before they reached the 2k mark and one of my collections won $5 award! (Haven't been paid yet, I assume that will happen Friday with the review payments.)

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I'm super excited, the month is 2/3s over and I'm 3/4 of the way to my goal for October purely based off PayPal deposits and not including pending payments or gift cards.

It feels good to be contributing (even a little) and it's great to know that others are learning and earning as well!

IMShopping

So I've been spending time on IMShopping a little more regularly lately. Nothing serious, but I've been answering 4-5 questions almost daily for the past few days.

I hold by my previous statement that it could be profitable to work on cash questions alone. 4 out of 5 that I did on Thursday (I think it was Thursday) won the $2 tip yesterday when they finished which is pretty awesome. Right now I've answered 22 questions, gotten best answer on 7 (some other answers are still pending), and gotten 6 additional thumbs up.

I've only been signed up since October 3rd, I haven't put consistent time into the site until recently, but I've still managed to earn $14 with them which is nearly a dollar a day. At that rate IMShopping could account for 7.5% of my end goal (or more) monthly.

Their community manager has also recently made an exciting announcement about hiring, and new ways to get paid:

IMshopping will begin hiring from our site starting on October 27th. We will be inviting community members to become paid Shopping Assistant Guides at that time. In order to be invited, you must answer 25 questions on our site to showcase your research skills.

View the full post here.

I do however think that their most recent update has decreased the number of tip questions though, because all the questions I asked used to pay $2 from the site, and they no longer do - so if you're looking to try and get hired, I'd suggest jumping in now!

Wanelo - Temporary Project

This isn't exactly the type of thing that I'd normally post in my blog, but because this seems to be an off and on project with them, I feel like it might have the potential to be a steady income gig.

Here's a freelance style project for parents being offered by a new website (that I really enjoy) called Wanelo - Want Need Love.

I wanted to test it out before posting it, I made $20 writing reviews on Thursday night and Friday morning. (Payment Proof)

1. Go to Wanelo and register. Make sure to upload a profile picture. (Registration is very quick. Don't worry–we never send out spam or ask for any personal information.)
2. Email momreviews1@wanelo.com to let us know your Wanelo username BEFORE writing any reviews. In the email, please let us know your age, the ages of all of your children, and your location. If you are hired, instructions for writing reviews will be emailed to you.

(Only the first 2000 qualifying reviews will be paid as of this posting.)

Qualifying reviews must be:

- in English
- between 110-130 words in length
- products reviewed must be products for babies, toddlers, older children, or specifically for parents.
- relevant to the product the review is about
- free of any curse words
- must employ good spelling and grammar

For the full write up visit: Job Post

IMShopping and IMReportCard

So I started putting a bit of time into a new find. IMShopping is a site where you can ask questions about merchandise and/or answer questions about merchandise.

Supposedly they select people periodically to become "Shopping Assistants" which means that you get money for each question you answer. However, until you're selected to do that (don't ask what the qualifications are, I don't know and neither does anyone I talk to) you can answer questions for "tips" of up to $2. To actually get the tip you have to be selected as the best answer.

I've only messed around on the site a little bit, answered 9 questions, and I've won best answer on 2 of those! The 9 I've answered also includes one I did before I had a clue what I was doing. Once you reach $40 you can cash out.

I think that if you put some decent time into it, it could be profitable. I haven't done it yet, but I plan on creating a schedule for myself and putting an hour into IMshopping daily to see what kind of turn around I can get from it.

Here's the first question that I was selected a winner for: Where can I buy a chemistry set for my daughter? at IMshopping

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Another site I've come across that has potential is IMReportCard. This is a site for grading and reviewing all kinds of financial oriented websites and programs. You get points for everything you do on the site, and you also earn points for anything your referrals do.

You get 50-150 points for writing a comment on a review, 10 points for grading a site, 1 point for rating other comments - etc. Each point is worth 1¢ and when you reach 2000 points ($20) you can cash out.

The site is legit, and has great earning potential BUT before you can do any rating you have to comment on something and get your comment approved. That's the hard part. It took me a couple weeks to come up with something that I could comment on because you have to have first hand detailed knowledge of it - and most of the more familiar ones (like TrekPay, YouData, etc) are closed because they've gotten enough comments already.

Regardless, at the very least, it's a good site for background checking sites before you sign up with them.

LiveWork, ALikeList, Cloud Crowd

ALikeList - I still have open invitations for people who want to earn a $25 Gift Certificate through them. They've actually extended the offer by a level, which means now MY recruits can earn it, and THEIR recruits can earn it! So I recruit Jenny, she can earn it, and if Jenny recruits John so can he, but whoever John recruits will not be eligible to earn it.

To send you an invite I do need an email address for you, I will not use it for any purpose other than sending the invite through the ALikeList form and forwarding your email address to the person in charge of the $25 Gift Certificates so they can mark you as eligible and qualified once you fulfill your goals.

The goals again are 1) Add 20 places to your Like List (this takes 10 minutes) and 2) Recruit three additional people to the program.

It's really simple, the site is really great (especially for those who enjoy supporting stores/doctors/schools that they feel are good quality), and the staff is the most amazing that I've ever dealt with. When you send in a concern to them, it's an actual warm blooded human person that responds - not prefilled cookie cutter responses.

To request an invite click here and fill out the form, once I send the invite I'll delete the form response from my email and that'll be the end of that, no need to worry about anything else coming from me unless you contact me.
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CloudCrowd is proving to be really great. I got my second payout of $8.23 from them today since they pay daily via PayPal, I've added the payment proof to the appropriate folder on imageshack. (Payment Proof).

I'd really recommend getting in on this one now and building up your reputation with them early on because so far it seems really solid and getting in with a good program like this early on can be really exciting.
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LiveWork finally paid out for the queries I did last month. It totaled up to $68.48. Just a reminder, this is a freelance site run by the folks who do LiveOps (legit telecommuting company). They hire folks as IC's (independent contractors) which means you have to save your own taxes to pay since they aren't deducted - but the work is easy and the pay is decent. I did Query work - which basically means you join a team, get a list of search queries like "1986 Cubs" or "free tote bag patterns", you look up some info on them, write a quick 5-7 sentences about the query and put a link in for more info at another site. You get about 64¢ each. At first it seems terrible because you start off slow, but once you relax you can knock out 12-15 an hour which is nice money.

The downside is that you don't get paid until the team finishes the project and the work is approved. In this case there were a few complications with people plagiarizing so it took a little longer. The projects ended on 9/29, and payment came through on PayPal earlier this evening, so it was about 9 days turn around. I assume it'd be a lot quicker normally. (Payment Proof)

There's also other freelance work available through them that pays by task or by the hour.

LiveWork

I recently joined up with LiveWork - a splinter company of LiveOps. (It's somewhat similar to oDesk.) I've been doing small scale "freelance" writing for a couple of different providers.

Nothing fancy, just short answers to queries that have been accumulated into a list. The pay isn't amazing but after you get used to the work and gain a bit of momentum, it can be decent money. Not "pay the bills" decent, but definitely "put groceries on the table" decent - which is what I'm primarily shooting for to start with.

I've really enjoyed it for the most part. It's a bit monotonous, but you learn some interesting things and there's absolutely no schedule at all. Just answer as many questions as you like, as often as you like, whenever you want.

The two projects I was on are coming to an end though, and I'm not sure whether new ones will be presented immediately or not.

I would definitely recommend LiveWork to people who are looking for supplemental income, even just to browse over once in a while - there's a variety of work, and although it's small now I assume it will blossom as oDesk did.