Work at Home Income Opportunities: A Profile of "Get Paid To" Sites

Okay, first we're gonna start off with something fairly simple: GPTs or "Get-Paid-To's". GPT's are websites that promote themselves as paying you to try products for free. That's not totally true. More accurately they are websites that are clearing houses for products which will pay you more than you'll spend to try the assorted "free" trials these companies are offering. Basically it works like this...

Company A has an affiliate program, whereby if GPT webmaster can get someone to sign up for their product, they'll pay GPT webmaster x amount (say $50 dollars). The owners of the GPTs then pay out (again, round numbers) $25 to you, the person who signed up for the offer. Maybe the offer is Free, maybe the offer is $1.00, maybe it's simply the cost of shipping & handling, something as nominal as $1.97 or as much as $9.95. Whatever the case, these sites operate off the principle that they will pay you anywhere from 2x to 10x your initial investment. Aside from offers, however, they also have "surveys" and "sign-ups" which can be as brief as a few seconds filling in your e-mail address to as time consuming as a couple minutes answering questions such as yearly household income, number of people in your house, if you own or rent, etc. Offers will pay as much as $20, $30, $40, $50, sometimes $80 + dollars, whereas surveys and sign-ups pay AT MOST $5.00.

All right, with all that explanation out of the way, the question is - can you make a living doing offers on these sites and unfortunately the answer is 'No.' If it were 'yes' it'd be the most brain-dead form of income around and we could all go home. So no, GPTs will not bring in an extra couple thousand a month. They do, however, serve as a good means by which to bring in an extra couple hundred a month (generally a lot of work at home moms who want some extra spending money frequent these sites). This can be useful if your goal is to pay down debt, keep the creditors at bay for another 30 days, or just have extra walking around money.

Just being aware of these sites, however, is not good enough. As I noted earlier, GPTs are essentially affiliates bunching all their affiliate programs into one site and making it work as a sort of shopping mall. And much as the stores in every shopping mall across America are pretty much the same collection of fifty or so outlets, so are GPTs collections of the same general group of offers. In other words, there are only a finite amount of offers you can do and cash you can make. This is where being a member of as many programs as possible doesn't increase your chances of making more money, but rather, I feel, hurts it. I'll explain in a minute.

I just want to touch upon this concept of there being "only a finite amount of offers" you can do. I've said this a few times, and while it's true there is a sense of diminishing returns each time you go back to a GPT, the offers do cycle through and change as time goes on. As a rule though, you'll generally be able to complete more offers then the site is able to update with. This means that in month 1 if you're able to make $500 doing offers on the site, the next month may only hold $300 worth of possible earnings. The next month a little bit less, and the next month a little bit less. At a certain point you plateau. Fortunately, there will also come a point where the old offers will be replaced by new ones and you'll be able to have a big month of earnings again around the $500 mark. The point is while they can make you money, GPTs are neither stable, nor consistent, nor dependable.

So, are these sites even worth doing? Yes. The real question is how can you get the most out of them. Well, Stay Tuned for my next post, when I'll address some of those concerns. Until then, check out two GPTs which I consider two of the best in the industry...

Deal Barbie Pays (www.dealbarbiepays.com)

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Monster Pays Cash (www.monsterpayscash.com)