Down On Our Luck

If you’ve been visiting my site for a while, you know that I am a big supporter of Big Crumbs and it’s one of the very few referral programs that I participate in. Now that it’s the 5th of April, I can be 99% confident that all of the March earnings are up to date and post about my results this month.

It’s not quite as good as February and no where near January, but it’s still extra money in my pocket. I think part of the drop could be due to the economy, but I still wish Big Crumbs would email it’s members a reminder to shop every 2 months. I think this would be unintrusive but yet enough to keep members coming back. This is about the same time-span that Ebates uses for reminding their customers as well.

My direct referrals have jumped by 10 this month so I’m now at 67 and starting to realize that 1,000,000 directs may be pushing the goal, but I’ll keep trying. I’ll be looking at smaller goals along the way as well so here’s to 100 in two months.

Feel free to let me know what you think.

About 2 weeks ago I decided to take the plunge and sign up for Yuwie. I figured it couldn’t hurt as it’s another free referral site that won’t take up a lot of time or energy. It also gives me another place to promote my eBay store and Big Crumbs.

I waited to sign up for Yuwie because I wanted to make certain that they actually pay their members, which was confirmed shortly before I signed up and you can see a real check here (FYI, this is not anyone related to me or affiliated with me in any way). Shortly after signing up I was bombarded with friend requests, which didn’t bother me because it makes for more page views for me. I built a small page shortly after that and posted a blog post. I really haven’t done much there since, but check my friend requests every day.

January’s RSR was $.45 and I only had 108 total page views so I didn’t make a dime, but I’ll keep plugging for a couple more months at least to see if these results can grow.

Yuwie Pros

1. I really don’t think the ads are any more intrusive than My Space ads and at least I know I can earn a portion of the money.
2. Unlike Myspace they allow affiliate links on your pages and in comments. As someone trying to run an eBay store and well as make some affiliate income, I really like this. However, the average Myspace user converting over may not like this, it really is a personal preference.
3. They pay about 60% of their revenue back to the users instead of everything in order to keep their business running. Any good business owner knows that cash flow is king when running a business and this is a good thing.

Yuwie Cons

1. It seems that there have been many spammers that have taken over, not good for a growing site that caters to the referral aspect of making money and gaining users. This could scare newbies away in the long run.
2. As the user base starts to grow you will need more and more people to view your page or get more referrals to make the same amount of money. This is a complication of their business model and can’t be avoided.

As of this point I will continue using Yuwie, if anything goes south, I will definitely be the first to let everyone know.

Let me know what you think.

Brenda

I have been in a debate with myself whether to post about my earnings with Big Crumbs here or not. I think I’m going to start a post monthly regarding this, I have seen other people do something similar with their Squidoo results for the month so I’m going to go for it. I would like to point out that my results may not be typical, but I do want to make sure that anyone interested in Big Crumbs knows that results like these are possible. You’ll see that I’m not filthy stinking rich from this, but extra cash that will be paid to me in March is always nice.

I really find it interesting that most of my referral commissions are coming from my 3rd and 4th level of referrals.

As far as working towards my goal of 1,000,000 people referred to this great shopping site, in January 2008 I had 13 different people sign up underneath me which brought me to a total of 43 direct referrals as of 1/31/2008. That leaves me with only 999,957 more to go. February is already off to a great start with 1 person signing up yesterday.

My goal is to become financially independent of my husband in terms of finances and these are the sites that I have been using to work towards my goals. All sites are listed in terms of my success with them and how easy it is to start earning money. Come back often, we’ll be updating this list as we find more sites that we like for their ease of use and time consumed.

In terms of success, ease of use and time spent, Big Crumbs is my favorite site overall. My goal is to get 1,000,000 direct referrals. I’m at 43 right now, but if you like to get cash back for your shopping, then I highly recommend that you sign up.

eBay is still a great way to clean out your closets and make some extra cash to help pay the bills. If Q can learn how to list stuff on eBay then you can too.

Amazon is a much better place to get rid of your used DVD’s, video games, and CD’s. It’s free to put up new listings, and if your items doesn’t sell, you’re not out any money.

Squidoo - Do you consider yourself an expert on a subject? Tell the world about it and maybe you can make a couple of extra dollars on the side. If you own a website, Squidoo is a great way to build back links to your site.

MyLot.com - I signed up for MyLot about a year ago and then totally forgot about it. Just recently they started sending out reminder digest emails so I started posting to the discussions there again. I don’t have a lot of time to spend there, but I respond to or start about two discussions a day.

The Up Down - I casually trade at theupdown.com when I think of it. You receive $1,000,000 in play money to start trading with. If you beat the S&P for the month you get paid. You can also make money by writing stock analyses and referring your friends. I haven’t made a ton there, but I have beat the S&P 3 months in a row so I have $1.15 waiting for me to claim as of 2/3/08.

Bux3.com - I know I usually don’t recommend pay per click, but I don’t mind this site because I’m not forced to view the ad the whole time. If they ever find a way to force this, I will definitely delete Bux3 from this page.

Bux.to Just like the site above, if they ever start forcing a person to actually look at that ad, I’ll probably stop using them. I just don’t have time for that. As long as I can just click and come back later, they’ll stay. Of course, if they stop paying, I’ll drop them faster than my cat runs up and down the stairs.

If you live in Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, or Australia you are now eligible to sign up for Big Crumbs and start getting some of the best shopping rebates on the web. There’s nothing to lose and it’s totally free. Besides,they’re even better than ever after adding the features in the upcoming paragraphs.

For the last couple of weeks now, Big Crumbs has been holding out what they have under their sleeve to make them one of the best rebate sites on the web and they finally revealed it today. They have gone 2.0. One of the best rebate sites on the web is now a social network as well. You can now email the member that referred you as well as people you have referred. Build a network of friends to share shopping tips with as well as other things. The website is now Verisign secured as well as scanned by Hackersafe daily for even more added peace of mind.

Just like My Space, you’ll have the ability to make your profile visible to the public or not and you’ll be able to block certain users from contacting you if you so wish.

The best part about everything is they have added more cash back offers, the ability to make shopping lists, and a place where you can promote your eBay store if you have one.

I’ll be updating more as I get to explore the new site some more.

There has been something brewing at Big Crumbs for the last couple of weeks now, but they were not able to reveal what it was all about. It looks like everyone will find out in a couple of hours now, it looks like they have changed ISP’s along with updating everything about their online cashback program.

I’ll come back and post as soon as I have more information.