Editor’s Note: Although this is a sponsored post, the thoughts in this article are 100% my opinion, not swayed by payment.

The GPT world is filled with a lot of startup websites, most of which will run for small periods of time before shutting down. With that being said, it’s a little difficult to find a program that is going to hang around with the industry leaders. Recently, I came across a website called ProfileReward – a pretty interesting take on the “get paid to” programs in that it relies on social media rather than simple individual participation to get paid. Now, I must add that it doesn’t exactly rely on having a social media profile which was a bit confusing to me, but it’s still an interesting take on the typical GPT site.

How GPT Programs Work

Since I haven’t spoken about these programs in quite a while, when we start with a simple description of how these programs work. there’s an advertiser out there that needs to get their product out to the market, occasionally they use what are called “affiliate sales.” What this means is that companies essentially higher middlemen to sell their product for them, giving them a small percentage of the profits along the way. In this way, companies are able to sell more of their product and they were originally able to – so is essentially a win-win situation.

What a “get paid to” program does is essentially insert a middleman between the middleman. In other words, these companies go out and collect affiliate offers, store them all in one place and give you the opportunity to complete the offers yourself (that, or share the link with your own friends and capitalize on their referral). What happens now is that the GPT company receives the full affiliate commission fromthe client, however they give you a percentage of that gain so that both parties profit in the end. While you could theoretically go straight to the company and receive the full commission, the idea is that with more offers on the table, you will receive a better total benefit. These “get paid to” companies, therefore, make the affiliate market more efficient.

How ProfileReward Stacks Up

The first thing I noticed when I went to ProfileReward.com was that they have a very refreshing website template. It’s always nice to have a website that focuses on making the aesthetics clean, because you will likely be spending quite some time on the website. This is a website that has a lot of potential, and while I would recommend a slow and steady strategy when it comes to completing offers (because they have not had any track record of paying)… what I’ve seen so far is very promising. Currently, they are going through the process of adding offers, so there are sadly only around 20 right now to choose from. I’d imagine that this number increases dramatically over the next month. On the bright side, this does show you that the owner is showing discretion over which offers to take and which to leave out, which is always a good thing.

one of the best things about ProfileReward that they have a very extensive list of tutorials. In addition, they had a very young support  forum that could prove to be very useful in the future once business picks up. When you are looking for a new “get paid to” program, one of the first things that you should be considering is how much support they have. I would say that ProfileReward definitely ranks among the best, and is the particular area that they excel the most. In addition to the support features, the overall structure of the website is very easy to navigate and understand. They have a few bonus programs and even some contests running to encourage you to spend more time filling out offers. In other words, they’re really doing all they can at this point to attract new people to the website.

My Overall Conclusion

I have a pretty solid history of figuring out which “GPT” programs will make it, and which will end up failing. It is of the utmost importance that if you put time into completing offers, you can be assured that you will be getting paid at the end. Due to a lack of history of payments, it would be impossible for me to flat-out recommend ProfileReward as a place that you should pursue. However, I think that the owner has put a lot of time into the program, and even taking the initiative to go out to other websites and purchase reviews (like this one) is a step in the right direction.I say register an account at ProfileReward, fill out a few offers and see if they pay – because if they do, you will likely be getting a better payout here than at most other websites due to the relative age of the company.

Stay bullish on the net.
-Jimvesting.com

I’d like to set some time aside today to talk about one of my latest projects that is currently in final testing: Pirate Cash! This is going to be a new competitor in the “Get Paid To (GPT)” industry, which has had a long history of many boom-and-bust companies. However, I feel that my unique position as a former watchdog of the businesses in this niche gives PirateCash.com all the advantages in the world.

But Why GPT?

There are many reasons why I have chosen this niche to start a new project, but at the very core I would say that the reason is purely passion. When I was growing up, I remember that I wanted nothing more than to score $10-20 for free online… I had a lot of time on my hands and wasn’t eligible to get a job anywhere. Nowadays, many demographics… from teenagers, to work at home moms, to the unemployed looking to re-enter the workforce… are heavily active in this industry. The role of a “get paid to” website is literally to provide a means of profit for people that have a bit of spare time on their hands, and it really works out quite well. Read the rest of this entry »

Ever wanted to start your own Get Paid To (GPT) business on the internet? Completing offers and surveys for money online has been a thriving industry in 2009, as more people have begun to look for reliable sources of alternative income in recessionary times.

In part one, we talked about how you should come up with your concept and lay the groundwork by signing up with affiliate networks and filing licensing agreements. Now, we will talk a bit more about setting up the actual system, and how you can eventually get your website designed and marketed professionally to have long term success. Let’s get started!

What You’ll Need

In order to successfully make your corporate vision a reality, you will need to do a few things. First, we need to find a compelling script to run our website. There are many pre-made software platforms online already that can get you started with your own GPT website, so picking the right one is especially important. I wouldn’t recommend that anyone go out and hire a coder for a custom-built platform until you start pulling in at least $1,000 in net profit every month. Second, we have the issue of design. It is very important that your website is not only functional, but easy on the eyes, so make sure you hire a reliable designer from the get go if you can. Finally, we will need to market our business once it is online, so I will discuss some of those tactics as well.

Our steps to success:
1. Choosing a Platform
2. Designing the Website
3. Growing Your Member Base

1. Choosing the Right GPT Platform

There are many so-called “incentive” or “GPT” scripts floating around on the internet. The most popular is without a doubt a service called “ShiftCode.” I highly advise against using this platform, as it is one of the worst. On top of lacking the customization ability, ShiftCode is easily sniffed out as “amateur” and many people will be immediatly turned off from using your website. If you are looking for the easiest path, go ahead and order up… but I would only hope that you aren’t looking for the easiest option, but the best option.

Instead, I would highly recommend that you go ahead and purchase a professional system for $100-$500. If you are serious about owning your own company, this will be pennies to you in a few months time. I have tried and tested many of these, and I believe that these top three options are truthfully your best options:

1. FSRevolution (Editor’s Choice! - USE COUPON “THENETFOOL”)
2. Cash Crusader
3. Aurora GPT Script

I actually own and currently use FSRevolution, and it is definitely superior to it’s peers. First off, I wouldn’t recommend that you use anything other than these “top three” as most systems nowadays are broken down with no more support available. FSRevolution actually has people posting on a daily basis in the forums, and they are actively signing into new partnerships so you can have offers available for you to promote to your users faster than ever.

2. Designing the Website

Going along with the first part of this series, I believe that if you don’t have a great design in place, than you simply won’t be getting the kind of traffic that you deserve (and crave). The bottom line here is that visitors don’t trust websites that look like they were built overnight, so you should spend an extraordinary amount of time shoring up your website and making everything look as good as possible.

Color scheming is very important with any GPT website, and I have seen some pretty bad combinations (none of which have ever succeeded as websites). In addition, it is essential to use the most lively graphics and high-tech logo/identity options that are available. I, myself, am in no way a graphic design professional. Therefore, I typically contract out all of my work. There are many websites where you can go to hire freelance designers, and they honestly do great work. I have worked most with, and would conversely recommend, either oDesk.com or GetAFreelancer.com. With both combinations, you get a way to interview your candidates beforehand to see who is really the best man (or woman) for the job. I’ve had some great work done very inexpensively here, and will actually be displaying a design I had made in an undisclosed project I have been working on shortly.

Don’t be hesitant to pour in $200-$400 for an initial design. You can always upgrade, but I find that sticking in a lower range keeps things reasonable on your books… allowing you to get “net positive” on your investment sooner rather than later.

3. Growing Your Member Base

Now that you have the software in place, along with a killer design, it is time to pick apart the daunting task of marketing. Honestly, because the industry has so many “crash and burn” websites around, it is very difficult to have much success in posting randomly throughout the internet like you could potentially do in another niche. Instead, I recommend the following:

Jimvesting’s Cookbook for GPT Site Traffic:

1. Join other GPT websites and participate
2. Focus on Google search engine keywords
3. Start up a contest, and advertise it around!

If you are starting up your own website, the first thing that you will want to do is actually to join your competitor’s websites. Why would this make sense? Well, by becoming a member of other websites, you can use this to turn their users against themselves and steal them away! I would join up any GPT website that has a forum, and slide a link to your own website in your forum signature. Start forum marketing from within your competitors’ businesses, and you can get a great user base coming in for lasting success. After all, if they are active on another website, they will make you more money than the average user.

Your second option, and perhaps a trickier option, is to get focused on Google keywords. If you can hit on the top of Google search results for things like “complete surveys for prizes” (just a random example), you could start to rake in new users that don’t know the big sites from the small. Because of this, I feel that it is imperative that you start to open up a Google SEO campaign to get your website on the top of the charts as soon as you can. I don’t want to get into marketing too much here, since this post is not about that, but you can check out more information in one of my old articles on Google SEO.

Finally, you should be offering some incentive to switch, and I would recommend a contest. Many of the people who you will be recruiting are going to be members of other GPT websites. Because of this, you need to prove yourselves to everyone that you are truly the best in the business… you are the company that they want to trust to pay them time and time again. In order to encourage users to sign up to your gpt website and use your services, you should start by giving away lots of prizes and gift cards (on top of the money that members are already earning) to boost your stats. Why not offer them extremely high payouts for a time? It will hurt your margins, but it will really drive your growth.

Bottom Line: I hope that you enjoyed this two part series on making your own GPT website. Hopefully, you have all learned a lot about making your own GPT company, which is something that I have actually done myself and have been mildly successful in. Once everything is up and running, you really start going when you gain entry into new affiliate networks, and more and more users start to come in. Eventually, it will be a momentum story and you will start to make money with little to no work!

-Jimvesting

Heading into the end of the year, we have a lot of great GPT websites all claiming that they were “the best.” Highest payouts, best bonus programs, fastest checks and best customer service… we’ve heard it all. But the bottom line is: some paid their members, some crashed and burned. From a guy that has been around the GPT arena to study and has actually USED almost every “get paid to” program on the internet, it’s time to nail down the best for 2009.

With that, Jimvesting dot com proudly presents our 2009 “Get Paid To” (GPT) Power Rankings. We’ve ranked the top ten GPT websites by six categories that we feel properly demonstrate the best qualities that you should be looking for in every program that you use. All of the following are trusted paying GPT websites with a solid track record… because there is nothing worse than getting burned by a GPT and wasting your time (and money). Lesson learned, if you are looking to make money by taking surveys and more… stick with the best programs on the net.

Official 2009 GPT Website Power Rankings

* Referral program includes a cash bonus for each referral — Graded on a 5.0 scale

After a few weeks of research and industry analysis, the 2009 GPT Power Rankings are based on personal experience, observations, community data, user opinion and hard facts. Get Paid To websites can be the biggest scams on the internet, or your best friend. All of the top ten are programs that I feel are best geared for 2009 and will end up paying you the most bang for your buck without risking a loss. We want as much upside as possible while limiting downside loss. Let’s have a closer look:

• Payout: This is a measure of the relative amount paid per offer. Since all GPT websites are paying you a percentage of their income for every survey you complete… the higher the percentage they offer, the higher their rank.
• Bonus: Most GPT programs nowadays provide extensive incentive programs to encourage user activity. The websites with the best bonus programs are oftentimes the most worth your time.
• Offers: Since making money with a “get paid to” program is largely a function of the number of available offers, I have analyzed which companies provide the most opportunities and ranked them accordingly.
• Referrals: As an affiliate, I sometimes make money by referring new users to GPT websites… and so can you! The companies with the highest paying referral programs will, ultimately, make you more money if you tell your friends about a particular site.
• Ease of Use: Some sites just look ugly, and turn you off of working with them. Others are hard to navigate. We ran a survey to figure out which sites were the best in terms of accessibility and understanding and ranked them here.
• Trust: Reliability is the single most important factor used in this ranking system. Why? What good is a site that never sends you your check! The trust ranking is based on industry standing, traffic rating and likelihood that you will get paid in the long run.

Top “Get Paid To” Programs Analysis

Emerging as the top two programs on the internet, Cash Crate and Treasure Trooper have been stand-out leaders for the past two years. Now that things have consolidated in the industry, Cash Crate has emerged as the best GPT website on the internet because of their simplicity, consistency and high bonuses. Treasure Trooper is the next-best GPT website with a great “treasure hunt” contest and a user community that provides decent bonuses… though not near the level of Cash Crate.

Among the new contenders, I have been very impressed with the level of support and high payouts from Deal Barbie Pays, Gangster Greed and Squishy Cash. Deal Barbie and Squishy Cash have very similar models based off Shiftcode (which I don’t particularly like)… with Deal Barbie providing some amazing offers and bonuses to get the #3 slot on our ranking list. Gangster Greed has some of the best bonuses in their forum that  Ihave seen out of a mid-sized company, so they are worth a look if you are looking for the highest payments in our list and can stomach a bit more risk from a lower “trust” level.

About GPT Programs and the 2009 Rankings

So-called “get paid to” (gpt) programs are still reliable programs that can make money on the internet. If you are looking for a secondary income and have a bit of free time (without the skills to do formal “freelancing” work online)… try some of these programs and see how much money you can make!

The 2009 rankings have been compiled as a case study here at Jimvesting dot com, and is the intellectual property of JRR Enterprises LLC. If you would like to re-post this list, please contact me for more information.

-Jimvesting

Bad news for the get-paid-to (GPT) community earlier this morning as one of the top names in the industry, SWATcash, filed for bankruptcy. SWATcash was one of my biggest money makers here at theNetFool.com, so it is going to hurt seeing them out of the picture. However, I have thoroughly analyzed the problem and have talked to a few of the employees in upper-management at SWATcash… and as it turns out it was simply poor business planning that got the best of them.

The Story of SWATcash

SWATcash was formed in 2006 by a couple of average joes pictured below. I was always on good terms with the members, namely “SWAT AP” and “SWAT Brian” (the owner), and they definitely had all the competitors beat on customer service hands down. It’s kind of funny how fates reversed here, as they seemed to be on top of the world giving out an Xbox a day… until it all blew up in their faces. Clearly, the recession has made an impact on far reaches of the markets, even where many people thought they were safe.

The problem? Amusingly enough, it was exactly the same problem that caused the economic crash… risk management. Just like the greedy investors that bought, packaged and sold junk-status investments, pretending that everything was rosy, and individuals that took out huge loans (that were backed on literally nothing), they had it coming. What SWATcash was doing was trying to grow too fast… in effect, they were a victim of their own success. Rather than keeping a nice reserve of cash into the future like other companies did, they forced money outbound to fuel growth with extravagant contests and high payouts.

Owner’s Confession: Risk Management Problems

This was great while it lasted, but on the morning of December 1st… thousands of users were blind-sighted as Brian, the owner, revealed:

“Due to all of the recent events I am sad to say that SWATcash will be shutting down effective December 1st, 2008. We will strive to do all we can to get payments out in a timely manner. Unfortunately if all goes well we will only be able to pay out Offer Earnings, Referral Commission, Shopping Earnings, and Click Earnings. With shutting down we have to end our contracts with the company that runs our servers which is really putting the strain on the company’s wallet and possibly charging us more than we will have coming in, in which case we will have to file for bankruptcy. We hope that they will be glad to work with us and get that number down so we can payout all of the members who have made payout through December 1st.

We know this sucks, you don’t have to tell me twice. We are still waiting on checks that are now almost 2 months late to us. I have been told recently that a check was over-nighted Wednesday only to find out today that it still hasn’t even been sent. That is just how it has been going lately for us. We are doing everything in our power to get what is owed to us so we can get what is owed to you. We realize that this is a terrible time for this to happen as Christmas is just around the corner, but believe me that this is hurting us just as much as it is hurting you. A lot of you may think that we have a mound of money in the company that we are sitting on but the truth of the matter is, is that it’s just not true. With paying to keep the site up, paying our employees the money is going down just as fast as it is coming in because every lead is being scrutinized more closely than ever and it is taking a longer time for payments to be processed. Now days all a advertiser has to do is say “I think we have some fraud here” whether it be one lead or 100 and your full payment is held till it is figured out which can take months.

Like I’ve answered before, “Why don’t you have an emergency fund?”, we did but it got taken out when we paid out in August and we later received word of fraud from the month of July and August. That’s just how it goes in this industry and for a long time we took small hits here and there but never one this big. We always put the members first throughout this whole 2 year run that the company has been around and don’t intend on changing now.

We really appreciated working with all of the truthful members that stuck around on the site and forums from the very beginning. Without you guys we would have never made it anywhere. The forums were always active and fun to be around and it truly made my job a little bit easier with all the helpful members answering questions when a mod or admin wasn’t around to answer them. I want to thank all the mods for doing a great job around here keeping the forums clean and informative. I’d love to thank Jeremy and Will for doing an excellent job keep the site new with cool features and making the site as unique as it was. Thanks to Soylagringaloca who did a great job handling support and making sure it was done in a timely manner and keeping it as upbeat as possible. And also thanks to SWATAP for providing us with pictures for visual representation of topics and posts. He kept the forums lively and bursting with activity. I hope I didn’t miss anyone but thanks to everyone involved with SWATcash it was like one giant family even though sometimes it got a bit out of hand.

The site will go down sometime tonight or tomorrow morning. I apologize for how everything went down and how this ended up, but I give you my word that we will try to payout members what they deserve and rightfully earned.”
- SWAT Brian (Former Owner, SWATcash.com)

So what happened here? They were blind sighted by a rush of fraud within their major affiliate suppliers (the guys that pay SWATcash) and are now unable to pay out anything to their users. After having missed payment for two months, they have now officially filed for bankruptcy… and will more than likely not be paying their members. Since the consumers are always the bottom rung of the bankruptcy-payout, I’m a giving “reimbursement” a 15% possibility.

Jimvesting’s Take on the Crash

Okay, so this obviously begs the question… Jim, why are you recommending a GPT website that is going to crash and not pay me. First, I want you to realize that SWATcash was a great company. The guys that worked there were top-notch, and their promo offers and high payouts gave you a high high margin. Assuming that you have used SWATcash for even a few months, you would know that you get 3x the payout on 1/2 the work with this website. I made about $2500 with SWATcash.com, whereas I would have made less than $750 equivalent with any other alternative.

“SWATcash was, in effect, a victim of its own success”

Is it over for the GPT industry? Heck no. This is a business that actually IS recession proofed (in a sense)… and the only mistake here was an over-confident investment approach by management. I know that competitor Treasure Trooper has a 3-month repository account that it doesn’t tap into unless there is an emergency. Cash Crate has a similar deal going on within their system. Neither Treasure Trooper nor Cash Crate has much of a liquidity problem as they don’t offer as many crazy prizes as SWATcash did. I’d still judge the whole arena safe as a whole.

Where Do I Go Now!?

The get-paid-to (GPT) industry as a whole is a great way to make money on your own to get a secondary income if you have some spare time after work. These sites present great opportunities to users who can casually pick up cash, and I have a new recommended base of websites that I will be evaluating over the next few days. I don’t want to declare a new recommendation lineup so soon, but it will be different. Rest assured, you can stay in GPT to make money for the holidays.

Hopefully, this crash won’t send major shock waves through the online space. They had a great loyal following, and were very much tied down to social media… creating almost a “cult” of users. Because they took so little profit, they gave so many people lots of money… very generous guys. If you were a member of SWATcash.com, I invite you to express your thoughts in the comment space here. So stick around, because I want to get everyone effected back on their feet and into the next-best-thing on the net!

- Jimvesting