Inbox Dollars - Paid Offers, Surveys and Emails

Inbox Dollars is one of many services that will pay you to view offers from merchants and service providers. What distinguishes them from other services is the quality of the sponsors that they work with, and the transparency with which they report earnings activity. Users receive a $5.00 bonus for signing up and are able to track their earnings closely. This is important, because a user must earn $30 before they can request a check. A user earns money by reading (and confirming) marketing emails, shopping with Inbox Dollars vendors, participating in consumer surveys, and accepting commercial offers from advertisers. User can also make a small (10%) commission on shopping, survey, and offer responses from other people that they refer into the system. The links to Inbox Dollars within this post are referral links.

Emails

The system will send two to three emails per day to the email address listed on the site. Users must click on the link included in the email to be credited for reading it. The link will normally direct the user to more information on the merchant who sent the email. A confirmed email pays $0.02 (two cents). The emails will often offer cash bonuses for qualifying activity on the sponsor's site. These are typically no different than the offers that you can find on the Inbox Dollars site itself, but sometimes a merchant will offer rewards that cannot be found on the site. In addition, acceptance of an offer may lead to follow-up offers from that particular merchant that contain additional awards.

Surveys

Some emails notify users of survey opportunities that match their demographic profile and interests. Users may also participate in surveys from the Inbox Dollars site. Surveys usually pay $0.50 but will sometimes pay more or less for participation. Users will not always qualify for a survey, particularly if they routinely attempt to earn money this way. However, it's worth the trouble to visit the site and click on the "Take Survey" link.

Offers

Cash Offers on the site can range from silly to incredibly useful, and feature brands like Intuit, Netflix, Discover Card, and others. The payout for offers ranges from $0.10 to $15 at the time of this writing. The lower-paying offers typically involve joining a survey site, accepting a free trial to a subscription service, or signing up for a newsletter. Higher paying offers may require the user to submit a credit card application, sign up for a free trial for a service like Netflix, or otherwise buy something from the merchant involved. The terms of each offer are displayed on the Offers page. Inbox Dollars also provides a link to just the "100% Free" offers - although these are often lower paying. I have used the Offers page to order stationery, try Gevalia coffee for free, and sign up for other survey sites. All of those offers credited to my account.

Shopping

Simply clicking on a merchant in the Shopping directory will earn you cash back on your purchases with that merchant. Shopping options range from online stores you've never heard of to trusted national brands like The Gap, Borders, and Target, to specialty stores like 1-800-PetMeds and iTunes. Percentages range from 1% cash back for high-ticket items like new computers (Dell) or car rentals (Enterprise) to up to 20% cash back for magazine subscriptions. Most merchants offer between 3-8% cash back. As an example, shopping at iTunes via Inbox Dollars earns 4% of your purchases back.

These cash rewards are by far the easiest way to earn money at Inbox Dollars. Just by remembering to visit your favorite merchants through Inbox Dollars links, you can rack up a lot of savings.

Games, Education, Insurance

Inbox Dollars also has "feature areas" that allow you to get insurance quotes, find real-world or online colleges and degree programs, and earn cash back while competing in cash games at WorldWinner.com. I haven't had a need for any of these services, so I can't say much about them.

The Inbox Dollars Toolbar

To make it easier to remember to use those shopping links, Inbox Dollars has created a browser toolbar for most common web browsers. The toolbar tracks your current earnings, notifies you when you have received a paid email or survey offer, and generally makes participation with the site a little bit easier. You'll also get $0.50 for installing the toolbar.

All in all, a good deal

Inbox Dollars is a reputable and consistent "pay to surf" clearinghouse with high standards for the quality of merchants it allows to advertise. My limited experiences with customer service have been favorable, and I got my first check three days after it was processed. Once you earn your first check, Inbox Dollars becomes even better, offering quicker payments (although the minimum payment amount is still $30), "orphan" referrals, and exclusive offers.

Sign up today to start earning your own rewards.

Contribute Your Knowledge: Bukisa.com

Take a minute and ask yourself how you prefer to teach things to other people. It often has a lot to do with how you learn (we tend to teach people in the same fashion that we learned a skill). Do you like to read and write instructions? Or do you prefer to listen to someone explain how to do it? Maybe you're the type of person who can't grasp a concept unless someone shows it to you. You're probably most comfortable teaching in the same way. Some people are able to teach well in print and on video, some are really good at only one. Some people are awful at one or the other method.

Here's the good news: no matter how you communicate, you can share your skills, knowledge, or learned opinions on Bukisa, and make money doing it.

At Bukisa, you get paid for traffic to your content on an earnings per thousand ("EPM") basis, so your income is determined by the popularity of what you create. But here's the really cool thing: you can post slideshows, video, audio, or regular old articles about whatever you want. So things that you used to post on YouTube (making Google rich in the process) you can move to Bukisa and get a slice of the action. Podcasts and audio that you didn't have a home for are now folded in as well. And you can even upload slideshows to Bukisa and get paid for whatever traffic they generate. As of this writing, the "Bukisa Index" is 3.45 - so you earn $3.45 for every 1000 hits on your content. That's already pretty unique - most sites will share per-click revenue, but will not reward you only for views.

Two Top-Earning Browser Toolbars

The battle for hearts and eyeballs is heating up, and search is no exception. There are a variety of ways to generate income from searches, but the biggest tool is the advertising that they can place around search results. There are ways for regular joes to capture some of that advertising value. Two of them are reviewed here: SwagBucks and The Bar.

SwagBucks

SwagBucks bills itself as "the Internet's Premier Currency," and they're not far wrong - by my calculations you can get as much as $0.50 per SwagBuck earned, depending on the value of SwagBucks at the time. The fact that the SwagBucks team understands that they should track the value of their currency is already a very good sign. I should point out that you can purchase a limited and rotating selection of mp3 singles for a SwagBuck, so in that case you're getting what is normally a $0.99 value. Also, many retailers are offering $5.00 gift cards for 5 SwagBucks. Bigger prizes fluctuate more, though, based on a variety of conditions.

As you search using the Swagbucks toolbar, you will randomly win Swagbucks, most often one at a time, but during special time periods you could earn up to 50. Swagbucks searches Google and Ask.com, but inserts its own search advertising in the results. Because the user base determines the value of SwagBucks advertising products, they're driven to give good incentives to users to download and search via the toolbar.

SwagBucks doesn't stop there - they have an active presence on Facebook and Twitter, and use these service to advertise special "Swag Codes" which can earn extra SwagBucks. And they have a referral program that allows current users to earn up to 100 SwagBucks from each person they refer to the Toolbar. (The link above is one such referral link.) If you like the service and tell your friends, they will be adding to your SwagBucks balance every time they win SwagBucks from a search result.

SwagBucks is very responsible with your contact information. I have not encountered any spam in my inbox or on Facebook or Twitter. They are committed to customer service, and the toolbar is attractive and functional. One great feature is that you can highlight text on a web page and it instantly fills into the search box on the toolbar. Also (at least with Firefox), any search string or incompletely-typed URL that you enter into the address bar is sent to SwagBucks as a search.

If you're looking for excellent search results, and great rewards for searching, SwagBucks might be the way to go.

The Bar

The Bar, by Boloto Group, operates on the same premise as SwagBucks, but they reward users for every click of an advertisement from their special ads sidebar. While you're browsing, you can click on the "ER" or "Ads" button, and receive ads from the ER Network that are targeted to the demographic information you provide. The Bar gives you four tenths of a cent ($0.004) for viewing ads, which open in a separate window. The emphasis is on video production, but there are also ads that simply lead you to interesting web pages.

Four tenths of a cent is not that exciting, but The Bar has devised a way to multiply your earnings - it pays you that same $0.004 for clicks from your friends, and their friends, and so forth, all the way to the famous "six degrees of separation." Depending on how motivated your referrals are, this can add up pretty quickly. When you consider that 1000 clicks is $4.00, it is easy to see how inviting tons and tons of people to this opportunity is an easy way to make some money on the web.

The Bar understands that friend networks of this magnitude are rare, so they offer another exciting opportunity as well - you can offer the bar to any charity, school group, or other organization that is looking for fundraising opportunities. The organization gets a dollar-for-dollar match on all of the activity generated by the members of its referral group. Because of the scale of organization mailing lists, The Bar could become a significant source of donations, just by harnessing the web activity of people.

The Bar has some interesting quirks, including currently running "training" ads that are not paid by advertisers. They're clearly trying to develop an advertiser base. But there's nothing shady or inappropriate. They do collect more demographic information than one normally has to give away, but they aggregate all that data - no user contact information is shared, and ads are delivered based on the user's membership in a specific demographic category. The downside is that your individual earning ability is tiny. However, as a fundraising opportunity (or if you have a million friends!), there is serious income potential inherent in your network.