Paid To Click advertising - PTC

PTC or Not PTC

It is the buzz acronym of 2007. (and maybe 2008)

Paid to click advertising, or PTC is popular for Internet marketers as well as people wanting to make money. The promises of wealth beyond your imagination to a comfortable extra hundred dollars monthly is promised by literally hundreds of websites out on the world wide web.

How can they pay you? Are they for real or a scam?

Here is *my* opinion on the Paid To Click gold rush.

Advertisers pay a website to guarantee them warm bodies to view their advertisements. Just like search engines can be paid so when you input a product or service, the paid advertisement always comes up at the top of the page and is sometimes highlighted. This is all well and good, but the problem herein is that the customer must be LOOKING for that particular item or service for paid advertising to work.

Introducing Paid To Click or PTC advertising. Here, an advertiser pays a website to advertise for them, usually 2¢ per hit or page view. The PTC website lures a potential customer or viewer into becoming a member by promising to pay them usually 1¢ per view and a referral for getting others to do the same.

It becomes the best of both worlds as th advertiser gets a warm body to view their ad and the clicker or viewer gets paid to view the ad. So where does all this money go and who gets it? Eventually, a customer will buy the service or product which in turn may pay a commission and it keeps the whole cycle going.

Show me the money!

The member/viewer(you) lets say gets 1 penny per click, so after viewing 100 ads, that person(you) now earned 1 dollar. If you have 10 other friends, neighbors, contacts doing the same as you and you referred them, you get a bonus or commission on their clicks too! Their friends, neighbors, and their friends and neighbors doing it becomes a powerful force.

If you look at it as a mathematical snowball effect you can see how you can POTENTIALLY make money. It all relies on continued participation by everyone and the constant referrals of others underneath the initial referrer.

1 person refers 10 which refer 10, which refer 10 and there you have 10,000 clicks.

10 friends x10 of their friends=100 new viewers 10×100=1,000 10×1000=10,000 and so on….

If each is paid 1 penny, that is a hefty crisp $100 bill for all 10,000 clicks. This is assuming a perfect world and everyone gets 10 friends and each one faithfully clicked their ad every day. That $100.00 is spread between the levels until it trickles back up to the initial referrer. Doesn’t this sound familiar to some of you out there? Network Marketing? Kinda.

BUT, we do not live in a perfect world. We are a fickle breed. Soon, we lose interest on things that are repetitive and there goes the perfect model right out the window. Don’t expect to get rich overnight. Like the snowball rolling down the hill it has to start with a single snowflake at the beginning.

Scam or Legit?

There are so many websites promising wealth. How do you sort them out? The best guide is intuition.

• If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. If promised $1000.00 per week or promised $100.00 per month, which would seem better? Most go for the quick money and say $1000, but that would not be practical. The 100,000 people it would take to pull this of isn’t likely for the average person.
• Look to see what others have already been paid. Some websites have areas to post payment checks with vital info blurred out photo’s can be doctored. If the photos are of most amounts under $50.00 it is a good bet the site is more legitimate than who post checks of $1000.00 or more.
• Written testimonials. Websites usually have support forums. Forums are not as easy to fake as photos. Watch to see that people posting amounts have been members for a length of time and have more than 5 posts under their belt. They are more likely to be credible.
• Don’t give out banking information. EVER! EVER! EVER! This is the biggest mistake that people make. Get a safe internet bank account and never tie it to your main household account. You can open secondary local bank accounts for little to nothing these days. PayPal is one service that you can open online. Then tie the new local account to PayPal.
• Search, Search and Search some more. A search engine may me the only thing that stands between you and losing your identity! Any popular search engine can be useful with just a few key words typed into the box. Search the company/website you are investigating and the word FRAUD, SCAM, COMPLAINT . If your results come back with just a few sites, then it is a reasonable bet the website is okay, but if it comes back with hundreds of results. RUN!
• Big Brother may be watching you. If you are a successful clicker, be aware that your newfound wealth is taxable when combined with your other annual income. It is INCOME.

In the end, it just boils down to common sense. If you want to try PTC to make a few extra dollars, then by all means, try it. If you happen to make more, enjoy your new found wealth. It can be as little as a click away!