REPOST Entry 1: How it all began

It all started about 2-3 months back, in early May. I was bored, and a recovering online game addict (don't laugh). I needed something to take my mind off it. Instead of going outside and enjoying the cool & breezy (okay, cold & rainy) weather, I stayed glued to the net, and stumbled onto a forum for making money on the net.

In retrospect, I think it could have been a mistake - replacing one addiction for another. Yeah, it probably was. But, at the time, it seemed like a good idea. The first month was a little hazy. There was no strategy, no planning, no direction, just random sign-ups and clicking. I was drawn in by the sites offering high payouts for clicking on email ads and banners. I was to learn later that most of these were scam sites created by fraudsters, scondrels, rogues, evil creatures that prey on newbies and the blissfully ignorant.

I had stumbled on something called Paid Per Click (PPC). When you surf the net, you're constantly bombarded by advertisements (unless you use an adblocker, but that's another story). Instead of doing all that for free, you have a chance of earning some money for your time. Basically, you get paid for viewing and clicking on advertisements, signing up for related websites and so forth.

Now, most people are drawn in by all those flashy sites praising some new site for allowing them to become millionaires (yeah right, don't quit your day job just yet). For the most part, most of these are scams. Usually, the site requires you to pay a signup fee and recruit others to join. But, wait. Isn't that direct marketing? It would be... if they were selling something tangible like electronic goods or vitamins. No, these are MLM/Pyramid schemes. MLM stands for Multi-Level-Marketing. It involves building a network of members under you. Networking is good (so says Donald Trump, so who am I to disagree), but MLM raises serious ethical and legal questions, so much so, that such schemes are now banned in the US and other countries.

Getting back to the topic at hand, the original site that drew me in, was actually a scam of some sort. It involved downloading a browser (IE-based), and setting it up to refresh a certain website (which will remain nameless to protect the ignorant) and run in the background while you surf in your regular browser. It was even recommended to use a proxy rotator such as MultiProxy to shuffle through a proxylist, in order to give an appearance that traffic was being generated from various locations. After a few days of that, the $$$ that was suppose to roll in... didn't. Apparently, the site wised up, and no longer credited people for this sort of traffic. Rightly so, because it's just wrong, isn't it?

I wasn't discouraged. In the meantime, I had signed up for a few other sites, a few of which I have stuck with, with a lot of others that have gone the way of the dodo. I learned the ropes, the terminology (PTR, PPC, PTR, CPM, CPC) and how to distinguish the scams from the actual sites.

As each day went by, it slowly consumed more and more of my time. It became somewhat of an obsession, just clicking clicking clicking. One day, I just decided, it wasn't worth it. Too many sites, too hectic. I would just choose a few, and stick with it (until something better came along, typical human behaviour). I created a PTR List which has undergone a fair bit of modification since then, and directed all traffic there, instead of promoting individual sites.

In 2 months, I racked up a grand total of USD 30.54 and 2.00 Euros. Not bad, for a newbie. It has been almost another month, and I've received another USD 12, with potentially another USD 40 (conservative estimate). Paypal is really quite useful, but there are many others to choose from.

Then again, what have I sacrificed to get this? Let's see. Daylight. Check. Social life. Check. Sleep. Check. No kidding. I must be crazy. But, they say, in any venture, nothing is certain and anything is possible.