Friday, December 12, 2008

Survey Surfer - the beginning

About a week or so ago I thought it would be fun to try and earn some money somehow online. I figured that I would try this not for the overwhelming need of additional cash, but to see if it could be done. There seem to be plenty of ways to make easy cash through the electronic medium. My email is never short of messages that guarantee riches if only you "click here". It would be much easier to make $100 per hour filling out surveys or doing data entry than it would be to actually go out and get a part time job, plus, I don't know any part time jobs where I could possibly make $100 per hour.

For the record, I'm a full time professional employee that makes a decent living. I'm not bringing in six figures or anything like that, but as my wife not so kindly reminds me, I'm definitely not starving. My goal is to attempt to procure some cash outside of the normal monthly budget for frivolous expenditures that would benefit nobody but myself. If you want to call that selfish, you would definitely be correct. So, with a glint of gold in my eye, I set forth hoping that the rest of the world was just plain stupid for not clicking on those emails.

My first move was to set up some additional email addresses outside of household account that I share with my wife. My reasoning for this was two fold. First, I did not want a flood of spam to invade my personal email account. I would much prefer any unwanted spam be directed to a free yahoo or GMail account that I could abandon without too much trouble. Secondly, I sought to keep my new money making machine a secret from my wife. What fun is it to have secret millions unless they are truly secret? She was also going to think I was a complete idiot, and I wanted to avoid that as well.

My second move was to find a way to make money on the Internet. This took me all of .40 seconds. Amazingly, when you type the words "money" and "online" into a search engine there seem to be a few matches, about 70 million (I'm not kidding). If you listen hard enough you can hear about 70 million virtual mouths start to drool when the results appear on the screen. I am not completely naive. All of these offers could not possibly be legitimate, but there must at least one out of 70 million that would get me $5,000 dollars per day promised in their listing. All those other people must be clicking on the wrong link.