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Since I started with PTC sites two weeks ago I have found that the money is building up quicker than I initially expected. So far in the last two weeks I have made $11.13 from PTC sites. That’s out of my total earnings of $165.74 in the last two weeks. It is therefore already a significant element of my online earnings.

The basic idea behind PTC is that people pay the PTC site to bring visitors to their site. To do that the PTC pays a lesser amount to people who sign up with it and click on links. When you click on a link and keep it open for a given length of time, anywhere from 5-30 seconds you get paid a certain amount. The amount can vary from a 0.001 of 1c to 1-2 cents.

Surprisingly it does add up and I certainly didn’t expect that it would already have accumulated to $11.13 after two weeks. I have worked up this amount of money by signing up with numberous sites and clicking links on all of them.

I’m an active clicker, practically every day, on the following sites:

10Bux   http://10bux.net/?r=guppielove
AdBux   http://adbux.org/?r=guppielove
Adverbux   http://adverbux.com/register.php?ref=77409
Advercash   http://www.advercash.net/index.php?ref=guppielove
Bux.to   http://bux.to/?r=guppielove
Bux3   http://bux3.com/?r=guppielove
Clixsense   http://www.clixsense.com/?2374457
EuroCentBux   http://www.eurocentbux.com/?r=guppielove
DailyClicks   http://www.DailyClicks.biz/?r=guppielove
DonkeyMails   http://www.donkeymails.com/pages/index.php?refid=guppielove
GatorBux   http://www.gatorbux.com/index.php?ref=guppielove
Hits4Pay   http://hits4pay.com/members/index.cgi?guppielove
IsabelMarco   http://isabelmarco.com/?r=guppielove
OwensClickPlace   http://owensclickplace.com/members/register.php?ref=guppielove
PaidClick   http://www.PaidClicks.WS/?r=guppielove
SLPay http://www.eurogole.eu/slpay/signup.php?r=184
XClix    http://www.Xclix.net/register.php?r=guppielove
VIPBux   http://www.vipbux.com/register.php?r=guppielove

The first step to making money with PTCs to by signing up to them and clicking links yourself. The next step is to get referrals. All PTCs have referral programmes whereby you get paid a bonus for every link that every new member you refer clicks on. Some of them have multiple levels so that you even get paid for links that those new members refer as well.

Even if you don’t join one of these sites using a referral link you will end up making money for someone else anyway. PTC sites have deals where they sell on unreferred members. Purchasing referrals is one way to do it but it is better to make money without investing any!

NB. If anyone wants to swap referrals with me please join any of the above sites with my link and give me a link of your own to another PTC for me to join. Obviously your PTC can’t already be on my list or otherwise I can’t join it.

EndowmentExpress.co.uk is a web-site to check out if you are looking for a quote to sell your endowment policy. They claim that they are able to sell endowments for up to 35% more than you would get from surrendering your endowment back to the life company.

The reasons why people may want to sell their endowment policies are varied but they all come down to the same root: need money quickly. This may be due to redundancy, divorce or some other reason that you need capital.

The process is simple enough: Fill out the online form to request a quotation. Endowment Express will then contact you with an offer for your policy. If you’re happy with the offer you can get the paperwork sent to you which will get things started. Payment should be completed within four to five weeks.

Obviously when someone is thinking of selling their endowment they will want to get the best price. That’s why it’s a good idea to visit a site like this to get a quote to see what your options are.

The web-site itself is very simple. There’s a freephone to ring if you want more information than is contained in the FAQs or About Us sections. What you’re probably interested in mainly though is the quote. The quotation form takes a few minutes to fill out. Those few minutes may be worth quite a lot.

Following on my report ‘How I Earned $700 Online in 15 Weeks‘ I now present my update. In the ten weeks since that report I have earned just over another $300. Overall my average weekly earnings are remaining steady in the forties (currently $41.78).

The sources of my income have changed somewhat. While sponsored posts are still the largest component I currently find that PayPerPost and PayU2Blog are the only two networks that are providing me with income. The others that I’m affiliated to - Sponsored Reviews, ReviewMe and Smorty have not been making me money for some time now. In fact I had to go back to December 20 to find the last time I earned money with any of them (ReviewMe).

To be fair, Smorty has been offering me work but the opportunities have been for online casinos and shopping cart software which haven’t fitted in with the themes of the blogs they are available for. The other two, Sponsored Reviews and ReviewMe, simply haven’t had anything for me.

PayU2Blog has been providing $15-25 per week on a regular basis up to now. In fact there was only one week, the first week of January, when I didn’t earn anything with them. PayU2Blog requires you to complete every assignment they give you. This works for me because the blog I post them on is very general. It wouldn’t be so good for a niche blog. My earnings with PayPerPost fluctuate more, anywhere between $0-50 per week at the moment, mainly because I am more picky about what opportunities I select with them. As with Smorty I am selecting jobs that fit in with the theme of the blog that I have with PayPerPost. It would be easily possible for me to earn more than $100 per week with PayPerPost on it’s own if I were prepared to write the maximum number of opportunities (three) per day but this would severely damage the quality of the blog that I post them on.

(Note: As you are probably aware there is currently an issue regarding loss of PageRank for people who write sponsored posts. If this happens to you it will have an impact on your earnings. You are better off researching this before starting to write sponsored posts on your site as it will help you increase your earnings.)

I have been trying a couple of new things in the last couple of weeks. One of these is Pay Per Click (PTC). These are similiar to traffic exchange sites in which you earn credits by surfing other sites with the difference being that instead of credits you earn money. Payment is usually 1c per site visited and, because the reward is monetary rather than surf credits, the number of sites you can visit is limited.

I signed up with my first PTC last week and since then I have signed up with another three. They are all largely the same. The advantage to signing up with many of them is that you can have them open in separate tabs and visit them all at once meaning you are earning with all of them at the same time. The amount of money is small but it is adding up quicker than I expected and between the four of them I have earned $2.34 in the last week.

Because there are so many PTC sites, most of which require you to earn a certain minimum amount before you get paid, there is always the danger that you will not get paid when you do reach the cash-out point after a month or two of clicking. The four PTCs that I am currently with - Bux.to, Adbux, Clixsense and EuroCentBux - all appear to be trustworthy. I will sign up with others as I find out more about them.

Another new thing I’m trying is earning money in virtual worlds. I also joined Second Life last week. This is a virtual reality world which is populated by tens of thousands of people. Like the real world it has its own economy and its own currency. This currency is exchangable for real world currency. So far in the last week I have earned around $3.27 in real world currency from Second Life. The possibility for much more is very possible once I learn the necessary skills. The earnings from SecondLife at the moment are from completing surveys and signing up for offers. If I manage to learn some useful skills in design, animation or scripting I could earn a lot more.

So anyway, here now is my breakdown of how I earned just over $1,000 online in 25 weeks. PayPerPost and PayU2Blog are far and away the two best earners. Bear in mind that I have only been using PTC and Second Life for the last week so obviously those figures are low. Also remember that the earnings from Sponsored Reviews, Smorty and ReviewMe have all but dried up at the moment. For me at least:

PayPerPost $481.50
PayU2Blog $272.50
AdSense $63.97
Sponsored Reviews $58.50
Smorty $49.20
ReviewMe $27.50
WidgetBucks $25.01
Irish Opinions $24.44
Commission Junction $15.82
Posting Direct $6.10
Amazon.com $5.59
Helium $5.00
GlobalTestMarket $4.00
SecondLife $3.27
Bux.to $1.31
Clixsense $0.49
EuroCentBux $0.35
Adbux $0.19

Total: $1,044.74

Clixsense is a web site which pays you to click on links. The pages that load are usually loud and garish advertisements for casinos or get-rich-quick schemes. Effectively you are being paid to view an advertisement.

The payment is small, usually 1c per ad for a basic member and the number of ads you can view per day is limited to around ten. When you open a link you must keep it open for a minimum of 30 seconds to get paid. There is also a referral scheme (10c per referral) which helps to speed up payout somewhat.

Payout, which is by cheque, is when you reach a minimum of $10. Unfortunately there is a handling charge for the cheque which is deducted from your earnings so you don’t get the full amount.

Clixsense is not a get rich quick scheme but it is a way to make a few extra cents per day. You can even have it open in a separate tab if you can’t spare the 30 seconds!

Two similar sites are Adbux and Bux.to. There are lots of others. I’m joining them one-at-a-time as I read a bit about them and establish which ones are reputable and pay up. Since you could expect to average around 10 ads per day on each site it might start to add up to a bit if you’re signed up to several of these sites and have other people referred as well, for which you get a bonus. The difference with Adbux and Bux.to is that they pay via AlertPay (similar to PayPal) which is handier than cheque.

Another site again is EuroCentBux. This also pays by AlertPay. The difference is that it trades in Euros, so a click here is worth 1 Euro cent, which is worth about 1.4 US cents at current exchange rates. Payout is at €10

When I logged into PayPerPost this morning I was interested to see an announcement that there had been a change to PPPs Terms of Service. Previously in order for your blog to qualify for PPP it needed to be at least 90 days old with at least 20 posts written within that time. This has now been changed so that your blog needs only be 30 days old with ten posts written within that time.

The reason for this is unstated but obvious: Googles smackdown of bloggers in the PPP network has hurt. There is the awkward situation existing now that many of the PPP bloggers (Posties as we’re called) have blogs which do have traffic and figure highly in search engine results but who have a PageRank rating of Zero. Meanwhile most of the advertisers with PPP continue to demand PageRank as a requirement for their posts.  PPP’s RealRank system has still to be widely accepted by advertisers and the new SocialSpark site is still some way from launching.

While posties with PR0 still manage to make some money they now do so at a greatly reduced rate to what they once did. On the other hand, if you are lucky enough to still have a blog with at least some PageRank within the PPP network you find that your competition is greatly reduced. This is good for the Posties with PageRank but bad for PPP and their advertisers. The easing of the ToS would seem to be an attempt to make it easier for blogs which might still have PR to join the network.

For any bloggers who have new blogs which got PR in the last update and were thinking of joining PayPerPost but are still younger than three months this must seem like good news. The question you must ask though is: is it worth it? Since average posts with PageRank in PPP are worth about $7 and you can take three of them per day, it would be easy enough to make about $20 per day with PPP but if you are writing sponsored posts at that rate it is likely that Google will detect you and remove your PageRank fairly quickly.

I think that many people will decide that it is worth it even if they get away with it for only a few weeks. This is likely to lead to an upsurge in throwaway blogs in the next month. And also greater competition for those already within the network.