It’s been about a year and a half since I wrote my first Project Payday review. Since then, it has grown to be quite popular. In fact, it’s the fifth most popular post here at I’ve Tried That. I have since been called a number of names for not actively trying the program, but still offering my opinion on it. Well, we decided to take a deeper look into the program. To do so, we brought in Cheryl to act as a secret agent for I’ve Tried That. Her article is a brief look into what you receive when you sign up for Project Payday. Cheryl has agreed to do a followup post later on with more details on her specific earnings. Stay tuned.
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A Look into Project Payday
When I was offered the opportunity to try Project PayDay, I figured why not? I had nothing to lose, right? So many people had commented on the original blog entry that they were making money through PPD, there had to be something to it.
I signed up on 01/07/2009 and paid the $34.95 fee to join. I was provided with a login and password to access Project Payday’s training site with resource materials. Throughout the signup process and training I was offered the opportunity to purchase additional materials such as step-by-step video tutorials or reference books for additional charges (usually $19.95 or more), but I opted to take the traditional route.
So, what is Project Payday?
Project PayDay (PPD) is a resource for finding out how to make money by working those “Click Here for a Free iPod” or “You Can Win a Free Wii” banner ads you see everywhere. PPD teaches you how to make money by becoming a paid referral for someone who wants that iPod or that Wii, and eventually becoming someone who pays for those referrals and cashes in on the profits from these free items.
The instruction manual is clear and concise, with videos peppered throughout to make some concepts more clear. Project Payday has a 3-step process, called “methods” that claim to get you making money quickly and keep you making money.
Method 1 is where everyone starts. The manual explains that to get started making money, you must participate in a referral forum. It gives you several to choose from, and even shows you what to do to start managing trades and “going green” to earn money right away. You log in to the forum, find someone who is “buying” referral opportunities (Buyer) and selling your services. You set up a trade agreement with the Buyer through the built-in trade manager, and then they give you their referral link. You use the link to log in to the site and complete enough offers or credits to “go green” or show up on the Buyer’s list as a qualified referral. Say the Buyer wants to get a $400 television from one of these sites. If they need just 4 qualified referrals, they could pay 4 people $25 each to sign up and become a qualified referral, and they’ve just paid $100 for a $400 TV. This is where you make money – you offer to be a referral, go on the site, sign up and complete the offers required. Once you have met the requirements, you let the Buyer know, and they verify it with the site, then pay you the asking price for the referral.
Sounds easy, right? There is a catch. In order to become a qualified referrer, you must sign up a certain number of offers. There are many to choose from, including makeup, pantyhose, credit reporting services, money making services, jewelry, coffee and more. Some of the offers are free to try, while others can cost from $1 – $50 or more, depending on what you are purchasing. This is usually an introductory offer, and must be cancelled within 7 days in order to keep recurring monthly fees or dues from being charged to your credit card. These fees can range from $7.95 – $79.95 or more per month.
The trick is, you can’t cancel too quickly, or you might end up “going red” and being forced to return any money you’ve earned back to the Buyer. If you sign up for the trial offer and cancel it a day or two later, you risk losing your referral pay. Most Buyers recommend cancelling on day 6 of a trial offer, just to be safe.
It sounds simple enough: earn money just to go on a site and be a referral. Just remember that nearly every referral fee will cost you something, whether it’s a trial fee, a membership fee, or the like. And if you don’t keep meticulous records of your transactions, you can end up paying through the nose when those monthly dues and fees start piling up. A $25 referral fee on a site could end up costing you $5, $10, even the whole $25 or more.
You also can’t just stay at Method 1 forever and continue to make money. Every site has numerous offers, but all sites have virtually the same offers. In addition, some offers are actually the same company. For instance, there might be six different credit report offers on one site, but they are all the same company. Try to sign up for two or three of them and you’ll get rejected for duplication. At that point you might as well move on to Method 2.
Method 2 builds on Method 1. You’ve already signed up for several sites to “go green” and earned cash. Now you become the Buyer, buying greens from people who are working Method 1. You pay them to complete offers for you, usually a small percentage of the amount of the product or money you are receiving from the referral site. For instance, you want a $500 PayPal cash payout. If that payout requires 10 referrals, and you pay $20 per referral, then you’re paying $200 for a $500 payout, for a profit of $300. Not too bad. Just one of those a week will net you about $1200 per month in extra income.
Method 3 builds from Method 2. You go from buying referrals for cash to buying referrals for other items like electronics, which you can then sell. This method is described by Project PayDay as somewhat more lucrative than the other methods, since electronics may have a higher profit margin per referral than cash.
The Bottom Line
Project Payday itself is an information source. You find out where to go to make the money, and what to do once you get there. (Our recommendation: Your time is better spent at a free site, like SwagBucks, where they offer $5.00 just for signing up.) Once you’ve gotten comfortable with Method 1 and 2, PPD even provides a mentor or two that can help you increase your income.
PPD also keeps in regular contact with you, e-mailing once or twice a week with “special offers” just like the ones you’ve been signing up for. These are generally offers such as a $1.97 trial offer on how to make money on eBay, and PPD refunds the trial fee back to you. Of course, there is no mention of the exorbitant monthly fees that program charges (for which PPD most certainly receives a kickback).
Money can be made with Project Payday, but the work is tedious, time-consuming, detail-intensive and risky. You must provide personal information (including your phone number), thus increasing your spam e-mails, junk mail and phone calls. You must also provide credit card information to sites that may not be strictly legitimate. Failure to note the details of the offers and keep track of orders and cancellations can result in significant financial losses.
I have been working the PPD program for the last 3 weeks and will report what actually happened in my next article, including how much money I made. Yes! I did make money.
Click here to read our third and final update on Project Payday.
Cheryl is a writer in Southwest Florida.
You can read her blog at: http://www.cliopatra.net/
Ok, after going through Project Payday’s recruiting process on Kelly’s video and spending half my afternoon figuring this thing out I was about ready to pull out my credit card and get things going. Something inside me said wait a minute, do some more research! Glad I did. Looks like you can make money with this but the headaches far out weight the benefits it sounds like to me. If I’ve got to call my bank and cancel transactions all the time, this isn’t for me. I’ll keep looking!
I love Project Payday and Easy Payday Revolution. PPD is where I first started making money online. I don’t know what I would do without that place. I sure do feel like I owe them. And you can absolutely make money at this. However, it’s not something you can set and forget. This is something that takes some real work. If you are not afraid of a little work then this could be great for you. Easy Payday Revolution is basically the same thing except for they give you $5/referral vs PPD $1/per and for every person you refer to the website you also become their mentor. It is truly unique unlike any other system I have ever seen.
oh my .. reading all of these posts on this website brought back some memories from back in 2009 when I got snuckered into this “freebie trading” deal … Of all the headaches it caused me, I remember the BIGGEST one that one company charged my cc for $80-some odd dollars after signing up for JUST the trial period ! I returned the product and it took T E N nervewracking days until they finally admitted having received it back but had been “backlogged” and it would take another “10 or so days” to get my cc credited …. DON’T GET INVOLVED IN THIS FOLKS, P L E A S E DON’T ! you’ll spend 50 dollars to “green” a site for somebody else and you barely break even ! not to mention the CONSTANT fight and struggle to get your MONEY BACK for overcharging your cc and/or trying to STOP autoships, this is a NIGHTMARE ! The absolute pits ! Because I am a long established good customer with my credit card bank, they took my word for it that I was being screwed royally and closed my cc account to STOP the parasites issuing me a new account number and cc so that I would once again SLEEP AT NITE !!!!! STAY AWAY FROM IT .. STAY AWAY FROM IT … !!!!!
i membered with ppd recently for free by doing a trial offer .
now some of the emails are scams sent by project payday, for example remember the partner with paul herbal life ripoff ?originally 9.99 then for 39.95 wtf,,,, sent to my email today ,,and thats why i posted on that scam today .
I’m glad I came here to see about the project pd ,, ” lol I have 2 trials to cancel
Thanks
I stumbled across PPD too and was almost tempted to try it after viewing the tutorials, but I got a bad vibe so I chickened out. However, I am desparate to earn a little extra cash from somewhere. I have been unemployed now for 4 months and money (and a job) is really tight and hard to come by. I would love to save money for bills and help my fiance save for our wedding. If anyone knows any really legit sites (other than PPD) would you please share with me.
I stumbled across this projectpayday this evening, and even though I wasn’t really looking for a work at home project at the time… I decided what the heck, I have some time here and there while at my job so why not make a buck. I got a bad feeling right off the bat when they wanted either 35 bucks off the top, or you sign up for this or that… So I signed up for a gamefly subscription which I had planned to do anyhow, just never got around to actually doing it. I was NOT going to throw any money around to a company that is supposed to give ME money. (why can’t anyone say “hey I’m so confident in my system that your membership is FREE right now.. you pay us AFTER you use our system, make some cash and see that we really are telling the truth and not scamming you?) Any how. I read the tutorial, got to the fast furious fifty with that ever so charismatic Kelly and started pumping the brakes. Right then I smelled the biggest, nastiest 3day old dead fish smell EVER.
so the whole gig is.. you gotta do what I did just to see what you gotta do.. just to make a dime here and there,you gotta sign up for this and that. and as Cheryl found out, if you don’t keep tract of all the sites you hit that “I agree to” button on.. you’re gonna lose your shirt. So I guess its back to the drawing board folks.. this one’s a bust. Oh and its easy to see who the REAL folks are that got bamboozled, and who is somehow affiliated with the fine folks at PPD just by the comments they leave… look at the dollar amounts going out and coming in….take the ever hopeful, optimistic, wishful thinking cap off and you’ll see what I mean.
My hats off to all the folks that went out on a limb and tried something new … and curses to all you who seek to further embed that hook so the corporate machine can reel’m back for another helping of scientifically researched charismatic lies to get every last dime out of your freshly created PayPal account.
This is a total scam. How long could you continue doing this? I mean, come on. I make a lot of money online, and I do it with Hubpages, Clickbank, and article directories. It’s fully legit. Of course, it takes work (that’s the only real way to make money). anything that makes you money online has to do with writing articles and promoting your links. Everything else is pretty much crap.
I signed up with Project Payday , was qualified by accepting offers and started promoting referrals , I send around 45 referrals and had a 50% conversion rate , They owed me $24.00 then this AM I received the following when I tried to sign on; Account Canceled Ni more leads will be credit to my Account. ? No explanation I wasted time and money What a ripoff,
It is something that you need to be extremely organized to do but if you are then you can make some fast money as long as you are dealing with honest traders….I also got burned many, many times with charges for products that go cancelled on time, paid numerous postage fees and made numerous trips to the post office to ship things back, got the run around on numerous occasions because I tried to get a return shipping authorization and spent numerous hours contacting my bank to get charges reversed all successfully. And I’m a very detail oriented, focused individual.
Regarding certain offers like the Boca Java I stayed a member beyond the trial period for several months and then submitted a contact form on their web site to cancel and they still kept sending shipments. By that point in time I had a new debit card number so they couldn’t charge for the shipments but they just kept sending them and now I’m being dunned by collection agencies and I’ll be damned if I was going to pay to ship back what I never wanted!
You can make money with this but all should be prepared to deal with exactly what I did.
In regards to project payday yes it does work I have made very
good money with this you can work long term or take off whenever its up to you right no investment at all just pay for a small shipping of a product like $2.95 and you pocket $47.00 profit not too bad for 1 hour of work
Thanks
Saleene
Can anyone tell me how to go about cancelling my membership to project payday so that I can get my “30-day money back guarentee” ?? I’ve emailed them but seen on the web that there is an actual refund section…..I’ve been roaming around the site for hours….. someone with expierience on this site please explain where the refund part is…..
@Christina, way to go. You will make more money easier when you move to method 2.
I tried out Project Payday not too long ago and I love it! So far I’ve gotten $30 for about 2-3 hours of work. I still need to do 2 more offers in order to move on to Method 2, but I can’t wait!
Don’t shoot the messenger! Cheryl will find out between paying for greens and purchasing new sites to refer to, she’ll just about break even, if she’s lucky. But hey, there’s much worse out there. However she knows marketing so she’ll turn it into a cash cow. Just like anything online, if you rely on their referrals, it probably won’t be worth it. But if you know how to recruit, like some of the newer forums are stressing now, you can do well. Good luck, dlevitt
try method two i never used my credit card and i already made a little over one grand in couple days. ya needa tighten up with that scam shit. ya needa read and find the easy way and thats in method two.
Oh please.
Yes we still linked to the site. Why? Because despite not earning much, we still made money from it. Some people are interested in making money regardless of the effort you have to put in.
Get a grip.
I read all the articles that were posted at the end of the second one, after saying it was hardly worth the effort there is a link that takes you to the ppd site. Layne I would have to agree with you this place is promoting the site they are trying to discredit lol……..HORRAY FOR IDIOTS THAT THINK SO LITTLE OF PEOPLE….
Layne-
Try searching next time before calling us crooks.
https://ivetriedthat.com/2009/03/05/can-you-make-money-with-project-payday/
What happened to the followup post?
This seems like one of those blogs that “pretends” to give a review but all they’re really doing is promoting their affiliate link for the product they’re reviewing.
Is everyone a crook these days?
Hello:
Got to add my 2 cents on this one. I too joined through an affiliate offer from Java coffee. I don’t remember how much I paid but got some coffee at a discounted price. Of course, it was a reaccuring, auto ship deal. I canceled before the trial date was up and low and behold, the next month I received another shipment and was charged $ 49.95 for 5 pounds of coffee. I contacted the company and was given the runaround about getting a refund. They finall agreed to take it back and credit my card. I had to pay a return postage fee and a restocking fee. In the end I got about $ 10.00 of my $ 49.95 back. As far as Project Payday it self goes, I was sent an offer by one of their member right after joining “to help me get started making money” I was promised $ 50.00 just to sign up for one of a hand full of offers which I could either keep or quit. I thought cool a fast $ 50.00 from the start. When I went to check out the offers, it was going to cost me a min. of $ 50.00 off the top which I could cancel if I wanted to after the fact. None of the offers were anything I was interested in to start with. I did not do it as I did not want to take the chance of not being able to get my money back. I proceded to get emailed 5 or more times a day by this guy wanting to know why I had not compleated any of the offers yet. I told him I wasn’t spending $ 50.00 or more to make $ 50.00. I have never had anything to do with them since. I felt it was a highly dishonest way of making money. I can not believe that this is in any way legal. Are people making money with this program, I’m sure they are. I could also go out and sell drugs and make money too but I’m not going to……
@ Dave – https://ivetriedthat.com/2009/03/05/can-you-make-money-with-project-payday/
Where is the update that was suppoesd to follow?
i love this site. thank you so much for your hard work on presenting so much info to folks.
i tried ppd and it wasn’t for me. way too tedious and i just never felt right about signing up for several trials and then cancelling. felt like it wasn’t in “good faith.”
cheryl did a great job on portraying exactly how the “program” works! thanks!
deb
I take it you didn’t really read through the entire post. Cheryl writes that she did make money, but found it hardly worthwhile. I don’t understand how you interpreted that as us claiming ‘Project Payday was sent from heaven’ but, it’s not. It’s hardly worth an effort.
This whole payday scheme is a scam including this site. This is just another site which pretends NOT to like something then one day they were enlightened and now the scam was sent from heaven.
What a pack of morons.
I’vetriedthat.com …shame on you.
TO MOSOI148:
All I can say is thank you. That was the answer to the RIGHT question I was asking.
AL.
TO CHERYL:
Thanks again Cheryl, but Mosoi148 gave me the PRECISE answer I was looking to find. But thanks for trying (twice) anyway.
AL.
You can quit in Method 1 if you decided it wasn’t for you.
You can quit pretty much when ever you want. Just make sure you don’t have any offers that haven’t been canceled, or that you don’t owe any one $$ for going green…
Sure, you can drop out whenever you want. You’re building your own business, essentially. If you want to quit, you can quit anytime.
TO CHERYL:
Thanks for the input, but more specifically what I want to know is, once you are already involved with the program up to your neck, say the 3rd. level, is one able to just drop it suddenly & walk away altogether, BUT without getting penalized for the “early withdrawal?” :)
AL.
I wanted to respond to AL2525 comment from February 25th. AL – PPD is a drop-in sort of program. You can log in to the forums and work whenever you want. If you’re in the middle of a couple of trades there may be some wait time involved, but it’s not as if someone is looking over your shoulder to make sure you do everything just so. But once you get in, the push is to keep moving forweard with the steps. You can make very little money with Method 1.
Hey guys, thanks for giving ol PPD another look! Agreed, it’s tedious, a bit risky, and there are better options out there…but most people can say the same about their Day Jobs! lol…
Thanks again.
~David~
Hi Steve!
Just got through reading your “Deeper… P.P-D.” And I very much appreciated its excellent informative content. It was precisely what I was looking for,to help me make an informed decision on whether or not to get involved with them. However, I do have a question for you regarding one aspect of their program which you neglected to mention.
As you can probably imagine, a significant number of us money-seekers, regardless of whatever else we may or may not be trying out presently, I think we always keep one eye peeled for a “better opportunity.” So if and when we find it, how hard is it to drop P.P-D. and move on to something else without getting burned? I mean, is it relatively easy, just as labor intensive as it is to keep it going, or worse?
Thanks in advance.
AL2525
Method 2 is trading green for greeen with other referals.
Once you have plenty of green sites you move to method 3 which is paying referrals to claim cash or product.
I’ve tried PPD off and on. It’s too complicated for me. I’ve ended up stuck w/ product and paying fees after being 1 day late canceling. It is a good way to make a quick $100 bucks, but I’m not organized enough to do it everyday. Way to many offers to try to keep track of.
Well done! This is a wonderful outline of Project Payday. Yes, the “Project Payday” product is a information resource, and the methods outlined do work.
You are so right, the work is “tedious, time-consuming, detail-intensive.” Its defiantly not a get rice quick scheme. You must be detailed oriented, patient, and focused if you want to achieve any short or long term success.
Over the last 14 months I have made close to $30,000 using the Project Payday techniques. So its work for me.
I’m looking forward to your next installment. Did you trade with me? :)