Reviews

The internet is definitely the new frontier when it comes to making money. There are a vast number of opportunities out there, but as with any frontier it’s also home to bandits and snake oil salesmen.

Most of the programs and systems that you should avoid want you to believe that it is easy to make big money online without having to do any hard work.

AppCoiner is one of these sites, let me explain more.

What is AppCoiner?

The sales page for AppCoiner states that it can help you make money by testing mobile apps and games. All you need to do is sign up, download some apps and write an honest review.

This is not all it seems to be as it’s using the words test and review seemingly interchangeably.

For most people this might seem like I’m splitting hairs, but they are very different. Are you going to be doing a variety of tests on different resolution screens? What about hardware? Operating systems versions?

Or are you simply taking a look at the app and writing a review, like you would with a toaster?

The Sales Pitch

After handing over your email address, you’re taken to the real sales page for AppCoiner.

It pushes the idea that it’s easy to test apps and make money. All you need is a basic grasp of English and a smartphone or tablet.

In fact, it lures you in with an interesting fact: in 2016 224 billion apps were downloaded generating billions in revenue.  Apparently you’re in for a slice of this cash because app developers want you to make reviews of their products.

While not strictly a lie, this is a misdirection as those billions generated from apps has nothing to do with how you’ll get paid. In fact the developers of the apps won’t even know you exist.

AppCoiner provides a handy calculator to help you work out how much you’ll get paid. This is a common technique seen on scam sites and doesn’t actually do anything. I mean, you can select how much each app review will earn you, between $5 and $30, but how do you know how much it will earn you?

It is meaningless junk designed to make you think you will earn big money.

Your Special Discount!

AppCoiner is open to anyone, anywhere, but if your country might have a huge demand for testers, as such AppCoiner will give you a $20 discount.

This is BS, as it’s the same no matter what country you are in, they are just using a tactic to make you think you’re getting a discount for a reason, when in reality, you’re not.

Try and leave the page and you’ll get hit with another $10 discount.

Not Really Testing

As mentioned above, I had some concerns about what AppCoiner is selling you. The reality is that you won’t actually be testing apps, but reviewing them.

What AppCoiner wants you to do is to log into your AppCoiner members account and write a review there.

This seems odd as wouldn’t it be better to write the review on the apps page on the App Store or Google Play?

It would yeah, but you’ll never get paid that way.

You see, the app developers have nothing to do with this, in fact if they were to pay you for a review they’d likely be banned from the various app stores for trying to game the system.

Instead AppCoiner provides you with a website to write your reviews on. This sounds great, though far from what is promised on the sales page, but it isn’t good.

The website you’ll get will be a subdomain of another website called popularreviewer, so for example you’re might be bobsmith.popularreviwer

Not only that but the site is a cookie cutter of every other site subdomain – they all look the same barring any unique content you add in terms of reviews.

There are a few problems with this sort of setup.

Firstly, you’re not in control. If the main site is taken down by the owners, your site and content is gone.

Secondly, subdomains are less likely to be ranked by a search engine. I did a search on numerous apps (“app name” review) and found only one subdomain from this site on page 5 of the results. That’s it.

Finally, you’re competing against every other AppCoiner customer.

Getting Paid

The sales pitch states that AppCoiner will monetize your reviews for you and will pay you out weekly, but how does this work?

At first I thought it might be some sort of affiliate marketing at the app store. That was quashed when I realized that neither Apple nor Google has an affiliate scheme for their app stores.

After looking at the sites provided by AppCoiner it became clearer –adverts. Each page of your site will contain 2 adverts, plus whenever someone clicks the buttons to go to the app stores, they are shown another advert and made to wait 10 seconds, and then forced to click a link to continue.

It’s these adverts that will make you money.

Adverts generally pay peanuts, but these are adverts for products on ClickBank, so it is in fact a type of affiliate marketing, so at least pay more in commissions.

As well as that, there is a built in optin form. If anyone signs up they will be sent emails that contain affiliate links with your tag in them.

Traffic, Traffic, Traffic

Due to the nature of the site you’re being provided, the only way to make it even remotely viable is to send vast amounts of traffic to it.

As these sites basically don’t rank, organic SEO is out of the question, which leaves social media and paid traffic.

Buying traffic to send to these sites is a very bad idea. Unless you know what you are doing it’s very easy to pay more on traffic than you get in commissions. That being said it’s a viable option.

Social media is also an option, but again unless you know what you’re doing it could end up with you simply being labelled a spammer.

Is App Coiner a Scam?

Is AppCoiner a scam?

By definition, no it’s not, but it’s certainly misleading – instead of simply testing apps and getting paid you’re effectively running a small affiliate website.

And that’s my other major concern with this system: you don’t own anything, but are required to do the work.

Everything you build here is owned by App Coiner. They could at any minute decide to replace your affiliate tags with theirs or shut the site down and then you’d have nothing.

My final issue is that you need to send traffic to the site, a lot of traffic for it to be worthwhile, and that will be costly in either money or time or both.

You’d be better off creating your own affiliate site; it might take longer to learn but you’d own the domain and have full control.

Before I start this InboxDollars review, let’s put the facts on the table:

• We all read emails.
• We all love money.
• It would be really awesome to get paid to read emails.

InboxDollars promises just that and they even go as far as to make the claim that ‘Money really does grow on trees.’ But just how accurate are these claims? Can you really get paid to just read emails? We wouldn’t call ourselves professional product and program testers if we didn’t give you an answer to these questions.

You can make money, but that doesn’t mean you necessarily will make money.

Each email that you read will net you anywhere between 1 to 10 cents. But these aren’t emails you would normally want to read. They’re advertisements for various programs or products that would result in InboxDollars making hefty revenue if you followed through and signed up for the program. Aside from emails, you can also “get paid” to play games, sign up for surveys, sign up for programs, shop, and search the internet.

What you aren’t told is that you will need to start spending money first and you’ll receive a measly percentage back on your spendings. This is the hidden truth behind their “get paid to” claims.

Take for example, this “Deal” offered for LifeLock. You get paid $20 if you spend anywhere from $120 to $324 for a LifeLock membership.

Okay, sure, this might be a deal if you are actually interested in their service and would like some money back, but for 99% of users this “deal” is completely meaningless.

My Results

I’ve been a member for about two weeks now and I have received 14 emails for a total of $0.40 cents. That’s a little less than 3 cents per email. If we take into account the $5.00 sign up bonus and the $1.00 introduction survey, I will need to read approximately 857 more emails.

At the current rate of 1 email per day, I’m looking at over 2 years of reading email just to receive my first $30 check. I don’t know about you, but I have better things to do than click on an advertisement once a day for the next 2 years just to receive $30.

You make a lot of progress really fast early on, but according to our readers in the comments below and some of the reviews we’ve seen around the web, emails start to slow when you approach the cash out mark.

Even worse, there are reports of accounts getting closed right when they are ready to cash out. We can’t confirm these reports and InboxDollars does reserve the right to cancel your account if you violate their code of conduct.

The Real Source of Funds

At this point, you’re probably asking yourself how could they possibly make money by sending out emails. I decided to look into a few of the programs that are heavily promoted throughout the site. Take for example, eBay. InboxDollars will pay you $6.00 to sign up at eBay and place a bid. Not bad right? Wrong. They’re making anywhere between $25-$35 every time a new user signs up at eBay and places a bid.

Stamps.com is also heavily promoted at a $10 bonus just for signing up for their free trial. However, in the event you forget to cancel the free trial after a couple of weeks, you will be billed $15.99 per month and InboxDollars makes $50.

Stay far away from any free trial offers. That is where you will most likely lose a lot of money.

It sounds like users are getting the short end of the stick while InboxDollars laughs all the way to the bank.

I’ve tried that and I don’t like it.

If you have nothing better to do than to read emails (read: view advertisements) for the next few years, then by all means sign up and get started. I do feel that doing anything at InboxDollars aside from reading emails is a recipe for disaster.

In an extreme case, suppose you sign up for the Stamps.com free trial and forget about your account. In a month you will be billed and in the event that you refuse to pay you can have your account forwarded to collections which could have a disastrous effect on your credit score.

This result could yield hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in damages all for a measly $10.

Personally, I’m closing my account.

How Does Inbox Dollars Compare?

If you’re looking for a decent alternative, I would highly suggest looking into SwagBucks. I’ve reviewed them a few months back and I’ve actually made money and was able to cash it out. and give some tips on how to quickly start making some money with them.

SwagBucks does pay you to do a number of things, watch videos, play games, answer surveys, but my favorite is that they pay you just to search the web. SwagBucks gets paid by sending you Google’s sponsored results and, as a thank you, sends some of their earnings back to you.

I’ve switched my main search engine to SwagBucks. They are using Google’s results, so you are still seeing the same exact page you’d see if you searched Google directly. But by going through them first, you can earn some extra money.

I highly suggest that you create an account today. You’ll quickly see why I recommend SwagBucks over InboxDollars. Plus, you get a free $5 bonus just for signing up.

SwagBucks Pays: Here’s Proof

I can’t make a recommendation without offering a little bit of proof that it actually works.

Here’s a look at my total earnings so far:

1 SwagBuck roughly equals 1 penny. So I’ve made approximately $928.78 since joining!

And here’s a peek at my personal cash outs.

You can redeem your SwagBucks for a number of things, but I’ve found it’s best to go for gift cards at places you normally shop. That seems to get you the most value for your “SwagBuck” and if you are as addicted to Amazon as I am, it’s a great way to lower your credit card bill.

That’s right. I’ve been able to make over $900 and it didn’t take over 2 years of clicking links in emails.

The Bottom Line

If you’ve gotten this far, by now you should realize I’m not a fan of InboxDollars.

There are better alternatives out there that have proven track records.

I’d suggest you stick with something else.

Ah, the allure of easy money. BigSpot knows their target audience.

I always need to preface my posts regarding online surveys.

It seems that whenever the topic comes up, a few people like to come out of the woodwork to call me a scammer for saying there are legitimate online survey companies. Real survey companies do exist people. It’s not the glamorous $75/hr jobs some websites try and lead you to believe, but if you sign up for enough companies and spend enough time taking surveys, you can easily make some extra spare change each month.

It’s true! Honest.

Also, a legitimate survey company will never ask you for money or to complete offers as part of a survey. These are not surveys, but scams. As long as you know that online surveys aren’t insanely lucrative and you never spend a dime to take a survey, you’ll do just fine.

Is BigSpot.com a Scam?

BigSpot.com, while free to join and use, isn’t exactly a survey company and they do tell you this upfront. Instead, what they’re doing is “matching” you with other survey companies. You fill out a small form with your demographics and they send you a list of survey companies they recommend you join.

You do have to decline a number of “offers” (read: spam) in order to get to the list of companies and this is where BigSpot.com makes it’s money. If you’re not careful, you could be giving away your private and personal information to a bunch of companies you’ve never even heard of. You’ll receive junk mail, credit card offers, spam, and just about every annoying type of direct mail offer you can imagine.

While BigSpot says they aren’t selling your information to these companies directly, your miss clicks here could technically count as your consent and you are basically sending your personal information to third parties.

So, I’d have to say that while BigSpot.com technically isn’t a scam, I still wouldn’t recommend joining them.

There is one redeeming quality to the site. Right on the main page is this paragraph…

Will I get rich?
No, silly. You’re not going to get rich taking surveys. You’ll have the opportunity to put some extra cash in your pocket each month and the chance to earn some really great rewards.

It’s a good relief from the usual scams that claim you could be making hundreds of dollars per hour and could even live off of the money you make taking surveys. They’re at least upfront about the income you could expect to earn.

In the end, you don’t need BigSpot. It’s just collecting emails to show you a list of survey companies.

Try These 3 Legit Sites Instead

BigSpot.com isn’t necessarily a scam. It’s not costing you anything, but they aren’t representing themselves fairly either.

You can skip all the hassle of shelling out your private information to a random company and join a few legitimate survey companies directly. Here are three that I highly recommend above the rest:

1. Swagbucks – Login, answer questions, take polls, watch videos, make money. I’ve cashed out a couple hundred dollars in my first few months of joining. Absolutely a must join.
2. SurveySavvy – This is my all time favorite survey company. I’ve cashed out thousands of dollars over the past 4 years from both my completed surveys and referrals. This one is highly recommended.
3. PaidViewpoint – PaidViewpoint is a fun way to pick up some extra cash in your spare time. You answer short three question surveys every few hours. Some surveys were created by companies, other by users. Every survey you take has a chance at earning you cash. It’s fun, easy, and definitely worth checking out.

You can click here and check out a list of 15 additional survey companies. These are all legitimate companies that are looking for panel members to complete SURVEYS. They’re not looking for you to complete offers, you won’t have to spend any money, and you WILL get paid.

Always remember that survey companies aren’t going to be the answer to your financial woes. They can be a fun way to earn some extra money in your downtime, but that’s it.

Don’t join any survey site expecting a windfall of cash. That’s just not going to happen. And anyone telling you otherwise is looking to make money off of you by either scamming you or selling your personal information.

Stay vigilant.

Mechanical Turk (or mTurk, for short) is one of the oldest micro job sites around. It’s been around since 2005 and has been providing people with a platform to make extra income online by performing simple tasks. It’s backed by retail giant Amazon, so you’re in good hands.

It’s one of those too-good-to-be-true statements where you can work from the comforts of your home in your boxer shorts, pajamas and fluffy slippers and earn real cash. But unlike other scams online, mTurk is legit and has been paying people on time for easy-to-do tasks for years.

Getting Started with mTurk

Mechanical Turk has two kinds of users – requesters (the people who assign and pay for tasks) and workers (those who will complete the tasks). Requesters are the ones who will accept or reject completed tasks of workers. Amazon doesn’t have a say on this, but mTurk simply provides the platform to connect these two category of users.

To get started completing tasks on Mechanical Turk, you’ll need to create an account. But note that not everyone will be accepted. mTurk has an approval process, which has been notorious for denying some users for no apparent reason, but if you’re lucky to have your application accepted, you can continue filling up your account info. If your application gets rejected, you can try again in a few days.

As a new mTurk worker, you’ll be under 10-day probation with a maximum cap of 100 accepted HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks). All workers must complete at least their first HIT to begin the 10-day count. Once you finish the probationary period, you’ll be given a daily cap of 3,800 accepted HITs.

One of the most important parts of your mTurk account is the dashboard. This is where you’ll see your worker ID, how many HITs have been approved or denied, how much money you’ve made so far, and your entire HIT record.

Note that all workers have to provide their tax details and other personal info like driver’s license number, SSN, etc. If you’re not from the U.S., you have to send mTurk a filled-up W8-BEN form.

All About HITs

The HITs are on a first-come, first-serve basis, but requesters will only give you the HIT if you qualify for it. There’s a qualification tab on every HIT, so it’s best to check it out first. These vary completely depending on the requester, but common qualifications include taking a test, completing a qualification HIT, or “approved HITs greater than 500, 1k, 5k, or 10k+.

These 500, 1k+, 5k+, or 10k+ milestones are important, since your approval HIT rate refers to the number of HITs that have been approved compared to the number of HITs that have been rejected.

Qualification tests pay as little as one cent upon completion, but they are important if you want to turn mTurk into a lucrative full-time career.

You can find three kinds of HITs on the platform:

1. Data Entry (converting image formats, filling out captcha, etc.)
2. Surveys (Answer surveys from requesters)
3. Transcriptions (transcribe content)

Some HITs are grouped in Batches (two or more HITs posted in one HIT). Workers should choose HITs carefully, especially if they’re still in the probationary period, since Amazon can close your account if it sees something wrong with your account.

Some HITs must be completed in just 3 minutes upon acceptance. Others have an hour, a day, several weeks of completion time, but if you miss this time frame, it will be counted as an expired HIT. It’s important to note that workers with high expiration rates won’t be able to qualify for HITs with higher pay.

Scripts and Why You Need Them

You have to understand that at any given time, there are millions of HITs available on mTurk. The great thing about mTurk is that you can filter these HITs according to your needs (such as expiry date, reward, time allotted and more).

New workers should familiarize themselves with the platform first, before taking on HITs. Ideally, those in the probationary period should choose easier HITs.

Once you get the hang of mTurk’s platform, it’s time to use various scripts that would take your turking to the next level.

The three must-have scripts you should install and why you should use them:

1. Tamper Monkey for Chrome or GreaseMonkey for Firefox – These browser extensions allow you to install all other scripts that will make your turking life manageable.
2. Turkopticon – Available as a Chrome or Firefox extension, this script lets you see workers’ reviews on requesters. This helps you avoid scam HITs and requesters who have made it difficult for mTurk workers in the past. Requesters listed her are given ratings for 4 factors (rewards, fairness, generosity and communication). Workers would be on the safe side if they choose requesters with over 90% ratings.
3. MTurk HIT DataBase – Automatically records every single HIT you’ve completed.

There are tons of Mechanical Turk scripts and plugins available for workers to use. You can check out a huge list of them here. Others let you auto-refresh the HIT screen automatically, some makes browsing for HITs more effective by personalizing parameters, others alter you via text or browser. Some scripts are aimed at advanced turkers (such as Scrapper or PANDA).

Whichever scripts you decide to use, these tools would help in increasing your productivity, calculating profits, improving HIT numbers, and providing a history of all your HITs. Simply put, if you wish to earn $500 per week on Mechanical Turk, you have to take advantage of scripts.

How Much Can You Earn from mTurk?

The income potential of mTurk may seem week, since HITs range from cents to dollars, but if you give enough time and work your way up to higher qualifications (10k+ milestones), the payment you’ll receive will definitely increase as well. Many turkers have done this as a side hustle to start, but are now banking on six-figures yearly from doing simple tasks.

Withdrawing money from Amazon requires your SSN and address proof. You can request for Amazon gift cards, or have your earnings transferred to your bank account. Your mTurk funds should be transferred to Amazon Payment on your Amazon account, before it will be withdrawn to your chosen bank. Note that bank transfers take 24 hours.

It’s recommended to transfer your mTurk funds weekly, since Amazon can terminate your account for some reason or another and all income you’ve generated from Mechanical Turk will be lost.

There are tons of resources to increase your mTurk income, such as Reddit (/r/HITsWorthTurkingFor), mTurk List, CloudMeBaby, and mTurk Grind, among others.

The Bottom Line

mTurk is a legitimate platform that lets you earn real money from simple tasks. Earning your way up to higher-earning tasks may seem daunting, but you can always do this on this side and focus on mTurk alone once you’re able to earn higher rewards.

It’s an awesome platform, and if you’re still mulling if you’re going to join or not, don’t. Do it now and reap from future rewards by turking today.

If you have an eye for photography and can quickly identify an interesting subject, scenario, or event, then you better make use of your phone to snap pictures and earn cash on the side. Foap is an Android and iOs app that lets anyone register, upload photos, and sell them for real cash. It was founded in 2012 with its corporate locations found in New York, Sweden and Poland.

Foap serves as a platform for casual photographers to sell their work to companies and brands. Calling itself as “the next wave of stock photography,” Foap also distributes photos through partners, such as Getty Images.

How Does Foap Work?

To get started with Foap, download the free app from either iTunes or Google Play. You’ll also need to create an account using either your e-mail address or Facebook account. You can’t start uploading photos yet though. You need to check out other photos first and rate at least five images with 1 to 5 stars. Once done, upload any photo you think people would find interesting, write photo description, license information, and relevant tags.

For your uploaded photos to be included in the Foap Marketplace, other users must rate your photo until it reaches 2.5-star rating or higher. The website has a rating system in place, wherein higher-rated images are seen more frequently.

The idea seems pretty easy, right? Well, Foap has two customers – the casual photographers who are uploading content into the app, and the companies or other people who need to purchase images. The demand is there. In fact, Foap claims to be partners with brands like Bank of America, Air Asia, Nivea, Absolut Vodka, Pepsi, Volvo Group, HoneyMaid, Heineken, Sony, Mango, Garnier, and more. But do these partnerships translate into earnings?

How Much Can You Earn?

Photos in the marketplace are sold at $10 each, but the money is split 50/50 – $5 goes to Foap and owners of the photos get to keep $5. The only good thing about this is, you can sell the same photo over and over as long as it’s hosted on Foap.

If you join Foap Missions – the company’s version of photo contests – you’ll get a chance to sell your photos to brands that started the mission. Companies often use the photos chosen for marketing campaigns. In return for being chosen, users may receive cash (somewhere from $50 to $500) or rewards, depending on the Mission description.

In order to get paid, you’ll need to cash out earnings before the 15th of the month. You then have to wait until month’s end to receive it via PayPal (No other payout options are available).

Things to Like about Foap

Foap isn’t the most novel idea, but there are several things to like about the app. For example, users do not need to complete a ton of requirements – all you need is a smartphone and photos that follow basic guidelines, and you can upload as much photos as you’d like.

Other notable things to like about Foap include:

• Mobile in nature – Snap photos and upload, even while on the go
• Huge community – Because the app is free to use, you can expect thousands of Foap users. This is a particularly great feature, especially for budding photographers who want free exposure of their work. Fans won’t translate to earnings, but it sure can help to get their names out there.
• Photo contest Missions – The money isn’t all that great (common prize amount is $100), but it’s one way to gain exposure if a popular brand uses your photos for marketing.
• Learning platform – Foap can be used for market research – what kinds of photos are people interested in? What kinds sell the most? The Foap rating system gives you immediate feedback of your work.

Things NOT to Like about Foap

Foap has a lot of potential, if the company changes these three things:

1. Rating system – The rating system has received a lot of complaints from users, since it’s basically free-for-all. Your photo may look award-winning and all, but as long as users rate it low, it won’t have a chance to be seen by a wider audience. There has been complaints that users can be competitive and down-rate others with obvious photography skill.
2. Require plenty of effort – If you’re a phone cam addict who takes over 20 snaps throughout the day, Foap can be a cool platform to showcase your work. It may not be worth the extra effort for people who aren’t fans of using their smartphones for picture-taking.
3. Price and Prizes – If Foap changes the rating system and more “worthy” users are featured, the company should also change pricing and amount of prizes to attract more brands and budding photographers to the community.

The Bottom Line: Should You Join Foap?

No one can earn enough money and turn Foap earnings into a full-time income. The Foap app is worth checking out if:

1. You’re only after passive income
2. You’re a professional photographer
3. You are willing to spend time and effort uploading photos (one at a time)
4. You excel in a competitive environment

Personally, I think there are better ways to spend your time in order to make money. Click here to see what I recommend most.