Can I actually earn any money online?

This is question everyone asks after calming down from spending hundreds of dollars on those fantastic offers to become rich overnight but getting dissapointed in most cases. Well I did same thing when I started to look for earning opportunities in summer of year 2005. What I realised was that answer is yes but it won't happen in one night or week or month like many claim in their sales letters or slogans. Making money online is possible just as much as in real life but you need to be more careful with offers you choose because not every opportunity is for you as those salespersons or affiliates claim. One of first thing to learn is how to determine which offer is for real and is not promising stars in the sky instead of real cash. Quite often offers are presented in a way that you can earn up to million in few days but details how it can be done are either not provided until you buy something advertised in this offer or are given partially which often is not enough to make more exact estimate and this is done for reason so people first spend money and only then find out real deal. Best way is first to find out in various forums or just by searching feedback from others who spent money on this offer. If you see a lot of positive feedback then it actually might be worth spending some money on this. In any case first consider if you can return your investment in any offer because it's just like in any business if you can't make profits with it then it might be just waste of time and money.
One thing I offer on my site is free expert advice in business opportunity that is one of easiest ways to earn money at this time. Of course risks involved are much higher than in other offers but work involved is close to zero so if you are looking for effecient time spending which doesn't require several hours spent daily then autosurfing is for you. Returns are high and at first seem impossible but after being in this for more than a year already I have found this to be golden middle between even higher risk opportunities like gambling, hyip and other online games and other end which are less risk but more time and work involving options like affilliate marketing, software development, e-book writing and etc. I also learned what mistakes to avoid and how to minimise risks which has given me only profits since and that's main reason I am still in this business and helping those who are new to this and don't have experience and knowledge to find best deals to make their time and money spent online most effeciently with profits.

What is Autosurfing?

It's combination of traffic exchange and high yield investment program. People can buy advertising and promote their product, website or anything they want to promote and in exchange they are offered to earn money by looking at other member's sites in rotation. If viewing of sites is done regularly money paid for advertising can be regained with profits. In autosurfing ads are shown as slide show with periodic change of ads usually with 20-30 seconds timer. For more details refer to autosurfing guide page.

What is manual surfing?

This is more powerful version of traffic exchange and high yield investment program combination. Difference from autosurfing is that to view the ads in rotation user must hit manually next site button after timer counts down to zero. This means more valuable traffic brought to your website because viewers actually need to pay attention to their browser unlike autosurf mode where people can just start the surf script and walk away while it runs. But in manual surf people need to sit at computer screen and watch those ads for 20-30 seconds before they are able to choose next ad. People who prefer traffic exchange sites to promote their site or product choose manual surf sites because click through rate or in other words amount of visitors who come to their site and actually see the content is much higher than in autosurf mode. Recently many programs have chosen to change from autosurfing to manual surfing.

What is HYIP?

High Yield Investment Program. In most cases such programs offer daily profits for doing nothing but investing of money. You don't need to surf any sites just have to make decision which investment programs to join and how much to invest. Some might think why I should join autosurf site if I can just go and put all my money in countless HYIP programs. Well truth is if you don't have time or possibility to surf daily it's better choice of course but if you consider earning money by doing something and need to promote some product or website you own then best choice of course is autosurfing or manual surfing because here you don't just get profits from your investments but also can get traffic to your website and sell product you promote. Surfing sites also allow getting referrals to your autosurf or HYIP programs because if you promote your referral links of some good HYIP you found recently some other surfers might notice your ad and join under you.
HYIP usually claim to get their profits from Forex trading, stock markets and other investment ventures but as experienced over 90% of HYIP programs are pure ponzi schemes with quite short lifetime. Higher is ROI higher is risk and shorter is lifetime of such program because once growth of members investing decreases program can't sustain the demand of cashouts it just collapses and closes. At this point most of investors who joined late loose their money. Only those who joined early can manage to make some profits but also only in case the program actually pays.
There are quite many tactics of HYIP scammers like paying once for each new member to show their test spend worked and they can invest more now but next payments never come. Also selective payment strategy is often used when HYIP monitor users are identified and only those users are paid which then leads to good reports on rating sites and more members believing they can safely invest in this program. Golden rule of joining HYIP is not too early and not too late because if you join early you might be the one who finds out program never pays but if you join too late you might be the one who paid to older members but there is just not enough money to pay your profits. So be advised if you join high risk programs to first check if program actually pays and it's not too old to be on finishing stages of operation.

What is shortterm and longterm investment?

Just as it says those are investments intended for shortterm or for longterm profits. In case of shortterm investments risk level is much higher because it involves very risky decisions and probability of loosing is much higher. Such decisions require good experience of spotting red flags and signs of scam program. But with higher risk come higher returns so usually it is up to investor which course of earning is optimal. My recommendation is to choose risk level based on experience and to avoid loosing everything it's better to start with low risk/longterm ones and then slowly try higher risk programs. Such approach will give more time to learn the basics of online investing and which offers are obvious scam or which aren't.

What is due diligence?

The investigation and evaluation of a management team's characteristics, investment philosophy, and terms and conditions prior to committing capital to the program or fund pool. In case of online investment opportunities due diligence main focus is on verification of managment's team existence and contact information. Many believe that if administration don't hide their real identification they are running legit business and such administration are not planning to scam you and then hide behind some fake id when attempting to run with your money. Internet is full of various attempts to get your money and false promises of money back guarantee but in many cases if you loose your money and id appears to be fake there is nothing you can do about it. In case id is real there are specific legal departments that deal with internet crime and would act upon receiving such claims. For eg Internet Crime Complain Center address is http://www.ic3.gov/complaint/ or FBI at https://tips.fbi.gov/. Usually due diligence findings that show identification of real company and administration decrease risk level for such program but don't forget that even most honest administration is not immune to business failures especially in high yield industry so don't rely solely on this research to choose where to put your money.

What is "scam"?

Scam is a fraudulent business scheme. Most used term in HYIP and autosurfing industry is scam and there is a quite obvious reason for this. As estimated approximately over 90% of autosurf or hyip programs are scams where members are offered to become rich quick but in the end most just loose money instead of making any profit. Scammers use power of anonymity in internet to simulate legit business opportunities just to trick people and steal their money. So far internet fraud prevention is quite low priority in the world and there are people who use this. There are lots of speculations what actually a scam is but in my opinion scam is simply a scheme where most of participants are loosing large amount of money instead of making promised profits. Many people call any program that stops paying a scam but I don't agree because even legit business plans might fail because of bad planning or wrong implementation.
For eg. I never considered 12dailypro as scam simply because most members were making good profits for quite long time and this program lasted over 8 months before it was closed because of Stormpay scandal. Also there are programs that provide fake due diligence information which after failure of verification result in labeling such program as scam. As I see it they better should use privacy services like whois guard instead of showing fake contact and license information. This just shows administration of particular program intends to fool people and once enough funds raised take the money and close the shop. Using privacy services usually is to prevent spamming and extortion attacks which in online business are quite frequent situations.

What is "Cheerleader"?

In forums and other expert sites you often will find a term "cheerleader" used. Such label is given to people who join autosurf or hyip programs mostly for referral commissions and will promote those programs they join no matter what even if a program is quite obvious scam with unrealistic returns like 200% back after 1 day or similar.
Many spam e-mails that you eventually will be receiving with such offers are sent by army of "cheerleaders" and promotion posts in various forums just stating same info you can find on promoted programs frontpage are sure sign of another "cheerleader".
There are also quite many sites that list outdated programs that have closed ages ago or just listing every program that has been created without any added value or research results on any of those which are creation of "cheerleader" crowds. Creating a webpage with list of referral links is just few hours work. Updating this information daily and adding additional research value requires a lot more than that. I recommend that you avoid joining offers from such "cheerleader" sites, e-mails or forum posts because in most cases such programs are scams.

What is DDoS attack?

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are a real—and growing—threat to online businesses worldwide. Designed to elude
detection by today’s most popular tools, these attacks can quickly incapacitate a targeted business, costing victims thousands, if not millions, of dollars in lost revenue and productivity. By adopting new purpose-built solutions designed specifically to detect and defeat DDoS attacks, businesses can keep their business operations running smoothly. DDoS attacks are weapons of mass disruption. Unlike access attacks that penetrate security perimeters to steal information, DDoS attacks paralyze Internet systems by overwhelming servers, network links, and network devices (routers, firewalls, etc.) with bogus traffic. DDoS is emerging as the weapon of choice for hackers, political “hacktivists,” cyber-extortionists, and international cyber-terrorists. Easily launched against limited defenses, DDoS attacks not only target individual Websites or other servers at the edge of the network— they subdue
the network itself. Attacks have begun to explicitly target the network infrastructure, such as aggregation or core routers and switches, or Domain Name System (DNS) servers in a provider’s network. In October 2002, a harbinger of future large-scale attacks was a crude DDoS attack that affected 8 of the 13 root DNS servers, critical systems serving as the roadmap for virtually all Internet communications. The growing dependence on the Internet makes the impact of successful DDoS attacks—financial and otherwise—increasingly painful for service providers, enterprises, and government agencies. And newer, more powerful DDoS tools promise to unleash even more destructive attacks in the months and years to come.
Because DDoS attacks are among the most difficult to defend against, responding to them appropriately and effectively poses a tremendous challenge for all Internet-dependent organizations. Network devices and traditional perimeter security technologies such as firewalls and intrusion detection systems (IDSs), although important components of an overall security strategy, do not by themselves provide comprehensive DDoS protection. Instead, defending against the current DDoS onslaught threatening Internet availability requires a purpose-built architecture that includes the ability to specifically detect and defeat increasingly sophisticated, complex, and deceptive attacks.
Many autosurf and HYIP programs quite often become target of DDoS attacks which are initiated by hackers, extortionists and other online criminals. They simply demand money or threaten to make targets website inaccessible to users, visitors or members. Luckily defensive tools against such attacks have evolved as well and nowdays such attacks are disabled within days or even just hours. I expect that soon every online program will use DDoS protection by default and it will become as common as anti-virus softwares. This won't of course remove this problem completely but such attacks over time will become less effective for sure.

What is ponzi?

A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that involves paying abnormally high returns ("profits") to investors completely out of the money paid in by subsequent investors, rather than from net revenues generated by any real business. There is no product or service sold which would generate such revenues. A Ponzi scheme must have abnormally high short-term returns in order to entice new investors. The high returns that a Ponzi scheme advertises (and pays) require an ever-increasing flow of money from investors in order to keep the scheme going. The system is doomed to collapse because there are little or no underlying earnings from the money received by the promoter.
Considering current anonymity level in internet using this fraud scheme is quite popular way of getting easy money for online criminals. This is because in real life you can get caught and face the monetary penalty for such activities but in internet such activities can be done without consequences and unless fraud prevention methods become more efficient in identifying such fraudsters this situation will not change. As mentioned before there is impression that over 90% of HYIP and approx same proportion of autosurf programs are run using this fraudulent scheme. People are dragged into such frauds because of unbelievable promises to become rich quick without lifting a finger or doing very simple tasks like watching some ads.
There are a lot of speculations that every HYIP/autosurf program is using this scheme and it is just matter of time when they will stop paying. Well in my opinion these speculations mostly come from people who fall for these impossible returns and never consider lower or medium risk programs that actually involve some business to create revenue. Also I don't think ponzi scheme definition can not be related to autosurfing because there is an actual service called advertising which if correctly used can do wonders in means of revenue generation. Many ignore this part of autosurfing business because all they see is option of investing some money and getting the returns and skip the advertising part. Well if proportion of advertisers is much lower than such pure surfers who don't care to promote anything then program with such population will eventually run out of business because service is not used effectively. That's one of main reasons why programs now change to manual surfing, require promotional URLs as mandatory part for upgrading and simply try to increase their advertisers proportion with various means. Only programs that don't care about promotion part and require only few sites to be surfed daily and what's most important thing offer daily payouts for surfers are pure ponzi schemes in my opinion.

What is spam?

Spam is flooding the Internet with many copies of the same message, in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it. Most spam is commercial advertising, often for dubious products, get-rich-quick schemes, or quasi-legal services. Spam costs the sender very little to send -- most of the costs are paid for by the recipient or the carriers rather than by the sender. What makes this issue related to autosurfing is that many programs especially scams sell their list of user contact details to spam generators and using same address for all your programs will eventually lead to increase in spam mails you will receive so it would be good idea to use separate e-mail for autosurfing which can be dropped or changed at anytime in case you become a victim of such spammers network.

Why my list has only few dozen of sites listed?

Often I get a question why I have only few dozen of sites while there are hundreds of autosurf programs out there running. Well answer is quite simple - I don't join every program that pops up daily because over 90% of those are clones of some scam programs with pure intention of doing quick buck with ponzi like scheme. It's not worth the time and money to join these sites as they usually last few weeks and either stop paying or vanish from internet. I choose quite carefully new additions to my list and usually I look for programs that have already been around for some time and gained good momentum and have good potential but sometimes I add programs that have just started but owners of those already earned good reputation in other fields of online money making or program has something special to offer which in my eyes looks like having quite good potential. Also usual due diligence checks and verifications against dirty ip or nameserver lists are done before adding program to my list. I also do surf in all those programs and follow their status daily in forums and read their newsletters sent out which allows me to follow each of those programs enlisted and doing this for hundreds of programs where most of them are shortterm would be too time consuming and ineffective. All of this ensures that I am listing best of the best in this industry and you won't find such approach too often in other monitors which mostly join every program that pops up without any checks done.

autosurf, faq, scam, internet scams, due diligence, cheerleader, DDOS, ponzi scheme, online investment