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Paid to Surf

Paid to surf programs have two sides - the surfers, and the surfees - neither one is particularly effective!

This operates on the same principle as Paid to Read programs. Surfers get pennies per click (if that), and people who market through these pay far more than what the surfers get paid (of course - how else does the company make a profit?).

They are not an effective marketing method, nor an effective income generation method. The reasons they fail to market well are numerous:

• If I am getting paid to visit your site, then I want to get in and out as fast as possible. My goal is NOT to see what you have to offer, it is to rack up as many pennies as I can, and I do that by SPEED.
• I don't particularly want what you have to offer, I just want the pennies. I am not going to even look at your page.
• If I am a "career surfer", I'll have multiple browser windows open at one time. I'll not even look at the contents, I'll just keep switching from one to the other to tell them to load the next page.
• Some people use software for auto-clicking and moving from site to site. You cannot be sure there is even anyone in front of the computer!
• People who join these programs are people who are not successful at operating a real business (some people will take exception to this statement, but if you have any kind of effective product or service sales, it will beat Paid to Surf any day). This means that they are not the most organized or logical of people. Is that the market you want to target?
• If someone feels they are desperate enough to work that hard for pennies, are they going to have the financial resources to buy your product?

If you are going to pay for clicks, do so through a legitimate Pay Per Click program, NOT through a Paid to Surf program. Fraud happens in both, but it is worse through Paid to Surf programs because there is more motive for the end user to defraud you in ways that are not easy to track as fraud.

Paid Inclusion or second tier (not Google or Overture) Pay Per Click will get you better results than this, and will cost you less in the long term. You can set up a Kanoodle account very easily, and get low cost clicks, or you can pay for inclusion with Exactseek and get good return for the low amount they charge for top 10 placement on their network of search engines (which is growing all the time).

Contributors: Laura Wheeler