Do almost nothing all day

Infinity Traffic Boost Update 9 Mo Into Using the Service

Update report on how InfinityTrafficBoost has been doing since I joined in early August 2017:

Marketing efforts online can take anywhere from one to three months to get decent trends developing that one can work with. I spent most of the past year more focussed on the earning side of surfing than I did on the marketing side, although a free member does have their share of links and banners they can promote on the traffic exchange. However, in the past several months, I began noticing trends that I found rather encouraging on the advertising side of life.

simple chart illustrationCourses I’ve taken in marketing for on and offline efforts generally state that you have to show someone something at least 7 times before they take action. These courses also teach that you need at least 1000 views to your product or service online before you start seeing action. Some say in more recent years that this number has ballooned to 10,000 views or more. This is due to the fact that so many more websites are out there and so many more viewers to get over to your site who are now largely jaded by most advertising.

Safelists are coming back into vogue in a huge way to get human eyeballs back on company advertisements. Traffic Exchanges have become another big item on the scene again, to get real human beings viewing ads and websites once more. Many offer 2:1 or 4:1 or other odds whereby a free user of these services can get so many other eyeballs sent to their site in exchange for the number of sites that user surfs themselves. Safelists offer free members so many email sends in a week whether once per day, once every 3 days, every 5 days, etc. Some offer as little as 1 credit per email viewed while others offer up to 50 email credits per email viewed.

I am a free member of over 12 different safelists, several classified ad sites, and InfinityTrafficBoost as the only Traffic Exchange that I am actually working. I think I joined a couple others, but with ITB not merely giving me credits to send other surfers to my site, but also paying me to surf, I got spoiled and only really hang out there compared to the other TE’s.

But as I was saying, recent months began showing trends that I wanted to share today. The first is that I get, on average as a free member, roughly 750 views per month to the various links I’ve put up on ITB. The main link goes to SFI and is the one actually being surfed by other members as they participate in the TE. While I was getting sporadic sign-ups to SFI from my safelist efforts, I could go for up to two months or more at a time before anyone would sign up. Meanwhile over at ITB, I am averaging roughly 2 sign-ups to SFI per month! That totally blows those marketing stats I mentioned earlier out the window!

A friend of mine recently signed up in April 2018, and is promoting her husband’s blog. Hardly a week into using ITB, she reported that Google Analytics was saying surfers from ITB were spending on average, 2+ minutes each at the blog link she’s promoting. Now keep in mind that an ITB surfer must sit at each website for 15 seconds before they earn another .25 ad credit and work toward their surfer reward pool shares. A free member can earn up to 25 full ad credits per day minimum, and up to 10 surfer reward pool shares that pay them at midnight EST every day. With those stats, my friend got excited and asked if she could surf more than her 100 daily sites. I replied that yes, you can, as long as you understand you will only get paid on the first 100 sites.

There’s more to InfinityTrafficBoost than what free members can do for sure! Advertisers can purchase any of 11 Traffic Package Options (TPO) and each one lets them advertise more links the higher they go, and purchase more ad credits the higher they go as well. One of the co-founders of ITB recently began doing comparison research to see how ITB’s traffic packages compare to other traffic exchanges out there and discovered that ITB’s prices are anywhere from 30% cheaper to over 50% cheaper than many of the TE’s he’s already looked at. In addition, advertisers wanting to save even more money can now make use of a brand new feature on the site called “The Ad Credit Auction”. This is where surfers make accumulated ad credits available for sale starting in 1000 ad credit increments, for prices well below ITB’s usual TPO pricing. Of course all you’re buying at the auction are ad credits. No additional link capabilities come with it or other benefits. But the potential for purchasing human views of your site drops significantly in this auction room.

I got thinking recently myself, that ITB will now be attracting two types of users: The earner, and the advertiser. Earners can advertise, and advertisers can earn, with 80% commissions possible, but each type of user will have a larger focus. Advertisers can even turn off the earnings capability if they choose, in their settings. This step alone boosts the number of eyeballs they can get on their websites.

10 Steps to Financial Freedom

My own focus is primarily on the earnings side of things. if I can find 4 active referrals who will do their 100 sites every day for a month or more, the snowball will start roughly 30 days later and then I can start working my way out of debt! Earnings are in BTC, but can be paid out in Etherium or Litecoin. Coinbase, the service ITB uses to pay in BTC still has high fees even though other places have dropped theirs to almost nothing, so ITB is recommending users get paid in Etherium or Litecoin and then exchange that to BTC to send to their primary wallet. Qoinpro is a good place to go for those kinds of transactions by the way. I’ll be making use of their services in this regard hopefully soon.

I could have cashed out in BTC within a month or so already, but decided to take another stab at “TPO my way up” which lets you automatically purchase TPO’s based on what you’ve earned, rather than purchase out-of-pocket. If I can find 3 other active referrals between now and the end of June, that will be great. Otherwise I’m looking at my first potential cash out this coming summer. If I hadn’t been attempting the TPO my way up method all last year, I’d have cashed out twice by now. But the months where I only accumulated my earnings instead have been some very interesting months on the advertising end of things!

If you want these stats for yourself, sign up here using my referral link. I’d love to have you on board!

team songdove

When One Thing Leads to Another And. . . Business and Ministry Collide???

bitcoinAs anyone who follows this blog now knows, I began a blockchain experiment back in February, outfitted my day-job’s website to accept Bitcoin as payment for services in May, and began a new business venture in late June. More recently in August, I found a marketing platform that has potential to earn a decent monthly income once I can find 4 people to copy me on that platform. I have 9 immediate referrals in that program and two more referrals under two of them, but so far no one is following my lead despite weekly team mailings. I’ve set up a support group on Facebook hoping to get the team members over there to share tips and tricks, but so far no one has taken action to join the group.

While the lack of action in this marketing platform is a little disappointing, I have run across another user somewhere around the world who is using the platform in a very surprising, encouraging, and uplifting manner. Two others are using another marketing platform I am part of, for similar purposes.

Christian flagImagine using your primary source of income to share the hope of the Gospel with people?! It is my hope that this marketing platform will become a significant monthly source of income, and I came to that conclusion early in August when the income-generation side of it was first made clear to me. Here we are almost at the end of September now, and this ministry opportunity is staring me in the face!

It’s interesting that I’d come across these users’ methods of using these platforms this week. I’d realized after a tea with a friend earlier this week, that not everyone who might want to use this platform to bolster their income will have anything to promote. The platform is a marketing method, so you do need something to market to others. If I run into Christians who could use this system of income, I now know what to suggest they promote: None other than the Gospel of Jesus Christ! The Salvation message! The current user doing this has created a page called The Four Steps to Salvation, complete with Scripture, video, and links to more information. Another user on the other platform has a picture of Christ and John 3:16 under it before carrying on with sharing their business opportunity. That user has created quite a gap on their page between the salvation message and the biz opp.

Earning commissions on advertising sales while sharing the Gospel of Christ is probably the best merging of two worlds I’ve seen so far! I am a huge proponent of the fact that the Internet is the final missions frontier. I had never thought of using existing marketing methods as a way to spread the Gospel, but stop and think about it a moment. . . Other business owners, other affiliates, other networkers, other opportunity seekers are signing up to use these services. They see your site just like you see theirs because they want to get their own message out about their opportunity. However, in the process of getting their own message out, they run across yours – the Gospel message. Opportunity seekers are often desperate for financial help. Affiliates are trying to augment household income, and business owners are looking for traffic as well. But while their goals may be somewhat different from each other, they ALL need Jesus. Once again we see another opportunity to use the tools of the day to spread the message of hope and healing, provision and eternity. Talk about tent-making! If Paul could make tents while preaching, we can earn sales commissions while sharing too! So far as I can tell only three people are doing this on two platforms, but hey, the door is there. . .

Now I know why I created the FB group image the way I did! (see image at top of post) It captures several things all at once:  Technology (the bitcoin), teamwork (team songdove), and the Holy Spirit (the dove). My username (songdove) incorporates music too, because singing has always been my love language between me and God.  Whether music plays into the business venture I don’t know, but the other elements now all make sense.

toolbox

Introduction to Faucet Alley – One Way to Enter the World of Bitcoin!

bitcoin faucetAs discussed in my first blog article on bitcoin, using faucets to earn your way into the world of bitcoin is not for the faint of heart and requires both a technician’s mindset and a worker’s mindset if you are to do what I did, which was earn $3 USD or 0.003+ BTC in the space of two months WITHOUT REFERRALS! Because of the large number of digits following the decimal, earning 0.003 is no small feat when we’re talking faucet earnings.  Most people in the bitcoin world don’t think this is a wise way to spend your time.  However, I proved to myself that for the person short of cash, it is a viable way to earn bitcoin in your spare time.

Before you consider entering the Faucet Alleyway, stop and take stock!

You MUST  NOT:

  • be easily swayed by advertising!
  • be easily confused by lots going on!
  • insist on waiting for every page to load before deciding if it’s good or bad
  • be computer-illiterate!
  • have tunnel-vision!
  • be slow-moving!

If you are going to venture into the faucet alley-way, you absolutely MUST:

  • be laser-focused!
  • be aware of what’s going on with every tab you have open!
  • Understand the basic parts of a browser and make heavy use of them!
  • Ignore advertising!
  • Learn quickly!
  • Understand typical malware behaviour and spot it fast!
  • Be able to clean your own machine of malware or have plenty of cash to pay someone else to clean it for you on occasion.
  • have quick reflexes with mouse and keyboard!

toolboxYour toolkit MUST include:

  • browser other than MS Explorer
  • plugin/add-on to block unwanted content not allowed in your home
  • up-to-date antivirus program
  • Ccleaner set to delete history and cookies as well as clear the DNS cache and old prefetch data.

How’d you do with your self-assessment and computer readiness?  If you ARE any of the “MUST NOT” items, this pursuit may not be for you.  Moving forward will put both you and your computer at a level of risk you may not be able to recover from.

However, if you are confident you are not affected by the “MUST NOT” list and confident you can handle the “MUST HAVE” list, and your computer is set up to handle the required toolkit, then let’s move forward.

The important thing to understand is that this is WORK!  Don’t sit down to my list of faucets thinking you are engaging in a leisurely activity.  This is anything but leisurely!  Boring perhaps at times, tedious at other times, but leisurely it is NOT!  You have to be on your toes constantly! Your computer’s security can’t be allowed to lapse either. This is because a jaunt down Faucet Alley is akin to swimming with sharks.  Some are friendly, some ignore you, and some come at you with teeth bared and eyes blazing! One of the faucets in my list is a bit of a nasty shark and I honestly wonder at the way the owner has chosen to make money off his site.  I have learned to handle the onslot this faucet delivers at times, but I don’t recommend visiting if you are lax or negligent in ANY of the MUST HAVE/INCLUDE lists above!  If you are not necessarily wary of what might jump out at you AND prepared to handle it the moment it happens, DON’T GO THERE!

Secondly, you need to understand this takes TIME!  Want to make money doing faucets??? You need to be religious about claiming as often as each site will let you! Of course you have a life to live away from your computer and perhaps you have other tasks you need your computer for as well, so don’t visit Faucet Alley all day long!  But when you do sit down to work the faucets, try to have several hours available at a shot.

Thirdly, all those ads you are seeing are paying the site owner so they in turn can pay you!  Don’t use an ad blocker!  Having said that, it is wise to have a plugin that blocks unacceptable content that goes against your family values, but don’t block ALL ads as a general rule.  Most faucets have a check built into them whereby if they notice a trend of ads being blocked, they will eventually “stop working” until you enable ads again.  Now if a site’s ad networks insist on showing you offensive ads regardless of your filter’s settings, put the site into quarantine for a few hours using the Brave browser.  If the site “stops working” open it back up in your favourite browser and see if the offending ads are gone.  If they are, continue on as normal.  It is precisely because of these ad networks being less than family-friendly at times, that life for the faucet earner can get so dangerous.  In fact, I recommend doing it in a location or at a time when impressionable eyes and ears are not present, to protect them from the visual or audible dangers that lurk around some corners in this alley way.

stop-dontgoOne of the rules of thumb I learned very early on my career as a computer repair technician, is that about:blank in a browser’s address bar can spell trouble, particularly for Internet Explorer.  About:blank has been taken advantage of by numerous drive-by installation threats dropping backdoor trojans, worms, rootkits and other nasties onto people’s computers.  This is one reason for the sharp eye paying attention to everything going on with laser focus ignoring the ads!  In my experience, allowing your antivirus scanner to scan links wreaks havoc with the various captcha codes you need to solve, particularly those that tell you to click images until there are no more.  Each image sent to you in that grid is a link that has to be scanned by your AV link scanner.  It’s better to develop a sharp eye for trouble than to bog down your computer with so many link scans, especially if you use my method for earning satoshi via faucets.

If you see about:blank show up, it will be there for one of three reasons:  1) Slow connection to the next page being loaded.  Many faucets use pop-overs and pop-unders.  These are full pages not merely pop-ups in small windows.  If a server is slow in delivering the site destination, a threat could be on it’s way.  2) The site being loaded is the one you were just at because now the page you were on has become a pop-under and your original site needs to reload.  Watching your address bar change from about:blank to another site address and having your mouse over the tab’s x button will help you discern if you are reloading the page you want, or having to close a tab you don’t want.  Eventually you will learn when a pop-under has just taken place, or a pop-over, and in the case of several of the faucets in my list, you can get both happening at the same time, meaning you close the left-most, right-most and leave the center tab loading in the little threesome that suddenly developed.

Be sure as well to go through your favourite browser’s security settings.  Set all plugins or addon’s to “ask me” so that you get a heads up if anything strange wants to take place.  I have Firefox set to prevent requests to install programs, and one of the faucets in my list regularly tries to ask permission to install something!  Not good!  This same faucet will at times try to force its way onto my system with spawning pop-unders.  Due to this behaviour, I’ve had two threats successfully get onto my system and I had to shut down my computer the hard way before beginning clean up in safemode.  Again, if any of this sounds way over your head, you might not want to be earning satoshi via Fauce Alley!  The number of faucets that use such tactics is fairly large it seems.  Knowing how this one faucet behaves periodically, I can spot other problem faucets very quickly and will not frequent low-paying faucets who behave in this manner.  The only reason I tolerate this particular faucet is because of how well it pays on an ongoing basis.  I rarely have to quarantine the site, and my filter catches most offensive material it’s ad networks might try to show.

Because browser-based threat delivery often ends up in temporary file locations such as browser caches, having a tool such as Ccleaner on hand can help with the clean-up.  Run this tool fairly frequently when you follow my faucet claiming method, but also use it in safemode whenever you have to clean-up after a threat that landed on your system.  Follow up that cleaner with a scan by Malwarebytes free or pro, then boot back into normal mode and carry on.  Mac and Linux users, I’m not sure how you’d do this on your OS’s, but I’m sure some well-deserved research could do you some good in this regard.

If I haven’t scared you off good and proper from this form of earning satoshi, then let me share what I’ve enjoyed about this form of obtaining bitcoin:

Travelling around the world from the comfort of your computer chair!  That’s right.  The reCaptcha codes that many faucets ask you to complete are pictorial in nature, and come from literally all over the world.  You’ll see street signs in various languages, storefronts from towns and villages in locations you’ve never been to or perhaps heard of, mountain sides, rivers, quaint little residential streets or bustling downtown scenes.  Even food dishes make it into the mix.  This takes the monotony out of the mix while also testing your ability follow instructions and further develop that keen eye for detail.  The goal of these reCaptcha’s and SolveMedia puzzles is to prevent bots from stealing satoshi from these site owners.  You WILL see ads offering to collect from faucets for you, but those are bots and bots are strongly discouraged as a form of cheating the system.  So hone your keen eye for detail and be an honourable satoshi hunter!  Perhaps share in the comments what languages you’ve seen on street signs, what countries you’ve vicariously visited and where you enjoyed going the most in the last round of faucet claims.

My method for using these sites to earn satoshi, is as follows:

1) Have all faucets open in tabs in your browser of choice.  Don’t use a rotator because you won’t be able to engage in my method very well with one of those.

2) Begin with the one-hour claim sites and note the time you began.  You’ll want to return to those in one hour. Next, move to the half-hour claim sites, you know you can claim again here when your one hour sites reach their half-way countdown.  Then move to the 15 minute claim sites and get those going.  If you have any 5 minute sites in your tabs, visit those last.  Thus begins your earnings session!

3) Now begin going around and around and around.  Generally-speaking, in the time it takes to do three 15 minute claims in a row because their timers all coincided, you’ll be able to visit your 5 min before and after all three.  When that string of claims is done, you’ll be close to claiming again in your half hour sites.  Repeat, then include your one hour sites and go around again.

4) Keep an eye out for the pop-overs and pop-unders and close them as fast as you can.  Some sites will do both, placing the reloading faucet in the middle of a sudden group of three tabs.  As you get used to the routine, you’ll learn to recognize this grouping and have the under and over closed by the time the faucet has reloaded.

5) It is best to use the XAPO wallet and XAPO faucets if you want to have your claims accumulate at a decent rate in one pool.  I haven’t done much with it yet, but another satoshi collector is called faucet hub.  I have to see what those faucets are like before I can write about them, but cashing out of a collector still means having enough in there to cover network fees.  This is the only reason I haven’t gone with faucethub or epay.

One thing to be aware of when looking at your wallet balance as it grows:  XAPO gives you the US equivalent, fully expecting that you will use your bitcoin to benefit life in the real world.  The potential problem can be watching the US amount instead of the BTC you are growing.  The US amount goes up and down based on factors affecting volatility in trading BTC.  If you have a goal of so much BTC, only watch that amount.  Remember, you’re investing TIME into this project, not cash out of your own bank account.

6) As already stated a couple times now, this is WORK!  You can get mentally tired out if you are having to clean up your cache and temp files several times in one sitting because of some rogue ad in an ad network’s line-up on one or more of the faucets you happen to have open.  Pay attention, ignore advertising, watch the clock, follow instructions, and have several hours at a time to get the ball rolling well and watch the satoshi accumulate.

How fast can YOU accumulate satoshi without referrals??!! Can you rise to the challenge??? Do YOU have what it takes to walk down Faucet Alley???