Income for Nothing: The Myth vs Reality

When it comes to sources of income that you don’t have to lift a finger for, 99.9% of them don’t work. None of the remaining sources provide a livable wage when engaged in alone, and extremely few actually follow through on their effortless promise.

Among those extreme few are the following three BTC earning methods:

If you have no BTC and want to earn it slowly but surely with no effort on your part, begin with either or both of these first two:

QoinPro: 
QoinPro will let you earn a tiny amount of BTC as well as a number of other digital coin, every day with no effort on your part. They went down for a few months due to a drastic redesign and a new app they were building for your phone. But they are back up now and those of us with prior accounts still have them, and our referral links still work. :-D

Earnings since signing up a year ago August 2017:QoinPro Earnings

CryptoTabBrowser: 
Using this browser, you can surf faster than Chrome itself, while making your PC or laptop earn its keep. On my 12yr old Windows PC, this particular browser actually works better than either Firefox or Opera and those two already work better than Chrome on my system.

Earnings since installing in August:CryptoTabBrowser Earnings

NOTE: These earnings were wiped out after an extended period of time where I was not logged in with my gmail acct due to recaptcha issues needing me to delete cookies all the time. When I installed the new mobile browser for CTB and then logged in, my earnings disappeared so I am starting over. We’ll see if a support ticket brings back the above earnings or not. Just like syncing your phone with Outlook, there is a right and wrong way to do it without wiping out your contacts. In my case, I think I wiped out prior earnings.

Freebitco.in: 
If you already have a bit of BTC in a wallet gathering dust somewhere, and it totals at least 30,000 satoshi or more, transfer it to your very own wallet at Freebitco.in and earn daily interest on your BTC savings! I’m at roughly 50,000 satoshi at the time of this writing, and earning roughly 60 satoshi in interest per day without doing anything to earn it.

Interest earned since April 2017:Freebitco.in Interest Earnings

QoinPro and CryptoTabBrowser are both good introductions to the concepts of digital coin and mining. QoinPro’s revamp included adding a full-fledged wallet, so that you can send as well as receive coin to any of the digital coins activated on your account. This feature is on their current roadmap, thought not yet implemented. Previously, you could only send to that wallet, now you will be able to send from it as well. This is good, because this wallet, like most of the others out there, does not earn you interest while you save. That is what Freebitco.in’s wallet is for. As you can see in the interest screenshot above, the daily satoshi earned is small on my 50,000+ satoshi amount, but it is almost three times the amount earned if I just use the free tab of the same site. So it’s as if I get three free rolls without having clicked the “roll” button. I like the idea of daily interest, so this is where I keep my BTC when I am not using it.

Earnings at each of these site are small, but paid to the user regardless. If you want these sites to pay you a more livable amount, you actually DO need to DO something! It’s called marketing and promotion! Due to how many people out there seem to only want money rolling in without putting in any effort, theoretically, your marketing and promotion efforts should net you quite a good following. The larger the following, the better so that your rewards for bringing in new affiliate members starts to grow. Do note that because everyone wants something for nothing, it will largely be YOU doing all the work, but conversely, it will be YOU that benefits more than the others precisely because you did all the work.

In other words, while you CAN get something for nothing, it is a very small something. None of these sites expect you to pay to earn from their services. So no worries about spending money you might not have. But in exchange for not spending any money, you may wish to consider spending time and effort instead.

Finding locations where your message about these sites will be heard, means a level of observation that you might not be used to if this is your first time delving into marketing and promotion. Facebook used to be the go-to place for advertising, but now that free efforts there get squashed under paid efforts rather badly, I can no longer recommend it. We’re putting out effort here, not money remember. You may still get eyeballs on your offers in various affiliate, networking, and online business groups on Facebook, but be warned, posting the same thing too often can land you in FB jail for a time until they let you start posting again.

Other online locations where you can spread the word include Pinterest, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. However, social networking doesn’t work for everyone. In those cases, it is time to head over to safelists/viral mailers or traffic exchanges. I recently wrote a blog article about yet another experience doing a mass send out from over a dozen mailers vs ongoing efforts at my favourite traffic exchange. You can read about that here. Incidentally, the two services linked in that article are what I strongly suggest you sign up to use to begin with. Other traffic exchanges do exist out there, but stay away from the auto-surfers. The convenience offered to you of just starting it and leaving it while you go away and do something else, means that not only are YOU not paying other member’s ads any mind, your ad won’t be paid any mind either. So if you’re going to put effort into these free methods of earning money, you want that effort to be wisely spent.

Classified ad sites, banner ad sites, particularly those that offer a form of affiliate system themselves such as:

can also work when it comes to promoting your free earning sites. You just need banners for the banner sites and sometimes square banners for the classified ad sites too. Some sites offer these already in their referral tools area, most don’t and you may have to create them in a graphics program on your own machine.

You decide how much time and effort you put into these sites that send you digital currency for no money, no time, and no effort directly on their programs. This article is simply here to say that yes, these sites do exist, you can earn and they do pay. But the earnings are small unless you at least invest time and effort promoting them.

When the Digital Intersects with the Offline World

bitcoinIt isn’t quite how I envisioned it. . . I’d dreamed of taking out my cellphone and opening the camera. I saw myself change the settings to video and then hand it off to my daughter as I prepped to open the envelope. My dream had me talking on camera excitedly about the trip to the store I was about to make, then we hopped in the van and ran off to the store. My dream continued with me picking up a few items then going to the self-checkout where the camera’s video function was turned on again. I dreamed of that moment when I punched in the card’s PIN and pulled out the receipt, triumphantly announcing that I’d just bought groceries with my BTC debit card!
 
No. . . it’s not going to be that way. Instead, in order to keep my HP Connect Instant Ink subscription going, I am needing to obtain a debit card that has a virtual number rather than strictly physical as is the case with the XAPO card I wanted to get. As of tonight, I have begun a slow transfer from freebitco.in over to the wallet of this virtual card. We’ll see how that went by morning. If successful, I’ll be able to order the virtual card tomorrow morning and then update my payment settings over at HP Connect Instant Ink to maintain my monthly subscription. Doing this makes the cost of ink so much more manageable and the printer gets used for everything from resumes to printing to music.
 
bitcoin faucetOn the plus side, thanks to the meteoric rise in value of BTC, the faucet earnings I’ve accumulated since mid February’s experiment began will be enough to pay for at least two month’s worth of this subscription as well as fees for use of the card and exchange rates from USD into CAD. So it’s nice to know I have accumulated useful coin that can have a real-world benefit to this household even if it isn’t a bag of groceries at the store. Still looking at that keychain flashlight I posted about earlier as well, but ink is a little more important at this time.
Hopefully, if all went well, I can post an update to my FB page saying HP Connect InstantInk is saved by the bright, shiny new world of Bitcoin!

Save Money With a Careful Eye at the Thrift Store!

Thrift stores get scoffed at, made fun of, treated like second-class citizens, and worse.  There is one thrift store where I live that sees its busiest time of year at Halloween!  But your local thrift store has so much more to offer you than gardening clothes and costume material.

My favourite place to shop is the Salvation Army Thrift store.  This store has been a revolving door for my family as we bring clothes the kids grew out of, then buy what they need.  One time, a pair of jeans my daughter found ended up going back to the thrift store a couple years later, still in wearable condition!

We have discovered that living in a an affluent city such as Kelowna means that people give away the most amazing things!  I have a long fur vest that I paid roughly $25 for one year, that would have cost 5 times that new on a department store rack.  My daughter found a two-piece winter coat that allows her to remove the inner lining to use as a spring jacket in its own right.  We paid less than $15 for it at the store that gets halloween business.  A blender I bought from the same store a couple years ago is still working fine.  The toaster I’ve written about twice now, was bought from the Salvation Army Thrift Store, meaning it was used when we got it, and all these years later it finally died!

If you’re concerned about brand-name clothing, my daughter just recently picked up a Levi’s and another pair of designer jeans for roughly $5 each at Salvation Army as well.  You seriously never know what you’ll find when you show up, but the quality of stuff people give away will blow your mind!

Next time you need to go buy another pair of jeans, tops, skirts, yarn, dishes, linens, furniture even, check out your local thrift store first!  A set of dining chairs fits my redone table top extremely well!

There is no need to hit department stores unless you need an item “yesterday” or can’t find it in the second-hand stores by the time you need it!  $40 formerly spent on a single pair of jeans will get you several pairs plus a few shirts to go with them.

Help your wallet smile and take advantage of the amazing generousity of others who give away name-brand stuff, sometimes with the tags still on.  Dress well for a fraction of the price!