This post is a step by step guide to making your first $32 at Inbox Dollars ($30 is the minimum payout level). And at the end I’ll explain how to almost triple your payout!For anyone who hasn’t heard of Inbox Dollars, it’s a website that pays you to read emails, take surveys, shop online, play games, and try out various products and services (as you can see from their banner on the left). Many people think it’s some sort of scam, but it’s simple advertising. Companies pay you to try out their products for free, hoping that you’ll like them well enough to keep using them even when you have to pay for them.
Here's what we'll cover in out quest for $32:
- Join Inbox Dollars - $5
- Intro Survey - $1
- Ebay Offer - $6
- Stamps.com - $10
- eFax.com - $10
Note that not all of these offers will be available if you don’t live in the United States. If you live elsewhere, let me know which ones are not available to you and I'll do my best to recommend others.
Join Inbox Dollars
If you’re not already a member, you can click the banner above or click here to join. You’ll need to give them an email address. The number of emails you get from Inbox Dollars is low, so it’s safe to give your primary email. If you’re not comfortable doing that, get a free Gmail account and use that. We’ll be getting another Gmail account later (or three if you plan on completing the Treasure Trooper and Cash Crate guides), so get couple while you’re at it. Also make sure you're using a decent, fast, and secure tabbed browser. I find Firefox to be the best.
You get $5 just for joining.
Intro Survey
When you login for the first time, you’ll be given the chance to take an introductory survey. This survey asks you some basic demographic questions. Complete it to earn another $1, for a total of $6 in your account.
You can take up to one survey a day. The other surveys available all require that you qualify for the survey by answering a pre-survey set of questions. If you don't qualify for a survey don't fret, just click the link again and answer more pre-qualifying questions. It usually take me 4 or 5 tries to qualify for one.
Ebay Offer
We’ll need a new email address for this one. I recommend going to mail.google.com and getting a free email address. You’ll use this email address for completing all the offers for Inbox Dollars, so if it gets put on a spam list you don’t really care. No real email will be going to it anyway.
Login to Inbox Dollars and click on Cash Offers in the list of links on the left of the page. You’ll probably find the Ebay offer in the Most Popular Offers section at the bottom of the page. If not, look through the pages of offers to find it.
The terms of the offer are that you must register for Ebay as a new user, and make a bid on an item. Since we have a brand new Gmail email account, it doesn’t matter if you’re already an Ebay member. Click on the offer to be taken to Ebay’s signup page (you must click on the offer, if you go directly to Ebay you won’t get credit for signing up).
Signup using the Gmail address you just created (if you created one to use for registering with Inbox Dollars, don’t use that one. Use the second one you should have gotten). After you get the confirmation email, login to Ebay and find an item to bid on. I tend to use the search phrase “coach bags”, my gf is always bidding on these so if worst comes to worse and I win... Well she won't mind. In any case you probably want to find an item that has several bids on it, and isn’t expiring soon. You can sort the listing by price to find the cheapest items (usually starting at 1 cent).
Go to the cheapest item you can find that has several bids, and make a bid that’s the minimum amount you can bid over the last bid. The chances are very good that someone else’s automatic bidder will outbid you even before the page refreshes. If not, the item’s cheap enough and there’s enough time left on the auction that you’ll be outbid eventually.
It took several hours for my account to get credited for this one but don't worry it'll happen soon enough.
Stamps.com
Now back to the Cash Offers section, find the Stamps.com offer and click on it. You’ll need to provide credit card information as part of the signup, but as long as you cancel your account before the trial period ends you won’t be charged anything.
Once your Inbox Account is credited for $10.00 for this offer (which will again take a few hours), you’ll have a total of $22.00, plus be able to print out $5 worth of postage from the Stamps.com application that you just downloaded. Be sure to print out your $5 worth of postage and make sure your account is credited before canceling your trial account (You have to call in to do this which is kind of a pain).
MAny of the trial offers at Inbox Dollars will work this way, you’ll provide a credit card and have a certain amount of time to cancel your account without being charged.
eFax.com
You’ll find this one in the free offers section. eFax is a nifty application that allows you to send a receive faxes without a fax machine. You do it all from there very easy to use website. If I did any faxing at all I might actually keep this one. This offer will get you a solid $10 and for me approved in just over an hour.
If you don’t get credit for an offer after a few days, clear your cookies and try signing up again. Either use a different email address, or if you’re using Gmail accounts you can insert periods into your email address without affecting delivery. For example, if my Gmail address were paidtoread@gmail.com, I could use paid.to.read@gmail.com and the email would still get to me. But it’ll seem like a different email to the websites you sign up at.
Ask for a Payout
You’re now at $32.00. Click the Request Payment link on the left side of the Inbox Dollars control center to request your payment. They take $3 out for processing (If you go do two $1.50 survey offers you can cover this cost). They do have some fine print on their check disbursement…they take a month or two to cut a check, and you have to be an active member by the time they do. This basically means confirming the paid emails they send.
You’ve also completed a number of different sorts of offers at Inbox Dollars and gotten a feel for how they work. There’s a lot more money to be had there, especially in the trial offers. The key point with trial offers is to remember to cancel before they start charging you. To be safe, wait until the last few days of the trial period, but don’t wait too long (I use my Google Calendar to mark out when I need to have things canceled by).
As I said at the beginning the same or similar offers can be found on both Treasure Trooper and Cash Crate. Cash Crate will actually give you $8 for the eBay offer, $13 for the Stamps.com offer (plus another $5 in postage) and $8 for eFax.com. On top of this Treasure Trooper will give you $6.50 for eBay, $14.50 for Stamps.com, and $7.50 for eFax. This will bring your gand total up too 89.50! Not bad at all, just be sure to use different e-mail addresses, clear cookies and uninstall old programs when signing up!
