Saturday, April 3, 2010

Instant Cash Sweepstakes? Great. PayPal Fees? Not So Great

Instant Cash Sweepstakes is a really interesting take on online surveys. Surveys are one of the best ways for Americans to make money online, but they aren't always easy: usually full-length surveys are designed with a particular demographic in mind so many won't qualify to take them and for those you do qualify for many will be quite long. ICS offers a different experience: it specializes in short surveys (three multiple choice questions usually) with no qualification questions. Takers of these mini-surveys are rewarded with entries into the daily cash draw for $50 and the $100 weekly draw, coins with which they can buy extra entries, and occasional cash prizes.

You might be thinking, "Oh, it's one of those sweepstakes sites. You never win those!" at this point. What really makes ICS a great site is that those occasional small cash prizes actually come in steady and often -- you really don't need to win the daily or weekly prize to make money there. Sometimes I find myself comparing it to NeoBux because it's easy to go there and at least pick up a few cents a day. ICS also has a fantastic referral program: you get matching prizes and tickets from your referrals. In other words, if your referral wins $0.05 and 5,000 tickets, you too will receive $0.05 and 5,000 tickets. Winning the big prize is frankly probably very unlikely (I can't say I've ever won it even though I believe I joined the site fairly early on in its existence), but Instant Cash Sweepstakes can be quite a lucrative site even if you never do win the big one.

What I like least about Instant Cash Sweepstakes is that PayPal fees eat up a sizable portion of your payout. I lost 36 cents off of a recent $2.01 payout. For this reason, some people wait a while and cash out a larger amount so they don't get double or triple fee'd. Oh well -- that's an issue with PayPal, not with ICS. PayPal fees aside, I give Instant Cash Sweepstakes my very strong recommendation! Note: this is a US only site. Unfortunately, this is typical of survey sites...those outside just a few countries have quite a limited selection of sites and a limited selection of surveys from those sites that do let them join.

No comments:

Post a Comment