by MJ Miller

Created on: August 20, 2009

For anyone that has searched for ways to make money online, PTC or "Paid To Click" or Paid To Read Email sites are probably one of the first things you will try. Getting paid simply to click links in an email or on their site is the easiest way to make money online. Sounds great, right?

Here's the reality. These sites operate by selling advertising. An advertiser hires the PTC site to send out an ad to a set number of recipients for a certain fee. The PTC site pays a portion of this fee to it's members for clicking on the link and visiting the advertiser's website and keeps the rest as profit. The advertiser gets guaranteed visitors to it's site that they hope to convert into buyers of whatever it is they are selling. If they get enough of a conversion, (actual buyers) the advertising they paid for is worth the cost. If they don't, it's wasted money.

PTC members have an incentive to click the link because they get paid for the click. The problem is, most of the members are simply doing it to get paid and they aren't interested in the advertiser's website so they don't convert (buy). The advertiser won't by another ad if the conversion rate is too low so it's usually a challenge for the PTC site to constantly find new advertisers to buy ads so they can keep paying their members and keep the whole thing going.

Unfortunately, a large number of PTC sites don't always succeed at this and they end up going out of business and they usually do it owing their members money. This is why the whole PTC system has a bad reputation and a lot of people think it's all just a scam.

The fact is, there are legitimate PTC sites that you can make money with. You just have to do a little investigating and find out how to tell the good from the bad, so I'll give you some tips on how to do just that.

The first thing you should do when looking at any PTC site is to look for the site's minimum payout level. This is the amount you must build up to before you can actually get paid by them. You'll probably have to read the site's terms of service or FAQs to find it. No matter how good they make their deal sound, if they have a high payout level, be very suspicious. Usually, a site with a high payout threshold puts it high so they can collect for a long period of time without having to pay out to their members. You can click links for months before you can get paid and they might just go out of business before you ever reach payout. Why waste your time if you can't get paid for months

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