Revolution Money Exchange is a new player in the online payment processing game. They look to be offering a competitive experience and are not charging fees when you send or receive money. In fact, the fees they do charge are all administrative for stuff like requesting a check and overdrawing your account and appear to be quite reasonable.  Also, their arbitration clause looks to be much more fair than most.

To establish themselves as players in the online payment processing war, they are offering a free $25 bonus to sign up and are offering $10 when you refer someone up to $500.  These offers will be expiring on February 29th, so take advantage of this while you can.

Revolution Money Exchange LLC is underwritten by First Bank & Trust, Brookings, South Dakota, which is FDIC insured.

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I would venture that most Paypal users have never had a problem with the world’s largest online payment processor yet hell fire and brimstone seem to be flowing about its name on the plethora of hate sites out there. I’ve been using Paypal for just under 5 years now and had never had a problem until this past Saturday.

As you may have read on Sam2k previously, over the last month or so I have been working on those pesky “freebie” sites that promise the greatest and bestest gadgets in exchange for completing some kind of advertised offer and getting a certain number of other people to do the same. The approach that I have been using involves the payment of others to sign up using my referral link and complete an offer. This approach has been marvelously successful and I was able to apply for review of my account on one of the sites Friday evening. Soon after submitting, one of my referrals was banned for violating the sites ToS. Since I had paid this person specifically to provide credit to my account, I sent him an email requesting that he return the monies I had paid him. I didn’t really want to drag the affair out, so when he offered me $19 (less than what I had paid him) in recompense, I accecpted.

From there, it all went downhill. Apparently, as soon as he sent the $19 to my Paypal account, he closed his own account. This caused Paypal’s system to throw a fraudulent activity flag and place a temporary hold on the payment I had received. When I received the email notifying me of this hold, I had not yet learned that this scammer had closed his account. So, being very confused, I called Paypal to find out what the problem was. I spoke to a moderately helpful Jim in Resolutions who was nice but unable to provide me with much information. He told me that I should contact the other party and request that he call Paypal. I did this but my friendly neighborhood scammer declined. So, I called back this afternoon and spoke with Rick in Resolutions for about 5 minutes. Rick told me that for the $19 it wasn’t worth either of our time and effort so he would just resolve the dispute for me and told me that if upon further review the payment is still diputed that I can call back and request a courtesy credit to cover it. This was an excellent response that perfectly addressed both my problem and the economics of the situation. I applaud Rick’s handling of the matter and respect the fact that Paypal gives its specialists the power to resolve problems without dragging things out. This may actually be the quickest dispute resolution I’ve ever been a part of. All told, the matter was resolved in less than 48 hours and only a few of them traditional business hours.

With customer service like this, I don’t understand why Paypal has so many haters. Sure, it was an inconvenience to me but there was no harm and it only took about an hour of my time. The lesson to be learned here is that reasonable people receive reasonable treatment from companies that they have dealings with, even Paypal. If you ever find yourself in a dispute, stay calm, reasonable, and talk it out.

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I got my first adsense check to day! The only problem is that in my excitement to open the unmarked envelope I accidentally ripped it in half.

I also sold Proxert.com today.

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Some time back I mentioned that after getting nowhere with Chitika I was beginning to have some limited success. I take it all back. All the limited monies I made were withdrawn during auditing. I won’t call Chitika a scam, but I can certainly see how some have been justified to name it as such.

Chitika was a great idea, but it’s useless if it doesn’t get money into my pocket. So now I’m left with finding a suitable alternative. I really only have 2 sites where I was really counting on Chitika to bring in some revenue, so I think what I’ll try is selling text links there instead. A couple sales and I’ll have made more than I ever “should have” with Chitika. If that doesn’t work out then I’ll have to try to find another ad alternative.

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I am proud to say that I have already met my Adsense goal for this month. I changed up the implementation of the ads on some of my sites and it has just about tripled my earnings from them. So I can pretty much call another goal that I have. It looks like I will get my first payout from Adsense at the end of this month. I’ve been using Adsense since August of last year and I never was really sure that i’d make it to the first payout, but I am going to.

So, I have a new goal for next month. That is to make a payout in one month. So I want to Average $3.33 per day for the entire month for a grand total of $100. So how am I going to do this? Well I’ve got one site that did very well when it was getting steady traffic from its previous owner, but that has tappered off. So I’m going to try to get it some decent traffic. I I do that then its earnings should sky rocket because it has a high click-thru rate and it pays well for clicks. Secondly I’m going to work on acquiring another already earning site or two.

In other interesting news, bring on Google Mars! If they’re already doing this with the limited info they have, I can’t wait to see it once they have a satellite sitting on mars.

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p>All I can say is that this month has started out great for me. Today is the first day that I have ever made over $5.00 in a single day. Most of it was from Adsense, but even though I’ve been critical of Chitika in the past, it is starting to pick up for me. My Adsense goal for this month was to finally make over $1 per month. Well, after two days not only am I above that goal, if things continue at this rate then I will have doubled in this month what I have earned to date.

This inspires me to say that succeeding with Adsense really is all about the placement. On two of my sites I completely changed the Adsense implementation and they are doing 1000 times better at making money while there has been no significant change in traffic. And unlike previous times, CPC is staying strong.

I’m still waiting and hoping for a PR update on the index of Mlinkz. If it doesn’t get it before the update is finalized then I am going to really begin to wonder.

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I’m going to go on record and say that yesterday was a pretty darn good day. I had to make a hard decision and so far it has panned out. Plus, Google was good to me as well.

Let’s start with the hard decision. Since starting this semester at school I have known that there was no way for me to keep running Mlinkz directory if it kept getting the number of submissions that it was getting each day. So I was faced with a hard decision. I could either sell it, my only really successful site, and start over with something new or I could tack on a fee of some sort so that submissions would be slashed. I fully intended to sell it after the PR update because I expected the homepage to go to PR5 and the category indexes to go to PR4. However, Google didn’t do what I was waiting for, so I opted for the second option. Yesterday morning I decided to charge a reviewing fee for submission to the directory. I also doubled the price of the featured links and I told myself that I was happy with a single site submission each day. Yesterday I sold no regular submissions, but I did sale two featured links!

I said that Google was good to me. Well it was. After waiting the entire duration of this PR update for something to happen to Mlinkz, yesterday the category pages that were linked to from the index finally got some PR. PR3s all around. I’m still waiting on the main page to get updated, but for not it is not as important as the category page.

Secondly, February has ended, so lets discuss how I did at Adsense. My goal for the month was $1 each day for a total of $28. All was going good and I was well ahead schedule until I had a dry spell in mid-February. Well yesterday I had an excellent adsense day and fell just $.40 short of my monthly goal. So this month I’m going to possibly aquire another site and really make the $1 per day for a total of $31 at the end of the month. If I can accomplish that then I will be only one month away from earning an adsense payout, something that I was never really sure I would make it to.

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I’ve been posting to MasterTheWeb for a month and a half now. But up until this point I have never made a single cent from this website. Until yesterday, that is, when I got my first adsense click from here. It was a small amount, certainly nothing to call home about, but I’ve been wondering for a while now why I wasn’t getting any clicks. Well I’ve finally got one and I hope this is the start of many more to come.

Another thing that I want to address is the apparent almost complete shutdown of Adsense on the weekends. I didn’t make anything on Saturday or Sunday or Monday and almost nothing Tuesday—despite having almost a combined 1000 impressions between them—and I only made $.40 yesterday, but I awoke early this morning to $1.25 already for today. Certainly I enjoy these times when I get good paying clicks within a small amount of time and early in the day, but it doesn’t always extend into latter in the day, which is always a little disapointing. This leads me to another interesting observation. Looking at my adsense logs, almost half of my earnings this month have come from clicks on Thursdays.

In other news, due to the poor performance of my Ads over the weekend I’ve fallen below my desired average of $1 per day for this month. Also, I applied and was rejected from BannerConnect.net. They looked promising, but I gave a very conservative estimate of how many impressions I could serve each month on the application and I was blankly rejected because I hadn’t put enough. This annoys me severely because I know that the site I was applying for gets well over 100,000 page views, and should therefore have 100,000 impressions per day. But I’m a realist, I know that it doesn’t actually get that many ad impressions because no program I’ve tried has been able to deliver that many. The most disapointing thing of all of this is that I still haven’t been able to monetize this site(and another like it) that I’m getting so much traffic to because no very good advertising program(Adsense and YPN don’t allow their ads on these sites) will accept it despite there being nothing really wrong with the content. There is only a perceived/opinionated/close-minded way of rejecting it and all the ad networks I’ve contacted are looking through these close-minded goggles.

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I am very happy that today is my highest grossing Adsense day in my short career. Today I made nearly $4 which isn’t much to some webmasters, but is quite a lot to me. When I first started I wasn’t making this much in a month. For February my Adsense goal is $1 per day for a total of $28 which is a modest increase in January’s earnings and almost pays for my VPS from Slhost. Today’s earnings put me on a little ahead of that goal with an average of a dollar and a quarter per day.

However, ecstatic as I am, I am also a little dissapointed that my highest click today has slipped through my adsense channels. Despite having all of my websites on URL channels and channels for all the Revenue-Sharing-forums that I am a part of, it seems that every time I have a high click, it doesn’t get reported as being part of one of my channels. IMHO Adsense reports should be expanded to give the url that a click came from if it is determined to be outside of a channel.

In other news, I applied to Fastclick today with one of my proxies. The good news is that they processed my application in just under 12 hours, which is half of their minimum estimated review time. The bad news is that they rejected it. I guess I’ll just have to keep looking for a good source of revenue that can be derived from a proxified page. I have heard good things about TrafficMP, but with them I’m making about a penny per day off of 10,000 page views which is really ridiculous. If anyone knows of an advertising program(cpm banner, cpm popup, or ppc banner) that accepts proxies and allows them to be displayed on proxified pages then please let me know.

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After seeing a general decrease in earnings from Adsense across the board over the last week or two, Adsense performed well for me yesterday. In fact, it was one of my highest paying days to date. I believe that my lowest click was $.09 which still isn’t what it used to be, but is much more acceptable than the $.01 that I was earning earlier this week.

Hopefully this is a positive trend with the low paying clicks earlier in the month being explained by a flood of new advertisors who are only paying small amounts per click.

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