Money Blue Book

AGLOCO is offering an application that displays ads on the bottom of your computer screen (screenshot). The company makes money off the ads and gives you a portion of the money they make. Not only do you make money when you use the application, but you also make money when you refer others, and when they use the program.

The program seems like a spin off from All Advantage, the old dot com era company that paid users to use their ad displaying toolbar. All Advantage ultimately went bankrupt because it paid its customers more than it could handle.

It is very difficult to predict how much you can earn with AGLOCO at this point because the program is still in its early stages. There is no guarantee that the company will ever make good on its payment promises. Of course, this all remains to be seen.

Since the application doesn’t cost a thing to use and doesn’t send me any spam, I went ahead and signed up. Might as well start accruing hours early and hope for a payout later. I’ll write more when I find out when this might happen.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m the only one that gets a kick out of doing these but I enjoy spending spare time finding ways to make some extra money on the side. For a while now I’ve been participating in a variety of money making programs like paid online surveys. Most of these programs pay you either points or cash to run their application or fill out their surveys. If you earn points, you can redeem them for gift cards or merchandise after accumulating a certain amount. I’ve already earned and received several $25 gift cards in the last few months for completing surveys and it gets easier every time. After a while you become very quick and efficient in filling them out, and now they rarely take me longer than a few minutes for even the supposedly long surveys. They key is to register for several and to indicate many interests to qualify for as many as possible.

It’s Just For Fun

Yes I know, it’s not the best way to spend my time, but it’s not like I’m quitting my job and becoming a full time survey filler. I do these as a hobby and to pass the time when I’m bored. Most of these online offers are pretty mindless and I can whip through them at work during my lunch or at home during a commercial break. Surprisingly the cash and points add up fairly quickly.

I’ll be posting such offers in my Fun Money category (I don’t know what else to call them). Let me know if you’re a sucker for free stuff as well. I know spam is a concern for many, but I haven’t encountered any such programs that send out unsolicited spam. I’ll definitely write a warning if I encounter one that does.

I am starting this site as a personal finance and investing blog. I plan on staying on topic, but on occasion I may stray a bit into technology or entertainment related subjects that interest me. I’ll try my best to keep my diversions and ramblings to a minimum, or I might simply somehow find a way to connect it to the subject of money. I’m sure my readers will help keep me from going off on a wild tangent.

The purpose of this site is to provide me an online space where I can write about my personal finances and share some advice about financial planning and my opinions on various money matters. While I want to discuss the more serious personal finance subjects, I also want a place where I can share some of the more light hearted news and bargains that I discover on a daily basis. Sometimes the offers and deals are so good that I just have to share it with people. Once I get my blogging rhythm going, I also plan on posting regular entries on freebies that I come across on the internet.

I am using Wordpress to power my blog. Even though Wordpress is very user friendly and makes blogging relatively easy even for novices, I have discovered that it still does require a decent amount of programming and computer knowledge. This is particularly true if you want to customize your site, and install the various bells and whistles to enhance it.

Thankfully, for the last few days I’ve had a substantial amount of time to teach myself the ins and outs of Wordpress and blog design. But I think I’ve been spending more time editing Wordpress code than I’ve been researching topics to actually write about. I should be able to start writing in a few more days.

This whole beginner blogging experience has been very enlightening and quite fun.