Womobomo

I'm having my exams in 2 weeks, and I was getting bored with revision, so I decided to write a post on my wonderful experience with iPanel online. I share good stuffs :3 So, what is iPanel online? They are an online market research team, founded in 2004 in Shanghai, China. If you would take the time to google "iPanel", you can see that they have already expanded to many countries, including Singapore. Check that you are living in those countries, because they each have specific websites for survey taking. Yes, you get paid to do surveys from iPanel.

I'm not very sure about the different survey methods, I think I've read somewhere that they do mobile surveys as well, but I personally have only done iPanel's surveys online. I'm from Singapore, so the panel I signed up for is iPanel Sg. So everything that I have to say in this post, is based on iPanel Singapore interface. I have received many survey invites since the day I joined, on average around 1 per week. Sometimes survey invites are not sent to your email (I have no idea why, could be a technical error). but I find surveys that I qualify on the website itself - "My homepage".

Here is a screen shot for the latest survey that was available :

Look to the right of the screenshot. Do you see "Rewards"? Basically, 600 points = 5 SGD. However, as the prize money increases, the amount of points you need to exchange for it decreases. So, 10200 points gets you 100 SGD. Interestingly, a 10,000 SGD prize is offered as well, and the exchange point is 1000200 points. The cash is paid via paypal only. There are many other prizes to exchange for as well, that are not in cash, some examples are HDV-D9 camera, Nintendo DSL, iPod Nano and so on. Once again, I reemphasize that these prizes are what is available on iPanel Singapore, you might find very different prizes available for other iPanel countries. If you are a member of iPanel of another country, please feel free to comment on this post with your evaluations.

Your points for each survey varies, and they depend on the length of the survey you have taken. I am extremely satisfied, that points from surveys are immediately credited without delay to account. I cannot have a proper screenshot to show, because apparently they don't keep a long history of records for their members to view, but here's what I have for you:

If you complete the survey, you get all the points you deserve. If you do not meet the condition, you still get some points. If the number of people taking the survey reached the survey criteria, then you get some points as well, and you're brought to a page informing you that "you were too late", for your "participation".

One obvious question you would ask is, why are members not given equal chances to take part in the survey? As in, if there was member A and member B, why would member A get the survey invitation in time to complete it and get the points, while member B gets the "sorry, too late" notification when he/she wanted to do the survey? The answer is already given in the first part of my post. You can never guarantee that there are absolutely, 100 per cent no technical errors in survey systems. Member A could have gotten the survey invitation earlier than member B had. Or perhaps, member A met the survey requirements a little bit closer as compared to member B.

I sometimes feel that iPanel works like this:

• When the survey is ready, the link is then available on each member's homepage.
• Members that are more suitable for this survey, are invited by email.
• Members who are not that suitable for this survey, can check the homepage and still see the survey "enter" link.
• Thus, checking back on the iPanel's website frequently is important so as not to miss out any opportunities available.
• However, this is just what I feel, it might be 99 per cent not true, I don't know.

On iPanel Singapore's homepage, there is another link called "Interactive survey". It is a place where members can create their own surveys for free. Some generous members would give a few points for their interactive survey. Here is a screenshot of it:

I had fun doing all those interactive surveys because all of them added up to around 100 points, and they are all short, sweet and simple. Honestly, each interactive survey takes less than a minute.

The survey topics you would see could be about anything, I don't have a superb memory so I can't really remember every survey that I did, but some frequent ones are about mobile phones, company products, advertisements, and health. There is also one additional way to earn points. Which is, to recommend your friends to take join iPanel as well. Always remember to login to your own country's iPanel. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you can only recommend friends that are from the same country as you, because the referral link won't work otherwise.

According to the latest news from iPanel Singapore, there is a referral contest going on, and from 1 May 2011 to 21 May 2011, for each successful referral you bring to iPanel, you get 200 points, and that is equivalent to 2 SGD in paypal cash. It is a really great deal, because normally, you only get 20 bonus points for each successful referral.

If you have read till here so far, let me recommend you to Singapore iPanel online and grab your 20 EXTRA points just for joining. Do not hesitate. If you have any questions regarding what I said (I'm human and I make mistakes too), comment on this post or contact me by using the contact form. Questions regarding iPanel itself should be sent via their customer service email.

I wasn't paid to spend an hour typing out these whole chunk of my own opinion, so this is seriously my own honest review. For updates on Womobomo, subscribe through Google Friends Connect on the sidebar to the right, or follow me on Twitter, or subscribe through newsletter, or simply subscribe to the posts.

I was thinking really hard on what to type for my next blog post on Womobomo. Honestly, there are just too many money making ideas out there and it was difficult to select one for this post. Nevertheless, while I was changing Womobomo's theme (Yes, I changed it!) I happened to pay a little extra attention to Nuffnang's button stuck on my side bar. And there you go ~ I shall blog about Nuffnang this week! Honestly, I haven't been using Nuffnang for very long. I am not sure what countries Nuffnang cater to (Probably in Asia Pacific regions), so I'm just going to blog about Nuffnang.com.sg for Singaporeans.

I've placed a sample of an ad unit above, hopefully you can see the ad because sometimes, there simply are no ads served. Okay, so like every other advertising community on the internet, Nuffnang gives bloggers a chance to serve advertisers' ads on their blog and earn money from it. Likewise, the different methods of earning are also similar to other advertising communities you can find on the internet. There are CPM/ CPC and MCPM campaigns. More details can be found on the Nuffnang's FAQ page, but I'll touch on them briefly over here.

1. CPM campaigns

CPM means earning by impressions. You earn by the number of Average Unique visitors in the week that you are serving the ad campaign. You are then arranged into "bands" by Nuffnang according to your number of visitors. Logically, the higher your band, the higher you earn. Or simply put, the more number of unique visitors you get on your blog, the higher you get paid.

2. CPC campaigns

CPC means Cost Per Click. Every time someone clicks on your ad unit served on your blog, you earn. That someone should be a unique visitor, and not yourself, or someone that clicks many times on that ad. According to Nuffnang, you will be credited 3 days after the CPC campaign ends.

"Should your blog display a CPC ad but not generate any clicks on the ad unit, no earnings will be accumulated and updated". - Nuffnang.

3. MCPM (Metered CPM) campaigns

This is kind of special, as I have never seen it before. I think it is kind of an easier way to earn, but only for highlighted/ top/ popular/ higher traffic kind of blogs. So what happens is, advertisers buy visitors from a specific blog for a certain period of time. During this time, visitors would be able to see the advertiser's ads on the blog and ... the blogger earns after the number of visitors that the advertiser bought are completed.

Interestingly, Nuffnang doesn't really show ad units every single time. Which means, like I said earlier, you will see their button/banner stuck onto your advertising space without an ad. I believe Nuffnang have received many, many questions about this, but it is all explained in their FAQ section. Simply put, if your blog is not assigned to any ads from advertisers, then you will not see any ad units ie. you are not serving any ads at the moment.

Yes, if you look at your bottom right, you can see a widget that shows you other blog posts from fellow Nuffnangers. It allows you to browse other blogs besides your own, and also invites visitors to your own blog. It is linked with Innit Chatter, and has a limited number of themes to choose from.

- You cash out when you reach 50 SGD, not USD.
- And yes, Nuffnang works together with Adsense.

You must be interested to know how much I am earning on Womobomo. Well, this site just started not too long ago, so there are of course, not many visitors. I'm getting a fair amount of traffic annyway, enough to make 1.4 SGD currently. As you may have noticed, I placed Nuffnang ads on the sidebar at the right, so two points to note about that are:

1. It will not get clicked often, mainly because it is hidden below the sidebar widgets.

2. Advertisers would not buy my number of visitors because basically, their ads are not shown on a highly visible area, unless at a point of time, I decided to place them in my blog posts.