My Newbie Advice

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Here is the best advice I can offer to new traders wanting to get started with trading in the Free Lunch Room.

Read The Training Guides And Tutorials

The Project Payday guide is a good introduction to trading, but don't rely on the information from there. I've found that their guide is a bit dated and some of the information is a little misleading. Much more up to date and realistic information can be found in FLR itself. The guides and tutorials you should read first to get started are located in two places:

1. Tutorials

2. Lunch Packing Assistance

Pretty much everything you could want to know about this business is in there. The Lunch Packing Assistance is also a great place to ask questions where you will usually get very quick responses from experienced traders and staff. Two of the posts I would recommend to read first are:

Delobar\'s Newbie Startup Guide

How To Stay Green

Want a peek at the possible downsides to all of this? Check this out:

Is Freebie Trading Right For Me?

Taking some extra time to be confident in knowing how all this works is well worth the effort.

Use A Messenger Client

Use Yahoo Instant Messenger (YIM) or AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) to communicate with the trader you choose to work with. Having live support at the beginning is invaluable as going green can be a trying and frustrating experience when you are starting out (no matter how "easy" a trader says their site is). Most traders offer this kind of one on one live support and I recommend that you choose one who does to work with.

About Doing Offers

When doing offers, document everything. Use one of the spreadsheets available in the tutorials section, or copy and paste all relevant information to a file, including the date of purchase, the offer's terms, the full TOS (Terms of Service) or T&C (Terms and Conditions), contact numbers, confirmation numbers, charges, trial periods, and cancellation instructions.

Carefully review this information before you submit your order. You can even go a step further and research the offer more extensively before you commit to it. You can google the offer or company, look for them on the Better Business Bureau, and you can also look here to see what others have to say about the offer:

FLR Offer Discuss (utilize the Search function to search for offers)

White and Black listed offers

I'm not saying that researching every offer to this extent is necessary, I rarely do all of that. You have to use your own best judgment and intuition to decide how much research is necessary for a given offer.

Of course doing offers that you have the most interest in or that advertise products you use anyway is the best way to go. Being informed and using great care in picking your offers is worth the effort and prevents headaches down the road.

If the offer has a trial period, pick a date to cancel should you decide not to continue with the product or service and write it down on your calendar. Then just look at the calendar every day to see which offers you need to cancel. If the trial period ends on a weekend, you'll want to cancel on the Friday before. Always give an offer a fair try though as it is against the TOS of most or all sites to sign up for an offer and cancel it right away just to get credit.

You see pretty much the same offers on most or all of the sites, so there are a limited number of them. Sooner or later you run out of offers because you've already tried all the ones that interest you (you can only do each offer once). At this point it's time to focus more on getting referrals to the sites you've greened on, and less on going green yourself (called 'jumping the fence'). This is how the real money is made in this business anyway.

Give some thought to what you are accomplishing when you do offers. Think about the features of the sites you are acquiring such as how much they pay per referral, how many referrals it takes to cash out, how reputable the site is, whether it is repeatable, and the overall difficulty. Remember most of your referrals will end up coming from newbies, and they like easy sites, but are also attracted by larger payouts.

Have Paitience

Be prepared to have a lot of patience and really take your time with doing offers. If you find yourself becoming frustrated or impatient, take a break and come back to it when you feel centered again. It's much easier when you can maintain a positive outlook and are able to use your best judgment, especially the first few times you go green. It really doesn't pay to get impatient and rush through things. After you gain experience, you'll get a system down for doing offers, and the process will flow much easier. At least they did for me.

It is also good to have a lot of patience with the entire process. Keep in mind you are dealing with people, and for various reasons they sometimes will not be as responsive as you would like. This applies to your trade partner, site owners, and sponsor companies. Most of the people involved in this are honest and try to act with integrity, but you should also be prepared to deal with the occasional person who is not. In either case, it's best to keep your cool, act professionally at all times, and to not assume the worst about a person or situation because of a lack of patience. If you're the type of person to lose your temper easily or jump to conclusions and make accusations quickly, perhaps you need to rethink whether this business is right for you.

Do Green For Green Trades

Green for green (g4g) trades are where you go green on a traders site, and they in turn go green on one of yours. Neither trader pays the other, but both traders make their money by cashing out for the prize on their site.

Consider doing green for green trades before you've used up all your offers because you end up getting paid more for your greens. One referral cashout sites are excellent to acquire early so that you can start doing g4g with them and cashout immediately and not have to wait until you get more referrals to get paid.

In Conclusion

If anything I've said is hard to understand, read through the guides and tutorials mentioned above and you will probably find that will clear up any confusion. If not, I recommend you post your questions in the Lunch Packing Assistance or seek out an experienced trader to help you, most of us will be more than happy to provide personal assistance. If you have feedback or constructive criticism about my advice, I would very much appreciate to hear about it.

Thanks for reading and may you have a very profitable trading experience!

[eroc]

add a section titled:

PATIENCE PATIENCE PATIENCE!!

[MommaOf2Many]

I think you've covered it all..........

[Lesley]

Nice! I'll pass it on to my new people. If that's OK with you!

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Originally Posted by eroc

add a section titled:

PATIENCE PATIENCE PATIENCE!!

LOL That's a good idea. Perhaps I'll add it as a headline above the last paragraph under "About Doing Offers", and emphasize the other ways patience is needed too.

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Originally Posted by Lesley

Nice! I'll pass it on to my new people. If that's OK with you!

Absolutely. Sent it to anyone or use it in any way. That goes for everyone of course.