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[K-Fabulous]

Nicely put together Ken!

[gracie]

nice post... i've been trading for almost a year and i also found it useful. thanks!

[fnicramp]

Great Job in putting this in a simplified version that a new person can relate to and understand the basics of Freebie Trading.

As usual Ken, your knowledge of Freebie Trading and your willingness to share is exemplary!

Happy Trading
Foye

[capricorn1]

Well, once again My Mentor said it all, so with that said, there nothing else to add to it...

Originally Posted by ksarner

As far as I can tell, this is the most basic tutorial in the entire forum. If you've come here from other freebie-trading sites, or if you've done extensive reading on this forum, there won't be much here for you.

There are a lot of tutorials here to help people run their business more effectively. But while I was reading through a few of them the other day, it occurred to me that there aren't any for someone who just wandered in with no background in the field at all, who doesn't know anything at all about this opportunity. This tutorial is designed for them.


What is this business about?

The opportunity presented in this forum is called "freebie trading". Freebie trading uses hundreds of websites called "Incentivized Freebie Websites" (IFWs). Each IFW will present advertisements from between 50 and 600 different companies (Jargon alert--these advertisements are collectively referred to as "offers" in the industry shorthand). The companies that provide the offers pay commissions to the IFW to advertise their products and services.

An important concept to grasp is that the IFWs are not allowed to pay people directly for completing the offers, but they ARE allowed to pay people to advertise their site. The types of prizes and cash amounts vary depending on the particular IFW site. The term 'freebie trading' refers to the process of two people reaching an agreement in which one person agrees to try some of the offers in return for a share of the second person's commission.


How does it work?

The IFWs get paid when someone signs up and completes an offer on their site. Let's use a real-life example. FreeCreditReport.com uses many different IFWs to promote their business. They offer a free 7-day trial of their service through the IFW. If you like the service, after 7 days you get billed each month at the regular price. If you don't like the service, you can cancel before the trial period has expired, and that ends your obligations to the company forever.

Always remember that all you have to do is to give the products a fair trial, but you do have to do that. If it's a trial period, keep them for most of it. If it's a product, use it for the trial period. If its an e-book, download and read it. Website? Register and look around to see what they offer. One of the ways that many offers determine whether you're a valid customer is whether you actually use the product. If you don't, you won't get the credit. After giving it its fair trial, if you decide the product isn't for you, you're under no obligation to keep it.

Not all offers are for a free trial period for their products or services. Some will require a small amount for shipping and handling, others charge a small fee. In most cases, though, this fee is much less than the money you will make by completing the offer. Since you get to choose the offers you're going to do, it's quite easy to make a good profit on your very first site.


How do I make money by completing offers?

Your trading partners will pay you directly to complete offers. (Jargon alert: completing a site's offer requirements to gain a credit is known in the freebie trading world as 'going green', or 'greening'. If you use your trading partner's referral link to sign up for an IFW site, complete that site's offer requirements, and get your credit, you 'went green' or 'greened' for them)

You'll be credited for the offers you do on the IFW to which your trading partner sends you. Again, no IFW is allowed to pay people directly for completing the offers. What they CAN do is pay OTHER people to refer people to them to complete offers. In this example, they will pay your trading partner, who will then give you part of that money. This works out well for both of you. You may need to pay a small fee for the offers you choose out of your half, but your partner will need to pay taxes out of his half. Everyone wins.


Can I really make a career out of signing up for stuff?

Probably not. You can make a couple of hundred bucks just by doing offers. But you don't have to try to make a career out of trying offers. If you've been listening closely, you might have noticed that there are two distinct methods of making money online through freebie-trading. Method 1 involves completing offers for someone else and having them pay you. Method 2 is what your trading partner will be doing. It involves finding other people and paying them to complete offers for you. Here's how it works:

Once you complete the required number of offers (go green) on an IFW, the site is "yours", and it gives you a referral link that you can use to refer other people. At this point, all you have to do is get enough referrals to sign up on the site (just like you did) and go green (just like you did), and you can collect the prize which that IFW offers.

Most people will start you on an easy site which pays THEM $40 per referral. As soon as you've signed up for the site using their referral link and completed the offer requirements, they'll pay you your share. Within about 24 hours, that site will verify that you've completed the offers and pay them $40. At that point, the SAME site you just completed will give you a referral link of your very own. All you need to do is find someone else to click on YOUR referral link, pay him some money to go green for YOU and you'll get to pocket however much money is left over after you pay him.. Best of all, after you've collected the $40, you can get ANOTHER referral and collect another $40 over and over again, without ever having to complete another offer on that site yourself.

Since there are literally hundreds of IFWs to work with, you can complete enough offers on different ones to build yourself a nice portfolio of easy sites that pay you $40 per referral. Or, if you prefer, you can collect a number of very difficult jackpot sites that will pay you $200 or more per referral. In my opinion, the best strategy is to get a nice mix of different sites. That way, you'll have a good selection to offer the people you find to work with. Once your portfolio is complete, you can walk away from Method 1 and all the offers forever, and start working on Method 2.


What's in it for the IFWs?

Money doesn't come from nowhere, and it might seem to you that the offers are paying out a lot more in commissions than they're getting in from the people who try them. Either that, or the IFW is giving out more in commissions than they're making in commissions from the offers. It wasn't until I got a little bit more deeply involved in the business that I began to understand where the extra money came from.

First, a lot of people end up deciding that they like the offer and continue using the product or service (or forget to cancel). Personally, my wife made me keep the incredibly expensive exercise product we got from Slendertone. I decided that I liked the herbal supplements from Alpha-Calm enough to keep them, and we both liked the $90 Miracle Knives enough to keep THEM, too. I was in no-way obligated to keep any of those products, of course, but once I tried them, I liked them. So the offers, collectively, made a reasonable amount of money from me. But I still made SOME money, and my family got to try a lot of products we otherwise wouldn't have known about. And the ones we kept were genuine bargains, which I got even more affordably, because someone paid me to try them.

Secondly, the more people who use a product, the more word of mouth advertising that product gets, and the company providing the offer doesn't have to pay a dime for that.

Lastly, the sad fact is that some people will sign up for an IFW site, start the process of completing offers, but then quit before finishing. When that happens, the IFW site still gets its commission on the products or services the person signed up for before he quit, but never has to pay me my commission. This makes me very unhappy and occasionally causes me to pound my head against the wall, and the fact that it helps the whole system to work doesn't seem like sufficient compensation. But it happens, and the IFWs make money when it does.


What you need before starting:

The needs are minimal, but they're not flexible. If you're missing any of the following, you'll need to get them before you start trading freebies. If you're unable to get any of these things, it's just not going to work for you, and it's best that you know that now before spending any more time on this.

1. If you're going to trade freebies for long-term income, you need to be a resident of the United States or Canada. You don't need to be a citizen of either country, but you do need to have a valid residence in either the United States or Canada.

You can make a few hundred bucks if you live in the United Kingdom, and maybe a hundred or so if you're from Australia, but there's no long-term plan. The good news is that if you're from the UK or Australia, you can get your money in a week or so, and then be done.

There are also urban legend type stories of someone's friend of a friend making a few dollars trading freebies from South Africa, but I don't think that they're true. At least I don't know how they could be. If you're from South Africa and you're interested, contact your trading partner and let him do some research. If he finds IFWs that will accept South Africans, make sure he tells someone.

2. A PayPal account. Getting a PayPal account is free and takes about fifteen minutes. If you don't have a PayPal account, you can get one here. You'll eventually need to get the account verified, which takes 3-5 business days, but that's NOT necessary to begin. For details on how to get your PayPal account verified, log into your PayPal account and click on the link that says "Status: Unverified"

3. A valid credit or debit card. (NOT a gift card or a pre-paid credit card. Canadian-based credit cards are fine, but Canadian debit cards are hit or miss. Many will work, but some won't. There doesn't seem to be a pattern. As near as anyone can tell, it depends on the specific Canadian bank with whom you do business.)

4. A valid home phone number. Neither Vonage nor Skype will work for freebie-trading.

That's it. If you have all four of those things, you can be making money online by trading freebies within the next hour.


What should I do now?

If you need to convince yourself that this is a truly legitimate opportunity, you can go here:
People who are making money!

After you've convinced yourself, if you want to just dive right in, you can either hook up with someone who's making money or read the advertisements for all the people who would like trade with you here:
Advertisements for trading partners

That's not necessarily the way to go, though. Being able to write a convincing advertisement doesn’t make you a good teacher/mentor. If you do a bit of enjoyable research, you can do better. I’d recommend you start by learning the rules here:
FreeLunchRoom RULES - Free Lunch Room

You can then have your basic questions answered here:
Member Tutorials - Free Lunch Room

and your more advanced questions here:
Freebie Help - Free Lunch Room
and here:
FLR Forum Support - Free Lunch Room

(There’s a lot of overlap between these last two forums.)

It’s better to start this way, because no-one gets paid to answer questions, so the people that do aren’t writing advertisements, they’re genuinely interested in helping. Read carefully and critically--people say a lot about themselves when they post. Find someone who seems to know what they're talking about--or someone who you'll be comfortable working with.

Once you've narrowed your choice down to a few traders, there are a few ways to learn more about them:

1. You can see how many trades they've completed just by looking to the left of any post they they've written. Underneath their name (and avatar, if they have one) is a bunch of information about them. At the bottom of that information, you'll see something like this:

iTrader: ###/100%

The numbers there are the number of trades a person has successfully completed. Naturally, the bigger the number, the better. You'll want someone with a proven track record and a history of success to work with. Unless you're in a huge hurry to begin, though, don't end your research there.

2. Click on the number I just showed you how to find. That will take you to his trading history, which is a page which lists what his trading partners have said about him, among other things.

2a. Near the top, in the center, you'll find his "Recent Ratings". That will how how many trades he's completed in the past month. Again, the higher the number the better. That's a good measurement of how active he has been on the forum recently, and a good way to guess how often he'll be here to help you if you need it.

2b. Down a bit from that and over to the right, you'll see a list under "From". It will include all the people he's traded with. This is a VERY important list. Click on a name or two from that list, and see how often that person traded with him. If they traded with him just once or twice and then moved on to someone else, he probably wasn't meeting their needs.

2c. Just to the right of their username is a number in brackets. That's a CRUCIALLY important number. It shows how many trades their partner has CURRENTLY completed. That's the best measurement there is of how good a teacher that person is. If many of his trading partners have gone on to successfully complete many trades of their own, it's a good bet that that person has trained them well for success.

To get the most accurate assessment of a person's trading history, you might want to scroll down near the bottom of this page, and look to the right. You'll see:

"Page 1 of X 1 2 3 4 5 6 Last »"

The further back you go in those pages, the older the trades are. His most recent trading partners might have only two or three trades completed because they're very new. They might also have only traded with him one or two times for the same reason. If you go back a month or two and find that his trading partners from a while ago only traded with him once or twice, then either moved on to someone else or quit, or if they didn't learn enough to have a reasonable number of successful trades themselves by now, then it's a sign of weakness somewhere in his system.

That should enable you to narrow the field of potential trading partners considerably. Once you've done that, you can learn more about the traders who are still on your "short list" by clicking on the “signature” at the bottom of his post. When you decide that you’ve found the right person to work with, send them a PM.

--Ken

[JennieJ]

Wow! Appreciate the time you put into this! Really great!

[Lois5669]

Great, basic information, Ken. I think this will really come in handy with having more traffic from newbies who haven't been exposed to the concept of freebie trading.

I do wonder why you don't think UK or AU residents can have long term success here, though? They may not have as many offers and therefore won't be able to do as many sites in Method 1, but they can do Method 2 indefinitely. (maybe I read that part wrong..?)

I like that you give requirements to start. May I suggest adding "18 years old or older"?

Anyway, thank you so much for putting this together. I think it explains things very well to a newbie and gives understandable steps on what to do from the beginning. Great job!!

[ksarner]

Originally Posted by Lois5669

Great, basic information, Ken. I think this will really come in handy with having more traffic from newbies who haven't been exposed to the concept of freebie trading.

I do wonder why you don't think UK or AU residents can have long term success here, though? They may not have as many offers and therefore won't be able to do as many sites in Method 1, but they can do Method 2 indefinitely. (maybe I read that part wrong..?)

I like that you give requirements to start. May I suggest adding "18 years old or older"?

Anyway, thank you so much for putting this together. I think it explains things very well to a newbie and gives understandable steps on what to do from the beginning. Great job!!

You put your finger right on the two parts I was least confident in writing. I think ZNZ allows people to do offers who aren't 18 years old, although you'd probably know more about the ZNZ ToS than I do. If they do, then I'm sure other networks do as well.

I'm not sure UK/AU people do have a long-term plan for success here. I don't know of anyone from the UK who's successfully greened more than 3 sites on the FLR, and it's a LONG, HARD struggle from iTr 3 to Method 2 success, especially when they can't even get free greens on most networks (no way to submit an address...spoken by someone who spent a couple of weeks trying to persuade European/Commonwealth IFWs which don't have any offers for Americans to give him free greens)

With a limited iTr to start, and a sharply limited portfolio, I don't think I'd be comfortable with recommending the American IFWs featured on the FLR to a personal friend from the UK/Austraila. Perhaps I should have worded it less strongly; I'm more concerned about overhyping the business than I am about underselling it. There's been plenty of hype already.

--Ken

[Lois5669]

Originally Posted by ksarner

You put your finger right on the two parts I was least confident in writing. I think ZNZ allows people to do offers who aren't 18 years old, although you'd probably know more about the ZNZ ToS than I do. If they do, then I'm sure other networks do as well.

I'm not sure UK/AU people do have a long-term plan for success here. I don't know of anyone from the UK who's successfully greened more than 3 sites on the FLR, and it's a LONG, HARD struggle from iTr 3 to Method 2 success, especially when they can't even get free greens on most networks (no way to submit an address...spoken by someone who spent a couple of weeks trying to persuade European/Commonwealth IFWs which don't have any offers for Americans to give him free greens)

With a limited iTr to start, and a sharply limited portfolio, I don't think I'd be comfortable with recommending the American IFWs featured on the FLR to a personal friend from the UK/Austraila. Perhaps I should have worded it less strongly; I'm more concerned about overhyping the business than I am about underselling it. There's been plenty of hype already.

--Ken

Oh, I agree on the "plenty of hype" part. I understand what you are saying.

I still believe someone from AU and UK can get free greens on sites that allow for those residents AND for US and CA residents (like ZNZ and GRF, for example). And, working the forum, they can still be successful with Method 2 since most users are from US and CA. Yeah, starting at a TR of 3 is going to be harder but I know some that have been here for a year or more who started Method 2 with a TR around that for that very reason. It'll be slow going in the beginning but it is possible and doable.

To be honest, I think you can be under 18 to do TRAINN sites. I'm not sure on ZNZ (I'll go look that up now). But most sites require you to be 18 (really, how are you going to have your own credit card to do the offers if you're not? dunno)

EDIT: Just looked at ZNZ's TOS and it says you must be 18 or older

[ksarner]

Originally Posted by Lois5669

Oh, I agree on the "plenty of hype" part. I understand what you are saying.

I still believe someone from AU and UK can get free greens on sites that allow for those residents AND for US and CA residents (like ZNZ and GRF, for example). And, working the forum, they can still be successful with Method 2 since most users are from US and CA. Yeah, starting at a TR of 3 is going to be harder but I know some that have been here for a year or more who started Method 2 with a TR around that for that very reason. It'll be slow going in the beginning but it is possible and doable.

To be honest, I think you can be under 18 to do TRAINN sites. I'm not sure on ZNZ (I'll go look that up now). But most sites require you to be 18 (really, how are you going to have your own credit card to do the offers if you're not? dunno)

EDIT: Just looked at ZNZ's TOS and it says you must be 18 or older

Adding the "over 18" now. I'll consider what to say about Commonwealth countries. It's a lot harder for them. I don't really want to discourage people from starting, but I'd rather not mislead them about how difficult it will be, and I'm not sure that a tutorial for pure beginners is the right place to go into an in-depth analysis of why it would be so much harder for them.

--Ken

[Lois5669]

Originally Posted by ksarner

Adding the "over 18" now. I'll consider what to say about Commonwealth countries. It's a lot harder for them. I don't really want to discourage people from starting, but I'd rather not mislead them about how difficult it will be, and I'm not sure that a tutorial for pure beginners is the right place to go into an in-depth analysis of why it would be so much harder for them.

--Ken

Gotcha. Thanks for letting me know your reasoning on that. I agree, it would be harder to transition. Doable, but harder.

Again, I do want to say this is a great wealth of information. I think it is really needed because I see a future where the majority of new sign ups will not have any pre-knowledge of what freebie trading is.