Getting paid for bookmarking

(by a guest writer)

If you already have or can build a strong power account you can sell it for a profit but while building the account you can earn money for promoting stories. Bear in mind that this is against the terms and conditions of many of the bookmarking sites, but it is not illegal and not likely to get you in any further trouble than losing your account. It's not, however, in the spirit of things.

The idea behind this is that people will pay you to submit and promote their stories to sites like Digg , Propeller, SU and other, and with your help they will make the front page/get more traffic.

You can find people already doing this, and begin doing it yourself in many of the web master forums such as Digital Point and the Site Point forums.  Anecdotal evidence suggest that some make $50-$100 a day doing just this.

Discretion is definitely the name of the game. That said, there are even web sites designed to automate this process and act as brokers. Users of the social bookmarking sites can sign up to sites like SubvertandProfit and UserSubmitter who act as aggregators and middlemen - they charge advertisers and pay a percentage of the fee to users to perform the bookmarking, voting or digging activity. These aggregators use a variety of techniques to keep one step ahead of the bookmarking sites to avoid detection of their voting manipulation, but it doesn't always succeed and they sometimes lose the game. Worst case scenario is that they have to start again in a new name. Just like users do when they get rumbled.


Mahalo, is a bookmarking site with a slight difference - it's trying to grow up into a search engine. The theory is that if enough people bookmark a page and add comments and tags - and if enough pages are so marked - that constitutes a good intelligence base to provide accurate search results. For this to succeed the concept needs to attract critical mass and they haven't yet. To speed the process, Mahalo pay users $10 - $15 per hand assembled search page they put together. Not all users are eligible. You need to be US based (at present) and you need to be approved as a Part Time Guide. Apply 

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