A bit of fun: Second Life, Paid Surveys and Affiliates

One of the first things I discovered in Second Life is that you need money to buy land or rent a shop front.


Second Life shops for rent

Once you make it out of Orientation Island and start visiting the ‘Popular Places’ listed in Second Life, you will soon discover that the easiest ways to make money are by ‘camping’ and by taking paid surveys.

Camping is the simplest: it involves finding a place whose owner will pay you small amounts of Second Life money (Linden Dollars L$) just to be there, and activating whatever script registers you as camping there.

Looking for a camping bench to earn money in Second Life. This location is a bit like musical chairs: they kick you off after 10 or 15 minutes, but if you’re quick enough you can get back on or grab one of the other ones…

Finding a place can be tricky – many camping locations are scripted objects such as park benches, dance pads and phone booths, which are often full, and in some cases you have to join a particular group to activate the camping script. Others may be time limited, eg you can camp to earn L$3 in 15 minutes, but only once. Others may require you to visit a web page to activate the camping script.

The obvious risk in visiting unfamiliar web pages, especially with a ‘get rich quick’ theme, is that they could be loading spyware onto your computer. I have not found any extra spyware myself, but I would recommend being vigilant with the virus and spyware checkers.

Tiered camping rates at The Pharm: take more surveys and earn money faster for camping.

In any case, I soon found a favourite location where I could camp indefinitely in a window in the background while I’m doing other things, as long as I wiggle the mouse on it occasionally to prevent Second Life from logging me out. It may not be entirely in the spirit of the game, but at the moment I’m short of time and just looking for some cash to get me started for buying some land and building things later.

Camping at The Pharm

Some Second Life entrepreneurs appear to be making money (presumably a lot) as affiliates of paid survey and marketing companies, and they even set up their own affiliate programs like a network marketing pyramid kind of arrangement.

Hippie Pay website: ‘camping’, paid surveys and multi level affiliate marketing

Paid surveys can be reached either from the camping web pages or from scripted ATM objects in Second Life (they look like ATMs). Doing the surveys earns money more quickly than camping, and also earns money for the affiliates, but they require you to go to web pages, fill in lots of your contact details and personal information, and answer various marketing questions. In some cases, you go directly to a survey, while in others you are signing up to do more surveys in future.

Paid camping presumably fits in with this arrangement because it brings large numbers of people to the places that promote the surveys, which keeps them listed in the ‘Popular Places’ tab of the Search window, and keeps reminding large numbers of people to do the surveys.

It’s worth reminding yourself that although Second Life is a game (or something), the surveys take place in the real world, using your real information.

Using false information can apparently getyou banned, though I’m not sure from what – if it’s just being banned from a particular Second Life location that pushes these surveys then I wouldn’t say it’s a great loss.

So, in any case, although normally I would avoid this sort of thing like the plague, I am moving house and phone number anyway, so I picked a few that seemed least intrusive and signed up with email addresses that would easily identify them if they became a source of spam (luckily I have catch-all forwarding for email using any of my domain names).

I also thought that maybe paid surveys might be worth a try – they are, after all, paid. So I signed up for one that looked least intrusive and made myself a few Linden Dollars. To be fair, I only filled in the minimum information – they do offer the opportunity to enter more of your personal information to be paid more for each survey you take, but I felt I had already given them more details than I would have wanted to normally (perhaps paid surveys are just not for me!)

After a couple of days, I was sent my first invitation to do a survey. The email offered me 10p (however would I spend it!) plus some entries in a prize sweepstake. So I thought I’d try it out. It asked me a couple of questions, ending with ‘Which of these supermarkets do you use for your main household shopping?’. So I chose Somerfield and was apparently no longer a valid entrant for this survey.

The next survey they sent me had already closed. Fair enough, perhaps I didn’t check my email for a while.

The next one again offered me 10p and some prize sweepstakes entries to do a short survey. I started the survey, which appeared to be about liquid soap and it went on and on. Then it asked all the same questions about deodorant. It reminded me of a time I said ok to a market researcher on the street, answered a load of questions about packaging of cough sweets and was given a pen and a notepad. So when I finally finished it, I thought, “Where’s my 10p and how do I get it?” Ok, so it’s only 10p, but it’s good to find these things out while it’s still only 10p.

So I tried to login and I couldn’t. I couldn’t remember my password, so I went to the ‘Forgotten your password’ link to get a reminder, and it had no record of my email address. I checked and it was the same address they had been using for my emails. I tried copying and pasting it in in case I had done an invisible typo. So I tried following a link from the email and going for the ‘forgotton your login name’ option to have the login name and password emailed to me. Strangely, it was the same email address I had tried earlier. But when I finally logged in, my account balance was 0.

I thought I’d wait a few days to check it again, but then I couldn’t log in again. So I unsubscribed, waiving all my rights to my 10p (sob).

I’ve stuck to the camping option since then.

About to make my first L$1000 by camping at Platinum Island (note the giant white rabbit with a hair dryer)

Made my first L$1000 – check out the exchange rate on Linden Labs website: L$1000 for US$3.50!

Links:
Nothing in (Second) Life is free

CPALead, which was established in 2006 by two young entrepreneurs as pioneers of the Internet Gaming marketing and advertising industry:

It all started when MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) owners Troy Krzyston and Robert Reynolds decided they wanted a better way to generate money in their games other than standard banner advertising.

Hippie Pay for Second Life – great idea, but go carefully.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 14th, 2008 at 12:51 am and is filed under Affiliate Marketing, Second Life, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.