My review on Cash Surfing Network
Website: www.cashsurfingnetwork.com
Cost to join: Free to start
Signup bonus: You earn $12 once you sign up (with a little catch of course)
Rating: 3/10
What is Cash Surfing Network?
At first I thought that it was a traffic exchange type of network, but this is actually a website dedicated in helping you to get referrals to traffic exchange websites. It does not cost you anything to join and it also has free training that you can take.
What is traffic exchange websites?
Before we can go into Cash Surfing Network, it is important that you understand the whole idea behind traffic exchange websites. These types of websites are very simple to do and also one of the easiest ways to get traffic to whatever you are promoting. It does have some major setbacks, but I will discuss them later.
There are 2 main ways to traffic from these types of websites. You can either exchange traffic in the form of visiting other people’s websites and in return you will get people that will visit your website. So in order to get 10 visits to your website, you need to visit 10 other websites listed in these exchange type of websites.
The other way to get traffic from these websites is to buy traffic from them. They are very cheap, but the drawback is that the quality of the traffic that you are getting is not that great at all. One way to earn money from traffic exchange websites is through their referral program.
For each new member that you bring into the network, you will earn commissions from 10% up to 30% from everything that they buy such as traffic or any upgrades.
How will Cash Surfing Network help you?
There is a whole list of traffic exchange websites out there and if you can refer people to all of them at once, you will be able to multiply your income theoretically. Once you join Cash Surfing Network, you will be asked to join multiple traffic exchange websites such as TopHits4U.com, PowerCashStream.com and NinjaSurf.com.
These are only 3 of the 30 that you can join in order to make money. Once you join the first 6 websites listed to you, you need to take your affiliate ID and enter it into the CSN phase 1 page. Once all of your affiliate ID’s are entered, you can start to promote CSN (Cash Surfing Network) by promoting your own unique affiliate link that you can find at the “my referrals” page.
Once you get a referral and they decide to buy traffic or upgrade their account with any of the traffic exchange websites that they joined under you, you will earn a commission. You can also go through the training which will not help you at all.
Is the training any good?
In short I am going to say NO. The whole idea of the system is not that bad, but the training on how to get traffic is a bit misleading. It does not matter what type of internet business you are trying to build, traffic is going to be the lifeblood of it all.
If you cannot get traffic, then you can kiss your business goodbye because without traffic, you will not make any sales. Below I will discuss the main sections on what is included in the training.
Getting referrals
I went through the training on how to get referrals and all you are being told is to join more traffic exchange sites to get traffic.
Branding
Not much was said about branding at all and you will once again be told to join another program called Brand me tool. This tool will allow you to put your face on the ads that you use to promote cash surfing network.
Building a platform
Here you will be told to use the CSN website as your platform or to build your very own blog. They do not teach you anything about building your own blog.
Branding ads and tracking
Not much to say here either, because all that you will be told is to create your own splash page and to track your earnings. You will be referred to 2 tools that can help you with that. I know from experience that it is not that easy to just go and create a splash or landing page if you are new to marketing.
You need to learn the basics of copy writing and domain handling before you can think about using the tool that was recommended. Tracking is also not so easy as it looks and requires a lot of technical knowledge to do it right.
Budgeting
We all know that starting an online business takes money right. You will be told that you need at least a budget of $75 per month to start using the tools described in this program.
Networking
Here you will be taught the basics of networking
Design
You will just receive a short pep talk on how important the design of your splash page is.
Targeting
You will only be taught that every traffic exchange website is different and that you need to use a different angle with each one of them.
Bonuses
This might come in useful, because you will earn a bonus if you surf a couple of websites together.
Communication
You will only be taught the importance of communicating with your referrals.
Membership levels
From the bat you will be a free member, but there is also other membership levels that you need to take into consideration.
Do I recommend this program?
The whole idea behind this program is not bad and I think that it will help some people to make more money with traffic exchange websites. One major flaw that I found was that the training was pretty useless. It is very easy to tell me to brand myself, but it a whole other ball game to teach me how to do it.
If you are an experienced marketer, then you might be able to figure these things out yourself with no problem, but if you are new to this, then you will have a hard time with it. I am also not a big fan of traffic exchange websites because the people visiting your website are not intended to buy anything that you have to offer. They are only focused on earning credits by visiting your website.
Learn how to build a REAL business
Instead of “branding” another person’s website and making them money, I would recommend that you build your own website because of the following reasons.
1. You are in full control
You can do just about everything that you want because you are the owner of your own website. Your website will also increase in value the older it gets.
2. You can earn a passive income
By clicking on ads the whole day is a very short term approach to make money online because you have to actively make it. You should instead focus your time and energy on doing something that will pay you over and over again. The real secret to have financial freedom is to stop working for money and to work on a model or system that will make the money for you.
At this moment I have several websites up and running that are making money for me on autopilot. I did the work once and I am getting paid for it over and over again. If you want to learn how to do what I do, then I would suggest that you start where I started by checking out this very valuable training resource.
I was actually reviewing ‘Is Get Weekly Paychecks a Scam?’ by Valie, part of his ‘Passive Income Cloud’ project but good old Firefox decided to crash and shut all my windows down!
Anyway, I really like this review as it is unbiased but having read it, I would not want to try MLM as reading the review just confirmed my suspicions on MLM, they make a lot of big claims about how much money you can make and how easily you can do it when the truth is slightly different. Yes, you can make money but it aint easy and you can’t make the sort of money most of these companies claim. It really is about recruiting as many people as you can to do the same thing but, they don’t make that very clear!
Great site! Renny
(would be grateful if you would take a look at my blog which is in the ‘just beginning’ process and tell me what you think, thanks.)
Hi Renny
Firefox can sometimes be a pain. LOL. Maybe you should try Google Chrome. You can comment with your url on the about me page here and I would be happy to take a look at it 🙂
Hi Viljoen
I guess programs like Cash Surfing Network are popular because they are free to join and your traffic is instant.
As for the quality of the traffic I totally agree in that it sounds predominately untargeted. As you also suggest the training does not sound too favourable either! I am so pleased I read your review, you’ve taken the guess work out of deciding to join or not!
Kind Regards
Michelle
Hi Michelle.
I wonder if some people are actually making money from that traffic. I think the only people that are making money are those that sell traffic to the ones that clicks on the ads,
You have a great site here and I agree with you the best way to make money online is to own your own website or business, and I found that cash surfing is not the way to go for long term income. I like your ideas here can you give me more info? and get back to me I have to run out thanks.
To make money with online marketing, you need to have a website and you need to write content on it. If you do a simple search on Google, then you will be presented with a lot of websites that have relevant information.
You can start by getting your feet wet with a free website from Wealthy Affiliate.
I think somewhere I saw an ad or maybe a review about a service people can sign up to buy traffic or referral. But I didn’t know that could have been about the traffic exchange websites.
It’s good that membership is free to start off with, and that there are different levels that you can pay. Does this means the more you pay, the more traffic to your website?
I personally don’t think it’s a good idea to buy traffic because these people are highly unlikely to buy products from you. They didn’t stumble across your site because they were looking for something.
Thanks for a nice review on the article.
Yes, if you go up in levels, then you need to work less to get more traffic. The traffic that you get from these types of websites is very cold because as you said, they do not have any intention to buy from you.
Maybe if you can offer them a way so that they can get their own real traffic, then you might make a good sum of money.
From what I read from your post, you pretty well sized up what I figured the concept of surfing networks would work like on the internet. It makes total sense that people would be looking to collect credits and not interested in buying anything from the sites they visit.
Nice to know that they mention things you should do but do not follow it up with proper training, which to me is not a system I would want to pay into without proper training.
Thanks for the great update.
Hi Travis
What might help is if the people that visited your website could do something on it like leaving a comment. This can be great for SEO, but with these surfing networks you reduce your bounce rate and your dwell time and that actually has a negative influence on your rankings.
I would never do this to my website.
Great information and yes I totally agree that traffic exchange programs are not that great. I used to do the traffic exchange programs and they turned out to be useless traffic quality sucks because you got people only there to promote there stuff and they do not care about what you are trying to promote.
If you kinda think off it there might be a niche that you can use traffic exchange websites with. If you can sell traffic or a program such as Wealthy Affiliate that will teach people how to get traffic to their website, then you might want to try traffic exchange websites.