Sunday, January 25, 2009

Make Money on Moola.com


I’ve have the blessing and misfortune of being extremely curious. I’m always trying something new or tearing something apart see how it works - it’s just my nature. One of my favorite things to experiment with is the act of making money. As you may already know, I’ve done a wide variety of things to obtain it. A while back, I bumped into www.Moola.com, a site that allows you to compete and win money by beating opponents and make money by subjecting yourself to advertising. It’s a blend of addictive time wasting games and an opportunity to make cash. Naturally it piqued me interest.

As I have found out, you can pull $10 checks from them every month,

but it isn’t as sexy as people make it out to be. You’ll spend a lot of time for the money you do win. You’ll be better off just getting a job, or doing one of the better online money makers. What makes Moola so alluring is it’s gambling nature - don’t get sucked in. The raw truth is that most players won’t make any money because they don’t have the luck, discipline, time, or knowledge to do so.

Normally I wouldn’t bother telling you about such a mild “opportunity”, but after I looked into around, I noticed the lack of a decent strategy guide on how to succeed with the site … ANYWHERE. I saw hundreds of sites offering bits and pieces of seemingly helpful advice; “secrets”, “hacks” and “tips” abound - but almost all turned out to be a huge disappointment.

I suppose that there are a lot of people looking around for something like this, and finally there will be. Since I already spent the time playing around with it, you won’t have to waste time on it to just find out that it may not be what you’re looking for. If you’re not already familiar with Moola, let me clear the air and bring you up to speed.

Remember, its just is a fun thing to mess around on, with an added bonus of making a tiny bit of money altho there are some players making thousands. If you’re going to play, you might as well play as best you can. With enough time, yes, you will get your ten bucks.

The Basics

In a nutshell the process goes like this. Someone gives you a referral like the one below

Moola Referral Link

Join Moola Now

You can make money in three basic ways. Playing games to double your wagered money (*gamble*), complete advertising offers, or win it on a “spin and win” wheel.

Note Only available to residents of USA and Canada

When competing for money, you begin with a gift penny, as well as whenever you go bankrupt. Then you wager it on a game against an opponent. You watch an ad, waiting for the game, then hopefully you beat the other player and take the winnings. You can keep betting, trying to double your money.

You also can complete the ad offers, just like you would through www.cashcrate.com or www.treasuretrooper.com. What this means is that they have a list of offers, and they tell you an amount of money you get from completing them. Many of them require that you sign up on some site and take some survey, giving you $1.25. Others ask you to try some free trial, or even get cash back on purchasing certain items.

Spinning the cash wheel is like Wheel of Fortune, you spin it and you get anywhere from $0.02 - $9000. Even though amounts less than a dollar are most common, they do pay out larger sums with the wheel. A guy won $9000 in December. Anyway, you get one free spin a day, and you can randomly earn more spins on the wheel by using their search engine. Anecdotally, it seems like the embedded search tool bar pays out higher amounts than the one from the site interface.

I want to assure you, that if they owe it to you, they will pay you the money.

The Catch

The “fill out a survey” cash offers, or “bonus boosters” as they’re called on the site, aren’t as good as www.cashcrate.com’s. They are pretty decent, but they don’t have the number or quality of them. You never have to do a bonus booster if you don’t want to .

The real catch is that learning to make money with the games is pretty tough if you don’t have some guidance. It’s a lot harder to make the $10 minimum cash out then people would have you believe. Unless have the right “meta-plan” you’ll end up wasting your time with little to show for it.

Additionally, it’s improbable that you’ll ever reach the higher levels of cash. The top player last time I had checked only had 5k. Winning a significant number of sequential games highly unlikely. Eventually, you’ll lose. Your best bet is to bootstrap your way up as best you can, using all the knowledge and discipline you can muster. The good news is that when players go broke, Moola gives them another penny. That means that there is more and more money slowly working into the hands of other players, ready to be taken.

You can also make money off of people that you refer into the site - but they have to cash out or win some boosters for you to get the extra money. Don’t plan on having multi level marketing success with Moola unless something unusual happens.

The Meta Stratagy

The main ideas of my meta strategy involves understanding risk exposure, time managment, and maximizing your skill. If you manage your bankroll well, you’ll receive a Moola check soon enough.

Note: I have excluded the known opportunities regarding collusion - where you gather a bunch of players and try to “beat” the system, mainly because of their convoluted and unethical nature.

Risk Reduction

With the games, the risk is simple: you lose the money you wagered. Every time you play you are exposing yourself to risk. In my opinion, when you’ve built up a small corpus of money, it’s better to play one game for $1.00 than two games for $0.50. The less risk you have, the better. It’s funny, even with the small amounts of money wagered, greed can cloud your senses.

Another thing to possibly look into is how to manage your bankroll. A good blackjack card counter or book would be able to fill you in on the finer details. One such risk management/bankroll determined strategy goes like this:

You make a wager and if you lose, you at least double your bet. When you win, you make the lost money back and a bit extra. Even after a run of losses, you’ll eventually win back all your money with a little extra as long as you have the money to keep playing. The larger your bankroll, the greater the chance you’ll win and recoup your losses with a little extra. This is why I suggest you complete a few of the free offers first, so that you can immediately have a larger bankroll to start off with.

There are also some risks in filling out the forms and completing the bonus offers. When you sign up for a trial offer you may forget to cancel at the appropriate time and have to pay for the service. You also run the risk of having heaps of spam dumped upon you. The best risk reduction here, is to set up an exclusive email for the offers and to use a spreadsheet with the timed offers.

Time Management

Twice the games at half the wager takes twice the time. Since the games last 2-6 minutes apiece, the quicker you can boost up from wagering pennies the better, since your dollar per hour earning rate is higher.

To manage your time effectively, look at the offers and determine the rough amount of time needed to complete it, and when you’d get paid on it, as some don’t pay out until the 7 day trial is up. The offers change periodically, so just browse them, pick the one that offers the most cash for least effort and do it first. In this realm, time management is all about dollars per hour of effort.If doing this strictly for money, the less playing you do, the better. You only have four total spin and wins a day per 24 hours, I suggest that you play long enough to get at the first two - about 30-60 a day. If you have time to burn at work, go ahead and play more, since an online game of Paper Rock Scissors may be acceptable when there’s nothing to do.

To get my spins as fast as possible, I like to have another browser tab open with their search bar. While I’m waiting for the ad to finish before my game starts, I crank out some random searches to get my spins. This multitasking is possible even mid game, if you’re good enough.

Maximizing Your Skill

As mentioned earlier, there is a skill component to the games. I found a set of decent “Moola Solvers“, which may help you achieve above 50% wins. This is an awesome thing, because over time you’ll be able to amass a little chunk of change over time. However, the solvers have their limitations. Humans don’t always make logical decisions, so calculating against what a perfect player would do is partially flawed logic. Plus, since none of us have infinite time or money, we can never ride out the ups and downs to obtain fully predictable statistical probabilities. It’s true, given 100 moneys, 100 typewriters, and an infinite amount of time, you can arguably get the great works of Shakespeare, but you’ve got 30 minutes and six monkeys.

A few tips tip in particular for Hi-Low - The Moola Solver will help you understand the best move for you to make, counting the cards as it goes along, helping you to know whether to guess higher or lower, but you should also use the information from the other player to help determine when you lock in.

When you are head to head with an even number of lives, cards and the opponent mis-guesses, sending him back to the beginning, lock in your card. You’ll still be even on lives, but have a huge boost in placement. I’ll lock in like this as long as I have at least a two card lead after he gets set back. If even on lives, but ahead four cards, lock in as well. Remember that if you have one of the middle cards, 6,7,8,9,or 10, you’ll most likely want to lock and switch cards. You may get a better card to guess off from and you’ll also count down the deck further, making card counting more useful.

Speaking of card counting, if you don’t use one of the solver helps, it’s pretty easy to learn how to do a basic count in Hi-Low. When the game begins, start at zero. Whenever a card above eight is played, the deck count gets a -1. Whenever a card below eight is played, the deck gets a +1. If the deck is positive, you’re more likely to flip over a high card (above eight). If the deck is negative, it’ll more likely than not, be a low (below 8) card. The further in the game you go, the more likely the count will reflect the nature of the cards.

Although you’ll probably only complete a few bonus offers through Moola, it’s a good idea to the best at that type of thing anyway, as you’ll probably want to make better money with www.cashcrate.com or wherever. Speed is the key skill in filling out forms and completing the surveys for cash so I suggest getting an auto filler like Roboform. If you plan on making the “get paid to complete offers” method a part of your income, you may want to dabble in speed reading a bit so that you can skim text and pick up what you need to know.

Summary

I hope you’ve picked up some vaulable tips for Moola.com, as well as discovered whether or not you should spend some time playing around there. The Moola Solvers Solvers are great if you’re going to get into it, but no reason to get started on their own.You’ve seen a few options I’ve linked to that are much better.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask. If you are going to play, play smart.