After my [don't] get-paid-to-read-email story was over, next thing I tried was a more "automated income stream" type of program:

The good thing about it is that, beside the work needed to set it up, once it's done it keeps running and earning for you. Most important, it's a good first way to receive that first "payment from the Internet" and the confidence that it implies.

In order to cash-in from this concept what you do is:

1/ Sign up for a free PayPal account if you don't have one, as most of these programs will pay you by PayPal.

2/ Sign up for at least two autosurf-for-cash programs. As I write this article I've been 10+ months inactive in autosurfing-for-cash, but I've checked a few of the programs I used back then, and these are the only ones I can truly recommend as of this writing (April 2005):

Autovisiting.com - Autosurfweb.com - Nomoreclicking.com

And with good reasons if you ask me:

* THEY DID PAY ME! (Sorry for the caps) :)

* I logged in to my accounts and they were still active after 10+ months of inactivity, with all my credits there! This is a good sign, really. I expected some of the sites to have cancelled my account for inactivity or something alike.

* Of all the truly-autosurfing programs that paid me back then, these are the only ones that are still around. The other paying sites are now not responding or in a "domain for sale" status, so these ones have passed the test of time.

UPDATE: Sometime around Oct-2005 I discarded autosurfing as one of my online income streams, so I don't know if the sites listed above still pay, or if they even exist.

3/ Anyway, once you signup each program usually gives you an autosurfing url, although some programs allow you to use two of them to earn credits faster, but this is the exception.

4/ You setup your multi-tabbed browser to auto-open all of the autosurf urls on startup, and...

5/ That's it! Everytime you start your browser it will launch the autosurfing urls, auto-navigate and auto-earn credits to your account that you can convert later into cash. Of course you don't even need to launch the browser yourself. If you know how to do it you can setup your PC to autolaunch the browser every time it boots.

6/ And as usual, if you're happy with the concept you can recommend it to others and earn from their autosurfing too.

Now, before you get too enthusiastic, here are a few drawbacks and some recommendations to overcome them:

* Your autosurfing PC will be browsing lots of sites, so it's likely to get viruses, trojans and whatever nasty plague. This is much more likely if your browser is IE or uses an IE-based technology. That's why I use Netscape.

To overcome this: Don't use your working computer to autosurf. I only recommend autosurfing if you can do it from a secondary computer where you don't have any data or programs you can't afford to lose. And even in this case it's a good idea to install some antivirus software to prevent that from happening.

* Some of your autosurfing urls will eventually stop because they reached some "framebreaker" url, some "modal dialog" or otherwise disruptive url, even if such pages are supposed to be banned from autosurfers. This won't affect the remaining autosurfer urls, but still you will be losing the potential income from the stopped autosurfer(s).

Well, in fact if you leave the browser alone, most likely you will find that after some 10 to 60 minutes ALL of the autosurfers are stopped because all of them were interrupted by some framebreaker url.

The only method I know to fix this is to set up a program that terminates and relaunches your browser at specific intervals. For instance, I use Netscape 7 as my browser and I use a external scheduler to do this termination and relaunching every ten minutes.

* Sometimes you will find that some autosurfing url is not working and showing a "too many connections" or "bandwith exceeded" page instead because there are too many users using it or they've eaten the service's bandwith. And it's not rare that some service switches hosting providers, so its autosurfing url may become invalid for a few days or weeks.

No problem, if you've applied the solution for disruptive urls your computer should recover from all of the above too.

That was an expected question. :)

* If you manage to setup all of the above

* If your computer is running 24/7

* With an Internet connection available 24/7

* Browsing five to ten autosurf urls

* And all of them pay you properly

To be realistic, you should expect to earn from your *personal* browsing only between $0.5 and $2 per day, or $15 - $60 per month. That would depend mostly on your computer's speed and Internet connection.

And of course the numbers will improve if you manage to recruit some sub-autosurfers for your network.

So, is it worth all the work for the payout? Up to you to decide. In my autosurfing days I used to average $.75 a day or $22.5 a month for having a secondary PC running. Not much, but it helped.

I dropped it because of the "too many viruses" issue, even though I had an antivirus installed, and mostly because I could use that PC for more profitable things.

But! As I'm preparing this article I've setup another secondary PC with three autosurfers sooo... who knows, maybe I'll get back to it again.

UPDATE: Again, around Oct-2005 I discarded autosurfing definitely. If you're interested in the concept I strongly suggest you learn to identify the X% Autosurf Scams before looking for autosurf sites.

As you sign up for the mentioned sites or any similar site, don't get confused if they ask you for a url to promote and insist that your url must be compliant with certain rules. This is only relevant if you were thinking about really promoting a site.

But even assuming that you only want to surf for cash, some sites will still require a "promotable url" to signup, so here is a totally autosurf-friendly url you can use for that purpose:

http://arpa3.net/autosurf-friendly.html

Also make sure that, where appropriate, you setup the url to "save credits" instead of "use credits to advertise" in order to earn credits you can later convert to cash.

This one is not exactly in the same category but I'm listing it because you can run it safely even in your main PC. In fact it's the only one I've run in my PC during my 10-month autosurf-inactivity period.

Take care,

P.S. - Next week I'll tell you about my moderately successful experience with Paid Surveys. It's not automated, but an income stream anyway. The good thing is you can do it from home at your own hours. Until then!