RedGage – Money-Making Social BookMarking

Get Paid To Book Mark Your Content

RedGage is a new social bookmarking type service with a twist.  Apparently, when you bookmark your own online content at RedGage, you get paid for views of that bookmark.  Make any sense?  Confused me, too, so I thought I’d check it out.  Within my first 42 minutes of submitting a link book mark to my “How To Sell An eBook With PayPal” post yesterday, I made $5.80 on RedGage.  It appears I got some sort of bonus from the site owners or editors or something (not too sure yet), but it definitely got my interest and made me take a look closer at this RedGage site.  Here’s what I’ve learned…

What Is RedGage?

From what I’ve read (see the current Google search results for RedGage here), RedGage has been in development for the last 18 months and has just been opened to the public.  RedGage has various advertisements on their site and they share that ad revenue with their users.  There is a certain amount RedGage will pay it’s user per 1,000 views of a bookmark of your own shared content.   The amount per 1,000 views  is dynamic based on their earnings from what I can gather.

For my bookmark to my blog post, I simply linked to it via their upload tool, gave it a title, some tags, and a description – then I got to choose a thumbnail image and submitted it.

It shows on the RedGage site as only what I submitted in my upload with a link to my original content.  Google appears to crawl and index these little RedGage bookmarks and it appears the links are NOT no-follow links (which is super nice).

This is how my RedGage link for my sell eBooks with PayPal bookmark looks:

It was super easy to do and it appears to be a quality bookmark and maybe a quality back link, too (still checking in to this).

As you can see from that image, I somehow got a nice little $5.80 bonus for sumthin’….lol. Have no idea why, but thanks, RedGage!  I also received some nice feedback from within the RedGage community which I really appreciate (thanks y’all!).

What Can You Submit To RedGage?

First off, from what I’ve read, you can only submit your OWN content to RedGage.  To me, this is another nice twist to RedGage being that other sites seem to frown on submitting your own content.

It appears as if you can submit links (like I did with my post), video, images, and blogs.  I’m still trying to figure out how the blog thing works so I can’t comment on that one yet.  All the submitted blogs seem to be formatted the same so I’m not sure if it’s a copy/paste job of your blog post or what.  All I can say is be sure to add a trackback url so you get a link to your original content.

There also seems to be a way to set  RedGage up so your Blogger and WordPress blogs, as well as your Flickr, FaceBook, and YouTube content get auto-added to RedGage.  I can see this being a nice way for additional exposure of your content so I plan to look into this.

You can also get RedGage to broadcast your content to your FaceBook, Twitter, and FriendFeed accounts – so again, that looks to be a good way to generate additional exposure.

You also get a profile page which Google does pick up (and they do seem to earn Page Rank).  You can link to your sites, and at the time of this writing, the links to your site(s) are NOT no-follow.

Here is my profile page – PotPieGirl on RedGage

How Do You Get Paid By RedGage?

As I said, the earnings per 1,000 views vary – right now it looks like the rate for 1,000 views is $1.07 (USD). This info is found under your “Account” tab once you are logged in.  So, at a little over a buck earned for every 1,000 views, I don’t see anyone getting rich doing this, but to me, it’s still a neat idea.

I don’t know about you, but I’m cool with free money  🙂

Once you hit your first $25, you can request to be paid.  RedGage will then mail you a Visa gift card.  Payments after your original payment are loaded to that gift card (or at least that’s how I understood it).

If I did the math right (and it is HIGHLY possible that I didn’t…lol) – if you receive 43,925 views to all your RedGage content, you would earn enough to buy a copy of One Week Marketing.  So, if you need a free way to earn enough to get your OWN action plan, there ya go  =)

My Initial Thoughts About RedGage

I like the concept of RedGage.  I think their two “twists” of being able to freely submit your own content AND get paid when people look at your submissions is a great idea.

I have a feeling that RedGage will be hit by those that might not have the best interest of RedGage at heart (as commonly happens with sites like these), but being that there is money on the line, I feel that RedGage will be quick to delete accounts of those that are using the site inappropriately.

Also, for those that think, “Wow, I’ll just sit there and click to view my OWN submissions over and over….” – forget it, it won’t work.  ANd if you DO happen to get away with it for a short time, you’ll get banned.  They make this very clear on the site.

I did also submit my Squidoo Help Lens to RedGage and it took fine.  Hopefully, Squidoo users will take advantage of this opportunity to get more exposure for their lenses – but I also hope they don’t ABUSE it.

Since I just signed up for RedGage and started using it a little bit earlier today, it is too soon to give a whole lot of quality feedback.  I do like the concept and I wish the site owners and investors the best of luck.  Hopefully my post today will send them some new folks their way and get some more activity going there.

Signing Up For RedGage

I had one little issue when signing up with RedGage.  I signed up and a little window opened offering to let me sign in and enter my confirmation code.  Instead, I just went to my email and clicked the confirmation link.

BUT – the link didn’t confirm me.  I had to copy the confirmation code they gave me via email and paste it in the box for it to take.  Not a big deal at all – just a heads up in case it happens to you, too.

When you sign up, there is a place to type who referred you – please type PotPieGirl.  I don’t think this has any earnings potential but I do think I can see who is in my network or something.  The only way I can find out is if someone types me in as their referrer…lol.

While they do have a “refer a friend” area where you can email someone an invitation, that is not practical for me.  I’d be there for DAYS entering thousands of email addresses…..lol.  Just a note to the RedGage staff…. a referral link sure would be nice  😉

Anyway, go here to sign up for RedGage.com, type in potpiegirl as your referrer (please), and then let me know what you think.

Click here for a full “Getting Started” tutorial for RedGage if you’d like more info and/or help.