I had a long, terrible weekend and since I can't post ratings today I'll just treat today like it's Monday and write a review.

What it is: AdF.ly is a site where users can get paid to shorten links and share them with others via social media, websites or forums. Users can also use AdF.ly as a tool to promote their own products or websites.

Who can join: The minimum age in which users can have an AdF.ly account is 18 years old. Besides that, there are no other qualifications users need to join so people from around the world can create an account.

What you need to apply: The only thing you need to get an AdF.ly account is an email address and a Paypal or a Payza account.

Cost to sign up: There is no cost to sign up for an AdF.ly account if you’re only using it for the purpose of shortening links. If you have a desire to use AdF.ly as an advertiser then you will have to pay for the service (my focus here is on the link shortening aspect of the site).

How much you can make: There really isn’t too much work involved in making AdF.ly work for you. The minimum payout for AdF.ly is $5 and though it doesn’t seem like much there is a bit of a challenge to it. The first issue most users may encounter is the fluctuating rates for the clicks they receive. AdF.ly pays different rates based on the country the people clicking on the links are from. The highest rates are generally from people in the US, UK and Canada (for those 3 countries the rate is generally between 0.002-0.003 cents per click).

The next issue a lot of users will encounter is where to share their links. There are many blog and forum owners who don’t like to allow people to share AdF.ly or similar links (mostly because some people don’t know how to act and like to be spammers). There may also be some issues currently with sharing AdF.ly links on Facebook (I’m not 100% sure on this because I don’t use Facebook). Sharing links on Twitter and other social media sites should be fine. I should also note that AdF.ly (and similar links) will not work on Wordpress hosted blogs (in posts or in comments).

The final issue a lot of people will encounter is the exposure to potential clickers. You can put your links in the perfect place but you can’t make other people click on them (figuratively and literally because it’s against the terms of the site. You also can't click on them yourself other than the 1 chance you get to test it). You only get credit for your link if a person clicks the link, waits 5 seconds (this is the most important part because it counts as them viewing the ad) and then users have the option to skip the ad (that button appears in the top, right corner) and continue on to the original destination of the link. The user doesn’t have to click on the ad for you to get credit but they do have to wait the 5 seconds which can understandably be a turnoff to some people (and again there are people who try to exploit this and ruin the experience for everyone).

Ways to get the payout faster: There are a couple of ways to get the $5 payout faster on AdF.ly. The first way of course is making and sharing more links. AdF.ly links never expire so as long as they are in places where people can see and click on them, they will always continue to work for you.

The second way is through a referral system. AdF.ly has a referral program that offers users 20% of all their referral’s earnings (The option also works for people who decide to refer webmasters to the advertising portion of AdF.ly as well but the commission on that is 5%).

Sign up to AdF.ly here.