Become Hated (But Rich!)
By several successful web entrepreneurs Copyright 2006 – No Part of This Document Can Be Reproduced Without Permission
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RUNNING YOUR OWN WEBSITE ....................................................................... 4 Affiliate Programs .................................................................................... 6 Using Datafeeds .....................................................................................10 Dropshippers & Wholesalers - Another kind of affiliate program.....................11 The Best Way To Sell ..............................................................................11 Conclusion.............................................................................................12 CONTENT BASED SITES .................................................................................14 Getting Free Content...............................................................................14 Building Your Own Content ......................................................................15 Google AdSense .....................................................................................17 Positioning Your Ads Correctly ..................................................................19 Selecting The Right Colours .....................................................................20 Other AdSense Tips ................................................................................21 Other Ways of Getting Paid For Impressions & Clickthrus .............................21 Conclusion.............................................................................................22 Selling a Product or Service .....................................................................23 BUILDING AN ADSENSE BUSINESS WITH FREE BLOGS.......................................25 Blogger.com Blogs..................................................................................25 Determine Your Blog Topic First................................................................26 The Settings Tab ....................................................................................27 Getting Traffic to Your Blog ......................................................................31 Submit Your Blog to Blog Directories .........................................................31 Trade Links With Related Websites............................................................32 Concluding Comments.............................................................................33 HOW TO DRIVE THE MOST TRAFFIC TO YOUR SITE............................................35 How to Rank High in Search Engines (Specifically Google!) ...........................35 Building a PR (Page Rank) by Writing Articles For Public Use .........................38 How to Manipulate Your Code to Keep the PR at Your Site ............................39 Pay Per Click Advertising .........................................................................40 Adding to Directories ..............................................................................43 Best Ways to Add to Directories................................................................45 Creating Press Releases to get Traffic ........................................................45 A Few Other Tips to Get Traffic and Increase PR..........................................46 Search Engine Optimization .....................................................................47 Recommended Websites & Forums For Website Management & Promotion......48 HYIPs - What are they?..................................................................................51 Can You Make Money From HYIPs?............................................................51 Tips on how to make money with HYIPs.....................................................52 A 13 Month Study of HYIPs ......................................................................55 HYIP Resources ......................................................................................56 Conclusion.............................................................................................60 Get Paid to...................................................................................................62 What are they? ......................................................................................62 Are "Get Paid to" programs worth the time? ...............................................62 How you can find the best programs .........................................................63 What are the best resources? ...................................................................63 The New Hybrid "Get Paid To" Programs: AutoSurfs.....................................64 Conclusion.............................................................................................65 Work at Home Programs ................................................................................67 Conclusion.............................................................................................68 CASINO SCALPING ........................................................................................70 SPORTS ARBITRAGE BETTING.........................................................................72
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What is Sports Arbitrage Betting? .............................................................72 Example of an arbitrage betting opportunity:..............................................72 What kind of returns can one expect?........................................................73 Resources you will need ..........................................................................73 A Quick Way to Make some Cash Now..............................................................74 FINAL THOUGHTS ABOUT DOING BUSINESS & MAKING MONEY (NOT JUST ONLINE) ..................................................................................................................77
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RUNNING YOUR OWN WEBSITE (If you already own and operate a website, please skip the next 7 paragraphs) There are literally thousands of ways you can make money by running a website of your own. Anybody, no matter how intelligent they are, can make a living off of running websites. First let me get started by explaining why most people aren't working for themselves running websites. The first and foremost reason that people never get started is because they simply don't know how to. Here is a very basic description of what someone needs to do to just get their site up and running: 1) Decide on what their website will do. Will it sell a product that you produce, or a service that you render? Will it sell products for other companies in which you will get a commission for? Will it simply be an informative website that makes money through different types of advertisements being displayed on the site? Will it combine all these money making ideas into one site? These are just a handful of questions that you must ask yourself before getting started. 2) What will your domain name be? For those of you that do not know, a domain name is your website address such as FileSharingTalk.com. First and foremost you want this to be a name that is (1) easy to remember, (2) short and sweet, and (3) catchy. Look at some of the most popular websites out there. Google.com, Yahoo.com, Ebay.com, and Alexa.com. None of these names have anything to do with what the sites are about. However they are extremely catchy, very easy to remember, and most importantly short. Now-a-days it is getting extremely difficult to find short domain names, as most of them are taken. You always have the option of buying a .net, .org, .biz, or one of the other less popular domain extension names. I always recommend going for the .com only though. For example, if you buy the domain name Smarttiger.net, you will lose a good amount of traffic simply because those people who wish to visit your site will end up going to smarttiger.com. Stay with the .com domain names, they always are the best. Another key that I strongly recommend is trying to use keywords in your domain name if possible. This does not mean that you go out of your way and buy some huge domain name to have the keywords in it. If it’s possible to keep your domain name short, while also incorporating a keyword or two, then go for it. Once you have decided on a domain name, you Page 4
must make sure that it is available. I recommend using http://www.plugsocket.com/domain-names/multiple-search.html to find the domain name you want, simply because they allow you to type in multiple domain names at once. This allows you to search for more than just 1 at a time. After finding the domain name that you like, you must register it. Domain registration can be purchased for as low as $6/year at some registrars. I however recommend using http://www.namecheap.com to register your domain names. They are very reliable, very affordable ($8.88 per year), and very helpful. They also provide you with a free 1 year “whois guard” which will keep your domain name totally anonymous to the public. You may want to go with a cheaper registrar, but most of them are not very reliable. 3) Once your domain name has been purchased, you must find a reliable hosting company. With today’s prices, you can get shared hosting for your site for as little as $12/year. If you are just starting up, shared hosting will probably be ok for you. This means that your site will be on a server with many other sites. Once your site is large, and bringing in the traffic, you will want to purchase a dedicated server or network of dedicated servers which usually run anywhere from $79/month up to $10,000+/month depending on how large a server/server network you need, and what extravagant features you need. Once you have purchased hosting for your domain name, your hosting provider will give you your nameservers (usually 2 nameservers which will look something like this: ns1.theserveribought.com, ns2.theserveribought.com). You will then need to login to your domain registration account, and edit your nameservers there. This is very simply. You just type these two nameservers in and your site is ready to go. Often times it may take up to 48 hours for your domain name and hosting account to propagate and show up on the web.
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4) Once this is done, you are ready to start your website. You can use website authoring software such as Microsoft FrontPage, or any of the other great software out there. These software packages (many of which you can find for free at http://www.download.com, by searching for "Web Authoring", "Website Creator", or "Website Software") make it extremely easy for you to make a basic website. Also, a great free alternative to commercial software is http://www.nvu.com. 5) Once you feel completely comfortable with what you are doing, and decide that you need to add programming features to your website, you will probably want to hire a programmer. This is where a lot of people get frustrated. They search around the internet looking for programmers, and these programmers charge $100/hour. They see this, think it's ridiculous (which it is), and give up. Let me tell you one thing. The best place to find a programmer is RentaCoder.com. You can get simple projects done for as little as $10.00, and larger projects done for a fraction of the cost you would pay elsewhere. One thing that I do recommend though is that you only use programmers with high ratings. There are a lot of programmers who probably know less then you do about building a website. Stay clear of these people. Ok, now that I have discussed the process which you should use in order to get your site up and running, I will move on to discuss some of the ways to make money from your website.
Affiliate Programs
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If you don't know what an affiliate program is, here's a brief description: With affiliate programs you sell products, and services on your website for another company or companies. You are paid a commission (usually anywhere from 1% to as high as 80% of the sale price). You don't have to worry about shipping anything out, billing anyone, or basically anything at all. All you have to worry about is cashing your monthly check.
I know this sounds almost too good to be true, but it really isn't. The only catch is that you need to sell these products, and it really isn't as easy as it might seem. Selling products for these companies online may become very difficult simply because there is a very high concentration of competition. For example you might want to sell posters on your website, but there are also 20,000 other sites out there that sell posters for the same affiliate that you sell them for. What would make a poster buyer pick your site over any of the other 20,000 affiliate sites? This is where proper internet marketing comes in. I will explain this in more detail further down the page. As for the affiliate programs, there are at least 30,000 companies online that have these types of programs. They include companies as large as Amazon to companies as small as a Mom and Pop store on the corner of your street. Finding the programs that are right for your site takes time. What you will probably want to do is sign up to several large referral group sites. These sites are specifically in the business of helping people like you find affiliate programs for the products that you wish to sell. Below is a list of Affiliate sites that I recommend. I have put them in order starting from the ones I believe are the best: - http://www.cj.com - Commission Junction - They literally have thousands of affiliate programs that you can sign up to with basically one click. You can then login and get your own specific code that you put on your website. When someone clicks on the link at your site and buys a product (whether it is the product that you linked to or anything from that same company), you will get your commission credited to your account. http://www.linkshare.com
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LinkShare - Very similar to Commission Junction, but is more product oriented rather than generally site oriented. Commission Juction tends to have more links to the entire store for the affiliates you want to sell for, while LinkShare tends to have more links to specific products. LinkShare and Commission Juction are the two programs you definitely want to sign up for
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http://www.clickbank.com
- ClickBank - This is probably one of the more productive affiliate helper programs out there. The reason is that they are not used quite as much as LinkShare and Commission Junction. This means less competition. They sell a variety of different products that you won't find on other affiliate sites. These products are mostly software (often e-books like this one) that are downloadable after purchase. If you are looking to sell this type of merchandise, then clickbank is the affiliate helper you want to use. (Screenshot #4) The above 3 are pretty much what you will want to start with. Once you get experience with them, and are looking for a more diverse line of products to sell, then you should check out other affiliate sites as well. Here is a short list of others: - http://www.websponsors.com - http://www.clickxchange.com - http://www.performics.com - http://www.shareasale.com - http://www.affiliatefuel.com - http://www.darkblue.com - http://www.clixgalore.com - http://www.fineclicks.com - http://www.affiliateguide.com
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- http://www.amazon.com *They don't use any helpers like linkshare or commssion juntion, you can signup with them directly and sell any of their products on their site. Once you sign up to these programs you will want to decide which products to sell. What I personally do is check out the EPC on certain products. Most of these sites will give you the EPC, which stands for "Earnings Per Click". That is the amount that the product yields to the affiliate (you) per click, on average, from all other affiliates trying to sell that product. This is a great barometer that can tell you which products are selling the best for other people. What’s a good EPC that you should be looking for? Well, it all depends on the industry and how much you are spending to advertise the product. If the EPC is $0.50, and it costs you $0.25 to drive enough traffic to your site to click the link to the affiliate, then you have a 200% return. On the other hand if the EPC is $40, and it costs you $41 to get enough traffic to your site to click the link, then you would be losing money. It takes a lot of trial and error, and just because one product converts well for one marketer doesn’t mean it will for you. Use EPC’s as a guideline, remembering that they are just averages.
Using Datafeeds One thing that a lot of people don't realize is that you can actually use datafeeds directly from some online sellers. For example Amazon.com, Art.com, and AllPosters.com allow their affiliates to use datafeeds. I'm sure you'd like to know what a datafeed is. A datafeed is simply a feed that you can use on your website to basically make it appear that you are selling these products yourself. An example would be http://www.totalposters.com This affiliate is selling posters for AllPosters.com. You can browse every single poster that AllPosters.com has for sale directly from totalposters.com. When you click on a product to order it, the owner of totalposters.com will get his commission (in this case 25% of the sale price).
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Setting up these feeds usually calls for more programming skills than the basic website owner has. You can probably get this done for you by a programmer on rentacoder.com for under $50.00. It's well worth it in the long run.
Dropshippers & Wholesalers - Another kind of affiliate program Something that is very similar to affiliate programs, yet has its differences are the Drop Shipping programs. You yourself can become a drop shipper for many companies and their product lines. What you do is sell products for these companies. You set your own price that you want to sell these products for. You then purchase the products from the wholesaler, who will ship the items for you to the person that buys it from you. This market tends to be less competitive as it seems less webmasters go this route. I personally believe this is better than affiliate programs in many ways. The best drop shipping resource in my opinion is: http://www.worldwidebrands.com. You can find many products here that you can easily sell on your websites. There are well over 3 million products listed here, from close to 5,000 different brands. The other dropshipper that I frequently use (especially to sell items on ebay) is http://nawca.org. If you are looking to get involved in selling wholesale products on ebay.com or on your own website, the following are extremely valuable links you will want to check out: http://www.alibaba.com - Thousands of products and companies offering wholesale goods. http://www.alliedelec.com - Supplier of electronics and parts.
The Best Way To Sell From my years of experience, I've learned one major rule when it comes to selling products either through affiliate programs, or Drop Shippers. That rule is simple: "The more product specific your website, the better you will do" This is so true. For example, if you have a website that sells virtually anything, sure you will have a large target audience, but from personal Page 11
experience, your sales will be very low. The more specific you get, the better you will do. If you have a site dedicated to selling reading materials, another dedicated to selling magazines, another dedicated to selling sports magazines, and another dedicated to selling only the Sports Illustrated Magazine, the more specific site will do the best. In this case it would be the site dedicated to selling "Sports Illustrated" only, followed by the site that sells Sports Magazine, then the site that sells magazines in general, then the site that sells reading materials. You might ask why this is the case. There are many factors that go into this, but the more specific your site, the more people that are looking for that specific product will purchase that product from your site. This has to do in part with search engines bringing more targeted traffic to your site, rather then untargeted junk traffic. It's not quantity, it's quality, when dealing with web traffic. If one person comes to your Sports Illustrated site looking to buy Sports Illustrated, you will do better then if the same person came to a site dedicated to selling 2000 different magazines. I've been selling for affiliate programs for over 4 years now, and this is probably one of the best things I've learned. Other tips on how to sell the most products from your site would include: - Easy to read site, that makes your visitors focus on the products you are trying to sell. The best place to put ads to products on content based sites is in the top left hand quadrant of your site. - Make the visitors think that they are getting a deal by buying the products from your site. Use words like, "Blowout Sale", "1 Week Only Sale", "Sale Ends Tonight", etc to make your visitors act quickly, while creating a sense of urgency. - Make your site look professional. Even though in reality they are not buying the products from you, they probably don't know this. The more professional your site looks, the more comfortable they will be buying from your site.
Conclusion Remember the key to affiliate sales is to make your site compete with the others selling the same products. To do this it takes techniques Page 12
that make your site stand out, as well as effective advertising and search engine optimization, which I will discuss a bit later.
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CONTENT BASED SITES One way of making money other than using affiliate programs, is simply by building a content based website that provides information to your visitors. By doing this, your website becomes a resource to those looking for information. Even though it might seem like you couldn't make money from a site like this, you actually can do quite well. Content is extremely important if you wish to have Google, and the other large search engines index your site properly. The more pages you have on your site the more pages you will have indexed in the search engines. This means, more content = more traffic to your site! First I will explain the ways of building a content driven site. I will discuss how you can make money a bit later in this book.
Getting Free Content If you are like me and a lot of other webmasters out there, you probably don't feel like writing pages and pages of content for your site. If this is the case, then there is a solution for you. There are literally thousands of free articles and essays that you can get and put on your website. Below I have listed just a small selection of the ones that I use. http://www.articlecity.com http://goarticles.com http://www.ezinearticles.com All these are excellent resources. Most of them require that you credit the writer of the article, and/or link to his/her site from the article. There are two resources that I absolutely think are a must. They are article and content manipulating software packages that create unique articles/content for you based on keywords that you want. They can be found at: http://www.trafficequalizer.com http://articlebot.com/
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They will create a unique article for you so that you are not competing with other sites that use the same articles. The one problem with adding free articles to ones site is that many search engines now have what is called a "duplicate content penalty". This means if multiple websites use the same articles, your site will not be able to rank as high as if you were to create a unique piece of writing. Many search engines fail to index articles which are on hundreds of sites already. This is where Articlebot and Traffic Equalizer come in handy. Please note that if you do use Traffic Equalizer, you should create your site on a separate server to your main sites since search engines often penalize webmasters for the use of this program to create what many term “scraper sites”. Traffic Equalizer creates pages based of keywords, by pulling the search results from google, to create a simple, yet optimized webpage.
Building Your Own Content If you happen to be a good writer, or even a poor writer you might decide that you'd rather write your own articles. This is extremely beneficial to some people, since if you write your own, that content will be entirely unique. If you take content from a free content site, who knows how many websites have those same articles on them. What I am trying to say is that if you write your own articles, you have a better chance of getting hits from search engines, as you don't need to compete with those other sites with the same articles. Writing your own content takes a lot of time. If you are a slow typer like me it might take you an entire afternoon just to write a 4 paragraph essay. I do believe it's well worth it though, if you have the extra time. Something to remember when writing your own content, is that these essays and articles are not being turned into a professor to be graded. This means you can do a below average job. In this case, as horrible as it may sound, quantity is better then quality if your goal is to get the most traffic, and make the most money from your site. The best content you can use is an opinionated argument or essay where you clearly state your opinion. These types of writings drive the most interest and can pretty much say anything you like, without worrying that you are giving false information. Having said all this, writing an essay that sounds like a 5 year old put it together will not be beneficial. Your goal should be to get people to come to your site and then stay a while or come back later to read more of your work. Although quantity is good, in the long run you want at least a little bit of quality. Page 15
Once you are ready to write an article, you should first visit a website located at: http://www.prsearch.net . When you get there, click on the tab on the upper right hand side that says "Keyword Research". Now say for example you were writing an article about BEACHES. Type "Beach" into the open field and do a search. You will get a long list of related keywords ordered by the number of times they were searched for on MSN in the previous month. These are the keywords that you want to include in your writing. Make sure that the title of the page with your essay on it has good keywords in it, and you have that same keyword(s) in an
tag at the top of the article. Also what I recommend is bolding several keywords in your essay. This will all ensure the best possible search engine results for your site. You do not want to overuse keywords in your essay, as search engines can penalize for over optimizing a page. Make your essay as natural as possible. We discuss the ideal keyword ratio and essay length later in this book. An example of a well written article with the proper formatting and integrated google ads (discussed later in this book) can be seen in the following example: http://www.randomimage.us/articles/second_mortgage.htm. If you don't want to take the time to write articles and essays, then consider hiring local college students to write for you for a relatively cheap price. College kids have a lot of free time and always need cash. You can also try http://www.elance.com for freelance writers who are looking for work. Also you may want to check out ghostwriters such as http://www.articleauthors.net. Writing Articles is not the only way you can build content on your site. There are many different ways that are just as effective. Another great way is to start up a forum, where members make posts. This is free content that you don't even have to write. Another easy way is to start a blog, where you post daily news, comments, events, etc, and allow your visitors to respond to them. Remember if you are building a content driven website, the more content your have, and the more pages your site encompasses, the better! Starting a forum can be very difficult in that you need members and posts in order to attract more members and posts. A great way to get a forum off to a booming start is to pay people to post for the first few weeks. There are several sites which offer "forum starter" packages in which you can purchase a certain number
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of members who will make a certain amount of posts. Here are a couple sites which are a must for any forum owner: - http://www.theadminzone.com/forums/index.php A forum dedicated to forum owners. - http://www.theforumfix.com - A blog published by an owner of a very popular forum When choosing a topic to center your content based website around, there are a few things that one should consider. First you need to find a niche which is not overly saturated. You don't want to be spending hours on end writing content and working on a site about a topic which already has a million different pages referencing it. You want a topic which is specific enough to allow you to easily become an authority site on. For instance, you might want to create a site about yellow pigeons in South Africa rather then just pigeons. Second, you want a topic that corresponds to Adsense phrases which pay high. Sites about mortgages get 20 times as much $ per Adsense click then those about celebrity gossip. Before you waste your time writing articles and optimizing a site for search engines you want to make sure your topic will be able to bring in the dough. Below is a very good tool which allows you to search for a keyword, topic, or phrase and see what advertisers are paying per click in Overture/YPN: http://uv.bidtool.overture.com/d/search/tools/bidtool
Google AdSense No matter what type of website you have, whether it is a content driven site, an affiliate site, a site that you sell your own products on or anything else, you should definitely be using Google Adsense to generate extra money. From experience, I know several webmasters out there who generate over $4000.00 a day! Yes a day, from using Google adsense on their sites. This is a must for any webmaster. Let me first explain what Google Adsense is. I'm sure you've seen those google ads everywhere on the internet that say "Ads by Gooooooogle" on them. Just about every website you see out there today has used them simply because they are so easy to use and can make anyone rich. Page 17
How do these ads work? I'm sure you are asking yourself that question. Well Google is the leading internet marketing site online, and continues to grow at a very quick rate. Anyone that owns a website that follows Googles guidelines (no pornography, gambling, etc) can advertise in Google's Adwords Program. How this system works is that you as a webmaster decide to pay a certain amount of money to google for every click someone makes to go to your site. These ads are shown on both google's search engine results, and on other webmasters sites who use Google Adsense. Basically every time an ad is clicked, the webmaster who is advertising has to pay google the amount he bid for that keyword. If a visitor visits your site and clicks on an ad from google adsense, you get approximately 40-60% of what that advertiser is paying to Google. For example if the advertiser is paying Google $3.00 per click for his keyword, and that ad shows up on your site, and is clicked, you end up getting approximately $1.50. You might think that $3.00 is a heck of a lot of money to pay for one single click, but there are actually companies, individuals, lawyers etc who pay as much as $200 per click. Yep that means that if that ad was to show up on your site and someone clicked it you'd get about $100! Check out the following link for a list of some of the terms which pay the best: http://www.cwire.org/highest-paying-search-terms Ok so how do you start? Simply go to http://adsense.google.com to apply for their program. Once you are accepted (most sites are), you will be able to login, and generate a simple javascript code that you place on your website just by copy and pasting it into the position you want. They allow you to choose from a selection of sizes, and use any colors you would like for your ads. Once you have created an account, there are several things you must decide. First of all the way google adsense selects which ads appear on your site, is that they send out a search engine type robot that scans your site (and the pages on your site) to determine what each page is about. For example if you have a page on your site about "Banking", the ads that you put on your site will most likely be about "Banking". Google does this to help you get the best clickthru rate possible. After all they want you to make money, because the more you make, the more they make.
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Positioning Your Ads Correctly Something that a lot of webmasters (most of them) don't know about Google adsense is that if you use more then one ad block, you have to be aware of how the system decides where to put the highest paying ads. From many tests that I've done, I've found that those ads that are the highest up on your site are the ads that will have the highest bid prices. Also on top of this, if you are using a table to seperate your site in a neat manner, the system will put those ads that are worth the most in the cells that are closest to the top left hand corner of the table. So for example if you have a table on your site, simply to make a nice looking side bar on the left hand side of your page, the google ads that you put in that left hand side bar will be valued higher then those put in the main section of the page (even if the ones in the side bar are at the bottom). What does all this mean? Well you obviously want to put the highest paying ads in a spot where you will get the most clicks. What I love to do when using a content based website is put my ads in between paragraphs, so that the reader has to see them. Since I want the highest paying ads there, I would not put an ad on the very top of the site. That would just decrease the value of the ads that are located in the prime position (between paragraphs). If you have multiple paragraphs, the best way to position your ads would be to put them all between paragraphs. If your content is only 1 paragraph long, then I suggest putting an ad at the very top of the paragraph right under the
header, and another ad at the very bottom of the article. If you are not into the idea of breaking up your text with google ads, then do this simple task. Go to the webpage that you are considering adding adsense to, Observe where your eyes go first, then ask a friend to do the same thing. Most likely both of you will find that your eyes go in the same general area. This is the area where your adsense ads should go. Google has recently release the adsense "heatmap" which displays the hot and cold areas for ad clickthrus on a webpage. The heatmap can be viewed here: https://www.google.com/adsense/images/placement.gif - the darker the color the better the clickthru rate.
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Selecting The Right Colours Selecting the right colors for your google adsense ads is very valueable as well. There are times you want the ads to stand out and there are other times that you want them to blend in with your content. Usually if you are putting ads within paragraphs I suggest making the background color of the ad match the background color of the rest of your site. This will ensure the most clickthrus as the ads tend to appear as if they are links provided by you about the topic. The key is to make the ads look like part of your content rather then advertisements. If you are putting ads on the top of your site above the article, or on a side bar to the left or right hand side of the article, I usually recommend making these ads stand out as much as possible. Bright colors are great even if it might contrast heavily with your site. Contrast is the key in this situation. Make sure you change the colors of the links so that they are readable on the new background you set for your ads.
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Other AdSense Tips Here are a couple things to keep in mind while shooting for the best possible clickthru rate you can obtain: - Try placing small images related to your content above or below each individual ad in the google adsense ad unit. Often these images will draw the eye directly to the ads, while also making the ads seem like content rather then advertisements. - Place ads in areas where people may accidently click. For instance, close to navigation links that are used a lot by your visitors. How many times have you clicked on the wrong link due to the proximity of that link to the area you were trying to click?
Other Ways of Getting Paid For Impressions & Clickthrus While Google Adsense is the best way to make money off of traffic to your content driven site, there are many other companies as well that might actually fit your needs better. Remember that Google Adsense does not allow any other text based advertising, similar to theirs, on any page in which adsense is displayed. One of these companies
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similiar to Google Adsense is Yahoo's Publicher Network, YPN located at: http://publisher.yahoo.com There are also other companies that pay you simply for having an ad appear on your site. If you tend to get low clickthrus, you may want to use a company like this instead. Here are some places that pay you simply for displaying ads on your site: http://www.fastclicks.com http://www.tribalfusion.com http://www.claxon.com http://www.rightmedia.com http://www.casalemedia.com A very unique advertising program that I really like is something called "Vibrant Media" located at http://www.vibrantmedia.com. They give you a code to place on your website, and it takes actual text on your site and makes certain words clickable. When clicked upon they take you to the advertisers site. This is very efficient if your visitors are doing a lot of heavy reading at your site. As for using Vibrant Media and Google Adsense on the same page, I don't recommend it, but some people get away with it. According to Google, the same page is not allowed to display both types of ads, however you are allowed to put Vibrant Media ads on one page of your site and Adsense on another. Vibrant Media is very similar to Google Adsense in that you get paid every time someone clicks the ad on your site. Vibrant Media just incorporates the ads more into the content of your site. Another company, that uses an approach similar to that of Vibrant media, is Kontera. You may want to check them out at http://www.kontera.com.
Conclusion Whether your site is content driven or not, you can always find room on it for ad publishing programs like Google Adsense, Vibrant Media, and YPN. There are so many programs out there that are like this. Different types of websites function better with different ads. You will have to use trial and error to determine which is best for you. Remember that the more traffic you get the more money you will make. I will be discussing how to generate the most traffic later in this book.
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Selling a Product or Service Maybe you are not interested in building a site to sell stuff for other companies. Maybe you want to sell your own product or service. If that is the case, then there are several important things to ask yourself. Does your product have a name? Do you have a domain name? If you answered no to these questions, then you should really consider tying them together. For example if you are selling a product that you call the "emblemaker" (don't ask where I got the name!), try and incorporate that into your domain name. Perhaps Emblemaker.com, or theemblemaker.com, be creative. The next step is building a website that will "Sell" your product. The companies that do the best at selling products are those that use techniques that make the Buyers (a) want the product, (b) want it now, (c) believe it is better then the competition, (d) believe it works better than it does, and (e) offers a complete money back guarantee. If you can do the above 5 things, then your product will be selling like hotcakes made of gold. (a)
How do you make the buyer want the product? This is easy. You have to make the buyer believe that without the product his life will not be as well off. As horrible as it may sound, this is how you do it. Instead of making them believe that they will be more well off with it, try and make them believe that they will be less well off without it. From my experience this works extremely well.
(b)
By making the buyer want your product this moment, it creates a sense of urgency, which in turn forces the buyer into abrupt decisions. An easy way to do this is to make it appear that you don't have many left (perhaps say something like "Only 22 remaining of the 1000 we had"). This also serves to get a quick sale, instead of relying on the customer to come back to your site later to buy it. Usually when they leave your site they will not be coming back.
(c)
The main problem you have when trying to convince a buyer to buy your product is convincing them that yours is better than the competitors. This sometimes is difficult to do. The simple way to do this is to compare your product to your competition, and simply state what yours has that the competitor does not. Perhaps the advantage of your product is the price, perhaps it's a feature your competitor doesn't Page 23
have. Perhaps it's nothing, but you can still make it look better. (d)
Sometimes when you are advertising a product, you have to exaggerate a little bit. You have to make it sound better than it actually is. Make it seem like a miracle (without lying about anything). The best way to do this is to create testimonials (from clients). Make it sound as if your product changed their lives for the better. Use lines like, "I don't see how I survived without this in the past".
(e)
A money back guarantee is a must. It ensures the quality of your product. Even if the buyer is not satisfied with your product most likely they will not take the time and work to request a refund. Studies have shown that only 5% of people who buy items with mail in rebates actually send the rebates in. Why is this? Because people are generally too lazy. The same goes for refunds. I don't know the exact number but from my experience it's probably lower than 5%. Offer awesome refunds, maybe even twice what they paid if they follow the stringent regulations when applying for the refund. Very few will take you up on the offer, but it makes your product seem extremely reliable.
When requesting payment information for the sales that you have made, make sure you have your buyers include their email address at all times. This allows you to compose a mailing list and send out emails when you introduce or upgrade products. This is one of the most effective advertising methods to get your customers coming back.
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BUILDING AN ADSENSE BUSINESS WITH FREE BLOGS This Section Is Used With Kind Permission of Jonathan Leger of AdSenseGold.com
When I first started out with AdSense, I had little money to spare on web hosting, and I knew nothing about how to get a site ranked in the search engines or to generate traffic. It took a lot of work, reading, experimenting and failure before I discovered great ways to build my AdSense business. I feel like it's about time that I paid back to the community for all of the knowledge and help that I received along the way. Hopefully this post will help you get started in the AdSense business even if you have little or no money to spare but desperately want to try your hand at it. Normally Google won't approve AdSense applications for free websites, but there is one exception. So if you're short on cash for hosting and are eager to get started, you might give this a try.
Blogger.com Blogs Not long after Google bought Blogger.com, they made AdSense available to Blogger blog owners. Blogger is great because it has an easy interface, Google and Yahoo crawl the blogs quickly, and best of all if you're broke--they're free, and Google loves to give out AdSense accounts to Blogger owners. :) So if you're looking to get started with AdSense and not spend much money, Blogger is a great way to get started. Before I talk about how to setup a Blogger blog for AdSense, though, let me tell you what an RSS feed is and how it works. If you already know this you can skip ahead. I make reference to this in the setup instructions, so it's important to understand. An RSS feed (as it applies to a blog) is basically a list of all of the recent posts made to your blog. People can use "RSS Aggregators" (software that continually checks up on your RSS feed to see if there's anything new) to keep up with new posts on your blog. Websites will also want to publish your RSS feed on their sites if your content is good. This gives them fresh content for their visitors. And we all know that content is King in the world of website building.
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Blogger blogs come with an RSS feed built-in, and you can use this to your advantage to generate traffic to your blog. I'll discuss that in a bit, but first let's get into building the blog. Create Your Blogger.com Account
Determine Your Blog Topic First Before you create the blog, you need to figure out what topic the blog will focus on. Think about your skills or hobbies that you're really good at. You might not be a mechanic, but if you're really good at working on cars on the weekend, and you love to do it, that would make a great blog topic. Brainstorm your skills and interests to determine what you would enjoy writing about. It's important that you like to write about it, since you will have to do so to build up the blog! I will say this: If you have some knowledge on a commercial or industrial topic, this will usually get higher paying AdSense ads. But a hobby blog can do very well also (I know this from experience!). Create the Blog Once you have a topic chosen, it only takes about 5 minutes to setup a blog. From the Blogger homepage click the "Create Your Blog Now" link and follow the blog wizard instructions. I won't get into detail about them because it's pretty straight-forward, but there are a few points I want to make. First of all, when you choose your blog URL, make sure that the URL contains the keywords for your topic. For example, if you're creating a blog about health insurance, "healthinsurance.blogspot.com" is ideal, or "health-insurance" or even "health-insurance-blog" or "healthinsurance-12345". Just make sure that your keywords are in the URL, that will help you be found when people search for your keywords in the search engines. Also, be sure to pick one of the professional looking templates. I suggest you just pick the plain-white one that is first in the list of templates when you're creating the blog. Once the blog is created, then click on the "Templates" tab and select one of the nicer ones shown there. I'm not sure why Blogger doesn't show you all of the available templates in the blog setup wizard, but they don't.
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The Settings Tab A discussion of the important points of each settings tab is outlined below. Basic On the "Basic" settings tab, set your blog title to the keywords you want to show up for in the search engines. That will help you get ranked. Give a good, detailed description about the benefits of reading your blog daily. You want to get people to add your RSS feed to their aggregators and websites so you can get traffic, and this will help. Answer "Yes" to the question "Add your Blog to our listings?". This will have your blog appear on the main page of Blogger when you make new posts (albeit for a brief period of time), and allow people to search and find your blog using Blogger's search tool. One other, lesser known detail about setting that question to "Yes" is that if you set it to "No" Blogger will shove "nofollow/noindex" metatags into your blog template header, which will prevent your site from getting crawled or indexed. I believe this was done to fight what Blogger called "spam blogs". Publishing Set the "Notify Weblogs" setting to "Yes". This will send a notification to Weblogs every time you make a new post. Weblogs is a site that lets people (and search engine crawlers) know when new content appears on a blog. You want the crawlers (and visitors) to hit your pages when you add new content, so be sure this is set to Yes. Formatting You can do what you want on this tab–I personally set the number of posts on the main page to between three and five. Comments Allow comments unless your blog topic is really controversial and you're likely to get a lot of flaming (people lashing out at you for what you have to say). Allowing comments is good because it gives more food to the search engines and keeps your blog updating and fresh even when you're not posting to it. I usually let anyone comment, and don't limit it. Page 27
Don't show the comments in a pop-up window, because that will prevent the crawlers from being able to get to the content since it's javascript-based. If you're concerned that people might flame you, but you want to allow comments, enable comment moderation so that you have to approve each comment that is added before it goes live. If you want to be notified when a comment is made, set the Comment Notification Address to your email address. Archiving Set your archiving to daily if you post every day, or weekly if you only post every few days. If you post every day daily is the best way to go, because it gives the search engines more unique pages to crawl and index. More unique content means more traffic to your blog and more clicks on your AdSense ads (I'll get to adding your AdSense to the template in a bit). If you don't do a daily archive (and maybe even if you do), enable post pages so that each post will still have its own unique page even if multiple posts appear on the same archive page. Having multiple posts on one archive page is not a bad thing if you have post pages enabled, since the posts tied all together make for yet another unique page on the blog. Site Feed Definitely enable the site feed. If your posts tend to be very short, you might enable full descriptions. But if you have long posts (which I recommend), do not enable the full feed, use the short feed. Here's why: If you put the full post in your RSS feed, then the person reading the feed doesn't have a reason to go back to your blog since they have already read the full post. No visitors to the blog means no clicks on your ads. AdSense has an "AdSense For Feeds" in beta testing, but it's not open to all publishers yet, so at least for now you need to induce people to visit the blog. If they can only read part of the blog post, then if they want the whole story they will need to go to your blog. You can plan for this by making sure that your title and the first 255 characters (about the first 50
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words) really pull in the reader's attention. You need to use those first 50 words to make them just have to read the rest. Also, if your RSS feed appears on websites, you don't want to give away the farm by showing the whole post. You're letting websites use your feed so you can get clicks on the posts in that feed and get visitors to your site to build AdSense revenue. So set the "Descriptions" to Short, write long posts and make the title and the first 50 words count. The Templates Tab If you haven't already picked a nice template from the list, click on the "Pick New" link under the templates tab and select one of the templates that you like and that fits your topic. If you don't already have an AdSense account, you can click on the "AdSense" link and apply for one straight from the blog instead of having to go to Google.com to apply. That's how badly Google wants Blogger blog owners to use AdSense on their blogs! :) Once you've done that, it's time to paste your AdSense code into your template. Click on the "Edit Current" link if you're not already there. There are two methods of setting up your template. You will generate the most clicks by doing the following: 1) Find the section of the template that looks like this: 2) Paste your AdSense code for a 336x280 large rectangle directly after the second
tag. Be sure to format the colors of the AdSense to blend in with the background of your blog for maximum results. 3) Optionally, if you want to show a second 336x280 block at the bottom of the list of posts, look for this code in the template:
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Put your AdSense code between the tag and the first
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Save your profile when you're finished.
Getting Traffic to Your Blog Once your blog is properly configured, spend about a week making a good, informative post or two per day. You don't want to go advertising an empty blog, so it pays to make some good posts first. You can post to the blog by clicking the "Posting" tab. Make your title be eye-catching while still containing the keywords that the post is most relevant to. For example, if your post is going to be about how to build blue widgets from scratch, and you want to be found when people search the engines for "Build blue widgets", try and make your title at least start with those keywords. For example, "Build blue widgets – from scratch". The dashes help the search engines differentiate the keywords from the rest of the title. You might get some stray traffic from people searching for blogs on Blogger, and your posts appearing in the "most recent posts" list, so don't be surprised if you get some traffic and AdSense clicks even before you start advertising.
Submit Your Blog to Blog Directories To get the traffic rolling you need to submit your blog's RSS feed to as many Blog Directories as you can. If you search Google for "RSS submission site", the number one result as of right now lists off 55 directories that you can submit your feed to. With a Blogger blog, your RSS feed is always your blog url plus "/atom.xml". For example, if your blog url is: http://myblog.blogspot.com/ Your RSS feed url is: http://myblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml This is very important, because it will help attract the attention of the search engines as well as get your blog noticed by people who are searching for information and for content for their websites.
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All of this will result in getting in-bound links to your site. Most people will use the title of your blog as the link text for the link to your site, and that's why it's important for your title to be the keywords that you want your blog homepage to rank for in the search engines. Having inbound links that contain the keywords you want to rank for is a very powerful way to get ranked well. I have blogs that rank on the first page of search results for my keywords because of this (some even in the first or second position). But you don't want to sit around and wait for the links to start to gather. You want to…
Trade Links With Related Websites Another thing I do to help get my blog ranked is to trade links with other webmasters who have sites on similar topics. I find them by searching for the keywords I want to rank for. If the blog category is not a competitive, commercial category, you can write directly to the webmasters of the top 20 - 50 results and see if they will exchange links with you. If it's a more competitive, commercial category, you can find out who links to the top websites for your keywords by searching for "link:http://www.YourCompetitor.com/" in Google or MSN. That will show a list of URLs that link to your competition. Write to the webmasters who own those linking sites and see if they will trade links with you, too. When you request a link exchange, be sure and make the request personal. Mention something that you like about the webmaster's site and why you think that your blog is a good match for a link. You might even go a step further and put up a link to the webmaster's site before emailing them. That way you can say "I've already put up a link to your site on my blog and wanted to see if you felt that my blog was a good match for a link back from your site"–or something like that. Take the first step, it's a good gesture and it helps you get more links. Of course, if they don't agree you can always take their link down. ;) If they agree to exchange links, make sure that you have them link to your site using the keywords that you want to rank for. For example, if you want your blog to rank well for "Home Made Widgets", be sure to have them use the link text "Home Made Widgets".
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You can manually insert the webmaster's link and description text into your blog by modifying your template. I try to put it in the left or right hand column just below the archive links. To do this, modify your template and look for this code: That tag marks the end of the archive list. Just below that code, add this code: Where [TOPIC] is replaced with the topic of your blog. Below the tag, add this code for each link you want to add: - Link Text - a short description about the site. And finally, below the links, add this:
Every time you make a new link exchange with a webmaster, just go in and repeat the - code with the new link and description just above the
tag. The more competitive your blog topic is, the more links you will need to get to rank well. But if your posts are informative, witty and humorous where appropriate, word will soon spread about your blog and your traffic will grow as people link to you without you even asking for a link. Growth in traffic means growth in AdSense revenue.
Concluding Comments I hope this tutorial will help some of you who are on a restricted budget and just getting started with AdSense to start making some money by creating quality blogs at Blogger. It takes some time and effort to make good informative posts, but once you have learned to create one successful blog you can repeat the process and create another, and another, until you achieve enough Page 33
success to start putting up your blogs at your own domain name instead of "yourblog.blogger.com". Blogger lets you do that, too, but that's a subject for another post. :) Thanks again to Jonathan Leger of AdSenseGold.com for his kind permission in letting us use this article.
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HOW TO DRIVE THE MOST TRAFFIC TO YOUR SITE Sure it takes time, energy and a little bit of money to get your site up and running the way you want. However the most difficult part - that makes close to 90% of webmasters give up on their project - is getting people to visit their sites. This tends to be extremely difficult especially if you don't know what you are doing. I will give you some extremely important tips that not too many webmasters know about.
How to Rank High in Search Engines (Specifically Google!) We all know that you want to be listed in search engines, and have the highest possible rank in search engines for not only a specific keyword, but for thousands of keywords. Usually when you ask for search engine optimization advice, the experts will tell you that you need to target specific keywords and try to be ranked high for them. This is a total lie (or misinformation) on the part of the so-called "expert". You don't want to target a few keywords, you want people to come to your site whether they search for 1 of literally 10's of thousands of keywords and keyword phrases. There are basically 3 search engines that you want to be listed in. These are the 3 that 99% of everyone uses. They are, in this order: (1) Google.com, (2) Yahoo.com, and (3) MSN.com. If you can get listed with a high ranking in just one of these, you should be seeing 1,000's of unique visitors per day. One thing that is very good about these search engines is that you don't need to submit your URL to them. You can, but it's definitely not needed. These search engines will find your site as long as you have inbound links from sites already indexed. The more links you have directing to your site on other sites, the quicker your site will be indexed by these search engines. Now the trick is getting your site as high as possible in these search engines (specifically Google). Google uses many algorithms and techniques to rank pages in the order they are shown on their search results page. The most important ranking tool besides the title of your site, and keywords throughout your site, is it's PR (Google PageRank). This is a relatively complicated formula used by google. Page 35
What google does is give sites a PR rating from 0 - 10. 0 is the worse rating, and 10 is the highest (only a very few sites on the entire internet have a rating of 10). These ratings are based on incoming links to your website. The more incoming links the higher your rating. However an incoming link from a site with a PR 9 increases your rating a lot more than an incoming link on a site with a PR 2. So the goal here is not only to get a whole bunch of incoming links directed to your site, but to get a whole lot of incoming links from other sites with high PR rankings. Also something to remember. Each page of a site has a different PR rating as well. This means that on a forum for example, the main forum page could be a PR 7, but each thread might only be a PR 2. There are different ways to achieve this goal. First of all you can submit your site to hundreds and even thousands of online directories. I'll provide a list of some of the better ones later in this book. This takes a lot of time, but believe me, it's well worth it. Another way to get these links is to exchange them (by reciprocal linking) with other high PR sites. This can be a problem though since most webmasters will not want to exchange a link with a site that has a lower PR then theirs. The best way to get incoming links is simply the natural way, creating high quality content that other webmasters want to link to. Write a controversial article or something extremely interesting, and you will have literally hundreds of bloggers linking to that article, distributing valuable PR to your entire website. Ok, now that you know that your PR rating is very important, and it influences your PR to have links to your site from other high PR sites, one question probably remains: How much PR do you need coming into your site in order to achieve a certain rating? Well no one knows this for sure, but I have done numerous case studies, and read up on a lot of information on Googles specific algorithm for determining PR.
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To achieve any PR rank, you need an average of 18 links coming from sites with that same PR. So if you wish to obtain a PR 9 (very difficult to do), you need a link on 18 different pages that have a PR9. However, you can mix and match as well. I'll try to explain what I mean.
Even though it will take you 18 PR7 links to obtain a PR7 for your site, you could also achieve a PR7 by obtaining 0.61 PR 9. This means that 1 PR 9 is more than enough to make your site a PR7. Also 3 PR8's should be enough to make your site a PR7. However these weights may be mixed and matched. By this I mean you could have 1 PR8 link directed to your site, but also have 12 PR7 links coming in as well. This should also provide you with a PR7. To better understand this theory, please refer to the chart located at: http://www.seogeeks.com/articles/pagerank-chart.php Again these are all averages, and PR also takes into account other factors such as the number of links on the site. So what does this say? Basically all links in general no matter how high their PR rankings are, will help your PR ranking in some way. The higher the PR of the links, the higher the influence on your sites PR. Also a high PR does something else for your site besides making it rank higher in Google.. The higher your PR, the more pages of your site Google will index into their search engine. The more pages indexed, the more times your site will come up for different searches. Now I'm sure you are wondering about Yahoo's and MSN's ranking system. Yahoo is said to have a very similar ranking system, and MSN is also believed to have something like it. This means that if you can get your PR ranking high, it will not only help your search rankings in google, but also in MSN, and Yahoo. I'm sure you are all anxious to see what your sites PR is now. You can do this at several sites. The site I like the best is: http://www.prsearch.net Simply go there, and type in the URL of your website. It will then return the results with your PR ranking (out of 10) to the left of the search result. This is also very useful in determining what sites you want to put your link on. PR rankings are updated on a daily basis (maybe even more frequently), but the Page 37
results shown on sites like PRSearch.net and on the Google Toolbar only update approximately every 3 months. This means the PR ranking you see might be lower or higher then your real current ranking. A few other minor tips for you when looking to obtain inbound links: 1) Google's system is not based 100% on PR. There are other factors as well. Something a lot of people don't know is that Google tends to rate links from sites with .edu, .gov, and .org extensions quite a bit higher than links from .com, .net, .biz, etc. These links are extremely hard to find, but if you can get one, you are in luck. 2) Also Google's system tends to like links coming from sites that are similar to yours better then those that are completely different. For example if you run a website about "Weather", it is better to have links to your site on sites that deal with weather rather than sites that deal with "cooking". 3) Anchor text is also very important. This is the text that is shown on other pages as the clickable text to your link. This anchor text should include keywords that you want to target more than others. However there is an important aspect to remember. You should not request the same anchor text from every site you request a link from. Google tends to look down on this, since they consider it a kind of spam. You want a variety of anchor texts so that all the links pointing to your site look natural from a search engines point of view. 4) When buying PR links, you have to realize that PR is spread to all the links on the site. The more links you have on the site, the less PR weight is spread to each individual link. For example if you have a link on a PR 8 site that only has one link to your site, it will benefit you a lot more than a site that has 40 links to other various sites as well as yours.
Building a PR (Page Rank) by Writing Articles For Public Use Another great way to get free inbound links to your site is to write articles and then distribute them for free. Like I have mentioned in the "Getting Free Content" section, sites like articlecity.com and others provide free articles for webmasters to publish on their sites. You may ask, "Why would an author allow other people to publish an article Page 38
they wrote?" Well, what many people don't realize is that every article you copy from a free article site has a footer titled "About the author". In this section, the author usually gives links to their own website(s). This means that anyone who publishes their article will also be giving a one way link back to the authors site. If done properly, by writing one or two articles, and then submitting them to a few dozen free article directories, one can achieve as many as a few hundred inbound links to their site. Below I have provided a link to a list of over 200 sites which accept and publish articles: http://ezinearticles.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=790 Not only can you submit to sites just for articles, but there are also many sites which allow blog owners as well as web surfers to submit interesting links to articles and other content in order to allow their users to rate and share the information with one another. Here are a couple sites which will get you a good 20-1000 clicks every time you submit a link: http://www.digg.com http://www.fark.com Please note that by submitting links to these sites, you probably will not gain too much PR, however it's a good way to drive quick free traffic to your site. Remember traffic equals dollars!
How to Manipulate Your Code to Keep the PR at Your Site Now that you know all about PR rankings, there is something else that Google just announced a few months ago. If you run websites like me where it includes many pages, not just one single page, then this is extremely important. Like I said before, each page of your site carries it's own PR ranking. Your main page usually carries the highest ranking since it usually has the most links pointing to it. Your main page then passes PR ranking to the other pages on your site. However when this ranking is passed, a large amount of PR is usually lost. The fewer the number of links that the PR is being passed onto, the higher PR those pages will receive. So in reality what you want to do is only pass PR to those sites that you want to. You don't want to pass PR to your "Disclaimer" Page, or Page 39
your "Terms of Service" Page. You also don't want to pass PR to your friends sites, or other sites that you link to. This would just be a waste of PR. You want to help yourself, not anyone else! Now the way to prevent PR from spreading to these unwanted sites is quite simple, yet very few know about it. I'm sure you are probably familiar with the html code to display a clickable link. If not, it looks like this: LinkedSite Anchor Text Now if you add a simple extra tag to this code it will prevent Google from spreading PR to it from your site. That tag is: rel="nofollow". It will be inserted into your code like this: LinkedSite Anchor Text Thats it, you have prevented PR from escaping your site! I told you it was simple :)
Pay Per Click Advertising Usually the types of sites that want to use "Pay Per Click" Advertising are those sites that sell products. There are a few tricks that only about 0.01% of webmasters use that is guaranteed to ensure the best returns per click to your site. First lets discuss some of the largest and most popular Pay Per Click advertising sites. In order from the most popular: 1) Google Adwords - https://adwords.google.com/select/ - This is by far the most used "Pay Per Click" form of advertising. Not only does your ads show up on google's search result pages, but on millions of other peoples websites as well. Those webmasters who have Google Adsense on their sites will show your ads as well. Since they are the most popular, you will end up having to pay a larger amount per click then the smaller sites, but I believe it's well worth it. 2) Yahoo.com (Overture) - This is now owned by Yahoo, and is very similar to Google. They have also released a webmaster publishing tool similar to Google's Adsense program, called YPN. Page 40
They are not used quite as much as google, but come in a fairly close second. I have found however that their bid prices for keywords tend to be a bit higher, and their minimum bid is 10 cents rather than the 5 cents that Google has. 3) Miva.com - Not quite as popular as Google and Yahoo's systems, but it is very effective, and the prices compete pretty well. 4) Others that are far less popular but tend to be cheaper: a) LookSmart.com b) Enhance.com c) 7Search.com d) Kanoodle.com There are also probably close to 10,000 others that are very unpopular and some that are completely useless. When advertising on these types of sites, you want to use a strategy that works best for you. Below I will explain a few strategies for different types of websites. -
For sites that sell products for affiliate programs, there is something that very little webmasters even think of. When you are putting an ad up directly to a product you are selling, you only want to pay for clicks to that product which convert to sales. A lot of webmasters decide that they will put an ad up that gets the most possible clickthrus. This is a major mistake made by 99% of webmasters of affiliate sites today. Why the hell would you want to pay any amount of money whether it is 5 cents per click or $100/click if those people visiting your site have absolutely no interest in buying your product? This only wastes money from your pocket! What I have found to work extremely well is making sure that I put the price of the product in with the ad that is being displayed. On top of this I detail the product as best as I can in the small amount of space that google adwords and these other sites give you. By putting the price, the potential buyers will only click your ad if they like the price. Thus you will only be paying for clickthrus to those people who are not only interested in the product you are advertising but also interested in the price it's selling for. This has been by far the best method I have ever used, and my affiliate sales compared to money I pay to
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advertise is extremely high! -
Now if you run a content based website in which you are trying to earn money through impressions of ads and clickthrus to ads, then you want to maximize the amount of hits you receive through this "Pay Per click" method. You don't really care how interested the visitors are as long as they click the ads on your site. The mistake that too many webmasters tend to make is that they overpay for ads, trying to obtain the very top spot. The top spot can cost as much as 1000% of what you'd pay for the 3rd, 4th, or 5th spot. In my findings, the 4th spot is the most valuable spot you can obtain when considering the money you have to pay compared to the amount of traffic you receive. The 1st spot will definitely get you the most traffic but you will pay up to 10X's more for only three times the amount of traffic you will receive. Always target the 4th spot, as it is the most effective (especially with Google Adwords).
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Always start out with a small amount of paid click traffic (especially when you are selling products), so that you can determine if you are making or losing money from sending the traffic to your site. I usually recommend starting out with as small of an amount as $1 for the first day. See what happens, and document it. The following day bump that up to $5. See what happens and document your results as well. Then on the 3rd day, bump it up to $10, and make any keyword adjustments, to try and make your ads more effective. Once you have studied what is happening, you can decide which keywords you want to assign the most money too. If you are more patient, I recommend only using 1 keyword per day when you start, so that you can see which keywords are turning over the most sales. Otherwise you might be throwing money into a keyword that is just a total waste. If you have 10 keywords you want to target take 10 days and test each one with a few dollars. Make sure you write down your results. Then after those 10 days, you can decide which keywords are losing you money, and which ones are making you money. Google does have a new tool to track conversions but it is not always accurate.
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Since there are millions of possible keywords, some of which you can target for as little as 2 cents a click, a lot of experienced webmasters use a method that I term "Adsense Arbitrage". This is when you use the cheaper, less bought keywords to drive
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traffic to your content based site. This site will then be loaded with Google Adsense ads (mentioned in more details previously in this book) that pay you on average of $0.50-$3.00 per click depending on the type of site you are running. You can easily turn the $10 a day you are spending for traffic into $35-$50 per day from visitors clicking your ads. Some webmasters even make a lot more. Imagine if you spend $1000 a day like some experts do! This takes a lot of time to learn, and bid prices constantly change so it's a good idea to experiment yourself before spending any huge amounts of money on ads. Again like I said above, target specific keywords each day. Jot down how much you spent for that keyword, and how much you made for clicks on your site that day. This is a great method to use when your site first starts up since it won't yet be getting any other traffic to interfere with your study. There is a lot of money to be made using this method. It just takes time to find out the right keywords to use. OK, now you should be an expert at using Pay Per Click advertising. Go out and start raking in the big bucks!
Adding to Directories An easy way to get a good amount of incoming links to your site is to add to as many directories as possible. What Directories are the Best? When it comes to getting in directories with high PR rankings, the two that are the best are Dmoz (http://www.dmoz.org ) and Yahoo.com. Dmoz is completely free, but it usually takes several submissions and/or a few months to get included once you submit your site. There is actually one strategy that not too many webmasters use when adding to Dmoz. Like I explained before, each page of a site has a different PR ranking. This means that certain category listings on DMOZ have higher PR's than others. While trying to pick the best
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category to add your site, you should also try and find the category with the highest PR. To do this, simply go to the category, copy the URL you see on the top of your browser while at that category page, and then paste it (or type it) in to http://wwww.prsearch.net Make a list of the categories that relate to your site with their PR rating, and number of links on the page. After doing this, decide which category you want to add to. First rank them by PR, then, if several have the same PR, choose the category with the least amount of links on it. Not only will a submission to DMOZ help your PR but it will also automatically put your listing in hundreds, maybe even thousands of other directories that simply use DMOZ's database feed on their site. So this should help you get a good amount of additional traffic. Please note that it is not easy or quick to get your site listed in DMOZ. Just submit your link there and forget about it. Sometimes they can list you within days, while other times they won’t list you at all. As for adding to Yahoo's directory, only non-commericial sites may be added for free. This means any content related site that does not sell any products, but you can still have ads on your site that make you money. If you have a commercial site, Yahoo asks you to pay $299.00. There is a lot of debate on whether it is worth it, since Yahoo has the option of declining your site and keeping the $299.00. My opinion is that if you can get listed on a PR6 or higher category then it is worth the shot if you are just starting out. If your site is large, and already making profits, then I don't think $299/year will hurt your pocket as much as the listing will help, but it all depends on the individual and the niche in which their site falls into. Not only is it going to help your PR, but you will also get a good amount of traffic to your site, since yahoo's search results are influenced strongly by their directory. Remember you must pay $299 yearly to keep your link in their directory. Another directory that I have found to have a good influence both on direct traffic and PR is a site called Zeal (http://www.zeal.com). They take an extraordinarily amount of time but it's free, so why not add it? Other Directories that are less popular can be found at many different places on the internet including the following sites: - http://www.seo-lab.com/directory-articles/best-free-directories.php
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- http://www.seocompany.ca/directory/free-web-directories.html
Best Ways to Add to Directories When adding your listing to directories, try to change up the wording that you use every once in a while. Change the wording in the title specifically. Use keywords as much as possible in your title without trying to make it appear to the moderators of the directory that you are doing so. This will help your search engine rankings for those keywords you use. Also I strongly recommend that you don't use your main email account when submitting your site, as you will be sure to get added to all sorts of mailing lists, which will result in a lot of unwanted email. Create another email account preferably at your domain name, as a lot of directories require that the email address that you submit with originates from your domain name. Adding to directories is a frustrating process that can take hours and hours to accomplish. Remember though, the sooner you submit them the sooner you will start seeing the traffic increases and search engine increases. Also once they are added, you won't ever have to do it again, so grin and bear it :)
Creating Press Releases to get Traffic A lot of webmasters are unfamiliar with the fact that anyone can create a press realease. You can do this at http://www.prweb.com for approximately $50 per release. If you are a great writer, and you have an interesting story to tell about your site or something written on your site, creating a press release can actually help your traffic massively. Just about every newspaper, and news agency will have the opportunity to see and publish your article if they like it. However even if none of them do publish it, your article will still be caught by some major news website including Google News. This will help you get some additional traffic. What I recommend is trying it at least one time and see what the results are.
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A Few Other Tips to Get Traffic and Increase PR There are a few other methods I suggest in order to increase your traffic, and PR ranking. Here they are: 1) Post at forums. At just about any online forum / message board, they allow you to input a signature that goes at the bottom of each post. Make sure that you link to your website in all your signatures, and make sure that these links are clickable. Most forum pages don't have very high PR but remember every link helps, and this can actually help significantly with direct traffic. 2) Post in newsgroups with the entire URL of your site. This can help, as there are more and more websites now that take direct feeds from newsgroups and put it on their sites. Also there are quite a few people who still read newsgroups. This can both help your direct traffic as well as search engine traffic. Remember, don't spam. It will only hurt you in the long run. 3) Banner Advertising. You must be very careful with this. Never buy banner impressions off of ebay. If the deal seems too good to be true, it probably is. What a lot of sellers on ebay do is sell up to 10 million impressions at a time for as little as $3.00. What they are doing is crediting your banner with 10 million impressions. However their website probably gets only a few hundred hits per day meaning it will take you literally 10,000 years to get all your impressions. Never fall for this. The best place to buy banner ads is directly from a website that advertises that they are selling ads. You can usually buy banner ads by Impression (how many times your banner is displayed), or clicks. When creating a banner, I always suggest having several created. Test them out to see which ones get you the best results. In general I have found that those banners that have the highest color contrast ratio are the ones that are the most successful. This is merely because they are more eye catching. You want your banner to stick out both from the website it appears on and from other banners that people are used to seeing.
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I like having at least one flashing item on my banner, and have found that banners with black backgrounds work better than any other color. A black background with yellow, red, or green text works the best. Simple is usually good, even if the banner looks like crap.
Search Engine Optimization Today it seems as though most webmasters know quite a bit about search engine optimization. Here is a list in the order from most important to least important of tips I have found to work the best. 1) Google PageRank (PR), which I have discussed at lengths earlier in this book. This is the single most important thing for any site (especially those which have a lot of pages). 2) Title of your page. This goes in the tags of your webpage. This should include approximately 50-80 characters/7 words max (usually a lot less) and should not simply be keywords listed. Many search engines view that as spam. Somtimes what I feel works the best is making short titles for each page with a direct keyword in each one. This is not only what shows up when someone searches in search engines, but it is also believed to be the single heaviest item that most search engines consider when performing a search. 3) Content is king, especially original content. Slapping a picture up on a page and writing a sentence about it will not get you the search engine placement that a page with 400-1000 words of rich content will. Title images with keywords, while also using alt tags for images, and don't overdo the content optimization. It is good to include your keywords in your content, however, if you overdo the keyword insertion, you will do more harm then good. This is called 'keyword stuffing". A good guideline for the frequency that your keyword should appear in a content page is about 4%. Anything over 8% would most likely get you penalized, while anything under 1% may not even be picked up on the Search engines' radar. Also what is strongly suggested is that you include your keywords in your heading on the top of your site. You should use either , , or tags for the heading.
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4) Your Domain. Try to make your Domain contain keywords for the market you are targeting. If you are creating a website about "dog food", then choose a domain name with at least one of those 2 words in it. Examples would be Mut-food.com, dogmuchies.com or even better yummydogfood.com. Remember though that you have to balance search engine optimization with the ability of members to remember the domain name and come back. Even though something like dogfood-dogfood.com may be good for SEO, it isn't something people will quickly remember. Also, Search engines usually don't discriminate between .com, .net, .biz, .info, etc, but people do. Choose a .com domain unless it is absolutely necessary to choose one of the others. 5) Be Smart - Don’t just use the most popular keyword phrases. The market is so competitive that you should be sure to include some niche keywords too. Another thing that I have found to be true is that most search engines including google do not like PHP scripted pages very much. If your site is PHP based, you want to have it scripted to appear as .html extensions to visitors and search engines. Most programmers should understand this request, if you tell them you need "mod rewrite done to make php appear as html". I have found this to help significantly with google results. Meta Tags are also very important to help your site get indexed better in search engines. I recommend visiting: http://vancouverwebpages.com/META/mk-metas.html. This site will allow you to create your meta tags, and it will give you the exact code that you need to insert into the of your webpage. I highly recommend using this tool.
Recommended Websites & Forums For Website Management & Promotion I have put together a list of some of the better websites out there which will help you in your quest to "become hated" like myself: General Webmaster related sites: http://www.sitepoint.com Page 48
http://www.seo-zone.com Webmaster related forums (Most useful listed first): - http://www.webmasterworld.com - This is where many of the big players meet, and discuss ideas/strategies. Their Google related sections are extremely useful for information related to adsense/adwords, and Google SEO strategies. There are people at this forum making upwords of $5 million per year. -
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums - This is probably the second best webmaster related forum. This forum is packed with all types of discussions from programming, to SEO, to a marketplace to buy and sell websites. This is probably the best place to go if you are looking to purchase or sell one of your sites.
http://www.webmasterforum.com http://www.ozzu.com http://www.v7n.com/forums http://forums.seochat.com http://www.webmaster-forums.net http://www.geekvillage.com/forums http://www.Webmaster-talk.com http://www.webdesigntalk.net http://www.akamarketing.com/webmaster-forums http://www.w3talk.com http://www.web-mastery.net http://www.htmlforums.com (great for html help) http://www.webxpertz.net/forums (geared more towards website programming) http://www.everywebmaster.com http://www.frontpagewebmaster.com http://www.theadminzone.com/forums (targeted towards forum owners) http://www.siteownersforums.com http://www.webdesignforums.net http://www.webhostingtalk.com (geared towards hosting resellers but has some relevant sections) http://www.webforumz.com (geared more towards programming) Search Engine Optimization (SEO) related resources and tools: http://www.seochat.com (The #1 SEO related resource - Many great tools)
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http://searchenginewatch.com (latest news on the most used search engines) http://www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html (Googles opinion on SEO) http://www.seotoday.com http://www.web-inspect.com (filled with many great tools) Other Webmaster related sites: http://www.sedo.com - A large marketplace dedicated to the buying and selling of website domain names.
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HYIPs - What are they? HYIP is an acronym for "High Yield Investment Program(s)". When we think of an Investment program, we usually automatically get suspicious. High Yield Investment Programs have been around for hundreds of years, but didn't really hit their peak of popularity until the internet came about. Now the owners of these high yield programs can start them up with basically no physical contact with their investors. This means that they don't have to worry as much about any government intervention, such as taxes, SEC regulations, etc. This however also means that they don't have to worry about doing anything legal. Probably about 99.9% of all online HYIPs are not being honest with you. The majority of these programs are Ponzi Schemes, named after Charles Ponzi who scammed millions from friends, family, and everyday people by creating a program that appeared to be a high yield investment. His program did not actually invest any of the money he collected. Instead it used the money from new investors to pay the returns to the initial investors. See http://www.markknutson.com/ for more details. For example if John, Jack, and Susan invest $100 into a Ponzi, then Peter, Chuck, Brian, and Randall invest $200 each into the program later on, John, Jack, and susan are simply getting paid with the money invested from Peter, Chuck, Brian, and Randall. The majority of the online HYIP's are simply this type of investment scheme.
Can You Make Money From HYIPs? All in all the admin usually makes off with a large sum of money once he decides to close it down. However the initial investors, those who get in when the program first starts up, will also end up making a large sum of money. The legality of these types of programs are highly disputed. It is obviously illegal to own and operate a program of this type. As for the initial investors, as far as I know, there has never been a lawsuit put out against any of them. If they simply
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believed that they were investing in a legitimate program, it's difficult to prove any wrong doing. There are literally tens of thousands of people online making money on HYIP's. There are actually people who make a living investing in these programs. It takes time to learn the ropes of HYIP investing, and most people lose money when they first start out. A great resource for learning the ropes and about the history of the HYIP industry in general is HYIP101.com.
Tips on how to make money with HYIPs Ok, here are some tips that I have learned by simply reading forums, and investing myself. Tip #1 - Don't fall for the "Extra" High Yield Investment Programs: Once you dig into HYIPs and find them, you will see there are various kinds of programs with various payout amounts. Some of the lower paying HYIPs pay as little as 0.1% Daily, while some promise returns as high as 1000% daily, and even higher! Now it's common sense that it is totally impossible to see returns of 1000% daily. An example of this would be if you invested $100 into one of these programs which promised to pay you back $1000 the next day. Even the best traders in the world cannot make these kinds of profits on a consistant basis. I personally recommend limiting yourself to investing into only programs that pay 2-3% daily and less. These are the programs that will last the longest, and usually end up having administrators who are more patient (meaning they won't close up and run with the money as soon). I always feel that the lower the payout the better your chances for success when dealing with HYIPs. Tip #2 - First in First Out: Since the majority of HYIPs are in fact Ponzi Schemes, this means that those investors who get in first will be the ones to see the most profits. I recommend using sites like http://www.gold-hosting.com, http://www.goldrater.com, and http://www.talkgold.com (along with a lot of other ones which I will get to in a bit) to find the newest programs as they launch.
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A mistake that I think too many people make when investing in HYIPs is that they use rating sites like these to find programs that have been paying out for a long time. Remember only 0.1% of online HYIPs are real investment programs, so this is an obvious mistake. Those programs that have been paying for a long time will usually be the ones to fail the soonest (not always the case but most of the time this is true). Tip #3 - Professionalism is the Key: When you are deciding which HYIP(s) you want to invest into, you should look at many aspects of the program's site. You will see some programs that have websites which look as if created by a 5-year-old, while you will also see some that appear to have invested thousands of dollars into their design and programming. It should be quite obvious that you want to invest in the programs that make themselves appear the most professional through their sites. The administrators of programs who plan to have a long lasting, stable lifespan, will usually take the time to make their site(s) look and feel the best. Those admins who only want to take in as much money as possible before running usually will quickly put together a site that looks like crap. Tip #4 - Evaluate the Programs Referral system: The majority of HYIPs now offer referral programs to their members. They usually offer a percentage back to the referrer of their referrals deposits. Most programs offer between 1-10% for referral bonuses. I believe that the programs with the lower referral bonuses are generally the programs that tend to last longer. However I also have found that a small referral bonus is better then no referral bonus at all, because it's those programs that end up getting the most investors. Again if the program is a Ponzi scheme, you want a program that will have a high number of investors. Tip #5 - Due Dilligence is important but not as important as people make it out to be: Due Dilligence on a program is a very important procedure to perform when deciding on which programs to invest into. Due Dilligence also referred to as "DD" or “DDU" is the process of verifying a program. For example if an address is given by the owner of the investment, you should investigate and try and determine if this address is correct. If a phone number is provided, you should call it and see if you can actually get through to someone. Other forms of Due Dilligence would be:
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Investigating the domain name used for the site. How long has it been registered for? Are the details on the registar correct? Can you contact the admin through those details? When was the domain name registered (in comparission to how long the admin says the program has been around for)?
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Investigate the IP address used by the admin. This can be difficult to do, but you should be able to send the admin an email. When you get a response, you can view the header of his response to find the IP address that the email originated from. Determine if this IP address matches where the admin claims to be from.
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Test the honesty of the admin. This is difficult to do as well, but you can do it by comparing things the admin says on his site to other details that you can dig up on him through his registration, IP address, etc.
All in all, Due Dilligence can help you determine the honesty and potential reliability of a programs' administrator. However most DD does not help from my experience. The main reason is that 99.9% of these programs are scams, thus DD doesn't prove anything. It is very simple for an admin to put an address on his site or domain registration to an office somewhere in the United States or even offshore. It is almost impossible for you to determine if in fact he/she works from that office or not, unless you were to pay him/her a visit. As for telephone numbers, they are also useless in proving anything since any Joe Schmo can go out and purchase an untrackable pre-paid cell phone. Some of the most trusted programs were run by individuals who made themselves easily available to their investors. Charles Ponzi was one of them. In the end, it didn't matter how accurate their personal information was, because they ended up scamming the investors anyway. Tip #6 - Get Your Initial "Seed" Investment Back ASAP The trick to these Games/Investment programs are to get your initial spend (Seed Money) back as soon as you can. Once you do this, you are then playing with only profits, meaning no matter what happens, you can only win or break even. If a program offers a compounding option, do not choose this option until you have withdrawn your initial seed money. Compounding is a way that administrators keep their programs alive by keeping the money in the system rather then having
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to pay it back. Your goal is to get your initial spend back as soon as possible. Once this is done, then if you want to risk your profits by compounding them, go for it, as you can't lose. Tip #7 - Be Smart and don't get Overly Excited about any One Particular Program: If it seems too good to be true, then it is. Don't put all your eggs in one basket thinking that this one program is your chance for financial freedom. Just because thousands of people are behind a program and believe every word the administration throws at them, doesn't mean that these thousands of people are right. Money does crazy things to people. Peoples dreams can fog their perception of what is real and what is bologny. If it was really possible for an admin to make 5% returns on a consistent daily basis, then why the hell would they be paying other people these returns when they could compound their own money and become a billionaire within a year?
A 13 Month Study of HYIPs With the help of several HYIP monitoring sites, we were able to obtain information on over 400 HYIPs in the last 13 months. This is the first study of it's kind and has never been offered anywhere else. We catagorized each HYIP into 4 types: Type 1 - Programs offering 0.01% - 1% return per day Type 2 - Programs offering 1.1% - 4% per day Type 3 - Programs offering 4.1% - 10% per day Type 4 - Programs offering 10.1% - 250% per day We then, with the help of 3 main HYIP Monitoring sites, invested the minimum amount into over 400 programs right in the beginning, from launch. We were able to obtain the following statistics: Type 1 (.1 - 1%) Total return paid back on investment on average - 93% Average length of time the program lasted before it stopped paying 112 days
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Type 2 (1.1 - 4%) Total return paid back on investment on average - 124% Average length of time the program lasted before it stopped paying 54 days Type 3 (4.1 -10%) Total return paid back on investment on average - 103% Average length of time the program lasted before it stopped paying 23 days Type 4 (10.1 - 250%) Total return paid back on investment on average - 119% Average length of time the program lasted before it stopped paying 112 days Our study concluded that on average Type 2 programs were the most lucrative, followed by Type 4, Type 3, and Type 1 respectfully. So in conclusion the HYIPs offering between 1.1 and 4% daily return, if invested in on the first day they launch, will pay back the most return before closing. Please note that these averages can be improved greatly if you follow the seven tips we provided above. We still feel that if you follow our tips, picking and choosing which programs seem the best, the lower paying programs will prove to be the most lucrative.
HYIP Resources There are literally hundreds of HYIP Rating sites and a good handful of Forums out there for discussing HYIPs. Here is a list I have composed to help you find the best ones. FORUMS Must Visit HYIP Forums http://www.talkgold.com/forum This is the single largest HYIP forum online. It has been in existence for over 3 1/2 years now and is used by just about every HYIP investor out there. It is extremely active, and very useful. The admin allows Page 56
freedom of speech to occur, which can mean some major arguments take place; however this freedom is what I truly believe makes talkgold.com the most useful HYIP forum online, and also the most popular. You can see the truth behind a lot of programs since nothing is deleted. This is the must visit forum if you want to learn about HYIPs.
http://www.thehyipforum.com This is another forum that took the idea from Talkgold.com and allows freedom of speech; however they limit the arguments, and also limit some of the bad language. This is a fairly new forum that has started off pretty quickly.
http://www.hyipdiscussion.com This forum is similar to all the other ones. They tend to not allow quite as much free discussion, as they remove some posts that tend to be argumentative. Depending on what type of person you are, this can be a good thing or a bad thing. This is a very good informative community though, and should be used if you invest in HYIPs.
Check these out too: -
http://www.moneymakergroup.com http://www.web-life.org/vb http://www.rolclub.com http://www.goldentalk.com http://www.hyipboard.com http://www.tb2i.com/forum/ http://gold-horizons.com/
HYIP MONITORING SITES These are sites that monitor whether programs are paying or not. Many of these sites also rate programs on how long they have been paying and how reliable they are.
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MUST VISIT MONITORS: http://www.gold-hosting.com This one has probably been around the longest. It also gets a very large amount of traffic to it. It is run by the administrator of talkgold.com, so he knows what he's doing. You can find the newest programs here as well as programs that have been paying for a while.
http://www.goldpoll.com This one gets a lot of new listings so if you are looking for the newest listings it's a good place to start. A lot of "Extra" High Yield Programs tend to list here though, so you have to weed through them a bit.
http://www.hyipmonitor.com This monitoring site has been around for a while. They have been less active as of late, but you can find some good details about programs here.
http://www.talkgold.com If you visit talkgold.com and don't go straight to their forum, you will see a list of HYIPs on their main page. These programs are listed in descending order by their listing date. This means all the new programs are at the top. They usually have several new programs listed daily. They don't rank the programs based on anything, but what is good about them is that they have links to every programs forum right next to the details of the investment.
Could check these out too - http://www.hyipinvestment.com - http://www.hyip-navigator.com - http://www.hothyips.com - http://www.hyipmax.com Page 58
- http://www.hyipranks.com - http://www.hyipsonar.com - http://www.besthyipsite.com - http://www.megahyip.net - http://www.hyipinfo.org - http://www.lotushyip.com - http://www.hyipranking.com - http://www.checkyourhyip.com - http://www.hyipcatalog.com - http://www.hyiptracer.com - http://www.hyip-watch.com - http://www.allbesthyip.com - http://www.myhyip.com - http://www.hyipsite.com - http://www.allhyip.info - http://www.goldpoll.com - http://www.allgoldhyip.com - http://www.besthyiplist.com - http://www.web-life.org There are plenty more, but most of them are very inactive and not really worth your time. HYIP RATING SITES - These sites are designed to let investors rate programs on whether they are paying or not, and whether they are reliable or not. This is a good quick way to see the current status of a program. MUST CHECK OUT RATING SITES: http://www.rankhyips.com This is my personal favorite since it has a cheat proof system. Most other rating sites can easily be manipulated by admins of programs who sign up multiple times to rate their own programs. They can do this by using Proxy (fake) IP addresses and multiple email accounts. With RankHYIPs.com their system is tied into Talkgold.com's forum. It will only allow certain members (who have enough posts) to vote, and those senior members of talkgold have more weight given to their ratings.
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http://www.goldrater.com This is one of the most popular HYIP Rating sites online, and is very good if you are looking for new programs, as a lot of new HYIP's list here. The rating system can be manipulated but the admin tends to do a good job weeding out the cheaters.
http://www.ministryofgold.com This site is by far the most active, and lists the most programs, but it has come under much criticism as of late. There have been reports that the admin removes those members who votes programs negatively (when they stop paying). Whether this is true or not I don't know. They also tend to have a majority of listings for the junk HYIPs (You know, the Extra High Yield Investments), the ones that pay too high returns. It's a useful site though if you are looking for the newest programs.
http://www.rategold.com This is basically a copy from ministryofgold and rankhyips, but it is also starting to become fairly active. Not quite as active as ministryofgold, but from my experience, it doesn't have any cheaters roaming around. You can usually get a pretty good gauge on whether or not a program is still paying at rategold.com.
COULD CHECK THESE OUT TOO: - http://www.gamesofgold.com - http://www.chamberofgold.com - http://www.hyip.org
Conclusion The online High Yield Investment Industry is walking a fine line between legal and illegal. Technically as long as you believe a program is legitimate then you are not breaking any laws. On the other hand, investing into a known ponzi scheme is technically illegal. Page 60
Having said this, no HYIP advertises itself as an illegal ponzi scheme, thus the burden of guilt falls on the shoulders of the operator of the program rather then the investors. We have not seen any records of any HYIP investor being brought up on charges for simply investing in an HYIP, or a ponzi for that matter. High Yield Investing Programs can be extremely lucrative if you spend time understanding the industry. Don't just dive head first into the arena. Instead, take the time to read the forums and the various links I provided above. Once you feel comfortable, then test out the waters with a small amount of money and see where it takes you. If you are interested in learning more about HYIP’s, than we recommend you check out one of the better e-books in the industry, HYIP101.com.
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Get Paid to.... What are they? "Get Paid to" Programs, also referred to by the acronym "GPT" are programs which everyday people are promised riches by simply spending time reading emails, surfing websites, clicking links, taking surveys, or referring others. Over the years this industry has changed quite a bit. In general, programs offer members between $0.001$0.10 per action. One program may offer a member 1/10th a penny per email they read, or 1/2 a penny to visit a website for 30 seconds. As you can see its hard to earn good money by doing this stuff. Having said this, 99% of these programs rely on referrals to jumpstart your earnings. Many of these programs exist primarily on the basis of getting other people to join under your downline. For instance if you refer 10 friends, and they all refer 10 friends then you have 100 people surfing websites, clicking links, or doing whatever other tedious tasks they may signup for. You then receive a % of all of their earnings.
Are "Get Paid to" programs worth the time? This is a tough question. The answer all depends on how much money you are satisfied making. If you are happy making a couple hundred dollars a month then this industry may be right for you. You must understand that it will take a lot of hard work, filled with tedious tasks. Most people who participate in these programs find it hard even to make a couple hundred dollars a month. Looking at a survey taken back in June from GPTForum.com, the average "GPT" member earns $60 per month. Having said this, the top members do earn a substantially higher amount of money. Just like any other industry, if you have the right strategy and spend enough time learning about the industry, then the potential is there. If you are a person who enjoys sitting on the computer several hours a day to earn a few extra bucks, then this industry may be for you. On the otherhand, if you are a person who
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doesn't like to sit still for too long, check out the other sections of this ebook.
How you can find the best programs Like I mentioned above, the "Get Paid to" industry is changing constantly. This makes it very difficult to develop any sort of strategy that works on a consistent basis. Since this industry relies heavily on recruitment of others, it makes sense to look for new programs that do not have a large member base. The less people in the program at the time you signup, the more people you have a chance of recruiting. Look on the forums we mention below for programs that just launch. Be careful of programs that offer the sky. Just like any other industry, there are scammers around every corner.
What are the best resources?
http://www.getpaidforum.com This is the most popular forum for the GPT industry. This forum has been around for over three years and basically is the center of the GPT industry. This is a great forum to just learn the basics and monitor the every day happenings in the industry. The people are friendly for the most part besides a few heated arguments that may erupt every now and then.
http://www.gptforum.com/forum This is the second largest GPT related forum. Being less crowded, it tends to radiate a friendlier atmosphere then GetPaidforum.com does. The people here are willing to help new comers and often take them under their wing.
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http://www.getpaidrocks.com/get-paid-to-avoid.html This site lists all the scammers of the past. This is a list of programs to stay clear of
http://www.autosurfcentral.com This site is basically a portal to the entire GPT industry. There are some good articles as well as links to some of the best performing GPT programs.
The New Hybrid "Get Paid To" Programs: AutoSurfs Just recently, a new type of program has caught on. These programs are commonly referred to as Autosurfs. Unlike other programs in the "Get Paid To" arena, Autosurfs pay out much more money. The only catch is that you need to pay to become a member of these programs. Basically Autosurfs are a hybrid between HYIPs and "Get Paid to Surf" programs. Most are built on a pyramid, ponzi structure and will eventually crash. Those who get into the programs the earliest, and refer the most new members, are the ones who make out the best. Here are some very good links to sites dedicated to just Autosurf programs: http://www.autosurfs.net This site is an Autosurf Rating/Monitoring site. Members rate the programs and leave comments about them. I like this site because it links directly to a Talkgold forum post for each and every program listed.
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http://autosurfmonitor.com This site is also a monitoring site for autosurfs. Members of the programs rate them and let others know if there are any problems.
http://talkgold.com/forum/f236Current_AutoSurf___Paid_to_Surf_Programs.html This is Talkgold's forum just for Autosurf programs. Here you will find every program neatly listed and discussed.
http://www.moneymakergroup.com/index.php?showforum=11 This is MoneyMakerGorup's forum for Autosurfs. This is similar to the link above for Talkgold. It gives people just one more area to discuss each program.
Conclusion The "Get Paid To" industry can be lucrative, however it is not for everyone. Money is to be made, but a lot of time, and tedious tasks are required. More often members of this industry tend to be teenagers, retirees, and stay at home parents. Don't expect to strike it rich overnight. I also want to warn you to be careful of scams, as well as programs which offer extremely high payouts. Recently we have seen a new type of program emerge, which is a hybrid between the GPT industry and the HYIP industry. These are programs which require one to invest an initial amount of money. Investors then received a percent (usually 1-15% per day) of their investment back after they surf a given amount of webpages per day. These programs are GPT programs built on a ponzi scheme foundation. They can only last a certain amount of time before they die out due to the lack of new members.
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Be careful, and play it smart, and you may just be able to pull in a few hundred dollars or more a month.
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Work at Home Programs Usually when you see any advertisement for a work at home program that offers up to $60/hour, you get excited and want to look further into it. The majority of these work at home programs are nothing other than pyramid schemes. The most common Work at Home Job you will see advertised everywhere from the internet to the telephone poles in your town is the "Get paid $60/hour stuffing envelopes at home!" Job. This of course will get your attention. I mean; who in their right mind, no matter how rich or poor they are, wouldn't stuff envelopes for $60/hour? This is nothing other than a pyramid scheme. You have to usually pay a sum of money (between $10-$500) to signup to stuff these envelopes. When you finally get the package in the mail, all it is, is an envelope with a few pieces of paper in it explaining what you have to do. What they want you to do is simply send out letters to other people asking them if they want to stuff envelopes for $60/hour. If they do, then they send you their money (again usually between $10 and $500), and you send them a copy of the package you just received. Then they can do the exact same thing. You are basically making money by telling people they can make money, through telling people they can make money, etc. etc. etc. This is highly illegal, and just a way some lazy people decide to make a living. There are dozens of other similar work at home programs, and the majority of them are also pyramid schemes like the one I discussed above. Don't fall for them. Some of these include the "Medical Billing" Schemes, where they usually require you to invest $2,000 or more for training, all of which will end up being stolen. Even though, like I said, the vast majority of these work at home programs are scams, there still are a few real ones out there. When looking at a program, be sure to investigate it before taking any actions. Here are some questions to ask to help you determine if they are real or not: -
How will I get paid? Who will send me the money, and how will it be sent or provided to me?
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What exactly is the job that I will need to do? Please give me a step-by-step process that I will be asked to follow.
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Is the money I make commission based, or will I be given a set amount of money?
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How long until I get paid for the first time?
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How much money will I have to pay to do this, including any startup costs, supplies, member fees, etc?
If you like the answers and feel that a program is real after asking these questions, then ask some of your friends what they think. Perhaps you are lacking common sense, and need someone else to tell you this. Here are a few very good links to get started and learn more about the legitimate programs out there: http://www.wahm.com - Work at Home Moms Web Portal. Includes forum, FAQ's, and more http://www.hbwm.com - Filled with articles, ideas and tons of information http://www.2work-at-home.com - Includes a directory of available Work at Home jobs as well as a forum http://www.homeworking.com/discus/index.html - Forum dedicated to people working at home http://www.moneymakingmommy.com - Filled with great Work at home articles and ideas http://www.whydowork.com/forums - Another great forum with topics covering all sorts of money making areas.
Conclusion Like I've said over and over again, the majority of these work at home programs are scams of some type. While there are a rare few that are legitimate, you should investigate them to the best of your ability before putting any money out. Also you should be aware of any laws that govern your country, that make some of these programs illegal to Page 68
take part in. There is money to be made, but it's only on a rare occasion that you will find a program that is both legit and legal.
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CASINO SCALPING Just like the real world casinos in Vegas and Atlantic City offer Comps for players who prove to be valuable to the casino, online casinos offer signup bonus's and extended play bonus's. As you know, every casino game is tilted in the casino's favor, so no matter what you do, you will not walk away a winner in the long run if you are playing with your own money. This is where the bonus's and a strict strategy come into play. There are hundreds of casinos online that offer signup bonus's. Check out the following link for an alphabetized listing of dozens of casinos who offer large signup and deposit bonus’s: CasinoCashJournal.com. For instance, if you deposit $100, they will match this with a $100 bonus. So what’s the catch? Usually casinos require that players have a betting turnover of 20 times the deposit + the bonus before they are allowed to withdraw the bonus money. This means that an account with a $100 deposit and a $100 bonus will have to wager (20 * $200) $4000 before they can walk away with the money. This may seem like a daunting task, however it’s not as hard as you may think. Not every game in the casino has the same odds. Blackjack is the best game to choose if you are scalping a casino because it has the lowest house margin. The casino is a 0.5% favorite in normal closed face blackjack. This means statistically that if you play 800 hands, betting $5.00 per hand ($4000 total) you will lose $20.00. Considering that your bonus was $100, you will walk away with your $100 deposit and the $80 remaining from your bonus. Remember this is statistically speaking meaning that what you are left with could fall on either side of $80, but on average it will be $80. To make sure you are maximizing your odds use a chart while playing blackjack so you know exactly what move to make, and when. I recommend the following chart: http://www.blackjackinfo.com/cgibin/bjbse.cgi?game=ac6. Now here are some tips before you get started: 1) Set up a Neteller account. http://www.Neteller.com. Neteller is accepted by almost every major online casino, whereas credit cards are not. Neteller has the best fees, leaving you with more money in your pocket after everything is said and done
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2) Be careful analyzing the bonus terms and conditions. Read them in detail and then read them again. I know this may seem tedious, but this is how a lot of casinos get the customer. Look for hidden clauses and understand the specific details. 3) Set up a separate email account for your casino activities. After you start scalping dozens of casinos, emails and passwords can get confusing. We recommend a gmail account since there is the ability to search all your emails for specific data. http://www.gmail.com 4) Bet in relatively small amounts. Since statistics are what we are going by, the more blackjack hands you play the more likely you are to fall in the 99.5% payout area, meaning the $80 mark in our example. Don't bet too small amounts where it will take you hours and hours to reach your total bet requirement, but also don't go overboard. We recommend betting no more then 1% of the bonus money per hand. In conclusion, Casino scalping can be a legal and fun way to make quite a bit of money online. The only downside is that each casino will only allow you to sign up one time and get one bonus. This means that the money you can earn is finite, and depends on the total number of online casino's there are.
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SPORTS ARBITRAGE BETTING What is Sports Arbitrage Betting?
The definition of arbitrage is: "The use of different markets/market makers in such a way that you gain a risk free profit no matter what the outcome of the event is."
There are hundreds of online bookmakers for thousands of sporting events each week. Not all of these online sports books have the same odds given for each and every event. Some sportsbooks may favor one team, athlete, or event, and others may favor the other team, athlete, or event. In this case you have an arbitrage situation, where no matter what the outcome is, you are guaranteed to walk away with more money than you started with.
Example of an arbitrage betting opportunity: These types of opportunities are extremely frequent if you know where to find the information. In our example we use a tennis match between, "Tom" and "Bob". There are two sports books that have this match available, "Sports Book A," and "Sports Book B". Sports Book A offers a line of 1.50 for Tom winning - A $700 bet for Tom returns (1.50X700)= $1,050 if he wins Sports Book B offers a line of 3.50 for Bob winning - A $300 bet for Bob returns (3.50X300)= $1,050 if he wins Thus, no matter what the outcome is, you will walk away with a $50 profit, a 5% return on your investment. Sure, $50 may seem like a small amount, but what other investment returns 5% within 3 hours or so?
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What kind of returns can one expect? The returns of arbitrage opportunities vary to a great degree, however most arbitrage bets have a return of 2-8% with the average bet returning about 4.5%. Check out http://www.sportsarbitrage.com/archives.php?results=Arbitrage for a complete list of thousands of past arbitrage opportunities with the return they made, next to each. As you can see, on a daily basis there are a large number of these arbitrage bets available. There are people who do this as a career and earn a very nice living from it.
Resources you will need Now, to start off you will need to find a service that provides you with updated Arbitrage opportunities. It can be very time consuming looking at hundreds of sportsbooks to find these opportunities by yourself. We recommend the following Services which are both reliable companies that provide up to the hour arbitrage opportunities: http://www.arbhunters.co.uk http://www.sports-arbitrage.com Other websites you may want to check out before you begin are: - http://www.sportsarbitrage.com/infopage.php?display=Bookmakers&listorder=80&menu =resources# - A huge list of over 150 online bookmakers.
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A Quick Way to Make some Cash Now Ok, so now that you've read this e-book, and learned all the fantastic tricks, tips, hints, and strategies to make a living online, let me give you a real quick way to make some money and generate revenue as you build up your empire! As you now know this e-book sells for $67.00, and I'm sure you know it's well worth it. What if I told you that you can help us sell this ebook, and for every sale you will earn $36.85! Yes, you will earn 55% of the sale price! That's more then we get. You can sell this book to anyone you like, simply by using your referral link provided at our affiliate site (http://becomehated.com/affiliate.php) Here are just a few ways you can sell this e-book. Imagine if you sell 100 e-books, which is quite possible with effective advertising. If you do this, you will earn $3685.00 for virtually no work. Imagine if you were to sell 1000, or 10,000! This is all possible. 1. The Personal Independent Review Nothing sells like a personal independent review of a product. Write an indepth article about why BecomeHated.com is the best buy for anyone looking to make money online and start sending traffic to it and watch those sales rack up. 2. PPC Advertising Not just Google AdWords, try out Overture.com, SearchFeed.com, RevenuePilot.com, BrainFox.com and a whole host of other PPC search engines. PPC is a guaranteed way of getting traffic to your site or your affiliate links. Use the strategies that I have talked about in this ebook to promote your affiliate link. 3. Forum Signatures If you are not an active forum poster, then you are missing out on a huge amount of free traffic from your forum signature. Everyday 10's of thousands of eyes could read your signature recommending BecomeHated.com. This is a fantastic way to get free traffic. Sign up to forums like talkgold.com/forum, thehyipforum.com, sitepoint.com/forum, webhostingtalk.com, etc. etc. etc. Another way to find forums with high traffic is to go to big-boards.com and search for forums by topic.
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4. Paid Banner Advertising This is a bit more expensive than your normal promotional methods, but nothing grabs people's attention like a big banner at the top of a website. 5. Email Lists We know we have a few marketers in our membership. If you have your own email list (which as a marketer is essential), then why not start regularly promoting BecomeHated.com with a personal recommendation. Just about everyone that has a computer with an internet connection would be interested in making money online, so why not sell them this e-book? 6. Web Site Advertising If you own a website or know friends that own websites, simply put your affiliate link on your sites. You can do this with banner ads or simple text ads. This is a very effective method. If you personally recommend this e-book on your site, you are sure to rack of plenty of sales. 7. Email Signatures Most of you probably send out multiple emails daily to friends, family, colleagues and those people who you've never even met. Most email clients allow you to have a signature that is placed at the bottom of each of your emails. You can simply put a link to your becomehated.com affiliate link in these signatures. Try it out and watch how many sales you get! 8. For more great tips on how you can sell hundreds of copies of this ebook and earn thousands of dollars doing it, please visit: http://becomehated.com/affiliate.php There are many many ways to promote your BecomeHated.com affiliate link, and those listed above are just the tip of the iceberg. There are of course some less effective, but cheap ways of promoting your affiliate link. These include promotion on auto-surfers, advertising on PTR/PTC sites and advertising to an untargeted market. Finally, there are some methods through which you are absolutely not allowed to promote your affiliate link by. These include all forms of spamming (emails, posting on forums with the same post, sending unsolicited PM's, blog spamming etc). DO NOT DO THESE!
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For more information on how to become an affiliate, and for urls to a dozen or so Becomehated.com banners, which will help you promote our ebook, please visit: http://becomehated.com/affiliate.php
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FINAL THOUGHTS ABOUT DOING BUSINESS & MAKING MONEY (NOT JUST ONLINE) When it comes to running a business, it generally takes a person that is patient, enduring, and friendly. Patience is a virtue. The successful business owners (including those who run businesses online) are those who set futures goals ahead of their present goals. They give up a little today for the chance to gain a lot in the future. When it comes to selling products, or running a website online, their is basically one determining factor that decides whether you are extremely successful, or you barely tread water. That is "Endurance". The owners who set forward looking goals, and work through their problems, are those who succeed the most. This means that you should turn a shoulder on the quick buck and aim for the pot of gold down the line. 99.9% of successful business owners have done this. If you spent the time to read this entire ebook, I am confident that you will be very successful in your future endeavors. I have set the path for your success; you now just have to follow it!
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