Posts filed under 'Money'
Simple Secret to Savings: Start with a Single Step
- by Yohana Vargas
“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” It’s as true with saving money as with anything else.
These days, we’ve been frightened into thinking we must save thousands of dollars immediately. Most of us simply cannot do this, and the media does us no favors when it makes the situation sound so hopeless that we might as well give up.
Financial planning should be focusing on real people, people who have trouble saving, people who really need the help that instead seems geared towards the wealthy.
As a result, many of us think that if we can only save, say, $10 a month, then it isn’t worth it. Not true! Once you sock away that $10 and realize that you’re still okay, you’ll realize you can put away a little more.
Maybe you increase it to only $20 a month, but that’s $240 a year, plus the interest you’ll receive for putting the money in a savings account or money market. You only need $250 to open an IRA, and that’s a worthy goal.
Even if you stick with $10 a month, that’s $120 a year, and if you think that isn’t much money, you can probably afford to put away more.
The best part of this technique is that you get into the habit of saving. Once you do that, savings can grow and grow as your income increases, your expenditures decrease, or you receive a bit of extra money from your tax return, a work bonus, etc.
Here are a few tips for saving more by starting small:
Pay yourself first. You’ve heard it before, but that’s because it works. When you pay your bills, write a check to yourself. Depositing as little as $5 from each paycheck into a savings or money market account should get you to that initial goal of $10 a month. If that’s painless, increase it to $10 per paycheck. If, after a couple of months, you find $10 is painless, increase it a little more. Keep doing this and you might be surprised at how much you can afford to sock away!
If your employer offers direct deposit, even better. Open a savings or money market account and have at least $5 per paycheck deposited into that account. Again, keep increasing this as you get comfortable with saving the money.
Do you spend $2 a day on coffee, a muffin, or some other inexpensive treat? Do that five days a week for 50 weeks, and you’ve spent $500! Spend a little of that on a coffee maker and some ground or whole coffee beans, and put the rest into your savings account.
When you save money with good deals or coupons, consider putting the difference into your account.
Most importantly, get yourself into the habit of saving, and don’t underestimate the effect of saving just a little. All you need to do to begin the journey is to take that first, single step.
About author
Yohana Vargas is Marketing Project Manager for BondRewards, the online shopping rewards program with the highest payout in America, and the only rewards program that helps Americans save for the future. Visit www.bondrewards.com and shop at over 500 merchants, including Target, Macy’s, Barnes & Noble, Land’s End, and more. You’ll be rewarded with free U.S. Savings Bonds.
April 18th, 2006
Pick The Right E-Commerce Pack And Put Your Business On Fire
- by Juhani Tontti
1. Businesses need powerful and quick technology and marketing in order for e-commerce to be successful. The objective is to grow your business by making it easier for customers to shop, and if your website’s lack of technology and marketing make it difficult for them, they may as well drive to the supermarket.
2. Before looking at e-commerce solutions, we must first speak about some typical problems of e-commerce. There are many complaints from customers, who have purchased articles online.
There are disorganized sites that are difficult and confusing to navigate; lack of information on the websites including failure to tell customers about special deals or prices.
The inability to pay with the customer’s own currency or payment processor, the inability for the customer to even understand the language in which the website is written; and frustrating and confusing shopping carts and check out procedures.
3. What are some e-commerce solutions? Having a professional looking website will attract customers and make them feel confident in buying. You want your website to be organized, quick and easy to navigate, and if you have an informational website, which is search engine friendly; presents special deals; encourages up selling in a customer-friendly way (such as showing related items or showing items that customers purchased, who also purchased the item you are purchasing); is accessible in the major languages and accepts major currencies; has a user friendly shopping cart and single page checkout, then you won’t need many e-commerce solutions!
Remember, when your business is e-commerce, you want to take all possible steps to make sure you and your product are presented professionally, friendly, and easily accessible.
4. Recovering from the dot com crash in 2000, e-commerce is rising strongly. Stay in the comfort of your home. Spend more time with your family. Be your own boss. The benefits of having a home business are numerous. These are familiar slogans.
That is why so many people try to run their own home business. Being enthusiastic about earning their own income online, these people search to find how they can create their own business. And their own diciplines.
Then they understand that there are so many options for them to choose from. So, what is the best e-commerce package for you? Talking about e-commerce packages, most online merchants have the same basic needs. The trick is to make sure an e-commerce package matches your needs. Causing less frustration, you should also try to find something that will be easy to use.
5. Some important things to look for in an e-commerce package are:
A. Select a provider that will give you a site and hosting company.
Selecting a provider that helps you set up a website and hosts it for you can save you from a lot of frustration. By choosing a website and hosting combination, you are sure that your e-commerce package will not have to be manually altered.
B. A lot of templates
While all templates can be customized, sometimes that just does not work for every business. If there is a large amount of templates to pick from, there is bound to be template for your business.
C. Payments
You need to make sure that the payment options that your e-commerce package uses will match your customers needs. For example if your e-commerce package only accepts Paypal, you will miss out on the customers that do not use Paypal but want to pay with credit card. This will decrease your earnings.
D. Shopping cart
Most people like to see what they have picked into the shopping cart. Customers may also want to change what they want to buy. Perhaps they found something better.
E. Calculation of tax and shipping costs
While most of the customers are not from your own state, tax is not a major problem. Shipping is a different matter. Shipping and shipping time must be calculated for all customers. Customers also want to see what their shipping costs will be.
F. Customer reports
While reports are not useful to customers, they are useful for you. E-commerce packages that offer reports help you track of your costs and earnings. They save a lot of frustration.
About author
Juhani Tontti NetBizMarketer has a passion to co-operate with other NetBizMarketers. Take a look at my sites, which gives a living to me at http://www.pluginprofitsite.com/main-8851 and http://www.Way2Miracle.com
April 11th, 2006
Autosurf programmes promise a good return with very little work. Most of the times, this is a charateristic of a ponzi scheme. So you put some money, you will get paid with money put in by other people, and these people will be paid with money paid by the next “investors”.
As such, when there are no more enough new “investor” to support the payout, these schemes are doomed.
The wildly popular autosurf programme 12dailypro (http://12dailypro.com) closed down last month (February 2006). Recently, Studio Traffic, another very popular one, is in a very serious problem over stormpay hooha and resignation of top management (read below).
So, to invest or not to invest in these schemes, the choice is yours. You may be able to make your fortune before it goes bust, or you may lose all the money you put in if it closes down the next day. Personally, I’d say, play only with money you can afford to lose.
From http://www.studiotraffic.org/forum/showthread.php?t=43489
Hello,
I received this news few hours back. Our top management has resigned. This means that offices in US, Canada and Spain will be closed.
With this shocking news and with recent problems with stormpay, I am sad to inform some changes which will affect members.
Members, who are in profit, please stop surfing as we can no longer afford it. We hope you will understand that we have done our best and this is something similar to natural disaster which is beyond our control. If you have funds in studiopay or in your studiotraffic account, please take note that in our TOS, we have never guaranteed payout. Your payout is determined based on our advertising revenue. Less advertiser revenue means that we need less people surfing. You can, however, still use your account for advertising purposes.
I am sure there are people who lost money with stormpay. We are victims too. Stormpay is still taking money from us everyday, we are not sure when they will stop and have expected that we lost our reserves (hundreds of thousands) we have with stormpay.
All is not lost as we can still depend on local funding from our offices worldwide. However, with top management resigning and offices closing down, we will lose almost 90% of funding.
Members who are not in profit, please send email to notinprofit@studiotraffic.com. What we will do is that in the coming months, we will seek venture capital and raise funds. Once we raised these funds, we will send it to you. Do take note that we are not obligated to do refunds or to send you back what you sent in. When you upgrade, you are getting accesses set with different account level so you can advertise your products or services better. When you upgrade, we have a refund policy where we will return you what you sent in, in the first 7 days. After the initial cooling period of 7 days, we are not obligated to do any refund as it is assumed that you accepted what you received.
We are doing this because we want nobody to lose any money with us. Please give us a reasonable time to do this as we need time to get it arranged. You can, however, still continue to use your account for advertising purposes which you have paid for. There is no need for you to continue surfing. All of you will automatically receive shares to all studio programs. If we cannot manage to raise venture funds, we will sell your shares in all studio programs and pay you back so it is the same.
We will close down studiopay website for a couple of months because with Studiopay staff resigning, we do not have enough manpower to handle it. We will do a complete restructuring with a new management team in it. Once ready, we will bring studiopay to public.
I hope all members will understand that we have done our best and what happened is something beyond our control. All studio programs will continue to run. We will continue to allow signups to basic accounts. Most of our current advertisers have mentioned that they do not need high level account holders to surf. As long as we can get a lot of people to see their ads, they are willing to continue to advertise with us. Our expenditure will be reset to the lowest because we will be getting only basic accounts members to surf.
After this, we will, most likely, have less than 15 staff working on this. Due to shortage of manpower, we can only attend to non profit members for the time being. Please send to notinprofit@studiotraffic.com.
As for other members, once we get everything back, we will continue to get you back to surf. Please give us some time to work things out. Please do not send emails because we do not have enough manpower to handle it.
Members please do not worry. As long as we start afresh, we are confident to turn things around and it will be better than before. Many of our staff has indicated that they would like to continue to help out without any payout. If you like to help us further, please email to support@studiotraffic.com.
I hope all members will understand that we are doing the best we can. We will continue to work hard and make sure no one loses money with us.
Sincerely,
John
March 15th, 2006
Selling business plan generally involve doing these 2 things well:
- do up a good business plan
- sell the plan to a partner / capitalist / loan provider
To do up a good business plan, have a look at these sites. They tell you how to form a business, from idea creation, writing proposal, to setup and operation.
- Business Week
http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/
- From the same publisher as the Entrepreneur magazine
http://www.entrepreneur.com/
- United States Small Business Administration
http://www.sba.gov/
- Small-business articles from the Microsoft Small Business Center
http://www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness/resources/articles.mspx
- Starting a Business: Advice from the Trenches
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/startingabusiness/
- Business Plan Software, Samples, and Strategy
http://www.businessplans.org/
- UK Small Business
http://www.smallbusiness.co.uk/
- Small Business Resources, Business Advice and Forms
http://www.allbusiness.com/
- Rich Dad Investment & Business : Read the articles & join the forum
http://richdad.com/
- Join Meetup.com and find your local entrepreneur/business group
http://www.meetup.com/
- For online business
http://onlinebusiness.about.com/
http://www.myownbusiness.org/
http://www.oncallgeeks.com/
http://www.internetbasedmoms.com/new-internet-business/
While some of the above links will give you methods for selling the business plan, general sales techniques applies too.
A master salesman is the salesman that has perfected his/her sales techniques so well that the buyer will have no problem granting him/her the deal.
Well-known sales techniques includes:
- Asking questions you know that your prospect buyers will say “yes” to. The more “yes” they say, the easier it is for them to say yes when asked to buy.
- Comparing two options, where buying your product is the superior one.
- Never argue with your client, always agree with them, even if you are absolutely sure they are wrong. Find a way to twist to your benefit if it really matters.
- Make your product seems to be worth more than it really is, then discount the price if you need to.
- Good packaging/ presentation/ store design/ website layout all makes difference to whether or not your prospect buyer will say “Yes!”
March 11th, 2006
Here are good important factor you need to consider when getting a loan :
- Loan Amount : How much do you need, and what are they for. Remember, you need to pay for Interest, so don’t borrow more than what you need.
- Collateral : What asset do you have for getting the loan? Or is it collateral free?
- Interest Rate : How much Interest do you need to pay for the loan? Is it worth taking? For example, if your business gives 5% annual return, while the interest rate is more than that, don’t take the loan.
- Payment Term : When do need to make payment back? How long until you finish repaying? What if you default the payment?
March 11th, 2006
It depends on how you want to make your money. You might want to make your question clearer. What do you mean by “Internet business”? What do you mean by “web sites I can use for free” ?
1. Having your own website
If this is what you mean, you need a domain name and a web hosting.
Domain name is your Internet address, e.g. www.my-own-web-site.com
Some web hosting companies will include free domain name if you buy their hosting package, but don’t count on that. Domain name is cheap. You can get one for less than 10$ per year at http://www.godaddy.com . Good selection of a web hosting provider is more important.
Web hosting is where you store your files.
There are many websites providing free hosting, some will give you a sub-domain name, i.e. http://your-name-blah-blah-blah.freewebs.com .
These free hostings provide free hosting in exchange for exposure to their own website.
Some of the more popular ones are http://members.freewebs.com/ or http://www.bravenet.com/
For a good list of free web hosting providers, you can see
http://www.free-webhosts.com/best-free-webhosts.php
If you are serious about making money, I strongly recommend putting some investment. Paid hostings are more reliable, more presentable, easier to maintain, have less restriction, and load faster.
Addaction ( http://www.addaction.net )is a good start. If you are not expecting a lot of traffic (especially in starting months), you can use a starter package for less than 50$ /year. Their technical support is superb, and it comes with many good scripts built-in.
For example, if you are looking to have online store to sell things, you can install oscommerce in few clicks. After that, you need only enter your products details.
If you have good contents, you might consider putting Google advertisements ( https://www.google.com/adsense/ ) on your website to generate income.
2. Use other people’s website to sell your products/ services
Ebay ( http://www.ebay.com ) is the choice for many others selling in the Internet. You can create an account for free and start posting your items for sale immediately.
If you don’t have your own products but want your design to be included with other people’s product, you can try Cafepress ( http://www.cafepress.com/cp/info/ ).
3. Others
There are thousands other ways to make money in the Internet.
Whatever you are doing, there are good guides to read on:
http://onlinebusiness.about.com/
http://www.myownbusiness.org/
http://www.oncallgeeks.com/
http://www.internetbasedmoms.com/new-internet-business/
Wish you all the best
March 10th, 2006
Get rich schemes are indeed very attractive for men and women regardless of who we are. It is the desire of everyone to be rewarded with the riches and abundance.
But does get rich schemes work? Yes, sometimes they really do. And you can really get a handsome reward for that. But many times, participants of the get rich schemes lost their money.
Get rich schemes can be in the form of ponzi schemes, autosurf, mlm, etc. They take money from you (they will call it investments), sometimes in exchange for a product or service that really doesn’t worth as much. But always, the selling point is that they will promise a good return for your investment.
Some of this schemes will take your money and just disappear. But the more organised ones will operate for quite some time, giving the investment returns for those asking to get back the investments, funding it with the money collected from new investments. When the confidence grows and more and more people are willing to put more money on the schemes, that is when the operator of the schemes disappear with the money.
So, do they work? Yes. As easy example. If today you put in $10,000 into a Studio Traffic ( http://www.studiotraffic.com ), your account level will be $100,000 after 9 months. After that, you can get $33,000 every months just surfing Internet. But as you can see, the risk here is that we don’t know how long studiotraffic will survive. If it survive forever, you get your money $33,000/month forever. If it closes down tommorrow, all your money go down the drain.
If you are more willing to learn, and go slowly, capturing opportunities around, working with other poeple to acquire the riches, I’ll suggest you to read around, looking for ideas, and gain knowledge along the way. But of course, that’s if you are willing to accept delayed gratification, which not everyone does.
March 10th, 2006
I want to know the answer also. Sure it is possible. And there are many excellent and innovative ways to do so. But let’s put it this way: if you are asking this, most likely you are like me, clueless.
I believe it takes money to make money. Maybe other’s people money instead of from your own pocket, but even then you will spend some time finding the right connection and convince people people with the capital you need. One month is not very realistic.
The closest example to your question might be The Million Dollar Homepage ( http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com )which was started on August 26, 2005 and last pixel was sold on January 11,2006 on ebay. Alex Tew made $1,037,100 through one of the most innovative way ever. But even that takes roughly 4 and a half months, and some amount of capital for the web hosting.
Instead of looking for quick money, you will better equip yourself with good knowledge and ability (e.g. through heliumknowledge ) so when the opportunity arises, you are ready.
March 9th, 2006
Indeed! There are many excellent opportunities out there. They pay worldwide, using international cheques or to you Paypal account.
What you need is Internet access, and, depending on what you want to do, some amount of cash. And account at http://www.paypal.com to get your payment. Then, you’ll need to have patience. Lots of it.
But whether you’ll make your first million on the Internet or barely enough to cover your phone bill, that’s another question. Just like any thing on earth, there is no free lunch.
If you plan to get rich from Internet, you’ll have to work hard and smart, finding suitable ways to get income.
Here are just few ways for making money online, some can be combined:
1. Online store : create your own website to sell your products.
http://sbs.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/merchant/
Minimum Investment = $200
2. Online auction : put your items for others to bid
http://www.ebay.com
Minimum Investment = $0
3. Ad supported / affiliates:
create a website with some contents and put advertisement on it
https://www.google.com/adsense/
http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html/104-2375284-9587133?node=3435371
Minimum Investment = $0 (if you use free sites, e.g. http://www.blogger.com )
4. Borrowed store : put your design on other people’s item
http://www.cafepress.com/cp/info/sell/
Minimum Investment = $0
5. Answering questions: earn money by answering questions
http://www.heliumknowledge.com
http://answers.google.com/answers/
Minimum Investment = $0
* Below are other ways to earn income but are controversial, some people earn lots of money, some poeople get their investment burnt.
6. Autosurf :
While these websites promise fast returns without much work, be aware that they might close down any time without any warning. When they close, most likely you’ll lose your investment. Only play with money you can afford to lose.
http://www.studiotraffic.com
http://www.12dailypro.com
Here is a long list
http://www.autosurfmonitor.com/
7. Paid email : get paid for reading
http://www.a-get-paid-site.com/get-paid-to-read-email.htm
http://www.getpaidguides.com/email/companies.html
8. Paid survey : get paid for filling in surveys
http://www.surveypolice.com/ratings.php
Whatever you are doing, these are some good guides to read on:
http://onlinebusiness.about.com/
http://www.myownbusiness.org/
http://www.oncallgeeks.com/
http://www.internetbasedmoms.com/new-internet-business/
All the best !
March 9th, 2006