Make Money Online with The Monetizer

10/12/08

Ways to Get Cash in Rough Financial Times

"Tough Times don't last, tough people do" is a very fitting statement right about now. The stock market has dipped to its lowest levels in about 5 years time. Gas prices have soared up over $4.00 a gallon, and luckily come back down a bit lately. Airfare travel has become even more expensive as the airlines are forced to add more and more charges so they can continue to operate. Grocery store and roadside stand prices have even been on the rise. With the way the economy has become a major issue in our lives as well as the upcoming 08' presidential election, it's time we adopted more of a deal-finding, opportunistic and saver's mentality!

The Roanoke Times has a recent article titled "How to Get Cash Fast" as part of its Good Housekeeping Reports. The article gives several tips on how to get money right now. Some may be obvious, others might be something new to consider.

1) Sell your unwanted gold jewelry - Gold is valued at over $900 per ounce right now so why not cash in? You've seen the ads all over TV. The article says to stay away from those places, but instead consult your yellow pages for jewelers who buy gold. Then begin the process of calling or going to each and finding out their commissions and offers. Draw up a list and find the best deal for your gold. Also, don't worry about workmanship of your gold pieces as the buyers will just be melting it down. Turnaround for this is about a day to sell your gold.

2) Borrow from peers - This doesn't mean your friends, because we all know if we're hurting financially, then so are they. Instead try out peer-to-peer lending at sites like prosper.com and lendingclub.com. You can usually borrow $1000 or more with an interest rate around 8% or so depending on credit. Good credit is vital to getting a loan this way. Turnaround for this is 1-2 weeks.

3) Tap home equity - As the article describes it, a home equity credit line is like a big credit card account with your home as the collateral. You can write checks against the credit line and interest is often tax-deductible. Use this in extreme desperation, because you'll be paying it back. Ask your bank or mortgage lender for their terms, as you may get a break as their customer. Turnaround for this method is about 2 weeks or so.

The Monetizer suggests IDEA #4, start your own home-based or internet-based business. Things like eBay sales, monetized blogging, paid article writing, affiliate marketing, survey sites and more can get you money without you even having to leave the house. You can consult the Monetizer's Moneymakers for a great list of sites to sign up for today!

And #5 is of course to play the lottery every week, but we all know about the chances associated with that!

10/8/08

Slate.com Looks at Blogging for Dollars

There's a fascinating 10/1/08 article over at Slate.com by Michael Agger entitled "Blogging for Dollars - How Do Bloggers Make Money?" The article takes a look at how blogging has exploded in size and continues to grow exponentially each day. According to the stats there are 900,000 blog posts created daily across the world. So this post is just a fraction of that!

Even more interesting, the article takes a look at the big money some people command from their blogs. Examples you may have heard of:

The LOLcat empire rakes in $5,600 per month;
Overheard in New York gets $8,100 per month;
Perez Hilton, gossip king, scoops up $111,000 per month.

(info source: Slate.com)

The article may state the obvious to us bloggers. That is in order to get the income you want from writing a blog regulalry, you need to have visitors and a high level of traffic. The example of 43f is given, which started out small then exploded and began to pay the bills.

Agger writes:

While monetizing your blog may be easier than ever, all of this comes with an ever-present hammer: the need to drive traffic. This month, the writer/blogger/productivity thinker Merlin Mann opened a window onto his angst with an anniversary post. Mann is best-known as the creator of the Hipster PDA (index cards clipped together by a binder clip)* and his Inbox Zero talk (turn your e-mail into actions). In a post titled "Four Years," Mann sketches out how his site, 43 Folders, grew from a personal dumping ground for his "mental sausage" into a full-featured destination for productivity nerds and life-hackers. In 2005, he experienced a key transition:

At some point that year, 43f became the surreal and unexpected circus tent under which my family began drawing an increasing amount of its income. This was weird, but it was also exactly as gratifying as it sounds. Which is to say, "very." But, my small measure of something like success did not go unnoticed. In fact, the popularity of small blogs like 43 Folders contributed to the arrival of a gentrifying wagon train of carpetbaggers, speculators, and confidence men, all eager to pan the web's glistening riverbed for easy gold. And, brother, did these guys love to post and post and post.

It is amazing the amount of money and traffic that some blogs generate. Shoutouts are given to Shoemoney and Problogger in the article, with link backs to their respective blogs. Both of their blogs command lots of visitors, subscribers and moolah. Yours can too if you follow in their footsteps, build something people return to and find often, monetize it properly, and you're well on your way...

Read the full artice here at Slate.com for inspiration and possibly some ideas on how to get your moneymaking blog into full gear!

10/5/08

Goal Setting & Maximum Achievement

Goals are considered the driving force in many peoples' successes. Most successful people who you read about had what many refer to as a "definite purpose" in mind. They knew what they wanted to do, kept at it constantly with a large amount of desire, and eventually they achieved something great. The success all started with a goal in mind.

According to Brian Tracy in his book Maximum Achievement, every successful person is a consistent goal-setter and achiever. Tracy goes on to state that there's more to goals than just setting them and maybe acknowledging them from time to time. There's actually a 12 step detailed process used for carrying your goals to fruition, aka the "Master Plan" which Tracey discusses in his book.

The 12 Steps in Goal-setting:

1. Develop an intense burning desire to achieve your goal.
2. Develop belief that your goal will be achieved.
3. Write down your goal.
4. Make a list of all the ways you will benefit from achieving the goal.
5. Analyze your position or starting point on the way to your goal.
6. Set a deadline for achieving your goal.
7. Make a list of all obstacles standing in the way of achieving your goal.
8. Identify any additional information you'll need to achieve your goal.
9. Make a list of all people whose help and cooperation you'll require.
10. Make a detailed plan for accomplishing your goal (including #3,4,5,6,7,8,9)
11. Use visualization of what it's like to have achieved your goal.
12. Make a decision in advance to never, never give up on your goal.

The idea is if you make a goal with at least a 60-70% chance that you can achieve it, and you follow the above steps, you are well on your way towards success! Thinking of the achievement of your goal daily is a great way to overcoming negative feelings too. And once you've achieved the goal, you're ready for even more challenging goals!

Tracey's Maximum Achievement is a great positive book about how to achieve success. There's more detail given on each of the above steps as well as questions to ask yourself to help identify the major goal you really want to achieve. The Monetizer greatly recommends the book as well as goal-setting! If you choose not to read the book, make the effort to set goals on short term and long term bases. Stick to them, refusing to give in to the temptation of "I Can't". If it's worth achieving, it's worth writing down, acting upon, believing in and eventually reaching!

9/29/08

Happy Belated 10th B-day to Google!

Happy Belated 10th to Google!

That nifty piece of web searching technology we'e all come to know and love, Google.com, turned 10 just the other day! Hard to believe the huge engine which has dominated its competition and revolutionized the way we make money online has been around a decade!

There's a lot more to Google than just Adsense and the search component. Here's several more key components:

Adsense - The advertising payment program we all know and love
Adwords - the advertising program you pay for to drive traffic to your sites
Analytics - a great free traffic and stat tracker for your blog or website.
Blogger - the very host of this blog, a great free blogging platform which makes it easy for millions of bloggers around the world to capture their thoughts, images, videos and much more in blog form!
Gmail - a nifty free email account for Google users
Google Product Search - a way to compare shopping prices on any item you want to buy
Google Maps - a cool satellite view of any spot you want, a way to get directions
Google Labs - an internet tech playground where you can design websites, applications, study your site stats and more!
Google Chrome - the recently released web browser that many are raving about! It's said to allow for private browsing and a feature which remembers your most visited sites to "get to know" your search habits better.

There's many more features to Google, and if you're reading this and haven't signed up for a free Google/Gmail account, The Monetizer strongly recommends it!

Google began way back in 1998 with less than 10 employees, a 7'x8' room and a $100,000 investment from Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim! It was the vision of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Stanford U grad students, and at one point it was named "Backrub". The creative duo behind the search engine decided to change the name to "Google" - a play on the word "googol", a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. That represents Google's mission to organize an infinite amount of information on the web. Today Google has grown into a corporate giant worth billions, or millions, depending on how the stock market's doing any given day. 10 years and still growing, Google is definitely the biggest, baddest internet company around, and it has changed the face of searching and surfing for us all in many ways.

Google's B-day bash is not without "aging" concerns about the search giant as it continues to move forward. CNN.com recently discussed Google's stronghold on the search market and how this may hurt the company in its future expansion attempts.

Google's expanding control over the flow of Internet traffic and advertising already is raising monopoly concerns.

The intensifying regulatory and political scrutiny on Google's expansion could present more roadblocks in the future. Even now, there's a chance U.S. antitrust regulators will challenge Google's plans to sell ads for Yahoo Inc., a fading Internet star whose recent struggles have been magnified by Google's success.

Privacy watchdogs also have sharpened their attacks on Google's retention of potentially sensitive information about the 650 million people who use its search engine and other Internet services like YouTube, Maps and Gmail. If the harping eventually inspires rules that restrict Google's data collection, it could make its search engine less relevant and its ad network less profitable.