Million Dollar Mattress Thrown Away?!

In some offbeat money news, an Israeli woman recently tossed out an old mattress for her mother in favor of a new one. What she didn't realize was that the old mattress was being used to hide away a million dollars. Once she found out that startling news, she immediately rushed out to try to find the discarded mattress. She searched frantically searched through three different landfills with no luck in finding the million dollar mattress. A manager at the dump explained why the lady is going to have quite a challenge finding her million dollar mattress...

According to Times Online:

Yitzhak Borba, the dump manager, told the radio station that his staff was helping the woman, saying she appeared “totally desperate”, but the mattress was hard to find among the 2,500 tonnes of rubbish arriving at the site every day.

Mr. Borba said that he increased security at the site to keep would-be treasure hunters at bay. For her part, Anat is displaying an admirable stoicism. “People have to take everything in proportion and thank God for the good and the bad,” she said.

I can see it now, a mattress company or store starts their own promotion or contest, where one lucky shopper or couple of shoppers buys the bed containing a cool million dollar prize!

But really, where should you keep your extra money, checking, savings accounts, the stock market or in a safe place? With the recession going on in the States it was seeming like a good idea to hide your extra money in your mattress because of the stock market and banking woes. But now it seems like you better think twice because you just might throw away a million dollar mattress!

Plentyoffish.com Login Issue - Poor Customer Service?

(Firefox displays that Plentyoffish.com server is down)

You've more than likely heard the story of successful internet entrepreneur Markus Frind. He's the brains behind a completely free dating site, Plentyoffish.com (down as of 5PM EST 6/8/09). The website operates as Markus' one man project, although he has admitted to hiring a staff of 6 or so to help out in a small office. He's made as much as 10 million dollars per year with his free dating site, just by running Google Adsense ads, banners and various affiliate ads such as an ad for "Double Your Dating", a $40 downloadable book. And the most surprising aspect of them all (or envy-inspiring) is he claims to work just a few hours a day, 10 hours a week and earns millions of dollars.

Markus find programmed and created Plenty of Fish all on his own, which in and of itself is amazing. Not that the site is beautiful, but it certainly became useful and profitable for what it is. Recently, Markus noted on his May 1, 2009 blog that he hired a programmer to start working on his site, which seemed revolutionary for this one-man internet million dollar business. Many people had called Markus a bit arrogant and nonchalant when it came to customer issues with the site, as he seemed to think it was always fine how it was and things that many users reported as issues, he saw as insignificant. For example, user pictures of themselves were distorted on certain pages because the programming wasn't done to fix the issue. As of today June 8, 2009 (6/8/09), it seems that the website is down. A plentyoffish.com login issue has arose and when you enter the site's address www.plentyoffish.com into your web browser, you're left hanging. This is something that happens with all sites, big and small. The difference here seems to be in the fact that there's no word of warning given to anyone about what the issue is with Plenty of Fish. A site like Google will at least inform members that the site is going to be down, or a splash page tells them that the site is currently under construction.

A few lessons can be learned from the Plenty of Fish login problems. Number one, you can become a millionaire off Google Adsense by creating a valuable, highly-trafficked internet property. Number two, that property should be run as a business with customers ranking first. It's the customers who drive a site like plentyoffish.com to be as successful as it is. Unfortunately for the head honcho, when a site is down that generates $10,000 a day, it's definitely losing income and potentially losing its members.

Read From 10 Hours a Week, $10 Million a Year at New York Times for more on Plenty of Fish and Markus Find.

Latest Obsessions: Hubpages & iTunes Podcasts

It's been a while friends, and unfortunately I was getting a bit complacent with my earnings and chose to enjoy some time away from blogging. Complacency is definitely a bad flaw at times, as it will rob you of your drive to make money as you feel "well this is good enough". A break was needed though, as we all burn out at times. I'm now focused again. I've recently been devoting my attention to two great moneymaker tools online: Hubpages and Podcasts.

First off, Hubs are compared a lot to Squidoo lenses, and in many respects they are similar in how you craft them with text, pictures, videos, RSS feeds and eBay/Amazon products. However, the Hubpages staff seems much more prone to kick you off for "overly promotional" pages. They generally don't allow more than 3 links to a blog or site. So when you build a hubpage, consider building it on a topic related to the keywords you want to rank for. In the past few weeks, I've been inspired by Courtney Tuttle's personal experiment to create 100 hubs in 30 days time and see how much income and link juice they generate. While I don't expect to do 100 like Courtney due to other projects, I've completed 10 hubs in about a 5 day span now, and set up Adsense, Amazon Associates and eBay Partner Networks to be associated with my Hubpages. It seems hard to track how much you're earning on Adsense from Hubs, but you may notice you've made X dollars and your report doesn't account totally for all the clicks. Those missing clicks are most likely from your hubs. Some simple math will tell you how many dollars or cents you've made. You don't even need to link out if you choose not to, as you may just decide to create free hubs for their potential revenue. Keep in mind it's a revenue sharing deal, so Hubpages will be giving you a % of the click money (more info on revenue sharing). Hubpages, like Squidoo, social bookmarking and article directories, can be a great way to get powerful links to your keyword content, so consider utilizing the free site as best you can. Get started at Hubpages here.

My other obsession as of late is listening to iTunes Podcasts during occasional free time. I know many bloggers who will tell you that you should be podcasting in addition to blogging and making videos all while marketing your stuff. Honestly though, who has time for all of that? Many success mentors and gurus suggest that we should constantly feed our minds with positive food, such as books, and audio tapes. Podcasts can do that if you find ones that interest you, and you can listen streaming through iTunes, or download to listen to later, or put on your iPod/iPhone. I recommend that when you have down time, you take a gander at what's available for free to listen to at iTunes Podcasts. The "Self-help" and "Business" categories offer a plethora of great shows, and some which are bad or just blatant advertising. I've enjoyed a few that talk about how to apply the Secret to your life, how to create wealth, entrepreneurial topics and SEO. And if you need to relax, there's some great meditation and relaxation style podcasts. The Inner Health Studios one in particular seems to put me at ease and to sleep almost whenever I want...so check them out, because they just might give you the inspiration, ideas or stress relief you need to make more money...Now it's about time for the The Monetizer to go listen to a relaxing podcast and take a power nap!

Lesson Learned in Blogging: Be Prepared!

First off, apologies to the faithful readers who stop by and view the Monetizer blog regularly. It's been a while folks, and ironically not even a day after I installed a brand new, more powerful wireless router, there was an internet outage here in the area. It turns out there was a bad fire in a nearby town which ended up damaging a major fiber optics line. That incident left The Monetizer and many other people without the internet for days. It's hard to remember back to a time when people didn't rely on the internet as heavily, but I do seem to recall them. Amazingly, the internet allows us to do so much from banking to making money online and keeping in touch with friends and acquaintances, that we really take it for granted. When it goes down many of us are lost.

Needless to say, when the net is down, so is my ability to update any of my blogs, check my online accounts, etc. My streak of updating one of my most heavily search engine visited blogs ended on Tuesday, as I had no way to post. I could have driven around looking for a free wi fi spot with my MAC laptop, but in a remote woodsy area, that can be a challenge and quite time consuming. But now in hindsight I've come up with some helpful things for all regular bloggers to keep in mind. These are just in case a disaster or minor incident strikes that interferes with your ability to blog, such as your internet service is out or your computer goes down. You basically should consider several alternatives and backup plans to keep your blog in business during those times. These may be common sense, but they're lifesavers in the blogging biz. Here's some ideas...

1) Schedule your blog posts in advance - Both blogger and wordpress allow the ability to create a blog post and then set the time and date of your choosing. I've used this feature quite a bit for my one blog, to automatically post at a certain hour each Monday and Friday. It's been quite helpful, and when I took a vacation, I set up a series of 5 blog posts to go up each day I was away. Definitely a life saver, and it could also provide you a nice break from blogging if you want it.

2)Have another blogger on staff - Whether this be your family member, friend or someone you hire, having another person authorized to post for you can also be helpful. Maybe it's a virtual assistant you hire. These people can be prepared to be your lifeline and post a blog or just an update to let your readers know what's going on and why you might not be posting in the near future.

3) Find the internet - As today continues with no internet service, I'm coming up with all the possibilities of internet services I can use free of charge. Examples are public libraries, friend or family in nearby areas, and the good ol' Bojangles fast food stop which offers free Wi-fi to patrons. I'm contemplating getting myself to one of these soon, because I hate to let my fans down and also realize that if the internet is out for days my email box will probably be overflowing with spam!

I've also considered the option of phones. I don't have the fancy Blackberry or iPhone quite yet, but I'm assuming these could also be lifesavers and allow people to blog over that wireless service. Granted, many of us find typing on a regulation size keyboard easier than the tiny ones that come with a phone. There may be ways to upload text from your computer to the phone/PDA so keep that in mind as another alternative.

It's times like these that truly put you to the test and can make or break your business. Folks, my best blogging advice is to always be prepared as best you can when disaster strikes. Always have a plan so that your blogging business can "weather the storm" and keep on going, and your readers will stay with you.

Here's to your success,
The Monetizer