Personal Finance Daily

God articles from MarketWATCH on their personal finance daily column. A good feed for finance bloggers around the world. Here is a bit from it,  

There are strategies you can adopt to propel you from ignorant beginner to smart novice. For one, you can approach the task of finding a winning horse just as you would finding a winning stock-market investment: Look for undiscovered value in horses with high odds. That’s what one expert tells personal-finance writer Amy Hoak in her Sports Watch column today. Read her column for seven tips on making a better Kentucky Derby bet, and don’t miss Steve Kerch’s story on why two favorites for Saturday’s race will have to buck a long-running trend to win. Plus don’t miss our piece on how to invest in real estate through your IRA, and find out what effect consumers online reviews are having on restaurants, all on today’s Personal Finance pages.

SOURCE = MARKETWATCH 

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Practical Guide To Total Financial Freedom, Volumes 1,2,3,4,5 have become hot items in the financial education arena of late. Samuel Blankson wrote the so-called, "practical guide to total financial freedom volume sets" and he hit it out of the park on this one.
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Review of Brazen Careerist Review From IWTYTBR

Pluralistic ignorance is a fascinating concept in social psychology. It’s a phenomenon “which involves several members of a group who think that they have different perceptions, beliefs, or attitudes from the rest of the group” (more). For example, Prentice and Miller, two Princeton social psychologists, found that college students tend to think other students drink more than they actually do. Schroeder and Prentice noted that “the majority of students believe that their peers are uniformly more comfortable with campus [drinking] than they are.” This means that

“because everyone who disagrees behaves as if he or she agrees, all dissenting members think that the norm is endorsed by every group member but themselves. This in turn reinforces their willingness to conform to the group norm rather than express their disagreement. Because of pluralistic ignorance, people may conform to the perceived consensual opinion of a group, instead of thinking and acting on their own perceptions” (source)

I find this time and time again when I talk to my friends. People will say things like, “Everyone’s” earning $70,000/year when they graduate, so I should, too. Or obody lives with their parents so it would be embarrassing if I did. We often make decisions based on what we see of our friends, but we don’t see the bigger picture and realize the differences in internal attitudes and behaviors across individuals and groups. Pluralistic ignorance colors our decision-making and the worst part is, we don’t even know it.

That’s why I like the new book by Penelope Trunk, Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success. Penelope writes for the Boston Globe and Yahoo Finance (she’s covered me before), and she has an attitude. I mean that in a good way: Unlike so many books for young people, this one reads like a real person wrote it, not a damn robot. You can actually hear her in her writing. Now, she and I disagree about some career-related things, but she does a great job explaining her reasoning.

And her advice is good. She talks about issues we care about  living with our parents, getting our first job, negotiating salaries, starting a company, how to make ends meet but reassures us that the things we feel guilty about are actually very common (see my thoughts about young people and guilt here).

For example, she writes that Job-hopping in your early twenties is a great idea especially if you’re still sleeping at your parents house. After all, the point of this period in life is to find the right work for you. But if the job-hopping doesn’t stop by age thirty, the feeling of instability intensifies to crisis. How many of your friends don’t know what they want to do, but feel pressured to pick one single job and focus on it?

I know plenty. I also know plenty of friends who don’t know what they want to do, so they go back to grad school. Penelope shows a better way to think that decision.

That’s what’s interesting about the book: It includes not only advice on how to think about large, ambiguous topics like going back to grad school and office politics, but also includes tactical advice that’s actually good. When it comes to creating your resume, for instance, she writes,

She writes excellent tactical advice for building your cover letter, negotiating your salary, writing a resume that stands out (Ditch the line about references on request. It’s implied. Of course if someone wants a reference, you will give one).

But more than tactical advice, she uses research from places like Harvard Business School not just her personal opinions to remind us not to feel guilty about what we’re doing. For instance, did you know that 50% of the Class of 2003 was still living at home 3 years later?

This book reminds me to stop fighting against the same things that everyone else my age is struggling with. If I wanted to live at home so I can afford to take a low-paying job that I love, that chapter on living at home would be worth the book alone. In other words, stop worrying and feeling guilty about what other people think and focus on the important goals. The best thing a book can do is reassure us, refocus us, and then give us the tools to do more than we thought we could do. This book is a great start.

Brazen Careerist isn’t perfect, of course. It’s overly list-y for my tastes, reading in some parts like a Top 10 Reasons to blog post. Also, the book is itself a bit unfocused, with points on starting your own business, perfecting your resume, working with your manager, optimizing your personal life, and doing yoga (?). But the number of insights I got from the book made up for it.

The book is good. So is the blog. And Penelope is a great woman with tons of interesting thoughts about career issues.

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Practical Guide To Total Financial Freedom, Volumes 1,2,3,4,5 have become hot items in the financial education arena of late. Samuel Blankson wrote the so-called, "practical guide to total financial freedom volume sets" and he hit it out of the park on this one.
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The Importance of Blog Leverage

The importance of a good blog can never under-stated in if you are in the business of making a living from Internet traffic. I suggest to all of those in that category to build a Wordpress blog and grow it up with fresh, quality content. When I say quality I mean spelling and grammer as well. It's no secret the the search engines see spelling and grammer when they spider in depth to learn about your online pages.

As you grow a quality blog, your Internet real estate becomes highly respected by the search engines and now you have some Internet leverage. Then you can introduce the web to your new sites and projects simply by creating a link from your high ranking blog to you new entity. Your "new entity" does not have to be an extremely powerful or "high quality" site to get the spider attention you desire.

This system work quite well so if you don't have Wordpress blog going yet, get going and start building one. Make the subject matter of the blog fairly general so that when you link to othere sites in the future, there will be some kind of relative subject matter. Also DON'T LINK BACK to your precious blog from your new sites. That is considered "cross linking" by some of the search engines and will get your domains banned. As long as you only link ONE-WAY to your sites and the sites are related to your blog there is no problem.

Kenny

Join The Money Traffic Group

For those of you who want some questions answered on how to make money online, please join our new Money Traffic Group. The link is here:
http://groups.google.com/group/moneytraffic

We'll be discussing Adsense income and of course HyperVRE. I'll be answering questions as quickly as possible.

Kenny

Case Study of Dennis The Newbie Affiliate

Submitted by Aaron Krall: if you would like a juicy-PR5-one-way-inbound link submit an original article by registering on Money Traffic. All articles are automatically approved and posted. If your article is offensive or spammy it will be deleted, so please make sure your article is money related and original. Thanks.

Dennis signed up for a super affiliate program and was ready to start making cash. His merchant paid out 66 dollars per commission, and calculated that with just 8 sales a week he would be making about $1,000 a month. He set up a Adwords campaign that would cost him $45 a month, wrote some articles and submitted them and waited for the money to start rolling in. Then he waited.......over a month later he ended up with three sales commissions. After adding and subtracting the numbers, he made just over 95 bucks total net profit.

This case may seem a little extreme, but it may not be as far fetched as you think. Most affiliates don't even get as far as Dennis! 99% of all affiliates barely make a living on the Internet while the other 1% are making a killing! What is the difference? Why do so many fail?

Well, what Dennis and the other 99% don't understand is that there is a lot more to affiliate success then just sending potential customers to an affiliates site. The next 6 steps will reveal some secrets of top affiliates. They are simple but their simplicity should not be overlooked. Follow them and you will succeed.

First, select an affiliate program that pays out a good commission. Anything less than $20 should not be considered. Then you should buy the product and use it. A personal, honest recommendation is very convincing and will help you in your credibility.

Make sure your affiliate program provides you with enough materials to help you succeed. Some affiliate programs will actually give you a re-brand able ebook to brand with your affiliate links that you can give away. Either way you will have to have some kind of free ebook or report to give away, so if your affiliate doesn't provide you with one you can buy one or make one yourself.

Now, you need to get an auto responder. This is how you will contact the list of people you will be creating, but don't worry I'll get to that. There are lot of auto responders out there, but http://doiop.com/aweber is the best, hands down. I would say more than half of all Internet marketers are using Aweber. You will also need to make some follow up emails but we'll get to that in a second.

Now set up your email follow up. It should be about 6-10 emails that reminds them about the report they downloaded, and introduces them to your affiliate program. For instance, you could say something like; Hey thanks for getting Top Ten Secrets of Super Affiliates! Before you read it, go get a copy of insert affiliate here before the price goes up. It will reveal all the secrets of the world's greatest affiliates.

Your emails should be short, but effective. Oh yeah, send them another freebie that they weren't expecting. They will love that, and it will increase their confidence in you and the chance they buy from you will increase!

The last step is to advertise for your free report or ebook. Article writing is the best way to do that for now. It's free, and until you get a website it's your only choice. In your article resource box, have your reader send a blank email to your auto responder to get your free report. Submit 3-4 articles a week and before you know it you'll have a list growing. It will take a while to build your list, but it will become invaluable to you.

There you have it. Using these simple steps you can make money with any affiliate program. Now go out there and get started! Don't get discouraged if you fail, the important thing is you go out there and do it. Here's to your success!

Aaron Krall brings you the: "Affiliate Money Machine". => How would you like to steal a proven step by step instant cash flow system that master affiliates use to fill their bank accounts with cash? Get your $67 Affiliate Money Machine now! Free for a limited time! Instant access here: http://www.truforyou.com/saw/specialoffer003.html

How Much Money Can An Adsense Niche Site Make?

When new-comers start trying to make money with Adsense niche sites they usually ask themselves one big question. HOW MUCH money do these sites make?

That depends on the category of the site, the nature of the content, the amount of content, originality of the content, and overall word count.

1) If the site is all about Insurance it will make more per click than a site all about tiddly winks.

2) If the content is completely original it will get more traffic and of course make more money.

3) If the site has more content it will usually make more money, as long as the article pages are not in a highly-competitive area.

4) If your site has a high overall word count then it will beat out more competition. The search alogs count how many different words are used throughout your site. This IS very important so try to use allot of different words through out your site.

Linking of course goes without saying......get lots of on-topic links inbound.

Kenny

YPN or Adsense

It's a question that comes up often for online marketers. Should I use YPN or Adsense for textual advertising?

There's advantages and disadvantages depending on what your website subject and category is. If you have web content that's related to products and services that are extremely competitive, you will likely be fine using YPN. You may even make more money with YPN.

But; if your web site or blog content is related to an extremely uncommon subject, product, or service, you will have trouble making as much money with YPN as you made (or make) with Adsense clicks. The reason is that the YPN network doesn't have as many advertisers yet and there is'nt enough ads to display on "niche sites". I thihk this will change in time, but for now that's the jist of it. Extreme niche sites displaying YPN ads will have low click through percentages and low earnings overall.

My approach is to stay loyal to the companies that have been consistent paying their commission on time. Some Internet marketers turn to YPN if they've lost their Adsense account for some reason or other.

One BIG con to YPN is if you're a web publisher that lives outside the United States. You have to some how get a U.S. tax identification in order to be paid. I'm hopeful that the Yahoo! Publishing Network (YPN) will soon allow international publishers to take part in their advertising model.

Kenny