Posted Monday, June 9, 2008 by momscashblog |
For some new bloggers and blogger’s to be, the issue about WordPress.com and WordPress.org can be quite confusing. Many people have started a blog using WordPress only to find they cannot monetize their blogs with ads because they are using WordPress.com and not WordPress.org. I’ve gotten some e-mails from a few bloggers who used MCB’s tutorial and went to WordPress.com for help and received the wrong information. Luckily I knew what the problem was because I did the same thing when I first started. So I’ll explain the two versions as best I can.
WordPress is an open source blogging software that is used by most blogs and a lot of websites on the internet. Open source means the software is “open” or free to anyone who wants to use it to run a blog or website. It’s a blogging software that is easy to use because it takes care of the HTML coding for you. However, if you’re into coding, that’s even better because you can use coding as little or as much as you like. There are two versions of WordPress (three, if you count the MultiUser version but that’s used by the larger websites who host blogs under them). The software works pretty much the same in both versions, but there are some differences in how you use your blog.
WordPress.com is “hosted by WordPress” and it is completely free. You do not need to find hosting. If you sign up with WordPress.com you will be in a WordPress Blog Community under the umbrella of WordPress.com. This is mainly used by serious “web loggers” and you can make your blog private to only your friends and family if you wish. (more…)
Posted Saturday, June 7, 2008 by momscashblog |
I don’t know about you, but I’ve always been hesitant every time I went to use my credit card number online. There have been many times that I wouldn’t buy something I wanted, just because I wasn’t sure if the site was safe or not. Years ago, I heard about virtual cards but didn’t know how they worked and I never got around to trying it. Now I’m using virtual credit cards and I don’t worry about anyone taking my credit card information. I feel much better making online purchases and I wish I’d done this years ago.
A virtual credit card can only be made from financial institutions who use ShopSafe. The ones I found who use it are Bank of America, MBNA, Citibank, and Discover. They are sometimes called “single use numbers”, “substitutes” or “controlled payment numers”. You can also have one made thru PayPal, but I’ve never done it with them, I’m sure it works pretty much the same way.
I just log into my bank or credit card company, go to the ShopSafe link, plug in my own expiration date and spending limit, and make my purchase online. It keeps your real numbers and information safe from hackers and fraudulent sellers by giving you a new temporary 16 digit card. No one can find your real numbers when you use these online cards. If anyone hacks into the company you bought from, the hackers cannot use your numbers. If they try to make a transaction the bank will reject it.
With credit card theft you only pay the first $50. so that is no biggie but it is a hassle. The worst thing is that if a hacker finds your real credit card numbers and matches it to some of your other information (which is easy for them to do), it can easily turn into indentity theft and that can take years to straighten out… if ever. So if you worry about using your credit card for online purchases, you really should try using a virtual credit card.
An added bonus is that I tend to buy less things because I know I have to go and get a virtual card. That keeps me from making “impulse buys” so for me, it’s a money saver.
Posted Wednesday, June 4, 2008 by momscashblog |
I found a really great tool that helps you find out which products sell well on eBay. I’m sure some of you already know about it, but I didn’t … and I think it deserves mention. It’s www.terapeak.com and you have to pay about $19 a month to use it. I really think it would be worth it to use for one month if you’re looking to sell products on eBay. ( I don’t mean selling your Aunt’s Elvis bobblehead… I mean selling a lot of product.)
Terapeak lets you search an eBay item to find all kinds of data on how it sells. That’s a great tool to have because some products just don’t sell well on eBay, so why waste your time even trying. It doesn’t mean your product is not good, it just means it’s not worth selling on eBay. It’s good to know these things before you get in too deep and spend a lot of money trying to sell something at the wrong place.
It give you the listing fees, items a seller has, and the success rate on a daily, monthly, or 90 day basis. When you search with something like this, always look for top sellers on eBay… don’t just look at the average price because it’s usually wrong. I recommend looking for the top 4-6 sellers to see what the product sold for. That’s the best way to get the right price on eBay and/or to know if you can compete easily enough.
You can also check out the “Hot Products” on eBay. This is good stuff to know if you don’t have a product yet, but know you want to sell something. You could choose something to sell from the Hot Products and start your venture from there. Of course there are hot products in many different categories, so check around.
I like that idea and to me it would be worth using it to find out what sells the best on eBay right from the start. I would get Terapeak for only a month and get all the information I could from te site in that one month. I would also get Robert Cyr’s book “Liquidation Sources Revealed” at http://www.thecloseoutindustry.com under Increase eBay Profits to find out more about liquidation, if I were going to take that route.
Let MomsCashBlog know if there’s another way to find this information easily without using Terapeak. I’ve never sold anything on eBay, but I’ve been a buyer many times! This looked like a good tool to use for sellers or anyone thinking about selling, but you might have something else to share with us.
Posted Monday, June 2, 2008 by momscashblog |
A fun way to make money online is buying and selling domain names. Most people think all the good domain names are taken, so “domaining” isn’t such a hot topic as it used to be. But the truth is, selling names is becoming even more profitable than ever and can only get better. The supply of good names is getting low, and the demand is increasing as new businesses and products crop up every day. It used to be that only the very big companies bought names, but now more people are willing to pay to get what they want.
The short one word names are thought to be the best and most are taken. (Sex.com sold for a record $12 million!) But there are still some uncommon words that haven’t been used, and it’s fun finding them or making them up. Google and Yahoo were not common household words until they hit the internet. Just get out a dictionary and plug a few words into the field to see what’s available. Two and three words strung together can have more meaning than just one word. They can be catchy and easier to remember than some one word names.
Always buy dot.com names because dot.org, dot.net, and the other dots are not as valuable as dot.com. To sell your names you might want a broker, so Google “domain name broker” (but you don’t really need one because if someone wants to buy your name, you will be contacted). Sedo.com, websitebroker.com, dotster.com and www.registernames.com are all good brokers but you have to find the best deal. Type the name you want into the field and it will say if it’s “available” or “make an offer”. If it’s available, buy it! If it says “make an offer, you can just move on to your next name, or if you think the name is valuable and you want to gamble on it, then become a buyer and make that offer and plan to resell.
Think of new ventures, globally or just within your state or community. One of my friends just sold a domain name for $1,600 in less than 6 months! When he heard that a new mall was being built in his city, he ran to his computer and bought the name. Within a few months, a broker told him someone wanted to buy the name. It’s hard to believe the mall owners didn’t register their name on the web before building the mall, but it happens all the time.
Domain names are a good investment and they don’t cost much (less than $15 each!). But as with any investment, the more you have, the better the chances of making money. Get in on it now, while there’s still some left. One of these days, everyone will have to “make an offer” to get a good webname and you could hit it big by selling yours.
Posted Friday, May 30, 2008 by momscashblog |
In my last post I talked about emotional motivators and gave a list of the ones most commonly used in marketing. Now I will let you know how I’ve used motivators on MomsCashBlog, and how well they worked for me. I’ve only been here a month, but I’ve already seen great results from using them a few times.
The emotional motivator that I chose to use was saving. I know, I know… on the list, saving is pretty boring compared to power, money, romance, sex*, and the desire to belong, but since this is a make money blog, “saving” is to be expected. Saving is part of the making money process. This month on MCB, the “Discount Codes” post was the one that brought in the most new traffic to my site and they pushed buttons and used my ads. The second most profitable post was “Free to All”. After that was the “Wii Coupon”. So, as you can see, the three top posts that brought new traffic in and made money were all about “saving.”
Of course “saving” is not an emotion, but neither is power, money, romance, or sex, etc. They are motivators which means they speak to us emotionally and can make us take action. Just saying the word “saving” might not conjur up an emotion in another person, but using the concept of saving either directly, or indirectly, can attract people to your blog. Think of the law of attraction… only you are purposely attracting people with certain words that hit their emotions.
Retailers use “saving” motivators all the time to get people to buy, or to attract new customers. Everyone likes to get a deal, and no one wants to pay top dollar for something when they don’t have to. But in retail you take a loss when you do this because that savings comes from your own pocket!! You have to give a discount, or give something away (and YOU pay for it) just to attract new business and bring people in with retail. But it works.
Borrow a Motivator
In my top money making posts, I provided discounts (savings) but I didn’t have to take a loss in doing so. Nor did I have a product to discount. I found other sites that had the “saving”, formed a post around it, and gave out information about discounts that someone else had… and I reaped the rewards. I didn’t take anything from those who have the discounts (saving). In fact, I helped them get the word out to people who did not know about that site. It’s a win-win-situation. (more…)
Posted Tuesday, May 27, 2008 by momscashblog |
Technology is very important and without it we wouldn’t be here on the internet. It can also be very helpful in steering traffic our way… but technology can only take us so far with our blogs. We’re dealing with “people” and unless we turn into robots, it takes the human touch to connect with others. The thing about technology is the better it gets, the less you need to know about it! All you have to do is let those smart programmers do the work, while you sit back and worry about sales and marketing.
Those who work in marketing say most of the same basic principals used in “offline marketing” apply to “onlne marketing”. Whether marketing offline or online, the most important marketing tool is appealing to the emotions of your viewers. Emotions are strong… they motivate us to want certain things, and to do whatever it takes to get them. If you have a blog, these offline/online marketing tips can be very useful to you. The internet has more potential for selling an emotion than offline marketing ever had for three basic reasons:
1. it is practically free!! All you need to invest is the cost of a site. (pennies a day)
2. it is text driven… and the easiest, quickest way to appeal to a person’s emotions is thru words.
3. it is easy for people to find what they want, they search for the words.
We usually think of “love” as the strongest emotion and it is a very powerful one that can be used in marketing. That doesn’t mean you have to make people love you to buy from you, but that would work also !(lol) It means you could sell the idea of “love”, or the idea that one will feel loved if they do what you say, or have what you’re selling. It’s done every day on the internet with matchmaking sites, relationship sites, social networking sites, relationship advice columns, relationship E-books, or “How to Catch a Man or Woman” E-books, even astrology and psychic sites are all catering to the emotion of love. And it’s a HUGE moneymaker on the internet (one of the biggest), because they are selling love and that speaks to a human’s most basic emotion of happiness, or “pleasure”. (more…)
Posted Saturday, May 24, 2008 by momscashblog |
You’ve got 3 days off, so why don’t you put up your website NOW. Just use MomsCashBlog’s Free Blog Tutorial and you can have your own website up and ready to go before the weekend is done. It won’t even use up the whole weekend because some say the tutorial takes less than an hour!! (not counting the waiting period for set up….which is ” break time”.) You can do it yourself with the easy step-by-step instructions.
Take a look at the Blog Tutorial and make some decisions of about what you want to name your website. You can even play around and put some names in at Step One to make up names and see if YOUR web domain name is available. There are a lot of websites out there so the availability of good names is getting scarce. It’s a good idea to register your domain name NOW! If you don’t have time to finish the whole tutorial in one sitting, you should at least choose your domain name and buy it before someone else gets to it first. Later, when you have more time, you can come back to the tutorial and continue with Step Two and then on to Step Three…and BAM!!…you’ve got your own website registered on the internet! Easy as One, Two, Three!
But the tutorial doesn’t stop there! Steps Four and Five get you going on WordPress, the most widely used blogging/website program on the internet. The Blog Tutorial continues to instruct you on how to set your site up, choose a theme (the look and design), post article, and make space for your ads and widgets!
Remember, with this tutorial you don’t have to do it all at once. You can start the process today and come back to it whenever you choose. Use the whole weekend to leisurely set up your site….take a day, take just half a day, or you can even do it in an hour, if you’re fast on the keyboard.
Fast or Slow…Do it at Your own pace! And once you have your own blog or website, that’s when the fun begins. Come back to MomsCashBlog and you can even make some extra cash by placing ads on your website! Take a look at the Free Tutorial and see just how easy it is to put up a website!
Happy Memorial Day……Support our Troops!!!
