Stay Away from the MLM BS Kids

People who should know better always seem to fall for these MLM scams. No matter what "product" is being sold or the type of pay "matrix" when it comes down to it all this garbage follows the same script. We mentioned Amway failures before, but there are many opportunities just as bad or worse. MLM by any other name still smells like shit.

What I really hate is there really ARE legit ways to Make Money at Home on the Internet. But most people are uninformed or just plain lazy. No one wants to do any actual work but everyone wants a "business." It's too bad that so many people would rather ripoff people and even scam their family than put in some time and effort doing something productive.

Let me give an example by comparing 2 Home Business Opportunities. I would think this one is a no-brainer but I guess I am wrong.

Opportunity 1:
No fees; $0 to join
Get paid commissions on sales of actual services
Allowed to use competitive vendors/programs to offer the best deals
Your market is the world- serve millions through online or offline marketing
No need or pressure to recruit other agents- Compensation based on your efforts
Commission is very high- either a very high residual or % or high double digit spiff

Opportunity 2:

Pay $500 to join
Get paid commissions mostly on recruiting, services are secondary
Has one offering, no competition on quality or price
Prohibited from selling online or marketing in any way, can only sell to warm market
Only get paid anything significant if you talk SEVERAL people into parting with 500 bucks
Commission on services ( similar services to opp # 1) is pennies

Now do you know which one of these people seem more likely to choose?

Don't do it, kids.

Multiple Income Streams: Huge Key to Online Business Success!

For the past few months now, one of my huge focuses in my online businesses, has been to bring in multiple streams of income, so that there is always a security blanket, if one of my income streams are struck down for whatever reason. For years, I've worked on bringing in my income from my cell phone site, and that has done well, but as with anything, there are ups and downs, and nothing is totally 100% secure. If there was ever a roadblock or a change in search engine ranks for my phone site, I'd need something to fall back on....basically, you don't want all your eggs in 1 basket. This blog was one of the original ideas we had to expand out, and build some other sources of income, being that I'd seen a few other online business people blogging, and sharing their ideas on making money with blogs. Google Adsense was the first step, and pretty easy to do some research on the best ways to set up and utilize it. Then it was moving on to learning about affiliate sales. Basically seeing what's out there and related to your website or blog, then offering it to your readers for a % of sales in most cases. Finally in the last month, I've seen revenue come in from 4 different sources, with others building as well. So I've reached a small goal as far as the security of having 4 sources earning me income, now I just need to build them so the amounts are a nice big secure number. The whole idea here, as I stated, is to build different sources of income, so that you can afford any disaster that may happen to one of your sources, and be backed up by so many others, that you're never left in a tight spot, and your income is always protected. Also keep in mind, you don't want to spread yourself all over the place. If you start 1 thing, and it doesn't work in a month or less, don't jump to the next thing and drop the first. Sometimes building 1 stream can take a long time, but usually pays off in the end if you put in the work required. When you have 1 stream working for you, then may be the time to look at what else could be done. Once your rolling well, 5-6 sources paying you in the thousands each month, will give you security, and a very nice monthly income, just be careful which programs you go with, and explore all options and narrow down to what works best for your site. I personally hope my current 4 streams, will soon be up to 5-6, and hopefully I'll be reporting back here that the streams have grown, and the stability I've been working at for the past few years may be reachable very soon.

Business Building, College, Marriage.....Time to Update!

Time to get this blog updates, as it's been neglected for awhile now, just because life has been very busy. As I've posted here before, I'm back in college, while balancing keeping all my online businesses running smoothly while growing at the same time, and I even got a week long marriage and honeymoon in there! The base of making it all happen was the college decision. Basically, I run my websites in hopes of making money....college grants and loans are there for the taking, and that money will help you go to school and get educated in your field (mine being e-commerce of course,) so why the hell would you not take the free money, get the education, and just run full speed from there. You're getting paid to get educated, which only helps you do more and make more down the line. Anyone who says free college money is for losers, must just enjoy making life harder on them self. The extra cash from school has helped greatly while I continue to work towards building my streams of income from online business. School does take up some time that could normally be used working on directory submitting, blogging, etc., but I've also noticed that by not having all that free time, I tend to think up a LOT more ideas about things I need to do or could do. Many times I'll have assignments due, and I'll just brainstorm what I'd do on a blog or something if I had that time free. Then when I do find some free time from school, I get the blog post up, so things have been productive on all fronts. I'm hoping when school is done, I can be more productive and get a lot more things done.

One major change that I haven't been a part of as far as "hands on" goes, but does affect me, and I've enjoyed watching, is the transformation/merger of Cognigen, the company I've been a member of for years, and which the company that brings together all the telecom services I offer, to Commission River. The new management team has come along, and brought a ton of much needed updates and improvements, which has given me a much needed boost to once again dedicate more time to working on selling more telecom services. Cognigen has always been a reliable company that always paid and I never had to question the integrity of the company. It simply had become outdated and behind the times. I think in order to keep selling agents happy, the company has to give us the latest tools, and show them they really want to help them succeed, which is exactly what the new team is doing. Luckily, I had the patience to learn about Cognigen, and was lucky enough to find some people already in Cognigen, who were willing to help and get me going. Once I was in, it was hard to get someone else in the company, and have to explain everything to them, without a whole lot of tools or references from the company. I think Commission River will not only help new agents understand how to get started, but will also deliver everything that veteran agents need to promote the products, and make the sales. I've had my cell phone site now for a few years, but this change in management, and their motivation for the company, has me wanting to work more and expand out with our VOIP services, and eventually our new service, which is credit card ordering and comparison. With all this going on, I'm hoping to get some free time to update this blog more, and keep a record of my progression, as I now have a few streams of income finally coming in, so all the working and waiting is slowly showing some pay off, so with patience and even more hard work, the progression I've made in a few months, will soon start snowballing into something bigger.

BlogRush doesn't like us anymore, do they still like you?

Well about a month or so ago, blogrush hit the scene, and spread like wildfire across almost every blog i came across. Great idea, bring more people to everyones blogs so we all benefit, awesome, we're always cool with that. After awhile, it was apparent that they were overloaded with new members signing up, spammers of course joining in, so they had to get things cleaned up. At first they were rolling out more features like a better selection of colors for their widget and such, cool, integrating colors is great. Next up they talked about TONS of new categories coming our way, good deal, we can pin point what section our blog should be in even better. THEN the big one, they were doing a massive clean up, totally MANUAL reviews of sites, etc. Welll that sounded great, cheaters and scammers suck and make it harder for those of us who bust ass because we have to, and because we can't afford to have our shit shut down and lose it all. Anyway, Blogrush's big cleanup hit, and it seems like a LOT of people, (including us) got left out in the cold. Now it's fine if certain blogs were kept out due to a violation of their terms or something, but we run a variety of blogs from this one, to cell phone news, to reality TV, to an entertainment site, and not 1 of them has been approved. It would also be nice if they gave us a REASON for not being approved, other than "You're not approved." I've read some places saying that money making blogs were hit, well this blog is just a record of what we're doing to make money, a business journal if you will, so we really don't know what's going on with this new strict stuff. Either way, we had Blog Rush on all of our blogs, and were looking forward to seeing it help us even more, but who knows if blogrush is going to keep all of us out, or if they will realize that they might be going overboard in the strict department. Odd thing about all this is, we received an email from BlogRush saying we were IN....but then upon logging in to blogrush.com, all our blogs show up as not approved. So who knows what is going on, but hopefully it can be fixed and it can still be a helpful program!

BlogRush.com, One Step Closer to the Traffic We Need to Our Blogs?

As some of you have read before, I enjoy learning about the various ways that other people are making money on the net, either with web sites or blogs. These days I mainly check out Shoemoney.com and Johnchow.com....2 of the biggest money makers on the net. So when I hear both of these guys endorse something, I know its at least worth me looking into it. Some, or actually a lot of the programs they use are strictly meant for the big time sites and blogs that are pulling in hundreds of thousands of visitors, but a few weeks back I read about BlogRush.com on JohnChow.com in passing, and didn't give it much thought. Then after seeing that ShoeMoney had also mentioned it, I gave it a look. Turns out the program is free, easy to install, and is all about bringing bloggers traffic, and traffic means money, so of course that grabbed my interest. Basically you sign up, which takes no time, pick your category, and that's really about it. You install their widget on your blog, and you're done. The widget shows headlines from other blogs in your category, and thus your headlines show on other peoples blogs. You earn credits each time your blog is viewed, and credits mean your headlines get shown more and more on other peoples blogs. Also if people sign up for blogrush via the widget on your blog, they will be "under" you, and they will also earn you credits for more views to your blog. All this basically means that it's set up to bring your blog the most traffic possible. All this seems like a great program, and after reading about the recent work they're doing on it to improve it even more, such as adding more widget colors, adding more categories to put your blog in, and manual approval which will weed out spammers and blogs that are trying to cheat the system, the people behind blogrush seem to be all about keeping everyone informed, and listening to what the members want. I'm looking forward to see what this program can really do, once its been going for a good while and they've added all the features and fixes that they want to have going. If your interested in checking it out, just look at the blogrush widget on the right, and click on the "Add Your Blog Posts Free" to sign up.

Making Money with Blogs to Build Income. Learning Adsense, Drawing Traffic, and More!

Since things aren't exactly explosive on the Google front for my cell phone site right now compared to a couple of months ago, and since Google really can't be controlled, and can pick you up and drop you as it pleases, I've been working more with the few blogs I own, including this one. Along the way, I've come across blog mogul sites like JohnChow.com and ShoeMoney.com, which are the top dogs who have worked their way to the very top of the online money making world, and their blogs are a major part of that. When I first started blogging, I created a blog for my cell phone site, and it was basically to aid my main site by writing content about cell phones, and linking to the phone order pages on my main site. Since then I've opened a few more blogs and have invited some others to blog on a couple of them, covering various topics like entertainment and reality TV. Then I opened this blog with G.C. basically to record our path to making it in the online business world. So with all this going down, we've picked up so many different aspects of making money online, and doing it with various sources of income. Blogging itself has turned out to be one of the biggest potential money makers out there. Of course, this sounds like the easiest thing in the world, you do blogs, you make money, bam! Of course there is the part about learning adsense and how to maximize it, how to get incoming links to your blog and why, getting your blog seen in the first place, etc. etc. For me it's one of those things where you can see the big picture (that seems to be a trend with most businesses I'm involved with), but you can also see the long long road ahead, and what has to be done. I myself wrote a blog awhile back about doing the work or never making it, and today I ran across a good blog by rkelley on ShoeMoney's site, about getting off your ass and working. The article basically puts the point across of just how hard is it to actually make money with blogs and only the few who actually put major effort in will ever make it. I've spent a descent amount of time between my cell phone site and college classes trying to learn anything I can about making some more money with the blogs to make ends meet. Of course Google Adsense is the most popular way to get some income coming in from your blog. I've recently taken a look at Joel Comm's Adsense-Secrets.com, which has some great tips on learning about placing ads, color schemes, and a lot of other aspects that are big factors in making money with Adsense. I'm really hoping the blogs can bring in some more money with some time and good content, and with all this potential, who knows how big things can get. I know there are bigger programs out there like Kontera and ReviewMe which can also big money makers once blogs get to a certain level of traffic on a monthly basis. Here's hoping that this will be one of the blogs that will one day have floods of traffic and I can sit here and blog about successful blog building, and share my tips on what I've learned in making money with blogs.

Going Back to College to Improve My Online Business...Finally Some Direction in College!

Last week I returned to college (via online courses) for the first time since 2002. I graduated high school in 1999, then took a year off, and started community college in 2000. At the time, I had no clue why I was going other than "college is good," therefore i just went and took basic classes, with 0 actual plan in mind. I surprised myself by getting an A in English 1, (prob the first A I'd gotten in a class since the early 90's) and did pretty average in the other classes like History 1, and a class in Microsoft Excel which I took just because I had a mild knowledge of the program from learning it in high school, so i signed up to take that class online. I took a full 12 hours in the first semester, then dwindled down as time went on, until I took time off again in 2002 due to burnout. I was just going and taking classes, with no degree in mind other than just something general, and I was also involved in the wrestling business at the time as a referee and manager, so weekends had distracted with the travel, doing shows, after parties, etc. My focus was off, and I knew if I kept going, I'd blow more money and get a less than stellar grade in more random classes, nothing really clicked, so i just "took time off" again.

Anyway, looking back to 1999, that was the time i started noticing the idea of "Making Money Online." I've already stated here in past blogs about my experiences with some companies, and I've also talked about my current telecom business, and my various other projects such as making money blogging, etc. I've been fairly successful with these ventures, but after some time, I started thinking about more and more ways to enhance what I already knew and was working with. My fiance began taking classes last summer for the first time, and I'd been helping her learn about all the different financial aid that was out there and ways to obtain it. After seeing how well the financial aid system is set up at our county college, and then stumbling across the E-Commerce certification that the school offers, I finally saw the opportunity to enhance what I was already going with my business online. I could finally take classes that go hand in hand with the things I do daily with my website, blogs, etc. Talk about a difference! 7 years ago I was bored to death with random classes, and now I'm taking Marketing and web page design classes which will enhance, and even teach me totally new things that I can apply, and see results with in my now chosen "Career" of working for myself, on my own time. The schedule for online classes are great, and very laid back, more my style.

For anyone who is working online, or has a certain interest they want to enhance, I'd definitely recommend finding out about financial aid at your closest school. Not only are you enhancing what you're doing or learning something new, but the government will even pay for it as long as your not already banking at a current job. There are even more opportunities out there with loans on top of grants if needed. This was an awesome opportunity for me to jump on in my transitional period of dropping my shitty unreliable day job to totally focusing on my own company, which will now eventually be backed up with a college education. It's an investment I couldn't afford to not take.