Millionaire: Earn money, control cash, become a millionaire

Today's Tip

2010-03-16T22:36:00.001+13:00

Go out and have fun. You'll never know what you'll learn from people out there.

One year later...

2010-02-08T16:28:00.006+13:00

Happy New Year! Oh its already February. Lol. Did you guys notice something? My last post was on March 4, 2009 which is about a year ago. So can I say that I'm a not-so-frequent blogger?

Okay now. One year has already past. How's my financial health? Not too bad. I may switch to another job very soon which grants me commissions on my sales. That's good aite?

How about my Adsense earning?

Hehe. I left this blog floating on internet for quite a while. Yet I still earning some money from it. How nice is that? I would say "It is very nice indeed!".

How much do I earn from Adsense?

Not too much but I'm still happy with the figure if compared to my 'hardwork' - blogging every year.

So boys, keep blogging 'cause you earn nothing if you stand/sit/lay down still.

p/s: Oh forgot to mention that I have new blog. It's about my daily cooking activities which called Dad in Kitchen. Subscribe it in your RSS reader as I'll cook and update almost everyday!

A&W Root Beer Float: 1 = 2

2009-03-04T17:59:00.006+13:00

Recently, I went to A&W to have lunch with my wife. Actually, that was my first time having any meals at A&W. The burger is quite okay, although it's not the best burger I ever had. Usually, I will only buy their Root Beer Float. I was once addicted to this thing that I buy it almost everyday.

Anyway, during my lunch that day, we only buy one Float and one Regular Root Beer. The regular one is for me although I love the Float so much. Quite strange eh?

Do you notice that the difference between Float and regular is around RM 1.00? That's crazy! RM 1 for one scoop of ice cream? Are you kidding me?

So what I did was:

Buy one Float and one Regular
Scoop half of the ice cream from the Float
Put it in the regular
Stir
Tada! 2 Floats!

And just how much do I save? A LOT! (If I keep doing this on every visit to A&W)

Happy saving boys!

Simple footer for blogger - how to make one

2009-03-01T11:08:00.010+13:00

I just change my layout into a new design, which is simpler than before. As a result, I've lost the changes that I made before like feedburner button, statistic counter, adsense and footer. I managed to get these stuff done yesterday but a simple footer seems to be the hardest one. Other stuff like feedburner button and statistic counter has their own website which shows us on how to put the code in. So, I have to come out with my own creation. So, are you ready to make one for your blogger blog? Ok let get started. It's not as hard as you think. Just follow the steps below and it will be done in seconds!

Log in to blogger account. Forgot your password? Just click on the link provided.
Look for the 'Layout' tab and then 'Edit HTML'. No 3 from the left hand side.
Using your keyboard, press 'Ctrl+F' to open the 'find' dialog box.
Type in 'footer-wrapper'
Type this according to the picture below (click on the image)
Click 'save template' and view your blog. It should look something like this:
Done!

Try it dude! It's so easy. No need to thank me at all, but a comment will be much appreciated :)

I'm back! (again)

2009-02-27T20:46:00.005+13:00

Hi dudes. So sorry for 'dumping' this great blog for so long. Actually, I just moved into my own house and plugged in the internet connection. So now, here I am. Starting to write this blog again.

Lots of stuff happening during my journey to become the next millionaire. It was back in 2006 when I was starting to realize that I have to have a dream which is........ to become a millionaire! I must say that it is not an easy way to climb up there. Looking back at this blog, it reminds me on how passionate I was when I wrote the first entry in this blog.

Then I've gone through a long journey, which takes me to heaven and hell (sort of). I still remember when my Adsense application was kicked out by a Google dude because of some violation on their terms and conditions. Since then, I become more cautious on what I write. But that doesn't mean that my freedom of speech is violated! I'll write everything in here as honest as possible. No worries!

Besides blogging about how to blog, I've wrote a few things about personal finance and how to make money online. You can view these categories in the sidebar (look at your right hand side please!)

Oh, before I forget. I've closed down my paid website for the time being as I feel it is good enough to just writing in this free blog.

Keep in touch guys. Leave your comments, arguments or maybe hatred in my blog. I won't delete it! And for all my fellow feedburner subscribers, thanks for the love!

Cheers, Raja

New Website

2008-02-11T22:32:00.000+13:00

Hi guys. Its been a long time since I write something on this blog. Actualy, I was busy studying for my final year in Building Science Degree. Now, I have more time to write posts.

Starting from last month, I began to become more serious in making a website. Right now, I already have my own domain name on my paid server and I'm really satisfied with that.

Do visit my new website at http://lymeus.com/

Thanks for your support.

End of month- Perfect time for shopping

2006-06-06T12:21:00.000+12:00

Some of you might think like “why I always don’t have enough money in my bank account?”. The answer is so simple. Because you don’t control your spending wisely. Remember that I have talked about how to spend your money wisely before? So, today I want to talk about why every end of month is the perfect time for shopping.

Why?

Simple. Because if you spend your money at the end of month, you may overspend and don’t have enough money for the rest of the month which is for about 2 or 3 days. Then, you will top up your money again using your salary, earnings from dividend or what so ever.

But, imagine if you spend your money at the beginning of the month, you will have to suffer for the rest of the month (maybe 2 or 3 weeks!). I’m talking about the big spending here; not the small one like buying bread or ice cream.

How?

You will have to distinguish between the needs and desired things. Basically, you have to fulfill your needs first. For example foods, school items etc. The desired things are like expensive clothing, new shoes etc. which you don’t really need them.

These desired things are the one that you only buy at the end of the month. And of course if you have some extra money!

Give it a try and see what will happen to your current account. I’m sure you will feel the difference after this!

Categories: Financial planning

Why high paying keyword is important

2006-05-28T08:20:00.000+12:00

Today, I was stunned when I found out that I got a click for my Google AdSense; it’s worth of almost $2 a click! Maybe it is not a new thing to you but it is very rare for me to receive such a high paying keywords click. Then, I try to find out on how I can maintain this achievement.

High paying keywords

Basically, you can find those high paying keywords very easily nowadays. There are lots of sites that offer low prices for helping you to get these keywords. These are some of them:- - keywordsexplosion.com - wordtracker.com

But, just having the high paying keywords is not enough because you have to optimize your sites so that the accurate ads will appear.

Optimizing

Basically, start to write an article spontaneously. Only after you have finished writing, then you read back and try to slot in the high paying keywords that you get from keywords explosion or wordtracker. By doing this, you can avoid making the article to look like you just want to get the money from it. And the article’s content will look more related to one another.

Bring down the crowd

As I always said, visitor’s flow is really important. You can’t earn money from high paying keyword and great articles if there is no one who will click on the ads. So, here is the free search engine optimizer that can do that for you (click here - open in a new window). The link will bring you to my personal review about the search engine optimizer. I personally am using it until now. So, have a good look and don’t forget to give it a try.

Categories: Blogging

More details on savings account

2006-05-23T14:21:00.000+12:00

Before, I was talked about the importance of savings account and personal financial budgeting. I also have mentioned that I will go for a vacation during this coming semester break. But, after I read the article again, I realized that I forgot one thing; to divide my savings. This is really important. So, today, I will share with you about this matter.

Why does it matter?

Imagine if I use all of my savings for my vacation and suddenly something bad happen to me. I have a friend who has his bag stolen while on a vacation. He lost quite large amount of money and the most important is, his passport. So, to avoid this thing, I have to put aside some amount of savings for emergency use.

What about if I suddenly fell sick during that time? This has to be considered too. So, here we go; some more money for medical emergency. Since I am not fully recovered from high fever, I think this money is really important. Moreover, I am a heavy smoker. So, I know the consequences of my ‘bad habit’.

How much money should I save?

This actually depends on you. If you have more problem than mine, than you should have more sections in your savings account. For example, savings for kids, family, home repayments, mortgage, debt consolidation etc. Since I am a student and does not have so many liabilities, my savings does not have to have so many sections.

So, the more liabilities you have, and the more plans you have for your future, the more sections of savings you need.

When should I do this?

As soon as possible. I assume that you don’t like to have no money when facing the unwanted occurrences, so that is why I recommend you to start dividing your savings as soon as possible.

P.S. Please tell you love one about this. Don’t let them facing emergency without enough money in their back. And this 5 star book might help you on how to do a better savings:The Insider's Guide to Saving Money

Categories: Financial planning

Increase page rank and visibility by using backlinks

2006-05-18T12:48:00.001+12:00

How to increase your page rank by using backlinks? How to make your site more visible in search engines? Maybe you have seen lots of blogs that have long lists of links, but don’t receive a good page rank or rank high up in search engines. This is because they don’t study the right way to use backlinks. So today, I will share with you the right way to use backlinks to increase your page rank and make your blog ranked higher in search engines.

Try to get linked by these type of sites:-

1. Web site that has a high page rank. PR of 5 or 4 is a good enough for start

2. Older web site. Usually, they are more establish and thus, have a high page rank.

3. Web site that shows your link at the homepage. Main page usually has higher page rank than the page below it.

4. Web site that put your link high up on the page. This will make a search engine reads your link earlier and thus, more weight to the link.

5. Web site that features your link in their content. This will give you 2 benefits:- higher percentage of click-through and a good page rank as well as higher ranking in search engines.

6. Same as for optimizing keywords, if the link to your blog is stressed (bold, italic etc), it will give more weight to your site

7. Web site that is related to yours. For example, I will rather get a backlink from a PR 3 money and finance web site than get a backlink from a PR 7 adult website. I don’t want my blog to be penalized for that.

8. Last but not least, get a link from a government web site. That is the most powerful one that I ever know.

Try these by yourself and watch your blog grows. Good luck!

Lyme L.

Categories: , Search engine optimization

Google Sitemap: Make your site index faster in Google

2006-05-16T09:13:00.000+12:00

Google Sitemap is not a new thing to a webmaster. It is a tool that helps you to tell Google every time you make some updates to your blog. I just used Google Sitemap a few weeks ago but today, I just realized the way to make Google index my blog faster. I just get a little frustrated because Google have to take about 4 or 5 days to crawl my blog. Then, with some effort, I looked around and read the help file from Google on how to make Google index my site faster.

Adding a Sitemap

The first step is adding a sitemap of your blog. This can be done in a few simple steps. Just follow this order:-

1. Go to this link https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/stats

2. In the box ‘add a site’, type in your blog’s URL. For example ‘http://i-want-to-be-a-millionaire.blogspot.com’. After that you should receive a conformation like this:- Your site has been added to your account. Verify your ownership to view detailed statistics and errors for it.

3. Click ‘Add a Sitemap’. Choose ‘Add General Web Sitemap' and check all the box. Fill in the sitemap URL with your atom.xml URL. Atom.xml is your blog’s URL followed by /atom.xml (for bloggers only. Others can try searching for Google sitemap generator by using the search box above). For example, ‘http://i-want-to-be-a-millionaire.blogspot.com/atom.xml’. Then, click ‘Add Web Sitemap’

4. Click ‘Verify’. Choose ‘Add a META tag’ under the ‘choose verification method’. Add the META tag generated according to the instruction given. Then, check the box ‘I’ve added the META tag ….’. Click Verify.

Ping Google sitemap

This step will help your site index faster in Google. It will notify Google any updates occurred in your blog. This is how you can do it:-

Type this in your browser navigation bar: www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=sitemap_url

For example: www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping? sitemap=http://i-want-to-be-a-millionaire.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Then, you will get a conformation like this:-

Sitemap Notification Received

Your Sitemap has been successfully added to our list of Sitemaps to crawl. If this is the first time you are notifying Google about this Sitemap, please add it via http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps so you can track its status. Please note that we do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear.

P.S. Do ping Google Sitemap every time you make an update to your blog. And please tell your friends about this blog if you find the content useful. Thanks!

Categories: Blogging, Search engine optimization

Fixed deposit and savings account

2006-05-14T08:42:00.000+12:00

I always ask myself, should I use fixed deposit or savings account? Like this month, I have about $2000 sitting in my savings account which gives 7.35% interest. If I put the money into a fixed deposit account for one full month, I can earn 7.4%. And I can earn 7.45% if I put the money for 3 months. So, finally I’ve decided to invest $1700 into the fixed deposit. These are some reasons of why I did this.

1. I don’t have any plan to spend that money in one month time. Since semester break is about a month ahead, I think it is better for me to earn money by doing nothing.

2. I don’t want to accidentally overspend my money since I need it for my semester break. I already have a plan for my break; a road trip across the North Island of New Zealand. So, it will prevent me from reaching my money before the time comes.

3. The interest rate is higher. That means more return to my investment. At the end of this month, I should get $10.48 of interest instead of $10.41 if I just save my money in the savings account. It is just a small difference, but for me every cents counts.

4. I’m not choosing 3-month fixed deposit as I don’t have enough back up money. It is important to have some back up money, just for the sake of emergency. Last year, I have experienced this. My grandmother suddenly fell sick and I have to go back to Malaysia as soon as possible. So, I have to buy the airplane ticket although it was the peak time for traveling.

I hope I can continue to save my money using the fixed deposit in the future. Maybe I will go for 3 months after this. For those of you who are planning to use fixed deposit, this are some tips for you:-

1. If you are planning to spend your money soon, don’t use fixed deposit. Savings account is better for you.

2. Make sure you have some money sitting in your saving account. Don’t put all your money into fixed deposit. It’s dangerous!

3. Choose the period that suits you. Don’t be fooled by high interest because higher interest usually applied to longer period of deposit.

4. Find a bank that offer the highest interest for fixed deposit (If possible). But, make sure that you know that bank’s background and history.

Good luck!

Categories: Financial, planning

AdBrite: Earn money from selling ad spaces

2006-05-12T00:05:00.000+12:00

Recently, I was looking for more sources of revenue for this blog. Since this blog has evolved and receive lots of visitors from day to day (please refer to my current Alexa ranking), I think it is a good time to experiment with something new. Then, I looked back at my previous sources of money. Finally, I decided to give AdBrite another try.

What is AdBrite?

If you still remember, I wrote about AdBrite not long time ago. You can view it here. But, it was just a brief explanation of AdBrite. Basically, AdBrite is the place where you sell some ad spaces from your blog. Then, advertiser will decide whether they want to advertise in your blog or not. Everything is done for you. You just have to wait for the money to knock on your door if someone buy your ad space.

Before I use AdSense for this blog, I was monetizing this blog by AdBrite. This was because I cannot apply for AdSense at that time due to some restricted content. After I’ve made some changes, then finally I got AdSense and applied it to this blog.

How much money will I earn from AdBrite?

It depends on you and your blog. You are the one who put the price for every ad displayed at your blog. If you are not so sure about the price, just refer to other publishers’ price and make some changes to suit your blog ads.

If you have a large traffic, let say about 500 unique visitors per day, then you should have a better bargain. Like this blog, I only have like 40 unique visitors per day. So, I can’t expect to sell an ad space for $10 a day.

Does AdBrite for you?

If you want to earn more money in addition to AdSense, then this is the answer. Just set it to non-contextual, then you should be fine. If not, you may face a cancellation of AdSense account.

Just be patient because you cannot expect to have your ad space sold tomorrow, unless you have a really famous blog.

I will come up with some tips for AdBrite in the future. So, do come back for updates.

P.S. If you are interested to advertise your link at this blog, just click on this link or the link ‘Your Ad Here’ at the side bar. Hurry up while the price is still very cheap!

Categories: Blogging

New referral programs from Google

2006-05-11T00:32:00.000+12:00

Early this month, Google has launched two new referral programs; Google Pack and Picasa. Now, you will have more sources of revenue in addition to AdSense, AdWords and Firefox referral programs. So, let’s take a closer look at Google Pack and Picasa; what are they all about.

Google Pack

Google Pack is a compilation of useful software for your computer. It consists of Google Earth, Google Desktop, Picasa, Google Toolbar for IE, Screensaver, Mozilla Firefox, Lavasoft Ad-Aware, Norton Antivirus 2005 SE, Adobe Reader 7, Google Talk, Google Video Player, RealPlayer, and Gallery Player HD Images.

Now you should see why it is called Google Pack; it has so much free software that takes about a paragraph to write! So, what you will get if you refer a person to download this pack? You will get up to $2. Not so much money but it still money, right?

You might ask, ‘What about if my referrals already have some of the software?’ Don’t worry because they can customize which software they are going to download.

Picasa

Picasa is an easy-to-use picture software that enables you to locate, organize, touch-up, share and make a visual album in just a few simple steps. Honestly, it is not a powerful graphic editor compares to Adobe Photoshop, but if you want something easy to use to edit your picture, this software is the answer.

If you have a picture blog, this software might be useful for you as you can upload photos straight from Picasa to your photo blog. And after you have tried Picasa, promote the software to your visitors. Remember, it is wise to try first before you promoting a thing. This enables you to write an honest review about it.

With every Picasa installed from your referral link, you will get up to $1.

Promote!

I’m not promoting these programs as I haven’t tried them personally. So, I don’t feel good about promoting them. But if you have tried them, what are you waiting for? Promote them and start earning cash!

P.S. You need a Google AdSense account to refer those programs to your friends. If you still don’t have a Google AdSense account, you can sign up by using my referral button at the side bar

Categories: affiliates

Interest rate and spending

2006-05-10T12:38:00.000+12:00

High interest rates; what’s that means to you? Usually high interest rates means that government is trying to cut off people’s spending and reduce inflation. But, in the real world, is this really happening?

For example, New Zealand government is fighting on inflation and hence, increases the interest rates. But, from my observation, people still throw their money around without any worries of increase in price.

So, what should we do in this situation? Basically, start saving your money. As the interest rate is high, you can get higher return. Today, the highest interest rate for saving account in New Zealand is 7.40% which is reasonably high. Imagine if you save $10000 for one whole year. You will get $740 without having to do anything! Besides, you can prevent your money from leak out for unwanted things.

And by saving your money, you will help the country to reduce the inflation rate. This will bring the price down. And when the time comes, use some of your savings and bang on! Buy things that you always wanted at a lower price as the inflation rates has gone down. Moreover, when the inflation rate is under control, usually interest rate will also go down slightly. So, it is not so profitable to save so much money.

So, take your action now. If there is any sign of increase in interest rate, save your money as much as you can. Then, when the price starts to reduce, spend your money wisely. Don’t overspend as it will quickly bring the price up again.

Categories: Financial, planning

Increase visitors by changing template?

2006-05-08T08:08:00.000+12:00

As you can see, I have done some minor changes to the template. Now, the main page will display 3 recent posts. But, it will show only the summary for each post. Before, the main page only has one full post. After making some analysis, I found that there are more cons than benefit of displaying only one post here. So, today, I will share my analysis with you.

Pros

1. I can put AdSense between contents- This will give better click through rate. Some people said I still do it if I put more than 1 post at the main page but I just couldn’t find the way to do that.

2. AdSense ads show more focused ads- Since the content is about only one topic, so the ads will be more relevant.

3. Forcing readers to click on previous post- Since visitors cannot read previous posts from the main page, they have to click on the link to the previous post at the side bar. So, they will spend more time here.

Cons

1. New visitor will never come back if- If the post of that day happens to be not so good, I will chase away new visitors. Remember, visitors want good content.

2. AdSense ads lag- I think most of you noticed this; there will be some time lagging for the ads to show the relevant ads. And advertisements that are not relevant will surely not receive any/small percentage of clicks

3. Visitors won’t have a clearer picture about the blog- They will not know what this blog all about clearly. If you look at the main page now, I think it gives more information of what this blog all about.

4. No description for recent posts- Description is important as it explains to the visitor about the particular post. Now, visitors can choose which post they want to read by just reading the summary for each post.

Therefore, I would love to hear your say about these recent changes. Any comments will be highly appreciated. Personally, I think the new template gives more benefits to my visitors. So, please comment on these changes. Cheers!

Categories: Blogging

Personal financial budgeting

2006-05-06T13:36:00.000+12:00

How to budget your money effectively? It is very important to do budgeting especially for personal budgeting. This will give you more control over your cash. Actually, it is not so hard to do a budget planning. So, today I will explain on how to budget your cash in a few simple and understandable steps.

What you need:

A pen
A piece of paper
A calculator
Knowledge of your income and expense

Budgeting process

1. List all your income- This may come from different source like salary, interest, etc.

2. List your fixed expense- For example rent, car loan, internet bill, electricity and water, income tax, etc.

3. List all variable expenses- The main expense comes first. Don’t know your main expenses? This article will explain further.

4. Include your savings- Saving money is really important for the future. So, do list this too. I would recommend you to save about 10 to 15 percent of your income.

5. Some money for emergency expense- This will include unplanned shopping, medical expenses, etc.

6. Minus your expense from income- Make sure the value is positive or at least 0. If the value is negative, tweak your expenses.

7. Put your financial budgeting plan at the place where you can see it easily.

8. Make sure you stick with the budget. Don’t over expense!

The whole process will only take about 5 to 10 minutes. Therefore, I hope you can utilize this simple ‘budget planning’ to help you to have a total control over your cash. Good luck!

Categories: Financial, planning

Different ways to increase website popularity

2006-05-04T16:18:00.000+12:00

Sorry for the long absence from posting on this blog. Actually, I’ve been so busy working on my construction project. I have to make 10 technical drawings and a model for that. So, I’m really sorry for not able to post here and reply to some email. I will do that after this.

Anyway, today I want to talk about how to make people love your website and consequently increase the incoming traffic. There are many ways to do this and I’m sure that you have heard about them before. But, in this post, I will tell you a secret that people always forget when trying to increase their website popularity.

Alexa traffic ranking

Most people like to use visitor counter to show how many people have viewed their website. This is good but do you know that some visitor counter allows you to set the starting number for the counter? And if the counter is set to count the pageload activities, the number will grow up really fast. For this blog, my counter (on the side bar) is set to count the unique visitors only. So, it will give more accurate view on how popular this blog is.

So, the point is, if you can show your alexa ranking, it will give more accurate view on how popular your website among other websites on the internet. For this blog, you can see it under my statcounter. It tells you where this blog sits among other websites. If you can score below 1,000,000, that should be good enough.

Now, why I’m telling you this? People will put more trust on a website that highly referred by others. By having a high rank in alexa, your visitor will know that your website has been read by many people and thus, will give them a good impression on how good your contents are. So, they might probably come again to refer to your website. And if you are lucky, they might tell their friends and this will bring more traffic to your website!

Page Rank

Higher page rank means higher position in search engines. I assume that most of you know this. And I might give you some tips on how to obtain higher page rank in the future. But for now, let’s see how important the page rank in the different point of view; webmasters.

Website which has a high page rank will interest many webmasters. Why? This is because, if they can successfully have a link swap with that website, their website will receive higher page rank. So, if you want to have a link trade, try to find one from a high ranked website.

What will you get from this? First, you will receive higher page rank which means higher ranking in search engines. Second, you will get more traffic from that particular website that you are linking with. Usually, a high ranked website has high density of traffic, so expect more visitors on your website.

How to check page rank and alexa ranking easily?

For alexa ranking, it might be easier if the site has a counter like what I have for this blog. But, if they do not, you might have trouble to find them. So, here is the add-on that you can use to detect the alexa ranking and page rank at the same time: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/321/. Don’t worry because it is free. This extension will only work with Firefox browser. If you are not using one, you can download it for free by using the link on the side bar (find the button ‘Get Firefox with Google toolbar’).

Apply this to your website and watch your visitor number grows. Remember, higher traffic means more money!

Categories: Blogging

Make extra money from passive blogs

2006-04-29T17:55:00.000+12:00

It’s been a long time since I wrote an article about blogging. For your information, I already have four blogs which are http://i-want-to-be-a-millionaire.blogspot.com, http://adsense-help.blogspot.com, http://blogfix.blogspot.com and http://blogmoney.blogsome.com. Actually, not all of them are functioning as a blog, because for adsense help and blogmoney, they are more to ‘one off’ projects or passive blogs. It means I write the content once and then, just leave them. But, from time to time, I will add new content into them. So, for today, I will explain about these two blogs in detail. The questions like what, why and how will be answered in this post.

What is a ‘one off’ blog?

Actually, it is not the common name that people usually use for this kind of blog. I just give them a name myself. ‘One off’ blog is a blog that you write once in bulk, and then post all the contents at the same time. For my ‘one off’ projects, they are more like a web site than a blog.

Why I build them?

Honestly, the purposes of those blogs are just to add more revenue channel for my AdSense account. It is a common sense, right? More page impression means more click. At least, that is what I believe.

Another usage of these blogs is to bring more traffic to my main blog (http://i-want-to-be-a-millionaire.blogspot.com). Since different people will have different interest, so I cannot expect people to go straight here. Therefore, I put a link to this blog from my other blogs.

How to establish a passive blog?

Just follow this FREE turorial about how to make a blog that generates money by clicking here.

The difference is just the content. Your content must be about something that is relevant for a long period of time. So, you do not have to do updates regularly; maybe just once in 3 months time.

Don’t forget to place links to your main blog to grab more traffic. (Tip:- Place the link in the content to get higher click-through rate). If you can, try to avoid placing links to ‘outsiders’. This will prevent you from losing clicks on AdSense.

I think that should be enough for today. Remember to try this trick because it really works for me; some extra money for just a-day job! And if you have any suggestions or ideas, please leave them in the comments area.

Categories: Adsense, Blogging

Banking with National Bank? Read this

2006-04-27T23:41:00.000+12:00

Today, I want to share with you about my terrible experience with my bank. Actually, I have mentioned the bank before quite a few times. The bank is National Bank. I have used this bank since last year and from that moment; I have faced lots of difficulties. I know that some of you do not ever hear about this bank. The National Bank is one of the banks that operate in New Zealand. It is one the main bank along the BNZ, ANZ, Westpac, and some other banks that I forget their name.

This evening, I went to a National Bank branch because I still haven’t received my bank statements for this month. Actually, I haven’t received it for 2 months and I have made a complain about it last month. They said that they have sent the statement to my old address although I have changed it before. I argued for that as I have changed my address 2 weeks before. “I’m sorry sir but different branch have different database,” that was what he saying to me. Wtf! Its not make sense as they should share the same database.

Anyway, when I asked about the statement today, again, they said that they have sent it. Since I don’t want to wait for too long, I asked the bank to print out a copy for me. Guess what? They charged me for that! It costs $4 for a single statement that I should receive for free.

At that moment, I know that I cannot put my trust on this bank anymore. So, at the same time, I asked them to close my saving account. I want to save my money somewhere else. I want a bank that I can put my trust on and I know that National Bank does not have that.

Actually, there are many other things that I’m not really satisfied with National Bank. One of that is, they charged me for online banking although they said that they will not do so as I am banking under a tertiary account. I’m really pissed off now. S#@t!

Therefore, I hope that you can learn from my mistakes. Search for the best bank which can give you the best customer service as I’m sure that you do not want to walk on my path. As for me, I have to retain my current account with the National Bank for some reasons. I don’t like to have any future business with National Bank but I have to. For your info, I am a sponsored student and my sponsor will deposit the money into my National Bank account every 3 months. If I want to change my current account, I have to deal with so many procedures and I don’t want to waste my time on that. So, what I can do is transferring my money into another bank when I receive my scholarship.

Please share with me if you have a better idea than this. Or if you want to share your difficulties with other banks, feel free to leave your comments here. Thanks.

Categories: Financial, planning

Should I use online banking?

2006-04-24T19:06:00.000+12:00

Before, if you still remember, I have talked about online saving account. Today, I will discuss about a quite similar thing which is online banking. Actually, it is quite a common trend nowadays to do banking activities online but for some countries like Malaysia (my home country), online banking is not been used widely. Maybe, the banking system there is not strongly developed yet. But, I expect online banking to be widely used in Malaysia in maybe 5 years time.

Okay, enough with some background of online banking in Malaysia. Let us talk about why we should or should not use online banking.

Advantages

From online banking, almost every transaction can be done from home. This is good as it saves a lot of our time. Now, we do not have to go down to a bank to do a transaction like transferring money from current to saving account. Before, this transaction only can be done at the bank since ATM machine cannot handle this.

By having online banking, we can monitor our account balance easily. This gives us more control over our budgeting plan (see this post about controlling main expenses). For example, I can now how many should I spend for the rest of the month by looking at the online statement. So, I don’t have to wait for monthly bank statement which sometimes will not be posted at all (I am currently using National Bank as my primary bank and have not received my bank statements for the last 2 months).

Disadvantages

Some banks charge online banking under service charge. For my National Bank online banking, they charge me about $1.00 a month although they said that I will not be charged as I am an international student (Damn! I hate National Bank).

And the biggest issue about online banking is security of your account. Since you are doing your transactions online, you information may be traced by other unwanted people. And by using your information like your online banking username and password, your money can be transferred away from your account in just a few seconds!

So, what am I trying to say here?

Basically, online banking is really useful in many ways but at the same time, the risk is sometimes quite high. So, do some research about your bank. You must know the level of security they offer for online banking. Ask your friends about their experience with the particular bank. And consider looking for other’s review online. For the New Zealand online banking system, I would say that Raboplus (operates under the Rabobank) and ASB are still the best. So, after all, the choice is yours. Make it wisely.

P.S. If you would like to share your experience about online banking, please leave it in the comments area. Cheers

Categories: Financial, planning

Know your main expenses

2006-04-22T19:49:00.000+12:00

There are many people out there still not aware of the importance of knowing where their money flows out. Then, at the end, they will suffer as not having enough money even for food. Actually, it is not that hard to study our expenses. All we have to have is our bank statement, a calculator, a pen and a piece of paper. Then, let’s begin our mission for today- controlling the money outflow.

First, have a bank statement in front of you. This can be a hard copy or just an online bank statement. Look for the highest amount of outflow. Then, look at the item that you purchase with that amount of money. Let me give you an example. For me, my highest expenses are for cigarettes and foods. So, I will write cigarettes and foods with the amount of money I have spent on the paper.

Then, sum up the total money that you spent for that particular of things. This should be in a month period of time. Let say, I have spent $80.00 for cigarettes and $150.00 for the foods.

After that, look between these items that you can cut off the spending from them. For me, those 2 things are really essential for my life. But remember, our goal here is saving some of our money from over-expense on the main source of money outflow. So, I have to find solutions to this problem.

What I can do are reducing smoking activities per day and reducing buying junk foods. Before, I use to smoke whenever I want (minimum of 20 cigarettes a day). Now, I have to reduce it to 10 to 20 per day. That is a lot, but if I think again, I can save more money from it. Moreover, it is good for my health. For the junk food, I can substitute it with bread or other foods that can full my stomach. And as you know, bread is cheaper than junk food.

So, take your action now before it is too late. Know your main source of money outflow and construct strategies to overcome it. You should see the difference from your account balance next month if you try this.

Good luck!

Categories: Financial, planning

Don’t pay more than you have to

2006-04-20T09:25:00.000+12:00

Yesterday, on the way back from buying some groceries, I saw this advertisement on a van which said ‘don’t pay more than you have to’. At first glance, it was just as same as other advertisement, but when I think of it again, it gives a very deep meaning to me. So, I think it is good to share my thought here with you guys.

Price and quantity

This is the first things that came to my mind. Usually, if we pay less, we will get fewer goods. But, in this case, I think it means than you pay less than you normally have to. If so, then that is good. But, then I thought about seasonal sale than often occur in Wellington. When it comes to summer or winter sale, the price will drop drastically. That is why I always save my shopping time for this occasion. I can save tremendous amount of money that I can use it to buy other things. Then, what about the quality of the goods?

Price and quality

This is another important thing to look at. Since we buy cheap goods, sometimes they are not reliable. Take an example from my friend’s experience on buying a pair of cheap shoes. He bought these shoes during the last summer from a second-hand shop. Because they were so cheap, he bought them although it was obvious that one of the shoes seemed to be a fake one. Then, after wore the shoes for about 3 months, he suddenly realized that he cannot walk when the road is wet as one of the shoes is leaking.

Price, quality and quantity; what should we do?

Actually, all of the 3 things play very important roles in shaping our shopping style. But, to perfectly achieve all of them is quite impossible. So, what we can do?

First, the most important aspect is quality. Quality goods usually last longer, so you can use it over and over again. For example, I still have and wear my pair of shoes that I bought 4 years ago and I wear them everyday. But, if you are the type of people who like to buy new clothes every 2 or 3 days, this I not really important to you as you may interested more in price.

The next thing is price, which is closely related to our money flow. For me, I prefer to look around for the cheapest and high quality good than just buy it straight away. And we are lucky because we can access almost everything through the internet. So, besides saving our money, we also save lots of our precious time.

Quantity comes last as it is not quite important to have so many things in a house. Personally, I think it is a burden to have so many things in my home as I have to do maintenance regularly for each and every thing that I have. The easiest example is to have too many shirts. We will not wear 3 or 4 shirts at once, so there is a possibility of not wearing some of them. Then, we ended up with buying the clothes without using them at all.

So, make your decision wisely as every step we take will determine our future to become the next millionaire.

Categories: Financial, planning

1 million free traffic

2006-04-15T20:04:00.000+12:00

Recently, I was looking for the way to increase the traffic to my blog. After a few hours of search, finally I came across this great site which offers a FREE e-book about how to get 1,000,000 free traffic! Because there are so many sites and e-book that give these things, I thought why just don’t give it a try? Then I just drop my email to read the e-book.

1 million visitors on your web site without paying a dime in advertising!

I found that this simple e-book really helpful. It thought me on the things that I do not know before. The e-book does not just talk about the same things that we hear or listen everyday, but it is more than that. That is because it offers 1 million visitors to your web site. And the best thing is, you do not have to pay anything in advertising which sometimes really burden you.

Reliable author

Stephan Ducharme is a young Canadian guy who just became a Millionaire on the Internet … in weeks! He spent more than 10 years and paid over $187,000 of his own money researching everything there is to know about the internet and on making money. He bottled some of his discoveries into an e-book and within weeks, ten's of thousands of visitor's a day was flooding to his web site. He went from 100 hits a day up to 1 million visitors in less than a few weeks. Without paying a dime in advertisement! And this just paid him over 1 MILLION DOLLARS! He says anyone can do it with what you are about to learn.

What should you do?

Since I cannot disclose much info about the e-book, I reckon it is better for you to just check it out. You have nothing to lose as it is a FREE e-book. So, what are you waiting for? See for yourself by clicking here: http://freeadguru.com/

For other webmasters

All you will have to do is give away the free e-book to your web site visitors as a gift from you and let Stephan do the rest. You will earn some cash for giving a free gift. Isn’t that great? Just click here to begin earning money by the end of the week: http://freeadguru.com/

Categories: Blogging, Affiliates

Site not found in search engine

2006-04-12T01:45:00.000+12:00

First, I want to apologize for raising quite a heavy topic on my last post. I know that not everyone knows and aware on how to do a FOREX trading. And it is quite hard to find a people who can give some comments on that post. Anyway, if you want to share something about FOREX trading, please leave your comments here.

The post before it; about oxado.com was a hot one which received 8 comments until this post is written (You can read the post by clicking this link). I think maybe it is because the topic can be reached by anyone on the net. I hope you guys will keep supporting my blog. After all, thank you so much and I hope that I can continuously serve you with useful info that you need.

Anyway, for this post, I will discuss about the relationship between a site and search engines. This topic has been raised recently in the Google Help Group, so I think this post may be quite useful to them and others. The problem is, ‘why my site cannot be found in search engine, even when I typed a certain keywords relating to my site?” You can find the answer here.

Why search engine?

Most of the searches done on the net are done from a search engine. That is why they are called ‘search engines’. For the time being, Google holds the biggest percentage of usage among the other search engine, followed by Yahoo, and then MSN. So, if you can placed your site at the top of these search engines for the right keywords, you will likely receive quite a big number of traffic to your site.

How to do that?

There are many important factors that will lead to your high ranking placement in search engines. And you have to know that different search engine requires different criteria. For example, Google gives priority to a site that has a higher page rank to be placed first. In addition, the ranking procedure will change in time, so we have to catch up with the updates regularly. But first, let me tell you the first step to promote your site in the search engines’ world.

Submitting your url

This is the first and most crucial step as many people always forget to do this. As a result, they will wonder why their site is not in the search listing. So, where to submit your url? Some people said, it is sufficient to just submit the url to the top 5 search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN etc.) but, in my own opinion, submit your site to as many search engine as possible. Why? Because these small search engine often focusing on some specific visitors. This means, that visitor will use their search engine to do searches on a specific topics; i.e. business and economy.

How to find search engines?

You can do this in the easy way or the hard way. Let me tell you the hard way first. Fisrt, open the Google search engine. Then type ‘submit a site’ or ‘search engine’. This will give you thousands or even millions of results. Then, open each links and begin your submission process. This may take some of your valuable time but, it is free. As almost all of us like free stuff, so go for it.

Okay, then let me explain to you the easier way to do this. Find a url submitter. You can find lots of them out there but sadly, you have to pay for it (most of them). So, what about if I tell you that I have found one FREE url submitter that has many other useful features. Are you interested to give it a shot? It is a-must-have program for a webmaster and the name is Web CEO. This may sound familiar to you if you follow this blog from the beginning since I have posted my review on it before. You can read the review here.

To be honest, I have seen the effects from this program after I used it for a couple of weeks. Now, if you can see my Alexa ranking (at the sidebar), it shows that this site is at the 588,433 place from millions of sites on the web. And as for the Google page rank, this site receives 3 out of 10. All of this happens after I used the Web CEO for just 2 weeks and my site only 1-month old! Isn’t that amazing?

What should you do?

If you ask me this question, I would say go for Web CEO. It is free, easy to use and the most important is, it saves your precious time. So, grab your free copy today or go to this page to read my review on it.

If you have tried Web CEO before or have some other suggestions, feel free to drop your comments here. Cheers.

Categories: Blogging, Search, engine, optimization