Carnival of Making REAL Money Issue #21 on August 1st, 2008
July 31, 2008 | Posted by InvestorBlogger | Be the first to leave a comment
These articles are presented for the Carnival of Making REAL Money edition for August 1st, 2008. Because there are only a few articles for this edition, I’ve only organized a few categories! Thank you for your excellent submissions and keep them coming! Summer time is no time to forget about personal finance, that’s for sure!
Personal Finance
- ChristianPF presents Money & Marriage: 7 lessons I have learned so far posted at Money in the Bible | Christian Personal Finance Blog, saying, “These are the lessons I have learned about money and marriage over the last 3 years”. And good suggestions they are, too!
- Yvette Stokes presents A Savings Account Plan for Anyone, Best Savings Plan Around posted at Yin Yang Data Report, saying, “In four easy steps you can be on your way to the best savings plan ever. This is a guaranteed way of saving money no matter how much you make.”
- Passive Income Investor presents Monthly Online Income Breaks $2,000 Barrier! posted at LIVING OFF DIVIDENDS & PASSIVE INCOME, saying, “I finally made $3K/month from Passive and Alternate Income Sources - yippeee!”
Online Earnings
- WM Media presents A Step-By-Step Approach To eBay Website Sale Business posted at Buy And Sell Websites, saying, “eBay website sale is a very popular method of making money online. Anyone can use this platform to make money.”
- Cindy King presents Where To Fit Your Marketing Pipeline Into Your International Lead Generation Plan posted at Get International Clients, saying, “Let us look at two different aspects of your international sales system. Your lead generation system in order to increase international business. You international marketing pipeline to feed your lead generation system.”
- Christopher Johnson presents 10 Ways To Earn Money In Your Spare Time posted at CoffeeBreakEarnings.com, saying, “10 Ways To Earn Money In Your Spare Time”
- Alex_Sysoef presents Blog Templates For WordPress Review posted at WordPress Web 2.0 How-To Spot-er, saying, “Web design for WordPress always comes down to evaluating which Blog Templates (or what is commonly knows WordPress Themes) fit your needs the most! This review of available options for choosing best blog template for your WordPress will concentrate not only on their visual appeal (web design factor) but also functionality!”
Investing
- Value Seeker presents Stock Investment Resource: Stock Market Investing Tips - Don’t Overleverage posted at Stock Investing, saying, “Be careful with margin trading. If you take on too much leverage, you may risk a margin call.”
- KCLau presents How to Calculate Your Investment Portfolio Return? posted at KCLau’s Money Tips, saying, “Article on how to calculate investment returns portfolio”
- Joe Manausa presents Housing Prices Decline Slightly - A Clear Picture Is Forming posted at Tallahassee Real Estate Blog, saying, “While there have been many articles written on the declining real estate market, most are filled with facts and figures that are difficult for the lay-person to follow. This article is filled with easy-to-understand graphs that demonstrate the modest decline in home prices.”
CALL for Submissions
I’m definitely looking for articles that are readable, inspiring, and well-written for readers who may or may not have much investing or financial knowledge. Articles will cover making money in the real world, as well as online; being in business; making investments; making money through smart decisions; and aspects of personal finance, etc.. It is NOT about dieting, surveys, drugs, selling things, what you ate last night or any of a myriad of irrelevant topics. If you are not sure what is accepted, read the previous carnivals. It seems that a number of people don’t bother to follow the policy… As such, …
- Your article must be original and previously unpublished in this carnival. I like to maintain a variety of sources and topics, I will only accept one article per person per blog. — If you submit MORE THAN TWO articles to any edition of this carnival, ALL your submissions will be eliminated without hesitation. Repeated multiple submissions to this carnival will mean that your articles and/or your behavior are spam-enough to blacklist your blog from this carnival.
- In short, submit ONE article from one blog once only.
- Spam: Articles must be unique, ideally hosted on a full-blog (ideally not on a subdomain of blogspot, blogger, etc.). If you are serious about your blog, then find a real blog host on a real domain.
- Comments MUST be enabled on any post submitted to the carnival and registration must NOT be required: I’m hoping that we generate interest in the submissions and that traffic generates comments. Let’s not frustrate our readers.
- Please, do include a comment about your article for your readers. Even if it’s just a few words, it will help me to know that your article is not a spam submission!
- Additional reasons for not inclusion: popup/popover/popunder windows, URLs that time-out, missing articles or moved pages, articles that make NO sense, any music/tracks/voice-overs that auto-play, articles that REQUIRE registration before reading and/or commenting.
- All editorial decisions are final. If you wish to know why I didn’t accept your original entry, please contact me via the contact form.
In short, I run this blog carnival in my free time, I receive no money for this activity, so I’d appreciate as much consideration as possible. It would be nice if you acknowledge the blog carnival somewhere on your website! Anywhere, it doesn’t matter: in a post, in the post you submitted, in the blogroll, etc.. or you can do a separate post when the post is published. This helps to drive traffic to the carnival, where people can find your posts!
In short, thank you for taking the time to consider submitting ana rticle
Best Wishes
Kenneth from Carnival of Making REAL Money
How Do Bloggers Use Their Credit Cards? Read on…
July 30, 2008 | Posted by InvestorBlogger | Be the first to leave a comment
Ages ago, I posted a reply to a request from Mr. Credit Card’s survey. I’d forgotten all about the survey until I received this email announcing his results: It’s worth reading, and great link bait. As is his follow up post on the bloggers involved!
Mr Credit Card here.
During March and April, I sent out an email to do a credit card survey. In fact, I sent out to over 150 pf bloggers. 45 of you have responded to the survey and I want to thank all of you for that.
But first, I want to apologize for taking so long to publish the results. There were several reasons. Firstly, I sent a few reminders to the people I sent the survey to and this took a while. Then, when I upgraded to Wordpress 2.5.1, I could not load any images (and I had to for this survey). My full-time work also got in the way.
Having said all that, I have published the results. I want to thank you all once again. In return for participating in this survey, I will mention your blogs in a special post tomorrow (hint : it’s not just a post full of links).
So watch out for my emails again tomorrow. And I hope you learnt something from this survey.
Regards - Mr Credit Card
And…
As a way of saying thank you to all of you, I have actually written a follow post that briefly describes you and your site and I’ve picked what I thought to be the best or most interesting credit card post you have written on your blog. I’ve named the post “Ultimate Collection of Credit Card Posts” - (well, maybe I’m exaggerating, but hey - it’s all of your post!).
Thanks once again. And I would appreciate if you could spread the word about the survey and the collection of cc posts. I’ve certainly learnt a lot from this and I might just write up my thoughts on how we could collectively make better use of our cc in a post tomorrow.
So watch your emails again!
Regards, etc..
If you’re interested, check out one of my favorite Credit Card Posts on this blog (I do have tons in the archives on Credit Cards!).
Happy Blogging, and keep that credit card tucked away!
Ovation Credit Services: Does it deserve a standing ovation?
July 30, 2008 | Posted by InvestorBlogger | Be the first to leave a comment
After yesterday’s post on the credit card habits of bloggers, and the results of the survey, a staggering 23% of the bloggers did not know their FICO score. While I’m sure that this was at least partly because some of us lived outside the US, I wondered why the others did not check.
In this paid post I look at checking your credit rating through one particular website, and answer one simple question: how easy or difficult is it to do this the first time? Welcome to Ovation Credit Services, a website that specialises in finding and repairing credit reports so that clients get a better deal when they want to purchase that LCD TV or new 4×4!
Finding information
To start this process, let’s see how you would go about finding out about information about credit scoring: Ovation provides extensive learning pages through the menu on the top right including, downloadable books, videos, a glossary, and general information pages. While there’s no mention of the individual credit reporting services, there is a general description of how the websites calculate your actual credit score and the weightings used, the various laws, and general customer queries.
The Website: Speedy, Responsive and Lots of Trust Building
Clicking through the website extensively to provide this review, I noted that the website is responsive, and fast. In fact, the homepage is quite large, but when saved to my disk only showed 257Kb. That size means that the website should load quickly even on slower or dialup connections. Each page loaded smoothly, and I didn’t find any out of date links at all. Moreover, I was surprised at how smooth the website seemed in Firefox. It’s important that websites adequately cover the major browsers, and it’s amazing how many sites don’t even bother with making their site compatible with the #2 browser.
In addition, it was easy to access the Privacy Policy, Disclaimers, Terms and so on, each of these was clearly linked in the footer of the page (which is where I found one non-active link under “Credit News”). The website has gone to a lot of trouble to enhance its reputation and trust with a number of features: including a no-risk refund policy, special deals, BBB credits and links to its record on BBB which is where you find out that the business started in 1976.
Loose Ends: Crowded HomePage and out of date blog
There are also a number of ways to contact the company, including a snail mail address, a telephone number and online chat, all of which add to the impression that this is a solid company with a reputation. However, there are some loose ends, including a blog that seems to be linked to some pages of the website: at Credit Repair Blog. It looks like the blog hasn’t been updated in about a year. Having worked with a blog on a credit card website before, they can be very useful to draw additional traffic and rankings to your main site, and such results can be very effective if the blog is written well. I’d strongly suggest reviving the blog and integrating that to the main site.
I also feel that the frontpage is really trying to do TOO much as there are 15 clickable boxes below the graphic above. I like the way the boxes light up when users mouse over them, but that there is too much there and this suggests perhaps a lack of focus at the moment on exactly WHO is going to use the website. I’d suggest trimming this area to just seven: the five boxes in the first row, the last page wide box, and all the others can be moved to a slideshow area where users click arrows to see the next offer situated where “No Risk Refund” is currently.
And so,…
In conclusion, though this service is not cheap and may not be suitable for all those who need good credit reporting, the website goes to some lengths to create both an impression of trustworthiness and value for money. I’d like to take a look around inside the site and the report areas to see what they have to offer. I’ll be contacting them to find out more. So stay tuned. Sponsored by Ovation Credit Services.
Quotation: Woody Allen
July 30, 2008 | Posted by InvestorBlogger | Be the first to leave a comment
There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?
Woody Allen, Film-maker, (1935 - ?)
Asus Eee 1000 PC - Available and Affordable!
July 30, 2008 | Posted by InvestorBlogger | Be the first to leave a comment
Oh, and what’s this I see? It’s the new Asus Eee PC 1000 running Windows XP SP2 (or 3?) in Chinese. It has an installed 80GB hard disk (not SSD) and seemed plenty quick even for my tastes. In fact, I tried the keyboard, too and found that it was quite pleasant to use. Priced at around NT$18,500, too.
It sported the new Intel Atom Chip at 1.6Ghz with a 10″ TFT screen at 1024X600 WVGA card. On board memory included 1GB DDRII, and 80GB (SATA). I also managed to find several other UMPCs at the new Kuang Hua Market in Taipei.
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