33rd Carnival of Making REAL Money – July 2009

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This is the 33rd edition of the Carnival of Making Money Online. I’m delighted to offer this limited list of top quality articles that are vetted from the original list of submissions. It’s always a pleasure to read through these submissions. So enjoy, and thrive in summer 2009~! It seems my reputation is getting around! I screen posts rigorously for spammers, non-blogs, repetitive entrants… So out of 142 entrants, I am presenting the top 10% of submissions to this month’s Carnival of Making REAL Money. It looks like we’re heavy on investing this month, which must be a sign that the stock market is recapturing people’s attention as we move into the summer months.

Personal Wealth

Four Pillars asls the obvious question about Dave Ramsey: Is Dave Ramsey A “Financial Expert” and then goes on to provide “a discussion of Dave Ramsey and his methods.” On a similar note, KCLau looks at Why Robert T. Kiyosaki is a best-selling author? which is posted at KCLau’s Money Tips. He reckons “Robert T. Kiyosaki is the best personal finance author I follow. I started reading his books back in 1999. Although some reviews you found written by readers on Amazon say that he keeps repeating most of the points, I still find them interesting every time. It works as a revision whenever he repeats.” Of course, not all pundits agree.

Relax provides some notes on How to become rich at The Wise Curve. Indeed, “…the door to become rich elite is open to us…”, though he fails to state anything more than the most obvious. Now if we can only find one of the keys to open it! To which MoneyNing provides a simple ‘key’ in his post Turbocharge Your Savings with Certificate of Deposits (CDs) posted at Money Ning saying “Certificate of Deposits are boring but it’s a guaranteed way of capital preservation!”

Investing

Patrick @ Cash Money Life looks at the age-old question: What is investing? posted at Cash Money Life, and examines “The differences between investing, saving, and trading,” whilepuneetkapoor2000 presents THE ART OF SELECTION – PART 1 at KuberKhana -Indian Stock Fundamental Analysis. He reckons “Stocks beat every asset class in the long run. However the question of choice is confounding. This article attempts to demystify the process.” The Smarter Wallet presents Investing In The Stock Market? Rules To Help You Sleep At Night posted at The Smarter Wallet , though his rules appear pretty simplistic.

Glowing Face Man looks at Short Term Assets vs. Long Term Assets which you can find at Glowing Face Man: Awaken the Badass Within. He comments “Longterm investment and passive income are all the rage these days, and for good reason. But it’s also possible to go too far. Sometimes, short term beats long term.” Jae Jun from Old School Value takes on The Art of Selling Stocks. Jae Jun writes “Buying a stock is only the first half of the equation. It is the easy half. Knowing when to sell and having a strategy to lock in gains is even more important.” Praveen looks at some of the trading rules he uses in Sometimes You Bend Your Trading Rules… from My Simple Trading System. He suggests, “Taking an early profit to ease your comfort in a volatile market.” AndInvesting School presents The Rule of 72 posted at Investing School, saying, “A neat mathematical trick to calculate when your investment will double!” It’s a pretty useful rule of thumb to figure out your returns!

In the current markets, thoughMichael Cohen tells us Don’t Bet On A Soft Landing Into The New Normal from his blog at Debt, Economics, Boom and Bust. He notes, “There are those predicting a new normal of 1-2% economic growth. We will likely not ease our way into that sort of situation.” This is a theme picked up on other blogs, already. MeanwhileSilicon Valley Blogger suggest some of the Best Online Stock Brokers For Cheap Stock Trades posted at The Digerati Life, saying, “Make money by investing and using the best brokers around!” Oh, if only it were that simple!

Online Riches

This week’s online riches section turned out to be rather weaker than I first though. However, four writers made the grade.

FitJerk presents Fit Jerk Talks SEO Techniques, Internet Marketing & Laws To Run A Business Online posted at FlawlessFitness, saying, “Why isn’t your website getting any traffic? Why isn’t your online business making money? And why does your Google ranking SUCK? The 4 secrets to online success revealed…” I wish it were that simple getting traffic, but it isn’t! Robert Alan also provides some good advice in his post Guide to Marketing and Advertising Your New Website posted at Bill Hazelton , saying, “Guide to advertising and marketing your website the first 90 days after you’ve launched.”

If you’re making money online,Jason G presents Drop shipping and Ecommerce posted at The Powersellers Union Blog, saying, “The Power Sellers Union is a drop shipping wholesale site that helps its members to learn how to start an e-commerce business from home with little or no experience.You can learn to make money on Ebay or your own website in no time dropshipping products at below wholesale price using real wholesale dropshippers.” AndPeter OBrien suggests 5 Ways Niche Review Templates Can Make You More Affiliate Income posted at Free Internet Marketing Tips , saying, “A great way to make more affiliate income is to increase your chances by promoting more than one affiliate product. With Niche Review Templates, you”

And if you’re interested in having your blog featured, remember to … submit your own work ONCE only, with a suitable comment to the carnival. Chances are you’ll be accepted. It always amazes me how many people fail to follow that simple rule.

Good luck to you all,

Kenneth from Carnival of Making REAL Money

Nozkidz: Online and Offline Promotion for a Real World Business

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Well, the last few days have been pretty busy as we’ve been pursuing both online and offline audiences for our school. So we’ve now managed to establish a fully bilingual website, with our own Blog in English. Offline, we’ve been promoting our classes with Teaching Demos, Activities, Flyers, and meet’n’greet style promos. It’s all been hard work, but we’re beginning to see limited success in a number of areas:

First, it takes consistency, timing and perseverance to get the promotions done. And just occasionally, a little flexibility. With the development of our online marketing effort, as I hinted, we’ve completed the initial stages of promoting the school site in English (with our english theme/blog), EzineArticles, Squidoo Page, Wordpress, and Blogger accounts. While none of the resources is particularly developed or popular, the combined effect has been to boost traffic to the English half of our website.

Online: Honeypots and Keywords

For the Chinese half, we’ve focused more on developing the keywords, putting up basic content. Many of the avenues open to US/European blogs such as EzineArticles are not just available in the local Traditional Chinese market in Taiwan. So we’re looking at developing more micro-sites to act as honeypots for traffic and boost our SERPS. Given language difficulties, this is not currently being pursued in any intensive way. Keyword search, however, has provided some interesting news, and the results of choosing specific keywords a few months ago is beginning to bear fruit.

We initially did a simple evaluation of our site courtesy of the Google Keywords Tool available in the AdWords accounts, looked at the statistics for the past six months, and created our initial selection of keywords. This proved somewhat haphazard at first, as the terms we chose weren’t the most focused. After doing some refining, we focused on about twelve terms. We’re not ranking for many of the terms in Google properly yet. But I was sad about that, until I remembered in Taiwan, Google is very much an also-ran. So I decided to check out the Yahoo! rankings, and their results were astonishing. Of our initial ten terms, only three ranked in Yahoo and one in Google. But when I started searching the other keywords, I was astonished to find a total of 13 keywords in which pages from our site ranked in the top 30 results. And many were on the first page for the results in Yahoo! General indications are though that many of these key terms don’t have high search volume, but at the moment, this is only the second iteration of keywords.

It’s difficult to see the individual effect of additional successful keywords but in general terms traffic is now approaching an all-time high. We are pursuing additional options in the English side of the site, as well as the Chinese… but it takes a considerable amount of time.

Offline: Flyers and Promotions

Running a promotional campaign has pushed my designing skills to the limit as well as other aspects. We decided to go for color flyers, instead of the usual black & white, which came out very nicely. In addition, we made extra specific flyers and color attachments to suppplement. Many of the leaflets were handed out to existing students and parents, while we ended up pushing flyers through mailboxes twice in the last week. In total, we’ve had over 2000 flyers printed and delivered in the past seven days.

My colleague is always skeptical about such things, but in handling offline promotion, I really think it’s important to get in people’s faces so that you get a chance to build up name recognition. Though our community is smallish, it’s a fairly big city and things are always changing. Familiarity takes a lot of time to build up on the streets so we’re going to be printing a lot more and expanding our leaflet campaigns to reach the major residential communities in our area.

Since we’re a real world business, it’s important to pursue a dual strategy of promotion. Local search traffic just isn’t significant enough to rely on 100%, but having a website means we are open 24/7 for information and communication. It’s a healthy symbiosis.

Tags: business, affiliate, marketing

The Italian Job: Why would you transport US$134.5 billion dollars in your briefcase?

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Something is not right. The story is amazing, the kind of thing you might see in a movie or work of fiction.

Italian financial police uncovered a briefcase literally stashed with bonds and papers worth US$134.5 billion dollars that was being transported by two ‘Japanese’ agents from Italy to Switzerland. And the US media is not covering it at all. I won’t regurgitate all the facts here.

There are too many good speculative stories and a smattering of actual stories:

News

Views

The story remains buried under a mess of international news,kidnappings, GM bankruptcies… that it makes you wonder if there is a case of deliberate burial of an otherwise significant story or just an inability in US media to portray stories that are significant, accurately and in a timely manner.

Whatever is going on, we note that a number of events are taking place that could indicate the whole situation.

The G8 countries are meeting in Italy at the moment, a Japanese minister just resigned, statements of faith from Russia and Japan, more meetings with the G8…. Can you add any more?

But I’ll add something to the mystery: it is interesting that Timothy Geithner attended a speech on Thursday evening, flew ahead to Italy and on getting there met both the Japanese Finance Minister Kaoru Yosano and Russian Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin in Italy before the general meeting.

While Kaoru Yosano stated clearly "We have complete trust in the fact that the U.S. views its strong dollar policy as fundamental”, you should note the language in another report: “We have complete trust in the fact that the U.S. views its strong-dollar policy as fundamental” which most reports missed quoting. (Source)

So what is he saying? That he trusts the Americans think their strong-dollar is important. He trusts what the Americans ‘thinks’. Since when did bankers and financiers only rely on trust? He’s stuck between a rock and a hard place: he can’t be seen to talk down the dollar when so much of Japanese reserves are placed in US dollars.

The Russians were quite happy to say they are looking to ‘help out’ the IMF.

Russia said on Wednesday it would reduce the share of U.S. Treasuries in its reserves and buy bonds issued by the International Monetary Fund. Russia holds about 30 percent of its reserves in U.S. Treasuries. The country had pledged to buy about $10 billion worth of bonds to be issued by the IMF as part of a fundraising effort to help countries hit by the crisis. (SOURCE)

And the Chinese are unhappy with the US policy on spend-spend-spend. They’ve been calling on the US to be fiscally responsible. But what is clear: China is quietly buying gold, silver, and other assets as well. Yes, they’re still buying US dollars, but … what are they selling to buy these other assets? Could it be a revolving door?