How did PipSqueak get cheap rates
when I get a headache whenever
I receive my phone bill?

It used to be IDD services that save money on phone calls, now with VOIP you can call anywhere for free* (notice that I use an asterix, I wish all businesses can survive by giving free stuff *wink*). Skype is one example of VOIP, you can call pc to pc (meaning you, the caller, and the receiver has to talk through your pc with mic and speakers/headsets) and also pc to phone line for a fee.

Recently, I found something even cheaper. I stumbled upon voipstunt.com, they have a free trial which I can use to call to a few major destinations (US, Canada, Singapore, Australia, and many more) for free. When I first tried it out, I keyed in my number and the destination number and clicked the “call” button, the next thing I know, my land-line phone started ringing! I picked it up and I can hear the calling tone which connects to the destination number. Calls are extremely clear. Best thing is I can even make local calls for free. I used it to call friends in US and my parents in another state in Malaysia. It’s all gooooooood. The only catch of the free trial is that it lasts only for a minute or two.

I decided to buy voipstunt.com credits because it is worth it to pay, it’s about USD$0.0136 per minute for calls to US and that’s cheaper than IDD rates here. Furthermore, I am given 120 free call days (to selected destinations), that means I can call for free in 120 days. However, this doesn’t mean I can call every day for as long as I want but it’s 5 hours free every 7 days, so that’s about 85 hours of free calls in 120 days…. it’s all gooooooooood.

Just as I thought I’d read every little fine print and covered every single fees on the voipstunt.com website, I was charged euro 5 cents for every connection I make. But you know what? Yup, it’s cheap so it is still all goooooood.

If you want to save your phone bills, get a voip service provider. It doesn’t matter if it’s voipstunt or skype, the important this is the voip service provider is reliable and offers call rates you are happy with.

Who is wealthy? Is it the person who earns $1 million dollars annually with $1 million in net worth or is it the person who earns $24,000 annually with a $1 million networth? Let’s find out…

Thomas Stanley and William Danko, author of The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy, created a formula to help you determine whether you are indeed wealthy based on your income. The formula is as follows:

(Age x pretax annual household income from all sources except inheritances)/10

This formula is what your expected wealth should be. So for instance, Jane is 34 years old. She earns pre-tax $120k annually and has investments which give her $20k income every year, she also inherited $300k from her parents. What is Jane’s expected wealth?

Her expected wealth is $476,000 (34 x $140k/ 10). This means if Jane has a networth of around $476,000, she is well on track or an “average accumulator of wealth (AAW)” . If Jane has less than $238,000 (one-half of $476,000 ), then Jane is considered an “under accumulator of wealth (UAW)”. However, if jane has more than $952,000 (double her expected wealth), then Jane is considered a “prodigious accumulator of wealth (PAW)”.

Which category are you in? AAW, UAW or PAW? If you are not in the PAW category, how do you get there? To learn how, I highly recommend reading The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy

I’m not being negative here, this is a very down-to-earth question. It hurts me to hear about people who took out a second mortgage on their home to buy a hot-tip stock only to lose all of it. Sure, if you did this and it all works out, you’ll be a very rich man but what if it doesn’t? You will not only put your life in poverty, but also your family’s. Think about your children or grandchildren who will have to pay your debt if you can’t pay it off when you are alive. This is not called investing, it’s called betting your life. Don’t ever, ever kid yourself that you will never lose money.

Investing is to be done with extra money. EXTRA. If all the funds in your account is needed to pay for your food and accomodation, then it’s simple… do not invest. However, if you want to invest but have no extra funds, then start saving a portion of your income every month for that purpose.

Investing is a gamble to some extent and money in the stock exchange changes hand very often. The key point to consider is that money changes hands from a dumb investor to a smart investor. What sets this two types of investor apart is: one picks stocks that fit their criteria, tracks, monitor it and consider the possibility of losing; the other chooses a stock blindly based on what others are buying or based on gut feeling that it’ll be a sure-win. If the money always end up in the smart investors’ hand, then what’s so hard about doing a little homework?

To sum it up:
1) Use money that you can afford to lose
2) Start saving money to invest if you don’t have money you can afford to lose
3) Read books about investing and personal finance
4) Play with virtual trading/stock market simulation before you use real money to trade or invest.

Jim Rohn’s Vision of the 21st Century

“More valuable than the money you make, is the person you become”

In the 21st Century, the improvements in technology has created unprecedented opportunity but has also bring in keen competition and the key is to be READY for these unusual opportunities and competition that will arise.

Ideas to be ready:
1) Learn more than one skill. Learning more than one skill not only gives you security in the future but also helps open more fortune.

2) Find good people. “If you search, you’ll find”. Doors of opportunity only open for those who knocks.

3) Getting people to work together. Getting people to work together pays big money. If 2 or 3 agrees on a common purpose, NOTHING is impossible.

4) Rewarding people for the small steps. Be so busy giving recognition that you don’t need it for yourself.

5) Affecting people with your words. There are 2 types of light: Insight and communication. Train, teach and learn to inspire others by helping others to see better than they are.

6) Learning more than one language. Give it as a gift to your children.

The Greatest Economic Formula is to give value to the marketplace. Value means product or service that people wants, but most importantly value means what you become. Find a way to serve as many people as possible.

“Our income primarily determines on our philosophy, not the economy.”

“Formal education gets you a job, self-education gets you rich.”

Jim Rohn’s Vision of the 21st Century

“More valuable than the money you make, is the person you become”

In the 21st Century, the improvements in technology has created unprecedented opportunity but has also bring in keen competition and the key is to be READY for these unusual opportunities and competition that will arise.

Ideas to be ready:
1) Learn more than one skill. Learning more than one skill not only gives you security in the future but also helps open more fortune.

2) Find good people. “If you search, you’ll find”. Doors of opportunity only open for those who knocks.

3) Getting people to work together. Getting people to work together pays big money. If 2 or 3 agrees on a common purpose, NOTHING is impossible.

4) Rewarding people for the small steps. Be so busy giving recognition that you don’t need it for yourself.

5) Affecting people with your words. There are 2 types of light: Insight and communication. Train, teach and learn to inspire others by helping others to see better than they are.

6) Learning more than one language. Give it as a gift to your children.

The Greatest Economic Formula is to give value to the marketplace. Value means product or service that people wants, but most importantly value means what you become. Find a way to serve as many people as possible.

“Our income primarily determines on our philosophy, not the economy.”

“Formal education gets you a job, self-education gets you rich.”

Here comes the juicy part… How do you make money from your website?

Did you know that there are more than one revenue models you can use for just one website? You can make money by:

1) Creating your own products to sell
2) Selling other people’s products
3) Selling advertisements

1) Creating your own products to sell

a) Create an Information product

If you have a passion and knowledge about a subject, why not write an e-book or create a membership site? You probably know things that other people don’t, things that people are willing to pay to know. It can be anything related to your occupation e.g. If you work as a corporate tax consultant, think of the tax loopholes that people are dying to know. It could be something related to your hobby or life e.g. single parent, best place to get cheap and good quality electronics, gambling systems, trading systems etc. The possibilities are endless!

Click here to learn how to Make Your Knowledge Sell!

b) Sell your offline business’ products or service

If you already have an exisiting business offline, GREAT! That means you already have a product or service. More and more people are throwing away their bulky yellow pages to search for services online. No matter it’s plumbing or business consultation, people are now searching online for these services. I highly recommend you to read this free guide entitled “How Can the World Wide Web Help My Local Business Which Has Local Clients??”.

2) Selling other people’s products

a) Affiliate programs

Affiliate programs offer the best opportunities to start an online business, you can simply place a link on your website and be up and running in no time at all. You don’t need to stock up products or handle administrative tasks like accepting credit cards or logistics like shipping, etc because the products are not yours. You promote other people’s products and earn a commission for every sale you make. Read the article “Online Business for Everyone” for more details about affiliate programs.

Please note that affiliate programs that are related to your site’s theme sell better than those which do not. (e.g. if your website is about gardening, then sell things that are related to gardening). Here are some resources to find affiliate programs:

i) Associate Programs Directory
The directory lists thousands of affiliate programs for you to choose from so there’s no need to worry about not being able to find the right affiliate program for your website.

ii) The Affiliate Masters Course
This Masters Course stands alone as a fantastic educational resource. It truly provides everything the novice affiliate requires to earn real income on the Net. It’s FREE too!

b) Resell rights

Resell rights let you sell a product and keep all of the profits to yourself. You can purchase resell rights to e-books written by other people and sell it at your own price. Usually you’ll need your own merchant account to accept credit card payments.

c) Drop shipping

With a Drop Shipper you receive the money from your customer and inform the shipper to send them the product. You then pay the shipper their price. E.g. you can buy an iPod for $150 but sell it for $200. You make $50 per sale and you never have to fuss with the logistics side. A lot of eBay sellers and online shopping malls use this method heavily.

3) Selling Advertisements

a) Pay per click advertising

This means you are getting paid for every click of the advertisement on your website. If you look around this website, you’ll find “ads by goooooooogle”. These are Google’s Adsense and I get paid if you click on any of them.

Sign up with Google Adsense, it’s free!

Other pay-per-click resources:
-IntelliTxt
-Chitika
-AdBrite
-Clicksor
-Yahoo! Publisher Network

3) Renting out advertising space

This works better if your site has high traffic and a lot of content pages. You can charge the advertisers based on your own rates whether it’s daily/weekly/monthly.

“Which money making method should I use?”

Personally, I prefer affiliate programs and advertising. However, revenue is shared and it’s not 100% profits. If you can create your own product, then go for that. There is no rule saying you can only use one or two method… you can use ALL of it or focus on one on your site, whichever you prefer.

Lastly… Money making myths

Myth 1: Advertisement revenue and affiliate revenue is dead. So not true.

Myth 2: Only huge sites with trillions of page views can make money. Yeah Right!

Myth 3: It’s dead easy. Just put a page and the cash will come!

A lot of scam sites tell you about that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The famous Irish lore is based on a bit of trickery, the rainbow will never end because it is a full circle! If it is too good to be true, most of the time… it is! You have to be skeptical and smart, if you find something that you think is great, do some research on forums or Google Groups and make sure you are reading a real customer testimonial instead of an affiliate’s sales pitch .

Recommended Gurus to Building Successful Online Businesses

If you need some down-to-earth advise from real internet marketing experts, visit my favourites:
i) Ken Evoy
ii) Rosalind Gardner

Both Ken and Rosalind have been in this industry for a long time, they give down-to-earth advise which withstands the adversities faced by most affiliates for not playing by the search engine’s rules. I highly recommend their products if you are seriously committed in building an online business.

Welcome to tutorial 2 of the Build a Website that Sells Series. It was hard to decide over whether to write about content for search engines or choosing affliates programs first. Eventually, I came to a conclusion that content is king!

No one on the internet can search for information at a site which consists only of graphics, pictures or flash animation. They search for information at a site filled with text content. Search engines welcome websites with content and not websites that splatter only banner ads on the page. It’s what fuels the internet and it will stay that way for as long as it exists.

Anyway, now that you have chosen a theme for your website, it’s time to start writing some content around “Keywords”.

Keywords:
Keywords or keyphrases are phrases or words that surfers type on search engines to find a website that has the information they want. For example: If I want to look for gardening tools, I type “gardening tools” to search for related websites. In this case, the keyword is “gardening tools”.

By using keyword tools, you’ll know what people search for the most. Using back the example earlier – the gardening site, mightygreenthumbs.com (I know peanuts about gardening, mind you), let’s say I want to write an article about “fertilizers”. So I use one of the following FREE keyword suggestion tools:

Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool
Digital Point Solution’s Free Keyword Suggestion Tool

I see that the word “fertilizers” is searched 26589 times and “organic fertilizer” is searched 5766 times in the month of February 2006. Supposing I have a very extensive knowledge of cheap and organic fertilizer I use everyday for my gardens, I click on the “organic fertilizer” to see more narrow searches on this area and from there I can see what people are generally interested in when it comes to organic fertilizers. The entire list helps me to brainstorm what contents I can write about fertilizers.

I may want to write a general piece on “Organic Fertilizer: An Introduction” and slowly branch out to narrow topics such as “The Advantages and Disadvantages of Organic Fertilizers”, “How to Make an Organic Fertilizer”, “Organic Fertilizers in Canada”, etc.

The Technicals

If you want to target the keyword “Organic Lawn Fertilizer”, a general rule of thumb to rank well on search engines using on-page factors relates to:

1) Filename
2) Title
3) Body text and headers
4) Meta tags and other tags

To ease your pain, you may want to consider E-commerce packages like Site Build-It!, it takes care of all these easily by checking your page and advising you how to optimize your page better for search engines. Anyway, on with the technicals:

1) Keyword in Filename
e.g. organiclawnfertilizer.html, organic-lawn-fertilizer.html, lawn-organic-fertilizer.html, etc
If you want to separate filenames, it is advised to use hyphens. However, too many hyphens create a spammy look. Google is quite strict about it. So a filename like: keyword1-keyword2-keyword3-spam-spam-spam is not advisable.

For bloggers, the blog providers automatically change your filename according to your blog title. All will go well if you follow all steps in this tutorial.

2) Keyword in title and meta tags

< HEAD>
< TITLE>Organic Lawn Fertilizer: The Awful Truth< /TITLE>
< META name="description" content="Everything you wanted to know about Organic Law Fertilizer">
< META name="keywords" content="organic lawn fertilizer, organic fertilizer, lawn fertilizer">
< /HEAD>


If you are creating your own website, you can add the < title>< /title> tag inside your < head>< /head> tag, like above. Although some internet marketing gurus argue it’s best to put ONLY the keyword in the title, you shouldn’t forget the fact that you are also targetting your site to visitors and not only the search engines. “Organic Lawn Fertilizers” may not be enticing enough to get clicks to your website, but maybe “Organic Lawn Fertilizers: The Awful Truth” will. It’s also important to put the keyword as the first few words in your title. For bloggers, your page title is equivalent to your blog title.

Meta tags isn’t as important as it was years ago. We use two common type of meta tags, meta keywords and meta description. If you refer to the code above, do you see META name=”description”? That’s the meta description tag and and META name=”keywords” is the meta keywords tag.

There’s very little use for meta keywords, but it does help a little bit in guiding what the search engine should expect from your website. The meta description is displayed on the search results and gives your visitors a glimpse of what your page is about, like this at Google:

Meta tags used to be extremely useful and it was fairly easy to rank on the top 2 pages if you used keywords in the meta tags, it’s not the case now because the major search engines like google, yahoo and msn doesn’t support it. ONLY A FEW search engines support it, and these are very minor ones which probably won’t bring you much traffic. The fact that it was so easy to rank top 10 by using meta tags years ago is the reason why no importance is placed on them anymore. The major search engines want targetted search results for their users, not spammy keyword sites that are filled with uncomprehensible text to the human eyes.

3) Body Header
Put a H1 header (e.g. use < H1>< /H1> tags) that is the same as the title before you start your articles, you can also put taglines with keywords after it. For e.g.,

< H1>Organic Lawn Fertilizer: The Awful Truth< /H1>
< H2>Just because it’s organic, doesn’t mean it’s good. Organic Lawn Fertilizers can be detrimental to your plant’s health.< /H2>

4) Body text
Have your keywords appear throughout your article or content 5-20% of the time.

4) Image Alt Tag
You can also use keywords when describing your images. These are alt description in your image tag, e.g.
< img src="picoffert.jpg" alt="organic lawn fertilizer">
The alt tag describes what the picture is about when you mouseover the picture, it also shows the alt words when the picture doesn’t load.

Other factors to consider

1) Get good sites to link to you
If you have google toolbar, you’ll be able to check sites that google gives importance to. It’s called Google Page Rank. The google toolbar comes with FireFox browser, but you can also download one for internet explorer. If you don’t have FireFox, download it because it’s the best browser in the world.

2) Add more content to your site regularly
Google likes websites that updates regularly, so do visitors

Other search engine optimization resources that help you to build website that sells:

Google Ranking Factors Checklist
Webmaster World Forums
Search Engine Watch

This is end of “Build a Website that Sells” Part 2. Now, let’s go make some money with “Build a Website that Sells Part 3 – Show Me the Money”

I’ve made this tutorial as easy as possible so that not too many technical skills (except a bit of HTML) are required for you to start building your very own website.

Basically, when you want to build a website that sells. There’s 3 ways to go about it:

Option 1:
Purchase an easily customizable website such as Site Build It!, made by the good people at Sitesell, Inc

Site Build It! (SBI!) is one of the most comprehensive e-commerce packages I have ever seen. My father is a user of SBI!. Despite his lack of knowledge about designing websites and online marketing, the step-by-step tutorials has led my father to a new source of income. If you wish to get into the game of building an e-commerce site without going through too many hassles, I’d highly recommend Site Build It!

Option 2:
Get a free website or a blog.

This is a very good way to start especially when you are a newbie, because most free site/blog providers are easy to set-up and has a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) site builder. However, all these free stuff are at an expense of a professional look. You’d get a website address of “http://www.freesiteprovider.com/fashion/~username” instead of a “http://www.yourname.com”. It’s always good to purchase a domain name (.com), so that when your website becomes popular… you can move your visitors to a new host with ease (see “Choosing Your Own .com”).

Option 3:
Purchase your domain name and web hosting separately. Make your own website. Do your own search engine optimization and online marketing. Sounds like more hassle compared to option 1 and 2? Option 3 requires a some technical knowledge.

Picking A Topic – Choosing the theme for your website

The greatest thing about the internet when it comes to making websites is that you can write about ANYTHING you want. However, I don’t suggest building a website just because it’s looks like it’ll make a lot of money. It is important to choose a topic that you like, this makes it easier for you to write contents for your visitors for years to come. Also, don’t be too greedy and make a website about everything under the sun, chances are your visitors will become confused when they arrive at your site that talks about gambling, ecards, jobs, software, weather etc.

Establishing Your Internet Presence – Choosing Your Own .com

Getting your own .com is not only cheap but it’s also a permanent address for your website, you can switch from host to host without having to provide your visitors with a new address… a .com sticks with you wherever your website goes.

Choosing a domain name is easier if you already know what kind of website you have in mind. If you wish to build a website about gardening, you may want to choose a domain name along those lines. Chances are general terms like gardening.com or gardens.com are already taken, so use your creativity and choose a domain name with combination of words e.g. mightygreenthumbs.com or choose another domain extension like .info, .biz, .be etc.

When I buy domain names, I love Register Fly because they offer the cheapest price on the internet. You can buy a .info for $2.99 and .com, .net, .org, .us and .biz for $7.99! Just enter the coupon code “FLY799″ on your purchase. Be sure to check the “hot deals” page for more promotion.

Next: Tutorial 2 – Simple Search Engine Optimization

This is a great personal budget worksheet because it saves me from forgetting expenses that exists. Sometimes I forget to include small on-going expenses like newspapers and this worksheet saves me from recalling what expenses I have and don’t have, this budget worksheet lists all the expenses from daily expenses to bi-monthly haircut to an occasional vacation.

Click here to download your own budget worksheet