Review of CashCrate

Are you looking for some start up cash for a business? CashCrate is the answer for you.

I learned about CashCrate from Amy Bass at www.mydebtfreegoal.com. Did you know that you can get paid for participating in surveys and completing offers?

I am the hyperactive type so I figured I try CashCrate out, while I listened to some audio books. I wanted to test it out for my readers. It surprised me with how user friendly the interface is and how much money you make. I devoted five hours of time in one hour intervals. After five hours, I made $84.25 in cash. That equals about $16.85 per hour or equivalent to a $35,000 full time job. Not Bad!

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Tips for getting the most from CashCrate:

1. Give really information - You need to provide really information, your phone number and e-mail address. The e-mail address can not be a temporary one too. They are constantly on the look out for fraud so inaccurate information will keep your offers from clearing.
2. Speed tip – I used my Google Toolbar’s AutoFill function to quickly fill my name, address, phone number, and e-mail address. I figured this out for the last two hours of work. It saves a lot of extra typing and time.

If you’re looking for some extra cash, CashCrate is the way to go. Click on the banner below to sign up today.

Making Money on Your Articles

I promised to write about making money on the articles that you write. I believe the good article writing could produce a nice passive income. For each quality article, you will generate about an average of $20 per month.

Let’s run the numbers
If you write 1 article per day for one month, that equals 30 articles in the first month. At $20 per article, you score a passive income of $600 in the first month. For each month that you repeat this performance, you double your money.

Sound’s great, doesn’t it?

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Three models of income generating online magazines

1. Upfront Payment & Paid for Performance
2. Purchased
3. AdSense model

Upfront Payment & Paid for Performance

These websites either pay you upfront for the article or pay according to the number of page views.

Associated Content – They are quickly becoming one of my favorite online publishers. They pay upfront for a quality articles between $3-20 per article. You also get a performance payment of $1.50 for 1000 page views. If you target a popular topics, I can see the possibility of hitting 1000 pages quickly

Helium – Helium pays for page views. The pay rate depends on your articles ratings, the amount advertisers will pay for that category, and number of page views.

Purchased Articles

Constant Content – They let you place your articles up for sale and take a finders fee. I have not used their service yet so I can’t tell you about their performance, but it may be worth a shot.

AdSense Model

The AdSense Model gives you some or the entire AdSense dollar your article earns. These sites require you to enter your AdSense Id number.

InfoSweet – Shares 50% of AdSense Revenues
Articlecodex.com - Shares 50% of AdSense Revenues
Articletrader.com - Shares 50% of AdSense Revenues
Articlewise.com - share 100% of AdSense Revenues
Earnticle.com - Shares 50% of AdSense Revenues
Ezinearticles.com - Shares 50% of AdSense Revenues
Hotwebtools.com - Shares 100% of AdSense Revenues
Oocuz.com - Shares 100% of AdSense Revenues
Savvify.com - Shares 100% of AdSense Revenues
Xomba.com - 50% of AdSense Revenues
VDOX.com - Shares 100% of AdSense Revenues
Freeblogarticles.com - Looks like it shares AdSense money. Could not find documentation but it lets you add your AdSense ID.

Let me know if I missed any good ones by adding a comment below.

Doing the right things

To grow our business to the million dollar level, we must do the right things. I know what the right things are – calling prospects, enrolling new student, upgrading students into higher value programs, selling retail, follow up on calls, etc. I know all the right buzz words but the power is in the execution.

Execution is the key!

I need to work on the perfect execution of my business systems. Discipline myself to constantly and consistently target the correct activities every day. My List of 5 keeps me focused on these activities.

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Article Marketing

The last few weeks, I worked on article marketing. I wrote 5 articles last week. I posted 3 articles and I am waiting for Associated Content to approve for more 2 articles. The results are profound. I have three websites that I am promoting - this blog, my personal blog, and my business website. My goal is to create at 5 articles for each website.

Since posting my first articles, I noticed my visits per day almost doubled. That’s from only one article! Also, I am generating some additional revenues from Adsense. Although my main purpose of this blog is to grow my business, I see great potential in creating a passive source of revenues from writing. How much of an increase in Adsense have I experienced? From three articles in one week, I generated about $5 each in additional revenues.

The internet is a wonderful thing. Any writers looking for additional revenues or possibly a full time career should consider article marketing. The next few days, I will write how to make it a possibility.

Looking for help write articles fast? Check out my post on Article Speed Writing.

Do you have a Financial Offense and Defense?

Fans, from all over, swarm to watch their favorite teams play NFL football. It’s amazing to watch high level competitors take the field and battle for the win. For a professional football team to remain a top contender on the field, they require a strong offense and defense to win. Our financial security has two sides also and without both sides we will lose in the end.

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Financial Offense

What is your money earning potential? That’s your financial offense. Most people display a pretty good offense. That means constantly achieving a higher and higher income level. Any awesome football team creates a winning strategy for their offense. With our financial offense, we need strategies too.

Offensive Strategy

Increase your income – If you have a salaried or hourly job, one of the best offense strategies is to constantly increasing your salary. For business owners, your offensive strategy is to increase and maximize the value of your time. David Bach, one of my favorite finance authors, in his book, Start Late, Finish Rich outlines a Four Week Action Plan to Get a Raise. David takes you through the steps to get a 10% raise. It works because I used it to get a raise at my customer service job. I received a 13% raise in 6 weeks by receiving a promotion. David Bach also outlines steps to increase your business by 10%. I took his advice and raise my student tuition by over 10% with almost no negative repercussions.

Create Multiple Streams of Income – Living with one source of income is a dangerous game. I set up numerous streams of revenue within my business. At one time, I relied on only student tuition as my only source of income. If tuition was down that month, I sat on the verge of financial ruin. Now, I operate with many streams. Some examples of streams of revenue for my business are tuition, retail, special events, birthday parties, drink machine. In addition, I have other ventures online through affiliate marketing, article marketing, online store sales and Adsense.

Passive Income – Any activity that you do once and profit from for a long time is Passive Income. Passive income ranges from stock and mutual fund investments, to writing articles online, and online store sales. Anything you can do once and enjoy a constant drip of income is passive.

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Financial Defense

I find that defensive money strategies are often ignored or non-existent. Defensive money strategies entail not spending everything you have so you can fund more offensive strategies. What’s the use of earning a million dollars, if you spend a million and half? This mindset results in you becoming broke the same as if you make $30,000 and spend $35,000. Wealth is not how much you make, it how much you have leftover.

Defensive Strategy

Simple Living - Make simple living your strategy for life. The fact of the matter is that the less you spend the less stress you have. These days because of the excessive impact of marketing, I find it hard to separate between needs and necessity. For necessity, we only need food, water, and shelter and everything else is fluff.

24 hour Purchase Rule - Before you buy anything ask yourself “Do I really need this?” “Would I cease to exist without this item?” If you answer No, place the item back on the shelf and wait 24 hours to think it over. Most items, you will not return to buy.

I try hard to develop both an offensive and defensive strategy. I always had a great offense but the defense took me time to develop.

Helium – Write and earn Cash

Catch the wave of writers writing articles and earn money … Try www.helium.com now.

It is a great way to get you, your business, or website noticed. At the same time, you can generate a passive income from your articles. Click on the banner below for more information.

After signing up, Helium will send you a confirmation e-mail make sure you read it completely and activate your account.

Helium uses PayPal to submit payment so you need an active PayPal account. All you need to do is enter your PayPal e-mail address. Helium pays out once you earn $25. You can click on the Earnings & Payment button to watch your earning grow. Once you reach the $25 minimum, hit the Request Payment button to receive your cash.

I like the competitive nature of Helium because articles are rated by other writers. The five best rated articles get the most exposure in each category. This means articles ranked higher by members earn more money.

Three factors affect the amount paid-out:
1. Quality – Higher rated articles earn more than lower ranked articles
2. Reader Draw – Some topics draw a larger number of reader than others
3. Advertisers – Advertisers pay more for certain topics than others

Are you having trouble writing articles? Read my blog on Article Speed Writing.

Article Speed Writing

Okay, I started my article marketing campaign. I submitted two articles last week. Then, Wham! I was hit with writer’s block. I started researching different books and I wanted to tell you about a book that really helped me call Article Speed Writing.

Article Speed Writing teaches you how to write content quick, about 500-600 word article in a half hour. By using the secret formula, I jumpstarted my writing and back on track writing articles to submit online.

Here’s some great things I learned through the program:

* How to do lighting fast research on any topic and learn enough to write an article in minutes…
* How to target keyword to drive more search engine traffic to your article.
* How to use the Golden Formula to step by step create a high quality article in less than 30 minutes.
* How to stimulate more ideas when you can’t think of how to start your article.
* How to write multiple unique articles using the same keywords.
* And much, much more.

I high recommend the article speed writing program and wanted to help my readers get started writing articles. I am sure that this program will help other writers like myself and make more money with the added benefit of save time.

You can read more about Article Speed Writing here. Read over the information and see for yourself how it can help you.

Associated Content

Associated Content is a place where writer's, amateur and professional, can submit content online on virtually any topic. Besides the fact that Associated Content will gain you exposure, it’s also a paid to write program where they pay you upfront for your articles and also provide you a performance bonus for page views.

Associated Content pays between $3 - 10 per article depending on the article quality with the average around $4. The performance bonus is $1.50 for 1000 page views. The payments from Associated Content are via Paypal.

The great thing about Associated Content is that the earning potential is great. Say you write 4 articles per day for 30 days. At the end of the month, you would earn $480 in upfront payments. If you earn an additional $1 performance bonus per month for each article then you create a residual income of about $120 which will go up every month.

In order to submit articles, you must be at least 18 years old and a US citizen. You must submit articles with unique content, decent quality (good grammar, spelling, etc.) and a minimum of 400 words.

You can submit articles on almost any topic. Here’s some topic suggestions: Business Profile, Travel Guide, Stock Tips, Humor Clip, How-to Guide, Product Review, Tech Advice.

When submitting articles, make sure that you submit them as Non-exclusive to Associated Content. This allows you to submit the article to other online magazines like Helium.

One last thing, I submit my articles to Associated Content first. Once you receive the payment, you can submit to other online magazines. Why? My first article was rejected because they found it on other sites and thought it was not unique or copied content.

Okay, there you have it. Everything about Associated Content. You can read more about Associated Content here.

Article Marketing 101

Okay, I hit on a great idea that has to do with my key strategy of becoming the Obvious Expert. ARTICLE MARKETING!!! Yes, these days with the internet the pen is definitely mightier than the sword.

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So what is Article Marketing, you may be asking?

Well, article marketing is writing articles and posting them for free at article websites. I already found over 25 sites. As a dug deeper into the article marketing world, I found many distinct benefits of providing your well-written articles.

It’s free
First, you gain the notoriety and prestige that comes with being a published writer. At the same time, you will propel your Obvious Expert status. All this for the best price... FREE!!!

Links to your website
Second, the articles provide the ability to backlink to your website. This will increase your traffic and hopefully your leads. Backlinks also help increase your search rankings on search engines like Yahoo and Goggle.

Some sites pay you
What?! That’s right. You heard it here. You can get paid for your articles too. Some sites pay you upfront, others split Adsense money with you, and finally, some put you’re articles up for sale.

Viral Articles
Once you submit your articles, these websites submit your articles to other websites for use (still giving you the credit). This means that people have a better chance to see your writing and visit your website.

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I spent most of this week signing up for these websites and I finished posting my first two articles today. I am really looking forward to seeing the results of my efforts. I’ll keep you posted.

Over the next week, I will go into more details about each site and provide an extensive list of links.

Key Strategy: Becoming the Obvious Expert

Elsom Eldridge Jr. and Mark L. Eldridge co-wrote a must read book called, How to Position Yourself As the Obvious Expert.(Click on the picture to get your copy) Becoming the obvious expert in my community is one of my key strategies in building a million dollar business and I will speak about it often.

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Three reasons to becoming the Obvious Expert in your business

1. Increase in leads – You will automatically attract more prospects by increased referrals. Since starting to work on this strategy, I have had new students arrive with at my doors and they tell me that they heard our school is the best around. Many times, they were referred by people that never took my classes!

2. Command a Higher Customer Value – People expect to pay more for an expert. Everyone’s heard that old adage, “you get what you pay for.” Higher tuition rates/ prices also make giving special discounts easier and customers appreciate them more.

3. Hear Less Sale Objections & Higher Lead Conversion – Most prospects are sold on your business’s value before walking in the door.

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Keys to positioning yourself as the Obvious Expert

1. Define your Unique Selling Proposition – What makes you unique from your competition?

2. Get Published – Write articles for magazines, send out newsletters or ezines, and publish articles on free web-based magazines.

3. Perform Informative Lectures – Provide valuable Lectures to organizations in your community

4. Wow them with Seminars – Host events that attract people and possible added income to your business

5. Create at Terrific Content-based Website – Provide lots of valuable information on your website to pull in more people

6. Community Activism – Coordinate charity or community events for a admirable cause.

Over the course of my quest, I will explore these ideas plus many more in order to elavate my business to the status of the Obvious Expert.

Improving Search Engine Rank

On my List of 5 today, one task is to improve traffic to my website.

Websites are an invaluable marketing tool for any company, but in order for customer find you, your website must come up through search engines. Search Engines rank sites higher if they have more backlinks to there page.


Here's a list of free directorys that I posted my website on to improve my traffic and ratings:

ProLink Directory
Submit Web Link General Directory
AAAWebDirectory.com
iExtreme Directory
iwebdirectory - Internet Web Directory: One time $1.99 charge for a lifetime membership
Perfect Directory
Free Web Directory
TWMD
Add Your Link
FAT64.NET
Internet Web Directory
MyBillionLinks.com Directory
Nuclear Land
Triple W Directory

Submitting to all of these sites was quite time comsuming but over time, it will be well worth the effort. I love tasks that involve one time upfront work but the benefits last indefinitely.

If you know of any more directories, please share with our reader by posting information in the comments below. Thanks.

Power of Focus

I took the Anthony Robbins 30 day Personal Power II program. I highly recommend this program to all my reader. The investment is well worth it.

I especially liked Disc 6 which talks about the power of focus. Our focus determines the results or outcomes in our life. We can access tremendous power by controlling the focus of our minds. Our focus depends on how we evaluation thing and an evaluation is nothing more than questions we ask yourselves on a daily basis.

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Disempowering Versus Empowering Questions

We have a constantly rolling movie of thoughts in our heads called self-talk. When we evaluate our personal situation, our self talk comes in the form of questions. These questions can be disempowering or empowering.

Disempowering questions are questions that leave us feel helpless and do not offer solutions to our current situation. For example, asking yourself, “Why am I not making enough money?” “How did I get so much in debt?” are disempowering questions. As you can see, these questions are self defeating, and ineffective.

Empowering questions stimulate your mind to think of solution to our problems. Examples of empowering questions are “How can I make more money, today?” “What activities can I do today to make more money?”

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Amy Bass: Real Life Example of the Power of Empowering Questions

Her and her husband had accumulated a substantial debt of $72,900. After reading, Dave Ramsey’s book, The Total Money Makeover, Amy decided to make a change. Instead of asking the disempowering question "How am I ever going to pay down this debt?", she asked the empowering question, "How can I make more money to pay down this debt?" With four kids, she decided to make her money through online marketing and through online programs like CashCrate. The best is that you can follow her progress online at her blog, www.mydebtfreegoal.com which I found to be a treasure trove of terrific information.

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30 Day Challenge: Your List of 5

After listening Anthony Robbin’s idea about the power of focus, I took the idea and applied it by using what I call my “list of 5”. Everyday, I ask myself the empowering question, “What money making tasks can perform today?” I write the tasks down in my Franklin Planner and rank them in order of importance. Then, I start with the most important and continue down the list with the intent to complete at least 5. This List of 5 has really driven some awesome results over the summer. Summer is usually a slow time in my industry. With the list of 5, I created alternate sources of revenue like a Summer Camp and stayed focused on marketing activities like flyer runs, public demonstrations, postcards, etc.

My challenge to you is to try my List of 5 idea for 30 days and let me know if you experience any results by commenting below.