How To Make Money Off Other People’s Debt

Yes, you read the title right. There has been some talk about this lately since a book came out entitled Bailout Riches. Well, the book’s concept is correct. You can make money off other people’s debt. His avenue of acquiring the debt is a little backwards, or outdated, and no it is not for everyday people like is suggests. So how does it work?

Think about it this way. How are companies making money off other’s people debt? That’s simple – interest right? Well, what happens when the people stop paying on their bill altogether? The company loses that money. When a company wants to recoup the money, they find a debt collector. So, the debt collector works for the company and collects debt for them, which at that point is called charged-off debt. A lot of times the credit companies have a division of debt collectors. Well, it also the same concept. You own the debt and the people owe you, right? When companies think they’ve done enough to collect, they completely charge-off the debt and sell it to a debt broker. The debt broker then sells it for pennies on the dollar to whomever wants it. Yes, sometimes these debt collections get moved for 1% of the debt’s value. So, how do you make money off it?

First off, you can intercept this debt at many points. You can be the debt collector and collect on debts usually gets backing 30% of the money and then taking 30% for a fee and giving the other 70% back to the bank. This way, you don’t buy the debt. You never own it, and you’re making 30% on anything you get back for them. But, who’s going to trust just a person off the street to do this for them?

You can act as the debt broker and have the banks sell you the debt and turn around and sell it to debt collectors for profit. They usually move a million to hundreds of millions in debt at a time (on average for around 5% of the debt price), usually making a very small percentage off this, but adding up to a lot of money for one transaction.

The third place to be is on the other end of the debt broker. You can buy debt from a broker and then go after the debt yourself collecting on it. Say you find a small amount like $300,000 of debt being sold for 1%, which totals $3,000 for an investment. Now, you go and contact the people and strike deals with them so they only have to pay a fraction of it back to you. If you get 2% of it back, you just made $3,000 profit. Or you could hire a debt collector to collect on the debt for you and pay them 30%, but remember collectors have usually already tried to get them to pay already by the time it gets to you then. I don’t know how successful businesses profit off of the bottom of the barrel, but there’s got to be a better way then calling and asking them. I’ve heard of some debt buyers picking up the bottom of the barrel debt and taking them to court and having it slapped on other assets of theirs, or garnished from checks.

When you are on top and people owe you, you have a lot of power, but in this instance you have a lot of enemies too. I wouldn’t want to be there, but hey, out there are some people who don’t care how much they are liked. One place I know of to buy debt is Debt Connection.

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Posted in Debt Management.

Tagged with bailout riches, charged-off debt, debt broker, debt buyers, debt collections, debt collector, debt collectors, other people's debt.

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By Admin – October 27, 2009

How to handle patent royalties and payments when buying, selling or licensing

There are many locations you can buy and sell patents online. This has not really taken off mainstream though. There are not any flagship websites for this yet, but you can search through multiple sites for patents. Some of the patent marketplaces are:

Patent Auction

Shop 4 Patents

Idea Buyer

Patent.com’s IP Exchange

New Idea Trade

You can also try IP (intellectual property) forums and eBay too.

Patent ownership and patent licensing rights’ basics

There are some basics you must known first about patent ownership. Having a patent gives the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, selling, or importing the invention, but at the same time does not give you the right to do any of that! In the case that it infringes on a pre-existing patent, you are held liable. Thus a patent search is performed before a patent application by a patent attorney. A patent search SHOULD find any similar patents and the patent application should work around those existing patents and not infringe on them, but sometimes that is not the case.

A good patent covers it’s bases by it’s claims not being so specific that someone else can slip in, make some adjustments, and have a similar patent without infringement. A good one should have broad claims but still explain exactly how the invention works at the same time. Just because it’s patented does not mean it will hold up in court. That is why patent attorneys are hired to file the patent application. They should be making a solid patent. Do-it-yourself patent application that make it through usually do not hold up in court.

Assigning a patent is transferring ownership of the patent. This is done when buying a patent. There are inventors and there are assignees. It might be invented by two people, but both assigned to a company. If you get one of the two inventors to assign it to you, the other inventor still has complete rights as well as you. That one can go and assign it to someone else too.

Patent licensing does not give you ownership of the patent. It gives you rights that may be limited to time of use, field of use, and geographical area. A licensee is just that – not an owner, just someone having a contract to use it. As far as owners and assignees go, everyone in these categories have 100% rights all the time. It does not matter if there are 50 inventors or assignees, they do not each own 2%, but 100% of the rights each.

Patent licensing and patent royalties when buying

If you are a large company, you are much better off buying the patent from the owner(s), since others might try to claim infringement later. If you are a small company, you are probably better off licensing the patent or producing your own invention along the same lines but avoiding infringement. Patent licensing can be expensive. When licensing try to get it based on percentage of sales, or even better yet, percentage of profits, instead of a fixed price, so you owe nothing if you make nothing. Many don’t want to do this because they are not guaranteed anything and would have to check your sales each month to make sure you’re not pulling one over on them. You could probably get a discount paying an up front amount instead and then monthly or performance based payments after, but it all depends on the risk you are willing to take.

If you do not have a lot of experience taking ideas to the market, cut what you expect to make on it in half, and double what you expect the invention to cost you to produce, and if it still totals profit for you then go with it. And always use a patent attorney when purchasing a patent. You can also use a patent agent, but an attorney has to go through much more testing than an agent, so attorneys have a deeper knowledge usually.

Read up on any patent online by putting in the patent number on Google. Google has a database containing all the patents, and will show you all the documentation on them. You can also check on USPTO’s website if it’s a US patent.

If you need money to buy a patent, you will have to seek out venture capitalists or angel investors and put together a solid business plan on how you can purchase the license, market it, and profit from it. But, venture capitalists will want a percentage of your business in return so count on them taking a piece of the pie. The good side is that they will usually mentor you too, because they want to make sure their money makes profit. On another bad note, some venture capitalists abuse the power of owning some of your company and will actual replace you if you are under performing.

Patent licensing and patent royalties when selling

Selling a patent is not all that hard once you’ve found a place to buy it or license it. Any payment structure you can think of can be done (lump sum, monthly, sales-based, collateral). Sales-based licensing can give you the most or the least profit. Have an idea of your stipulations ahead of time. Are you offering an exclusive or non-exclusive license? How long do you want them to license it for, or how long will you make it exclusive? Do you want to still keep some rights for yourself? You can arrange a leaseback style agreement with them to benefit from a full sale, but still keep some rights yourself. Have a patent attorney write up your agreements, and tell him he will get paid from the proceeds so he doesn’t stick you with a bill ahead of time. Also make sure the seller knows where the patent is on it’s timeline. A patent fee is needed for continuation every 4 years.

If you need money to get the idea patented, you can sell it ahead of time having companies sign a non-disclosure agreement or by getting a provisional patent. You cannot list it for sale this way though. Once you get a prospect, you then have to cover the patent cost probably with your own loan, and then sell it. A company will probably not pay you up front if you have no patent. You could also try to sell the idea to them with a valid patent search already done and let them file for the patent, but you will receive much less.

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Posted in Royalties and Residuals.

Tagged with angel investors, buy patents, intellectual property, invention, patent, patent agent, patent application, patent assignees, patent attorney, patent infringement, patent inventors, patent license, patent licensing, patent ownership, patent royalties, patent search, provisional patent, royalties, sell patents, USPTO, venture capitalists.

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By Admin – October 27, 2009

The Keyword Academy – Personal Progress – Working or Not?

I am writing this post to tell everyone how everything is going with The Keyword Academy. I joined about 2 months ago. I haven’t had a lot of time since I was right in the middle of moving and still unpacking some. The Keyword Academy tells you to make, I think, 10 niche sites to start out with to see which ones take off. So, me being the bad student I am, only have 2 so far. They also tell you how to target green keywords and write posts and how to do the link building. I’ve followed most of that, not to the T, but pretty closely. I’m sure I have more links than I should right now for my two. But, even if you overdo it so that the links don’t look natural anymore, it will be good later on after some time and the dust settles and Google starts to like your site more. It’s really about trying to get in Google’s favor since they own the market for search engine usage.

The first month was actually quite discouraging. You set up a site, get a ton of links, and nobody comes. Interesting… where are all the people? Well, if you let your site sit for a little while, the traffic eventually comes because you start to rank on the search engines. Often times you start to rank for things you weren’t trying to rank for. I noticed my site is ranked 5th for Keyword Academy Affiliate and 19th for Keyword Academy. I wasn’t going for either of these but I’m ranked for them. I didn’t even have a post dedicated to that until this one now. I’ve been watching what terms people are searching for when they find my sites, and sometimes I may not have anything on that subject on my site but just similar sayings, so I will start to target some of the searches I’m seeing more and more.

keyword academy method I’ve learned a ton over the past 2 months. Even if I haven’t done a ton of work, I studied up on all the different strategies (black hat techniques, gray hat, and white hat). The Keyword Academy teaches white hat seo (search engine optimization) techniques. It also throws a little bit of gray hat techniques in there. I never want to just be told by one source what works and what doesn’t since it doesn’t give me the full picture. So, I definitely see now how all the techniques work. If you follow The Keyword Academy techniques though you will not have to worry about a site getting deindexed and receiving no traffic because of it. Whereas black hats throw a ton of sites out there and only expect maybe 10% to stick on the search engines, and they make a load of money until they get cut off, and move on to the next trick. Using white hat seo is a better, much more stable means of making money online. Plus, you’re not spamming the internet.

Internet advertising is tricky. The trickiest part is just finding out what you should advertise, how you should advertise it and what audiences to go after. I hear kids and the elderly click on the most ads which generate the most profit. But, I’m not targeting things for kids or the elderly, but I will try that in the future. I started a blog here on How To Make Money. While I can take over the competition since the competition’s pagerank given by Google isn’t very high, I did not realize when starting out to also look at how much competition there is (and there is a LOT of competition for that keyword). A strategy I’m seeing and have been told by other great internet marketers is to start low, target keywords related to your keyword but are much longer and have less traffic, because it’s easier to rank for them and then they give you a boost on your main keyword. I could go really in depth into everything I’m writing about here and I probably will in the future, but I’m trying to keep it simple for easy reading and understandability. Plus, I’m a computer geek so I won’t use all the acronyms and tech jargon that I normally do… just yet.

The bottom line is that I am just starting to see some traffic since I picked very competition niches and I’m just starting to see that traffic turn into a trickle of revenue. My longest living site is only 6 weeks old, and I’ve made $10 so far, but half of that was all last week. So, now I see that I’m just at the beginning. Yes, I put in a lot of time for $10 so far, and I am young and make just under 6 figures a year so that’s pocket change to me. But, that money is passive income (it’s residual and will keep coming) and it’s the very start to my journey. So, I plan on taking internet advertising much further. A lot of people make $100/month after 3 months jumping right into it. I just like to have better in-depth knowledge than most people before proceeding and it’s got my favor now. I will build more sites and will target many different things to find out what takes off the best. And I will analyze all the data. That’s what I’m good at, and I’ll keep posting progress here on it.

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Posted in Internet Advertising, Personal Journey.

Tagged with how to make money, Internet Advertising, keyword academy, keyword academy affiliate, making money online, niche sites, passive income, residual, residual income, revenue, seo, the keyword acedmy, white hat seo.

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By Admin – October 27, 2009

Learn how to make money off patent royalties

A patent is a grant to the exclusive use of an invention to the inventors or whomever the patent gets assigned to, such as a company. It holds the right to exclude others from using, creating, selling or importing the invention.

An inventor can patent a machine, a part, a process, a combination of different matter, or any new improvement on an existing idea. Patents are a great way to protect your idea, but do not in any way guarantee it will make you rich. The idea needs to be used in order for that to happen, otherwise it is just an expensive piece of paper. Patents usually cost between $2,000-$10,000 to obtain due to legal fees and attorney fees. The variation on cost is due to the simplicity or complexity of the patent, how many other patents it references, and what category the patent falls under. You can draft up the application yourself but it may not hold up in court so well later.

US Patent

What can you do with patents?

98% of patents filed for never make money. Why? The issuers are just trying to protect their ideas and the ideas never make it mainstream and they are not familiar with how to make money with them. How can you have better odds? First, you can talk with companies about your idea to get a feel for what others think before you have a patent by having them sign a NDA (non-disclosure agreement) before speaking with them. Another way to cut the costs up-front is to file a provisional patent license instead usually costing $500-$2,000. This protects the idea for a few years while you talk with others about it and get buy-in or round up capital to take it to the market. Later you can apply for the full patent.

Once you have a patent, you can do multiple things with it. You can take the product or idea to the market yourself, thus getting full profit from it with all the work and overhead. Or you can have someone else do it. You can sell the patent which gives all rights away. Or you can license it and receive royalties. Your payment can be structured in different ways (lump sum, constant percentage based on sales, part equity of the company it’s being licensed to, or flip the tables around and sell it to them then leaseback, or cross-license it for something of theirs).

How much can you make with patents?

The most typical method of royalty payment is a percentage based on the licensee’s sales. There are two main types of licenses for this method – a exclusive license and a non-exclusive license. With a exclusive license you are allowing that one company and no one else to license the patent from you. The price of the patent license can vary greatly, usually between 1%-20% of the sales price. Software and internet patents are usually the highest, followed by pharmaceuticals. The general rule is 25% of the net profit. Say a company would make a 80% profit off your product, then 20% would be a good royalty rate. If it is in a market with lower profit margins and they only expect to make a 10% profit, then 2.5% is a good royalty rate. A non-exclusive license will always be less, maybe a 1/3 of the price would be a good starting point. So, you must find more than 3 companies then to buy your patent in order to make more money than with an exclusive license.

Who can you sell patents to?

You can seek out the companies you feel it would benefit the most and talk with them. Otherwise, any place there’s inventors online, there are companies wanting to buy patents. New inventions are the life-blood of most industries.

What if someone tries to steal your idea?

If someone then infringes on your patent, gather all the evidence you can and take in to a patent lawyer. Some patent lawyers will review cases and choose whether or not to go after it for free. Free at first that is. If the case is won, they get a hefty payout, and if it’s not, you don’t owe anything. You’d need to convince them it is a good case though. Otherwise, extensive patent litigation can go into the millions. But some cases, much like one lost by Blackberry had a half a billion dollar payout. So, if you’re being infringed upon, it might be in your best interest to sit on it and bring it up a couple years down the road when the company is making a billion off it. If they are truly infringing they will have to pay you what they earned off it.

This is more or less an overview to help you learn how to make money off patent royalties. To actually tell someone step by step it requires an entire book. If you’re great at coming up with new ideas I highly recommend pursuing it, and learning businessmen and investor motivations so you can pull some strings. Many inventors do not go beyond the idea, or the patent.

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Posted in Royalties and Residuals.

Tagged with how to make money, inventor, learn how to make money, making royalties, patent, patent lawyer, patent license, patent licensing, patent litigation, patent royalties, patents, royalties, royalty payment.

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By Admin – October 15, 2009

Finding a great deal on a house

We closed on the house and now we are moved in. There are different approaches to finding real estate for less than it’s value, and in the current market it is not that hard to do – except they are not being appraised at fair market values currently, but are being appraised at the current condition of the market since it is not a fair market. Finding a great deal on a primary residence is a great investment opportunity. Here are a few house hunting tricks to make sure you get a place worth more than you pay.

I know tricks that will have people coming to you to sell their house for much less than the place is worth, but when you are house hunting, you don’t use these tricks, since those houses are not the type of house you will probably want for your primary residence. You want to choose the house you want. Look at houses listed on the MLS and for sale by owner homes as these people are most likely keeping their homes up. If you want a fixer, you’re best deal would be to track down abandoned properties. When looking at houses on the MLS make sure you take note of location, size, and taxes. These are the 3 biggest factors. My wife cares about the looks, so I let her look through them all first, pick good ones, and then I run through them.

Location is the first determining factor in how much a place is worth. If you don’t know what areas are worth more than others than you’ll soon find out. Next make a note of the square footage. This is the second biggest factor – an immaculate ranch is nowhere near the price of a rundown mansion. The third is how much the taxes are. Most people look for low taxes, but unless there was a large project done to the house that was never reported or they are claiming it is not yet finished to get around paying the taxes on it, the taxes often reflect and are actually directly tied to the assessed value. So look for high taxes, and a low sale price. Each city, town and village have a different tax rate, so a house in one town can have half the taxes as one in another town but still be worth more. So, when comparing values by taxes, do it by location.

Once you’ve got some narrowed down, look up there actual numbers. Google “the county name”,”the state abbreviation”, GIS (e.g. for Orlando, FL you’d google “Orange County, FL GIS”). GIS stands for geographical information system. Most counties have these available online and have tax information and assessed values tied to it. Right now mostly all the GIS systems require you to use Internet Explorer to view them. Every one is set up different, but will probably have a district field, house number field, direction field, and street name field. Go to search and put in the district (probably a drop down menu of all the cities in the county), and type in the house number and hit search. This usually narrows in down enough. It will list a couple houses and click on the specific one and it will take you to a map of the land and show you information about it (likely at the bottom and usually including the assessed value). Here you can the actual value of the house, and it’s actual taxes. You can usually click on something to take you to the tax statement which will list any issues as well, such as delinquent water and sewer or other taxes. If they are delinquent it gets tacked onto the next year’s taxes making it look like it’s worth more because of the higher taxes. You can also find out what didn’t get reported sometimes. Say, on the MLS it says “Finished LL” and taxes read 1700 square feet for the first floor and 1700 square feet of unfinished basement. Then you know the owner did the updates and it’s not yet reflected in the taxes and ultimately the value of the property. Also, click on a button that likely says Inquiry and then on all plots of land around the house to check the others out too. Make sure the house is not the most expensive one in the area. If your house is the most expensive – it’s value can’t raise as fast and can lower quicker. If it’s the least expensive, the value can only be brought up quickly, but not lowered much.

I hope this information helps someone. As far as ours, we got one at 75% of it’s value. It was a short sale, so the people were going into foreclosure and instead of letting that reflect bad on their credit for 7 years decided to sell before that point by making a deal with their mortgage bank to sell it for less than what they owed on it. Then all parties have to split up the loss. In that case it was the seller, the bank, the private mortgage insurance company, and the government since they were subsidized. And they had to remove a lien in the last 2 days before it closed. It closed in under 30 days – the fastest short sale the mortgage company has ever done. Most take around 3 months, but we pushed the envelope.

By the way, never think of your primary residence as a real asset. The only way it becomes a real property investment is when you sell it. If you never sell it, you never make any money from it. The rule of thumb is, if you can’t count on it as a source of income, it’s not an asset. It’s a liability since it costs you more than you make off it. Some people may argue with that, but that is an investor’s rule.

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Posted in Personal Journey, Real Estate.

Tagged with foreclosure, great deal, property investment, real estate investing, real property, short sale.

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By Admin – October 6, 2009

Personal Finances – My Journey From The Beginning Up To This Blog Post

I am planning on continuing posting on my current situation financially. I’ve had very interesting ups and downs. More often than not at the very same time of course. That’s what happens with finances. Great things happen and you pay, right? Bad things happen and you pay too. Well, hopefully by reading this you will take the words of advice I will give and use them so that you don’t have to make the same mistakes I’ve made.

I’m 27 years old right now. 5 years ago, I owned a condo and rented a bedroom out to a friend. I knew a lot about finances and that’s how I could own my own place when I was 22. I was making about $36K a year then. Many things happened all at once then. My funds were depleted from a down payment and buying all the furniture I needed. I guess you could say I was still living healthy. I was very smart when it came to handling and investing money (was doing it since my parents could sign for me), but all my knowledge was to the tune of having money. I was not knowledgeable when it came to not having money.

5 Years Ago – Started To Get Burried In Debt

Well, then things changed. There were multiple things that hit me all at once. Me and a couple friends went to Florida and we bought a timeshare (believe me it’s the worse investment on the planet). Of course the salesperson conned us into thinking it was great and we could even make money off it. This last week I finally got it completely paid off, but there are still yearly maintenance fees. I’ve tried reselling it. It didn’t work. At this point, I don’t have hope for it anymore and I’m willing to give it away. My friends still want it though it’s never been used. I am thinking of getting a attorney to do a quit claim deed on it to take my name off, and leave it to my friends to stop the bleeding. This was the first thing.

Second, a place gave me a check for $4,000. An obvious mistake. I told them what they did and they insisted it was mine. At the same time, the escrow from my property taxes was paid to me, twice! They wouldn’t take the second one back, and my escrow wasn’t claiming any negative amount. So, I was leery of both these things. Months past, maybe 4 months and by that time I thought if someone was missing money you think it would have been caught by now with all of the monthly statements and auditing that takes place. So, I started to get things that I needed at that point. The same month both of them asked for the payments back. I had nothing I could do except put everything I could on credit and pay them both back with checks.

4 Years Ago – Big Time Debt

Too Much Credit Immediately following this I got engaged and married. Since both of our parents aren’t rich, we paid for most of the wedding, the rings, the honeymoon, etc. I had no choice but to put this on credit. We tried to keep expenses down as much as possible. And then she moved in and had to find a job which took a while and didn’t help the situation. About 6 months into being married we were $24K in debt. And about 6 months after that, both our cars died… completely. So, we leased two cars. I knew buying was better, but all I could do was lease. To this day, we have never missed a payment on anything, but it was hard at times. We started paying off debt as much as possible, but we had no emergency fund, so any issue that came up had to go on credit. I would advice having an emergency amount, regardless of how much debt you owe. At this time, my FICO was around 625 – the lowest it’s ever been.

I started balancing amounts on different cards so the debt to available credit ratios were as low as they could be. Now, this has changed from a single debt ratio per card being looked at to your complete debt ratio. One thing that helped me was getting a Shaw’s Jewelers card. They weren’t as strict and the gave me $10K available credit. I never used it and it helped me greatly because now it looked like I was handling my debt better because of how much available credit wasn’t being used.

3 Years Ago – Starting to Look Better

Well, luckily, I set a budget and we stayed to it the best we could. I started to make more money at work because a threatened to leave my place if they were not going to pay me what they said they would when doing a position change I never got compensated for and what anyone else was offering me. I later left still because of the fact of being swindled for years and made more elsewhere. We started to get a handle on everything. We got the debt down to $14K in about a year and a half.

2 Years Ago – Bought a House

Then we decided to move to a house instead of a condo, and the payments were the same, but I didn’t anticipate all the extra costs. More space means more heat and electricity, sewer and water, buying everything to keep a yard up. I thought about these things, but didn’t think beyond say getting a lawnmower and a snowblower for outdoor work. You need much more equipment than that. So, when writing everything down on a budget it worked out, and I had a misc. category, but didn’t expect to miss so much that would be needed. From the sale of the condo and buying our house, we were able to get down to $5K in debt, which then shot back up to $10K after all the house extras. According to my wife’s logic, more rooms means we need more stuff. Still $4K less than before the move. After that I packed all the credit cards away. They are not to be used anymore. Some that have been paid off, closed my accounts because of inactivity (that felt good).

3 Months Ago Until Now – Moving Again

New House

We ended up not liking the middle of nowhere (which my wife was use to as a child, but had in a few short years become accustomed to everything being so close in the condo). Myself having grown up in the city, found the middle of nowhere to out of touch. And we decided if we were going to think about having any kids later it would help to be close to family too. Of course when we bought the house I made sure that the place was undervalued, so even in this horrible market we were able to get our money back on the house, but we didn’t make a profit. Basically the realtor made our profit. While we were selling the house some unexpected medical bills came up and insisted we pay them immediately (don’t they usually offer payments?). That got tacked onto our debt bringing it to $11.5K. In the midst of moving out and moving into a new place we stayed with my parents and got some of the debt paid off.

So, here we are today, in the middle of moving to a new house (our second house, third place) that’s close to friends, family and life. Were’ getting a short sale (at 90% of it’s current bottom of the market value, and 75% of it’s fair market value). We’re closing on it in less than a week. We have $8.5K left in revolving debt. I could pay most of it off at this point, but that would deplete our cushion money. And I’m making more than double what I was when we got married. My FICO score is now 800. I will continue on our plan to pay off debt and should be debt free in a little over a year, and credit cards will be banished for good. One will be kept locked up for back up, but I plan to never use them again.

The Future

I am now looking to create multiple streams of passive income now. I studied real estate investing and attended meetings. That is really what I would like to pursue in the future, using creative techniques to start out. But, even though with creative techniques you don’t need much money in hand, I don’t want to get caught in the middle of something and not have the extra cash to hold me over. I’m not about to make a mistake like that.

So, I’m starting out with internet marketing which costs pocket change to start and provides passive income also. It’s seems fairly simple, especially since I’ve always been a computer geek. That is my current job – being a geek. I am starting to do this through adsense and some affiliate marketing. I just started this month.

I am also pursuing building wealth through a great website startup (the first of it’s kind) and currently looking for sweat equity partners. We will see which area will get most of my attention and hours, but I see it as tiers (internet marketing, internet startup, and real estate investing) based off of the initial investment and backup supply needed, but all 3 have great cash on cash returns. Very little down and a lot back.

Journey I will document my journey here. I’m sure it will have it’s ups and downs, and I’m not afraid of sharing them with everyone. I’ve made a lot of money off stocks in the past and can share a lot of knowledge there, even doing some daytrading, but what I’m focused on is passive income now. I’m looking for certainty and not gambling or educated guesses like the stock market.

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Posted in Personal Journey.

Tagged with adsense, affiliate marketing, building wealth, debt, debt reduction, finances, make money, making money, passive income, real estate investing.

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By Admin – September 21, 2009

How To Make Money Working From Home

Everyone’s seen lots of work at home ads. How do you know if they’re legit? What should you avoid, and what actually works?

Avoiding the Scams

The first rule of thumb to go by is if they are getting you to do work for them, or is it talking about you setting up your own business? There is usually plenty of money to be made in working for yourself, or having other people’s time working for you while you run your own business, but if they are offering you “grunt work”, it’s definitely a scam. Grunt work includes the following:

Assembly jobs – usually require you to buy a kit, put it all together for them and send them back
Data Entry jobs – usually a sales pitch for another kit – for real jobs like this you’d be applying directly to a hospital or other reputable company
Multi-level marketing – requires you to sell a product to a user base, who sell it to a new user base, and so on and so on, also known as pyramid schemes. All the money flows up with these, so to make money you’d have to be the one starting the scheme and I would advise against that.
Online business kits – provide you with a guide you could have gotten for free
Posting Ads – these are spammers getting you to do their dirty work, and given you some fees if people are scammed into buying something from the spamming efforts
Stuffing envelopes – companies can get machines to do this for them for cheap – tests on this method have revealed that it really makes a couple dollars an hour

The second rule of thumb is – Are they straight forward about how you are going to make money working from home? If it’s legit, it will tell you what you need to do, how much work you need to do, what pitfalls to expect, and will have either have a live person coaching you online or a forum with other members that are building their businesses just like you.

Building an empire

It’s time to ditch the above ideas and grow up. Focus on building yourself an empire online. The best investment proven throughout all of history is property (real estate). You don’t even need to straight out buy it if you know other creative methods. You get someone in there renting it from you, paying for the place over time so you are gaining equity, gaining appreciation, saving on taxes from running a business, and of course they don’t just cover the cost of the place, but they even provide you with some extra monthly income. Each place you own provides you with more. It is one sure way to build yourself an empire.

Well, just like real estate investing, internet real estate is the same way. You create properties to generate a cash flow. The more property you have, the more you make monthly. Maybe you have a website, but it’s not making money for you. Well, that’s because you either didn’t make the website for that reason, or you didn’t do it right. You’re probably wondering how to make money off websites then. Here is a quick explaination, but I encourage you to learn from the experts that love sharing their knowledge on the subject at the bottom of this post.

To start making money doing work from home you need to set up a blog. You can do this through Blogger for free, or create your own website and use Wordpress if you would like more control over everything that goes on the website. You need to first pick a subject by targeting the right keywords (words that will be searched for using search engines like Google and Yahoo). You must search for subjects that advertisers will pay you well for. Advertisers pay Google and then Google gives you money for placing Google Ads on your website (it’s called Google Adsense). After you find some good keywords, you check to see what the competition is like out there by searching for those keywords using Google yourself. If it has weak competition you can probably rank in the #1 position on Google for these keywords. You then set up your blog targeting those keywords and place articles and links on other websites pointing back to your website and Google will give you more and more traffic. With more traffic you get more Ads viewed and clicked.

Adsense is one way to earn money online with a blog, but there’s also other ways. Let’s say you are writing about a specific product that you bought and tried before, you can advertise for Amazon or eBay then and give them a link to buy it themselves. These companies will also give you commission on sales. It’s called affiliate marketing. There are innumerous affiliate programs by companies that will pay you a portion of what they get paid for referring people to them.

Hubpages are quick easy way to start since you can put up single posts and then try to get them ranked well on Google. They are free to create and can generate some real money. Here is some advice and proof on hubpages. Making Money Online

If you want the best guidance, training, support and teachers available, for just 1 dollar you can test drive The Keyword Academy for a month. The forums are full of people that work from home doing this for a job. The teachers are Mark and Court and can answer any questions you ask. Griz is even a member (a blogger currently making $50K/month) being taught and teaching others in the academy.

Even if this isn’t your cup of tea, with the money it generates, it’s worth getting others to do the work for you. There are lots of people you can outsource blog creation to, so get involved today.

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Posted in Internet Advertising.

Tagged with affiliate programs, earn money online, extra monthly income, how to make money, Internet Advertising, keyword academy, make money, making money, working from home.

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By Admin – September 11, 2009

Easy Money Making Ideas

Need some supplemental income? It never hurts to search the internet for ideas for making money. Unfortunitely, you often times get a website trying to sell you a product. Aren’t you trying to make money? Not spend it? Isn’t that the idea? Well, here are a few ideas to make money quickly and easily without much more knowledge than you are already gifted with.

One simple money making idea is to de-clutter. Why not take a look around at things you haven’t used in over a year. Do you really need them? If you haven’t used them lately, you can probably do without them. eBay them! It doesn’t require any money up front. You pay the listing fee after the item is sold, out of your profits. It’s very simple to put things on eBay.

Already have the hang of listing items on eBay, then try this method. Look up local rummages, and visit them at the very end of their rummage time when they are just starting to pack up. Take a look around and if the items are of pretty good quality, make them an offer like “I’ll give you $50 for all your kids toys” or “I’ll give you $100 for everything you got left here.” People don’t want to keep their items for another year. That’s why they are having the rummage – to get rid of everything. Most likely they’ll cut you a good deal. eBay the items that you think will sell, and donate the rest (recording everything on ItsDeductible for getting your money back in taxes for anything that doesn’t sell).

Another money making idea is using a hobby of yours. Maybe it’s crafts or building furniture. Find a way to sell your work, either local, on eBay, or setting up your own website (it doesn’t cost much if you do the work, and it’s not hard these days). Maybe writing is your hobby or photography. There are websites that you can post your written masterpieces on and receive money (such as Storymash that pays you through web traffic ratings to your pages). There a ton of other sites that buy photos (just Google “Sell Photos”).

Are you looking for other ideas for making money? For a more lucrative money making idea to retire off of? Perhaps you want to create wealth using a method that allows you to generate more and more income while you’re not working. If so, check out the following blog posts Earn Money Online 24-7 and How To Make Money – The Smart Way. You will probably have to learn a new skill, but isn’t it well worth it?

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Posted in General Education.

Tagged with earn money, how to make money, make money, making money, money making ideas, receive money, simple money making idea, simple money making ideas, supplemental income.

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By Admin – September 10, 2009

Paid Surveys – A Scam?

Large companies and retailers perform in-house research on the consumption habits and usage of their products and competitor’s products to improve on their brand and marketing for their targeted audience. The Intenet has allowed them opportunities to reach out further to larger masses and get a better, fuller picture to narrow down their results of what their demographic is wanting, needing, or tired of. So they provide incentives for their online research in the form of paid surveys.

Usually paid survey sites pay you, the reputable ones do, after you complete each survey offer. Some companies will issue you a check or a PayPal deposit for the amount indicated upon completion, but others will offer you survey reward points that are to be accrued in your account until you reach a certain amount and then redeemed for cash rewards, gift cards, or free merchandise. When online surveys are proposed to you, it will indicate the proposed payment amount, whether it be $5.00 or an entry into a sweepstakes.

The most lucrative online paid surveys will offer $20-50, but expect the amount to be equal to the effort required, since these will take you typically 1-3 hours to complete. No one should expect to make a lot of money, or get rich quick off of filling out surveys. No one will retire from the rewards they receive, or make any sort of income to live off of. It is solely meant to supplement you, to be a fair trade, for the time that you spent filling out the survey. If you are really actively engaging in taking all offers presented to you, you could earn a couple thousand a year. Don’t look at it as a career, but simply some extra pocket change. Paid online surveys are mainly for the work from home type people that would like to kill some time and make money in the process, such as, stay at home moms, college students that are looking for some extra spending cash, or online working professionals.

If you’d like to take some paid surveys, there are plenty of free survey services out there. You should never have to pay a service to gain access to their list of surveys. They’ll try to sucker you in by claiming they have access to surveys that pay out better than others. The truth is you could find the same surveys on free sites instead, so don’t let them fool you.

So, in conclusion, are they a scam or not? In depends on the company, and what they claim. If you sign up to free sites only and don’t expect to make a living off of it you won’t be scammed. Some legit paid survey companies are:

American Consumer Opinion

Lightspeed Consumer Panel

MyPoints

Opinion Outpost

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Posted in General Education.

Tagged with make money, paid online surveys, paid survey online, paid surveys.

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By Admin – September 8, 2009

Earn Money Online 24-7

Want to ditch your physical work’s office space for working from home or on a beach? There are hundreds of ways to earn money online. You can sign up for freelance work in any field imaginable, sell photos to services, offer tech support for open source software, be a virtual assistant (secretary or accountant), or consultant with special expertise, write reviews, etc. While these sound like viable options, we’ll be focusing on how to make money over the internet while you’re NOT working. Consider these options below and think about the potential of earning money 24-7 without working 24-7:

Internet Advertising

Google offers a way for anyone with a website to earn money online, called Adsense. Adsense is a way to monetize your websites by putting Google ads on them related to your site’s topics. You can earn money through it by either people clicking on the ads, impressions (how many people view the ads), and referrals to the Adsense program. You’re income depends on your topic, traffic, and ad visibility. Top notch Adsense marketers are generating $50,000+ per month, some are over $1 million a year, while a lot that do it as a side job are at $5,000 per month.

Along the same lines, many advertisers are offering products through affiliate programs with Amazon, Ebay, Half.com. These programs allows you get paid a small percentage if the person ends up buying a product you advertised on your site. The top 50 Ebay affiliates are all making over $1 million a year. As last advertised Amazon affiliates get paid up to 15% of the product cost to the referrer.

When a person gets to a certain comfort point with internet advertising, most the time they will then start selling their own products through their websites. All of these advertising methods can be combined to generate multiple streams of income.

To be successful, you’ll have to learn the ropes, and there’s no better place to do that then through The Keyword Academy. At a very low price to join, and at such a small monetary investment to get a website started, and with such high returns, it makes sense.

Ebay

Selling on Ebay is an easy way to earn money online. I highly suggest you start out with selling your goods through auctions first. But, if you want to fully monetize your business, use an Ebay store! It takes a bit more money up front than internet advertising, but it can also provide a very substantial and unlimited amount of income. It takes a lot of commitment at first to grow, but later can be run by someone else. The most important thing is having a consistent inventory and dependable suppliers. There are wholesale suppliers, distributors and drop-shippers. Find the right one for you, so that you can keep your profit margins as big as possible.

Virtual marketplaces

Among the virtual environments, Second Life is the biggest. Others are There.com and Kaneva. They are worlds where people interact with each other using virtual representations of themselves. If there is e-commerce in the world that converts to real money, you can probably generate income off of creating products (furniture, clothing, pets, you name it). Some of the more successful designers are bringing in thousands of US dollars a month off selling items for around 1 US dollar a piece. In fact, a recent dress on Second Life went for $1,700 US dollars, and over a 2 and a half year time span, one of the virtual residents accrued $1 Million US dollars off of selling property. Still think it’s just a game?

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Posted in Internet Advertising.

Tagged with affiliate programs, amazon affiliates, earn money, earn money online, ebay affiliates, how to make money, how to make money over the internet, Internet Advertising, keyword academy, make money, making money, money making ideas, passive income, virtual marketplaces, working from home.

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By Admin – September 7, 2009

How To Make Money – The Smart Way

The world is littered with bad advice on how to make money, and knowledge is the key to making money. There are many ways to make money, and while most of the information available, that is not a scam, is correct that it is a way to make money, remember the saying “Work smart, not hard”. How do you do that? What must you know and what must you do? You’d be surprised that it is not that hard, but very few learn how to make money properly, because you must self teach yourself. Most people would rather pay tens or hundreds of thousands for someone else to teach them. If you can’t self teach yourself, you won’t have the self motivation to execute either.

Educate Yourself

First thing first, you must educate yourself on general business and investing terms, methods, and techniques. Working as an employee makes you money, but only when you are actually working. Whether the owner is working or not he is still getting paid though. Do not waste time on reading articles about how to make money quickly or how to make money easily as most of these will tell you how to make pocket change. The truth is if you want to learn how to make money easily, it’s not going to be so easy at the very beginning. You’ll need to study hard and learn from experience. You must understand what cash flow is, what gross and net income are, what cash on cash return means, what the difference is in habits between the rich and the poor, and the importance of using other people’s time and other people’s money. Explaining all that you should know in this area would take an entire book, or several. I would highly suggest you learn how to make money by reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money–That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not! and Cashflow Quadrant: Rich Dad’s Guide to Financial Freedom by Robert Kiyosaki to gain great general knowledge on these topics. Then move to studying about a specific method you’d like to start generating passive income with. You can refer to the Business Dictionary to look up any terms you don’t know. Wasn’t it the old G.I. Joe commercials that said “Knowing is half the battle”?

Reduce Debt

Second, if you have debt, come up with a debt reduction plan, and work on paying it off. Paying off debt is as good as generating new income. It increases your cash flow, which turns into your available cash you have to use in generating more income. I would suggest using the debt snowball technique to get your debt paid off. To summarize the technique, it goes like this: Add up all your minimum payments, add extra to the amount (how much more can you afford to pay), pay the minimum on each and add all the extra to one payment to get that one paid off first. Once it is paid off, use the same amount you were paying, and pay all the extra towards the second one you choose to knock off your list, and so on and so on, until all are gone. For some wise advice on eliminating debt, visit this blog on debt negotation.

Earn Passive Income

Third, start generating passive income. What is passive income? Passive income is money received on a regular basis with little effort required to maintain it. What are some passive income methods?

Earnings from owning a business that does not require direct involvement from the owner
Income from real estate rental properties
Royalties from licensed patents
Royalties from publishing a book or other intellectual property
Earnings from internet advertising and sales
Earnings from repeat sales of products and services that must be renewed

It takes work and dedication, but mostly, it takes education. It is not hard to learn. You don’t need to be a genius. And I wouldn’t exactly call it hard work either. But it does take self-motivation and follow-through. In fact, most people that get paid passive income start out doing it for themselves to gain the knowledge and then outsource the work to others to sustain growth of their income. If none of the above sound like fun to you, think harder about the first one. Start something you like to do, figure out how to make money off of it, start generating income, then train others to do the work for you. You can never get laid off or fired, and you can have as much free time as you’d like.

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Posted in General Education.

Tagged with debt reduction, earn money, how to make money, how to make money easily, how to make money quickly, Internet Advertising, learn how to make money, make money, making money, other people's money, other people's time, passive income, rental properties, rich dad poor dad, royalties.

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By Admin – September 4, 2009

How To Make Money Off Other People’s Debt

How to handle patent royalties and payments when buying, selling or licensing

Patent ownership and patent licensing rights’ basics

Patent licensing and patent royalties when buying

Patent licensing and patent royalties when selling

The Keyword Academy – Personal Progress – Working or Not?