The Rich Blog

Factoring is a great way to maintain a positive cash flow when building your business. Accounts receivables financing also known as invoice factoring is the practice of selling your invoices at a discount to a factoring company. It is a quick way for small business to raise working capital when needed. The factoring company buys your accounts and advance you up to 90% of the face value of your invoices. They then collect payment from your customers and return the remaining 10% minus there fee after the customer pays in full.

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If you have already read my article about Five Reasons to Invest in Silver Right Now, then you know why silver is a great investment opportunity. Here is another reason which is recently posted online by the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee (GATA) and made the news on popular silver blogs.

In November 2009 Andrew Maguire, a metals trader in London, contacted the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) enforcement division to report a criminal activity. In his emails, Maguire described in detail the way JP Morgan signals to the market its intention to take down the precious metals. When the signal is given, traders recognize these signals and make money shorting the metals alongside JPM. Maguire explained how there are routine market manipulations at the time of option expiry, non-farm payroll data releases, and COMEX contract rollover, as well as ad-hoc events.

On February 3 Maguire gave two days’ warning by e-mail to Eliud Ramirez, a senior investigator for the CFTC’s Enforcement Division, that the precious metals would be attacked upon the release of the non-farm payroll data on February 5. On February 5, as market events played out exactly as predicted, further e-mails were sent to Ramirez while the manipulation was in progress.

“It would not be possible to predict such a market move unless the market was manipulated”.

In an e-mail on February 5 Maguire wrote: “It is common knowledge here in London among the metals traders that it is JPM’s intent to flush out and cover as many shorts as possible prior to any discussion in March about position limits. I feel sorry for all those not in this loop. A serious amount of money was made and lost today and in my opinion as a result of the CFTC’s allowing by your own definition an illegal concentrated and manipulative position to continue.”

On March 23, 2010, Andrew Maguire contacted the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee (GATA) Director Adrian Douglas. Maguire told Douglas that he has been told first-hand by traders working for JP Morgan – Chase that JP Morgan manipulates the precious metals markets. You can find the email communications between Andrew Maguire and the CFTC here at www.gata.org/node/8466

As this case is currently being investigated by the CFTC, no major news channel, except the New York Post, has published this story yet. So nobody really knows if it is a conspiracy theory or reality. But if this case gets an approval and made public, the silver prices will skyrocket to new highs.

Written by Guest Author: J. Scott

It seems like getting out of debt is a hot topic for 2010. News sites seem to be highlighting folks that have worked hard to become debt free. I have had many emails from people asking me the best way to eliminate their debts and how to stay debt free, but there is no simple answer. Becoming debt free is a process and requires much self control and knowledge. The best way to achieve these goals is to educate yourself about the subject and practice what you have learned. Starting an emergency fund and using the debt snowball method to pay off your debts are great places to start your journey. I will give a short description of both below.

1) Emergency fund: We all fall into bad times where we have problems paying our bills, this maybe the reason you are in debt in the first place. With an emergency fund you will be able to still pay your bills on time, when you do fall into these slumps. The goal is to save up at least 3 months of living expenses, but 6 months is highly recommended. Simply add up all your expenses like rent, food, phone, entertainment and what ever else you spend money on now and multiply your total by 3. Save up that much for when hard times hit and you will be able to maintain the same lifestyle until you get back on your feet.

2) Debt snowball method: If you have multiple outstanding debts you want to pay off, this is one of the best methods out there. You basically list your debts in order of highest interest first. You start paying the minimum on all your debts except the first one on the list. Put all the cash you have saved from paying the minimum and any extra you can come up with each month towards to first bill on the list. After this bill is paid, put all the money you were paying on the first bill towards the next debt on your list and continue the process until you have finished paying off all your debts. The debt snowball method is designed to keep you motivated to pay off your bills and motivation is the key to managing personal finances.

Learn as much as you can about these and you will be well on your way to financial freedom.

Clickbank is a marketplace for digital products like e-books and software. If you are wondering how to make money with Clickbank, basically there are two ways after you sign up for an account:

The first way is to use Clickbank to promote your own product. If you have created an e-Book or software, Clickbank serves as your affiliate program manager and helps you recruit affiliates to promote your product. All you have to do is to determine what percentage of the sale you are willing to pay the affiliates. Clickbank handles the rest.

The second way to make money with ClickBank is to promote other peoples products. The Clickbank Marketplace list thousands of products to be promoted which range anywhere from dog training to computer programming. You can get a copy of the product before deciding on whether to promote it. All Clickbank products are covered by a 60 day money back policy.

Once you are done with your product selections, the next step is to promote your new products. There are two popular ways: You can create a web page to advertise your product or integrate your Clickbank products into your emails or newsletters to be sent to the subscribers.

If you decide to create a page to sell your item, write a good sales statement that accurately describes the product and the benefits it provides for the buyers. Use highly-searched keywords in order to get search engine traffic to your page.

If you prefer to promote your product through e-mails, you can use auto responders to create follow up messages to be sent to your subscribers to promote your Clickbank products. By the way, if you don’t have enough subscribers, the best way to make people give you their email address is to offer them something they find valuable for free. You can write an eBook and give it away for free to those who give you their email address or subscribe to your newsletter. Make sure your free eBook covers the same niche as the Clickbank products you plan to promote.

If you are having difficulty with selling your products, here are some tips to help you make more money with ClickBank:

- Choose your target audience. Do not waste your time trying to convince someone to buy something they have no interest in.

- Choose products with a good commission rate. Spend your time and money on marketing a product that will convert and provide you with a healthy commission at the same time.

- Know your Product. Make sure your sales copy is clean, easy to read, and free of any errors. Don’t forget that you can get a copy of the product before deciding on whether to promote it or not.

Good Luck!

If you own a small business, you don’t want to pay a web developer thousands of dollars to build a website for your business. All you need is a basic, professional looking website that is inexpensive and easy to maintain. And WordPress offers you such an option.

WordPress has become an amazingly popular publishing platform that anyone can use to create professional looking websites. There are a lot of people who think that WordPress is just blogging software, but it’s much more than that. It can be a website’s entire content management system.

Here are 5 main reasons why you should consider WordPress when building your small business’ website:

1. It’s FREE

First, you need to choose a domain name and a hosting provider. There are a number of quality hosting companies like GoDaddy where you can host your WordPress site. Most hosting providers offer an option that allows you to install WordPress in just a few clicks. That’s how I created this blog. The only thing you’ll have to pay for is the domain name which costs about $10 and the hosting plan which costs as low as $5 per month. After you install WordPress, you can just log into the admin area and start building your website.

2. Ease of Use

WordPress is very easy to use. You don’t need to have any programming skills or anything like that. When you log into your WordPress account, you will see that you can easily create a great content and establish a fully functional website in less than an hour. There are also plenty of tutorials on the web to help you.

3. Themes

A theme is basically a template that changes the look of your WordPress site. There are hundreds of free themes available for your WordPress account. Some of them are even customizable!

4. Plug-ins

A plug-in is basically a tool you can add to your WordPress site that enhances the functionality of the website. There are plug-ins that help you with accepting payments, designing contact forms, building photo galleries and even optimizing your site’s search engine rankings. If you go to the administration panel, you will see a list of plug-ins available for your website. And the best part is most of these plug-ins are free!

5. Support

WordPress is an extremely popular and commonly used piece of software. There are over 15 million WordPress publishers worldwide. If you have any problems, there are thousands of people available to help you on the WordPress forums. So they have got you covered!

If you are a small business owner who wants to provide your customers with online business services like marketing and e-commerce, I would highly recommend WordPress. It’s free, customizable and an all-in-one solution for all your needs.

Good luck!

Twitter has become a popular social networking forum since its launch in 2006. Its rapid growth in recent years made it also a great marketing tool for business owners. Once people realize that Twitter is more than just a way to stay in contact with friends and family, they start to look for ways to make profit. Most profit comes from increased sales for products or services thanks to additional website traffic generated by Twitter.

If you want to be a part of this income generating network, all you need to do is

1. Sign up for a twitter account and

2. Build a huge Twitter follower.

In order to add followers on Twitter, you can use a paid software like Twitter Adder which costs about $50 or just do this step manually from your Twitter account. If you spend 10 minutes every day on adding friends, you can achieve about 250 followers a week or 1000 followers a month. Just find a person that tweets related to your business and go to his/her followers list. Then start clicking on the “follow this person” button and try to add all these people one by one. You will notice that at least 1 out of every 10 people you follow will follow you back. If you can add 200 people within ten minutes, you will have at least 20 followers by the end of the day.

Now you can start tweeting. Twitter is a great way to market yourself and your business online. However, avoid some common mistakes that most marketers make:

-         Make sure your messages do not appear as spam even though they will be. Use your common sense and make them look like they are written by a human, not a machine.

-         Do not promote your business in your tweets all the time. Tweet some personal messages, quotes or holiday messages once in a while.

-         Do not tweet the same messages over and over again.

-         Limit the number of daily tweets to a maximum of 10 tweets a day. Otherwise it will be considered spam.

-         Do not send any offensive messages. Keep in mind that your tweets are being received by people from all over the world.

I personally think that the best way to make money with Twitter is to use it for building your trust factor and attracting visitors to your website. Twitter is popular because it’s all about the people, not brands. That’s why I recommend not attempting any direct money-making methods from it.

Making money on Twitter, just like making money on blogging, is not easy. However, after spending some time and patience, you will see an increase in your website traffic. If you are using advanced tracking systems like Google Analytics, you can even see the traffic coming directly from your Twitter account.

If you are not satisfied with the income generated from your additional traffic and looking for other ways to make money, here are some more ideas:

1. Affiliate Marketing

Sign up for an affiliate account with Paydotcom and search for a product that you want to sell to your Twitter followers. You can choose to tweet manually or use automated tweeter programs to promote your new products. Some of your followers will click on your links and buy the product which will make you earn a commission.

2. Try Magpie

Magpie matches the advertisers with the twitter users who are willing to display ads on their tweets. Sign up for an account at Magpie and let them insert ads into your tweets. You get paid a small amount every time Magpie tweets the ad out on your account.

3. Use your background as Ad space

If you have thousands of followers, you can use your twitter background image as an excellent ad space. You may not easily find advertisers but yet it is worth to give it a shot.

Good Luck!

People start blogging for a variety of reasons. Some people create a blog to express their views or opinions while others do it just because they think they can make money out of it. As it gets very exciting and fun in the beginning, especially when choosing a domain name and a blog theme, not all people can stay motivated for a long time.

Here are the top five reasons why bloggers quit blogging:

Lack of Interest

Many bloggers start blogging just for the sake of it. Free blog providers like Blogspot and Wordpress can entice this kind of people into starting something that they are not really passionate about. If you want to start blogging, ask yourself this question: Would I be willing to pay $20 a month to start a blog? If your answer is yes, then blogging is or at least will be your passion. Otherwise it will become a burden on your shoulders as you progress and you will eventually quit.

Lack of Time

Some bloggers can’t devote enough time to update their blogs and their blogs become boring. They don’t publish new posts, they don’t reply to comments etc…Well, there are many reasons why these people can’t find time for blogging. They can be busy with their daily tasks, browsing social networks, or maybe working on different projects.

Lack of Skills

Blogging requires some basic skills like writing and editing. Some people are actually not that good at writing as they think they are. They start blogging but later they find it difficult to write a new post or an article. If you can’t produce quality content, you will lose your own attention before that of any other readers.

Lack of Readers

We always seek appreciation for our work, right? Blogging is about distributing your messages online and receiving feedback on those messages. Comments, star ratings and social bookmarks are the typical feedback types that bloggers like to see after they publish new posts. If you are not receiving any feedback, this can be very frustrating and a good reason to lose your interest in blogging.

Lack of Income

This category applies to those who start blogging as a way to earn an extra income. Many bloggers get discouraged when they don’t see any earnings in the first couple of months. You need to keep in mind that making decent money from blogging is not that easy. To be realistic, you cannot expect your blog to reach millions of readers and earn you a decent income in less than a year. Of course there are exceptions, but if you keep your expectations low in the beginning, you won’t get disappointed. Patience is the key.

Good Luck!

In order to make money from your blog you don’t need to be a programmer, but you need to have a basic knowledge of some of the web technologies. Before we start, just make sure that you are familiar with some technical terms like search engine optimization (SEO), RSS feeds, pay per click advertising and affiliate programs. If you do not know what these terms mean, look it up on Google right now. To make money from blogging, it’s important to become a web savvy person.

Before we start talking about methods, you need to understand that no matter what you do to make money, first thing you need is to get TRAFFIC to your website. Why is traffic so important?  Because your income is a direct function of your website’s traffic. The more traffic you get, the more income you will earn because more visitors means more ad clicks, more product sales, more affiliate sales, more donations and so on…

If you want to know how to build up traffic, please read my article “10 Ways to Increase Traffic to Your Website”.

Here is the list of methods:

1. PPC Advertising Networks

Google AdSense is the most popular option under this category. First, you need to sign up for an Adsense account. Then you can either post the codes provided by Adsense on your website (if you know how to) or just use a plug-in provided by your blog provider. The network will then put ads (either text or images) relevant to your website, and you will earn a certain amount of money for every click on your ads.

2. CPM Advertising Networks

CPM stands for Cost per Mille, and it refers to the cost for 1,000 impressions. With this method, you get paid according to the number of page views that the ads displayed on your site generate. CPM advertising tends to work well on websites with a high page views per visitor ratio like online forums and magazines.

Popular CPM advertising networks are Value Click and Advertising.com

3. Direct Banner Advertising

Selling your own advertising space is one of the most profitable monetization methods, because it cuts out the middleman commissions. The downside of direct banner advertising is that your website needs to generate high traffic to attract advertisers.

4. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a very popular method. Merchants are willing to pay other people a commission for selling their products and services. This type of advertising is also called CPA (cost per action) and CPL (cost per lead). Clickbank is the most popular affiliate network.

5. Selling an E-book

Selling an e-book is a very efficient way to generate revenue. Make sure you have a PayPal account to accept payments.

6. Membership

Although most of the forums and message boards offer free membership, there is always a possibility to create a private one where members need to pay to be able to read and post. However, in order to charge for a membership you need to provide exceptional value for the members.

7. Marketplace

Sitepoint and Digital Point are great examples of online marketplaces. You can allow your visitors to buy and sell products on your website and possibly charge a small fee for new product listings.

8. Paid Surveys

Vizu Answers pay you money to run a small survey or poll on your website. All you need is to sign up with them and select the kind of poll or survey you want to run on your website.

9. RSS Feed Ads

With the quick adoption of the RSS technology, you can now make money displaying ads on your feeds. You can sign up with Feedburner and start displaying CPM based advertising on your feeds.

10. Donations

Placing a “Donate” link or button on your blog can be an efficient way to earn money. Please do not underestimate the potential of this method and make sure you have a PayPal account to use this feature.

Good Luck!

Having a blog doesn’t mean anything if you don’t start promoting it. You need to attract people’s attention to your new website.

The sooner you start promoting, the better results you will get. The reason is that it sometimes takes months to establish a regular visitor base.

Social Media

One of the best ways to promote your blog is to create a profile or a fan page on some of the popular platforms. This can include creating a Facebook fan page, a profile on Squidoo, MySpace, Flickr and even a YouTube account. These pages often act as backlinks to your site.

Submitting Articles

Write an article about your website and submit it to Technorati and EzineArticles. You can even send your original posts to other content publishers like Associated Content. By writing and distributing relevant articles you can create a base of incoming links. By submitting your articles that include a link back to your blog, you are not only getting better at search engine rankings, but also creating a traffic stream to your site.

Search Engine Optimization

If your blog has not been properly optimized for the search engines, then this is a must! The appropriate keywords should be integrated into all posts you publish. Make sure you use tags when publishing a new post. There are even plug-ins that you can use to create automatic tags. If you are using WordPress, I recommend the “All in One SEO” plug-in. This will take care of this step for you. Without optimizing your site, nothing will help you get better in search rankings.

Search Engines

Although search engines find your site on their own these days, I strongly recommend that you submit your blog to the main search engines. However, when you submit your blog’s URL to a search engine, submit it only once to avoid getting banned.

Create a Sitemap

In order to help the search engines fully spider your new site, you must have a sitemap. Google XML Sitemaps Plug-in will automatically create a sitemap every time you update your blog.

Link Building

Backlinks play a significant role in search rankings. There are a number of ways you can work to grow your backlinks. You can post on forums, message boards or other blogs and leave a link to your website.

In conclusion, do whatever you can to promote your blog. You have a lot of free advertising options. Try to get links from every relevant source you can think of. The more attention you get, the sooner you will start to see progress in your reader base and search engine rankings.

Good Luck!

A blog is an online journal where people can publish their thoughts and opinions. It may include images, audio, video and all other media components. Most blogs are frequently updated to include new posts and commentaries.  And in general, they are focused on a particular topic such as web design, sports or technology.

If you are interested in starting your own blog, here are the five easy steps for you:

1. Decide what you want to blog about. Pick a topic that you are passionate about.
2. Choose a provider. The most popular providers are Blogger and WordPress. These sites are free and offer pre-made templates and easy publishing tools.
3. Find a domain name. This part is really fun. Use your imagination and find a good domain name that would match your blog’s theme.
4. Choose a template. Most sites come with a set of predefined layouts and schemes that you can choose from. Select one and personalize it.
5. After you have set up your blog, write a few posts and make any adjustments to the layout or style if necessary.

Congratulations. You’ve made it! Now it’s time to promote your blog.

Tips:

• Update your blog frequently
• Keep the posts interesting
• Spell check your writing before posting
• A picture is worth thousand words
• Be yourself, it’s your blog!

Good Luck!