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Wealth Building Made Simple - Four simple ways to increase your wealth.

]]> http://thewildinvestor.com/successes-mistakes-and-tools-to-increaings-your-wealth/feed/ http://thewildinvestor.com/get-riches-off-used-golf-balls/ http://thewildinvestor.com/get-riches-off-used-golf-balls/#comments Sun, 06 Jul 2008 05:01:20 +0000 TheWild1 http://thewildinvestor.com/get-riches-off-used-golf-balls/ Ok so maybe you won’t be able to pack up everything and move to the beach, but maybe you can get a new golf club. Here’s how:

I’m sure many people out there went golfing over this 4th of July weekend. I also know most of you grabbed those range balls that made its way off the driving range or you grab those dirty balls on the edges of creeks and water hazards, but what do you do with them? My friend and I debated this for some time.

I know the thing I do is either keep the balls and switch them out whenever I am near a water hazard or I’ll just blast it off somewhere its not suppose to go.

But did you know that you could actually make some decent money selling these used golf balls?

Most golf courses hire full time companies that dive into that disgusting water and grab up the balls. Eventually the club will sell them for a discounted price.

Before we go any further it is important to remember that to make any type of money we are going to need to round up hundreds of balls. After all they are usually re-sold for $1.00 or below per ball, so they would obviously pay less for them. Although if you really put some work into it, some nice extra spending money can be made.

How to find the ball?

The first method involves simple collection. Maybe you don’t really want to put in any extra work. Just round up some balls over time, and then eventually try to sell them.

If you have a little more entrepreneurial spirit, then perhaps you could invest a couple dollars into a golf ball retriever. This is some sort of contraption that allows you scour further into the water for golf balls. For both these methods, just keep a look out when you come near any type of deep roughs or hazards.

Another good spot to look is in mud. Many people often don’t want to bother getting dirty or cleaning the ball, so they just leave it there. I know I have done that several times.

Now if you really have the entrepreneurial itch, then perhaps you can even contract a deal with some golf courses; however, that would require you to do much more work. If you have some scuba gear lying around, then go for it. At least now you have a monopoly on that course.

One thing I wouldn’t recommend is to actively stay in one place for a long time trying to retrieve balls. Most likely you will be asked to leave by the Marshall. So maybe try and go during off hours.

How to unload the merchandise?

First and foremost, before you even try to sell the golf balls they should be cleaned. Do whatever you have to do, but try to make them look as close to new as possible.

The easiest option may be to sell them back to the golf course; however, being the middle man you won’t get as much money as you would want. They are not going to buy it for more then they are willing to sell them.

That being said the best choices include selling through Ebay or Craigslist. You could choose to just sell in bunches or separate into packages by brands. Selling more for the more exclusive ones of course.

There are people easily making hundreds of dollars selling used golf balls. Why can’t you? At the very least it could cover the fortune they require you to play per outing. Maybe even the cost of gas to get there? What about new balls to play? Never realized how much money actually goes into playing a golf round.

image source - thewoodentee.net

Learn how to get the new Nike Sasquatch Driver discounted or even free.

Even I HAVE MADE SOME MONEY DOING THIS, and I am as skeptical of these type of money making schemes as can be.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

The basic idea of this scheme is to find leads on behalf of other companies. In return, these companies will pay you some form of compensation, whether it be commission based or a flat fee.

Leads can be as simple as someone entering their email address, paying for shipping and handling, or actually buying a product. Obviously, the more work that needs to be done by the lead, then the more money you, the affiliate marketer, will make.

Thats Great, but How Do I Get Started?

Join Affiliate Network

The great thing about affiliate marketing is that it is absolutely free to to get started. To begin, all you have to do is join an affiliate network. Those are companies that find the campaigns that you can put to work. The one I am part of is Market Leverage (yes this is a referral link, but its free for you so who cares); however, there are tons of others that you can join, but this is the only one I have ACTUALLY made money from.

Find a Campaign

Once you have joined a network, we obviously want to find a campaign. You have probably seen many of these already in action around the web. I always wondered who would actually fill this stuff out, but, according to my stats, there are.

I like to find the campaigns where the leads have to do the least. Although you get less compensation for those, I like to bet on the bulk. Other people might like to choose other types. It really depends on what you think you can get to work. That is what I like about affiliate marketing. There are infinite ways to be successful at this.

Bring in Leads

Obviously we can’t make money until we have a lead, but how do we find them? Some like to create an email list and work that way, while others like to create landing pages. Those are pages that are set-up to entice the lead to fill out the form or whatever it is they need to do, and they are very simple to create.

What has worked for me are landing pages. You can see one of mine over at SportSayers.com. The initial poll is just a cover for the actual lead. By simply clicking on yes or no to the question, the lead will be able to get free online poker passes. It doesn’t matter whether they click yes or no because it links to the actual affiliate page where they must simply fill in their email addresses. Most people will usually just put in their junk email address, but a lead is a lead so who cares.

There are numerous ways to get people to come to this landing page. One of the most used is Google Adwords. I really don’t like the need to have to spend money to make it, but I decided to go ahead and give this a try. I set-up $50 dollars in my account and created an ad campaign. Almost instantly after I click submit, I got my first lead. I’m not going to lie. I was amazed.

None of these money make scheme stuffs actually worked so easily for me; however, now I am hooked and finding more ways to increase the revenue.

Let It Run Free

Once you have created all your campaigns, affiliate marketing can truly be considered as passive income. Sure you could make more money with more work, but that is entirely up to you. Many of the top services you may use now run on affiliate marketing. It really opens your eyes to world of making money online and the internet.

Do you have any success with affiliate marketing? Feel free to leave a comment or contact me if you need help getting started. It really isn’t that hard.

Remember to get started over at Market Leverage.

image source - wealthyaffiliate.com

Now you may be thinking, what does that do for you? Well through PayPerPost, a publisher is required to select a category that best relates to the website, such as: business, money, fitness, and so on. Once you find the right category, you are given several products or services that can be reviewed based on the category that is selected. So what this means is that now I have the ability to bring you new resources that you and I may not of known about, while I get paid for it at the same time. It is a win-win situation. The price of each review varies and the options are determined on the traffic numbers for your site, but don’t worry I will not clog this site with reviews everyday.

Other then just writing reviews, PayPerPost also allows you to receive offers from users that come across your website. If John Doe comes to my site and wants me to write a review about whatever he wants, then he can directly request his offer straight off my site, with the code installed for the application first. For this opportunity, you can create your own price, but be careful not to price yourself out of the market. They have tons of other great tools.

So overall this is a great new opportunity that has been available to TheWildInvestor, and there really isn’t anything from stopping you to join in on the fun. It also brings tons of learning opportunity and, with the new found money you have come into, what will you do with it? The only real requirement that I know of is that your site has to be at least 90 days from the first post, and it should take less then 24 hours to get approved. So what are you waiting for?

Sign up for PayPerPost now!

To get right down to it, you can read what the goal of rssHugger is straight off their site:

rssHugger is a unique website that aims to bring bloggers and readers together. rssHugger aims to provide blog owners with a unique easy-to-use way to promote their blogs by sending them traffic, building backlinks for search engine optimization, as well as attracting new rss subscribers if the content is interesting to the reader. rssHugger aims to help visitors be able to easily find blogs that write about subjects they are interested in. These subjects include: internet marketing, making money online, charity, sports, gambling, and many more. If the visitors find a blog that they had not previously heard about, they can easily add it to their RSS readers or bookmark it.

Blah, blah, blah it is another way to get your site out there. It originally cost $10 to get an account, but it has become such a hit that now all you have to do is mention it in your blog/site. It is a pretty interesting idea, and after the disappointments I went through with BlogRush (BlogRush? More like BlogNot), I am willing to give this service a chance (just don’t let me down).

If you got a site, then go to rssHugger and give it a try. Unlike the stock market (there had to be a connection somewhere), there is basically NO RISK here.

For other great tools to monetize and market your site go to my Money tools page.

For people that don’t know what BlogRush is, it is a widget that is placed on your site that will pull 5 “related” articles from other BlogRush members. As a reward for putting up the widget your articles will be posted on other’s BlogRush widget. If you referred people to use the service, then you would get even more syndication. This was suppose to help gain traffic for other sites.

Two months ago, when this service first rolled out, BlogRush was the talk of the town. The company promised to drastically increase the traffic of websites. Almost any blog/site you went to, someone had an article raving about BlogRush (to increase their referral network obviously). This site was also suppose to cater to those smaller up and coming sites. At first glance it all really seemed too good to be true, and I guess it was.

Phase I

Problems first arose right when the service first launched. BlogRush wanted to put some ugly, non customizable image on your site. This factor alone could turn people away from clicking on a story. The amount of syndications you received depended on how many people clicked on your widget, some other horribly long confusing equation they use, and the amount of traffic your referrals are receiving. With the mixture of all those factors, suddenly the “big” websites began hording all the links. With the combinations of their massive referral networks and everything else there links would show up way more then the less fortunate. If this seems all cluttered and confusing, then I am right there with you.

Phase II

I gave BlogRush a two week trial and right before I was about to remove it for good they announced that BlogRush is going to roll out some updates, so I decided to stay on until I can test out phase 2. Apparently the new updates were suppose to include: smaller widget, more categories, and better stat tracking (might of been best for them to leave this update out). The smaller widget just turned out to be a skinner, more narrow ugly pencil. The new categories seemed promising, but what happens if your category is not populated with well-known sites or even that many, and the stat tracking just shows how this service is failing its original intent. As you can see in this picture below, the last couple of syndicated articles have received no clicks after more than 100 syndications; moreover, throughout the entire 2 month period BlogRush has only brought in 8 visitors.

With at least more then 500 syndications/article (around 60), that leaves just a terrible click per impressions.

Final Thoughts

At one point BlogRush did seem promising, but after examining all the factors it really just doesn’t seem that beneficial. Many times your success is dependent on the location of where other sites keep their widget. If they keep it at the bottom of the page most people would probably not see it. So its almost like you are doing work for other people while receiving no benefits. This means I am taking up valuable ad space or whatever else I might use it for, for something that basically isn’t doing that much.

Some things that I think could make BlogRush a much more viable option is to let you fully customize the look of your widget like Google Adsense or almost any other web service. It would help make it look like it was part of the site and perhaps persuade people to install the widget in a more prosperous place. I also think removing the referral network would help make a more even base for everybody.

So although this service may have worked out for some people, I am thankful that I will no longer be using BlogRush unless major improvements are made.

This method of monetizing is particularly geared towards web sites, blogs, whatever you want to call them. I came across this wordpress plugin over at bloggingtips.com. It is called Link a Dink. With this you can basically turn any word in your post into a link. For example, my site is about different ways to make money, so I might want to buy the word “money” on a site that is running this program. Now every time he mentions “money” in his post, it will automatically become a link targeted towards my site. Obviously, I would want to do this at a site that talks about money a good amount of the time.

Still not convinced this is a great tool? Another way to utilize this efficient plugin is by turning words into links that lead towards your affiliate programs. Maybe you are managing uh… I don’t know… a plant site, and any traffic you send towards a nursery or plant provider will pay you commission for each lead. Now you can turn certain words to automatically link to their site. It is almost like you are running your own advertising program.

The bottom line is that in almost every aspect of dealing with your product there is probably some way to monetize it for a profit. You just got to take some time and figure out what that method is, or scour the internet until you find something.

For those that are unclear, sites create value by building their traffic. As more visitors come to a particular site, that increases advertisement views, and as the traffic gets higher so does the cost of ad placement on that site. The hardest part obviously is redirecting traffic to your site.

Now communities or even neighborhoods, you could call them, have been developed to try and collectively build traffic. Some of these sites include:

• MillionEuroWiki
• MillionDollarWiki

The idea consists of you buying a page that has a certain topic. For example, you might decide to purchase the right to the word “money.” If that is available, then you will lock up that word and nobody else can ever buy that same topic. As the owner of the page you can now do whatever you want with it. You can compare this with purchasing actual real estate. Each page on the sites I have given cost a one time fee of $100. Most people combine blended advertisements and information on the topic that they secured.

How Do I Make Money?

As I mentioned, the goal of this community is to build up traffic and page rank collectively. In short, page rank is what Google uses in its search. The higher your rank the more likely your site will show up at the top of the searches. For instance, if you do a Google search for a celebrity you will see Internet Movie Database at the top or if you do a search for a topic you will see Wikipedia. The final goal is if someone did a search for money (the topic I used), then the traffic built up collectively should increase the page rank, thus, causing our money page to show up at the the top of the results page.

All this will cause our site to generate more traffic, and, as I said before, the ads that we have subtlety placed on our money page should bring in some monetary gains. Then eventually you should be able to sell your site for more then $100 (hopefully much more). Almost like flipping a house. We took a bland boring page, renovated it, and then sold it for profit.

Now there is great risk here. We are betting that in the future these communities will blossom, but if they don’t, then most likely we have lost our initial investment. I personally don’t feel like taking a risk on these sites just because there are so many of them and so few spaces at the top of Google searches, and I rather have my own space; however, there are some heavy hitters in the blogosphere that have locked down their pages.

So check out some up and coming neighborhoods or build your mansion. Either way buying real estate on the internet is huge hit right now.

What should it be about?

The site that you create should be something you are really interested in because a lot of time will be spent marketing and maintaining your creation. If you don’t enjoy the topic, then eventually you will have to force yourself to work on it. The topic can be about a subject or a service. You don’t even need to know everything on your topic. A blog on how and what you learned can benefit many people…

What do I need?

The first thing you need is web hosting and your OWN domain. There are few free good hosting packages, but if you plan on ever having massive traffic and good uptime then paying for web hosting will pay off in the end. My web hosting, HostMonster, offers a free domain when you buy hosting, and they have good competitive prices. It’s real important to pay for your own domain because how many yoursite.blogspot.com have become profitable? Not many…

After you have that all situated, its time to create the site. There are two ways: designing from scratch or using blog software (wordpress). Most popular software can be installed in one-click through your hosting control panel. If you want to create it yourself, then I recommend Dreamweaver (what I use) or just notepad; however, you will need to learn html and probably a little of php. Wordpress is most popular and pretty easy to use. One downfall is that customizing the look of your wordpress can be a challenge. There are many different themes you can download. It is normal for most people to continually change the look of their site at the beginning because you are getting a feel of what layout will be best for your content.

Got hosting, domain, and created my site… Now what?

For most people, this is where they start throwing all different types of ads up, but it is important to first build your traffic because without them the ads won’t bring any money. So go build your site, and in the next MMO I will go over tips to bringing traffic and then monetizing your site. Feel free to post your link in the comments.<!–kw=venture mmo online site–>

In this age of the internet almost everything and anything you want to do can be done on the internet. It is availabe for all ages and produces a low barrier of entry. Through tips and suggestions, advice and ideas will be given on making money online (MMO).