Multi-Level Marketing (MLM)

Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) is featured on this blog because it is a recognised and (usually) legitimate method of gaining income. It is not one that we would generally recommend.

The concept behind Multi-Level Marketing is that of the sales "pyramid". Each participant has a place on that pyramid, and his or her job is to recruit others to their "downline". Those recruits will in due course, so the theory goes, recruit others to the tier below them, who will generate an income both for the participant's recruits and for the participant him or herself.

Typically MLM involves the selling of a product. However such is the marketing model that in actual fact it works equally well with or without a product to sell. The essence of MLM is that once a pyramid of successful marketers has been created the original participant will be able to sit back and watch the money flow in as those below him struggle to create portfolios of their own and to build their own vibrant downlines.

Where Multi-Level Marketing has worked it has been because those within a particular downline have been dynamic enough to fill out the spaces below with active, spending customers. Some people do make a considerable amount of money from MLM. The problem that arises however is that no matter how big the structure, there is always somebody who is going to be suffocating at the foot of it all, unable to find fresh recruits with which to create a new downline. With all the money in the system being provided by participants, for the person at the top to win somebody at the bottom needs to be out of pocket.

Those who are involved will tell you that there is a difference between Multi-Level Marketing and Pyramid Selling. In truth the only difference is that with MLM there is a token product being sold in order to justify the exchange of capital.

There are many MLM products and schemes on the market. Some require a buy-in on the part of the visitor. But all of them operate essentially the same way and for similar reasons.

Google AdSense

Google AdSense is the counter side of Google's AdWords program.

With AdWords, advertisers pay to have their promotional material displayed on Google's pages. It is displayed on a Pay Per Click basis, meaning that every time a visitor clicks on the ad the advertiser pays a fixed fee to Google. At the time of submission the advertiser sets a limit as to how much he or she is prepared to pay for each click, or in total over a given time period.

On the opposite side of the coin is Google AdSense. With this program blog and website owners display content supplied to them by Google, advertising other people's material. When a visitor to your site clicks on this link you, the blog or website owner, receive a share of the fee incurred by the advertiser.

There are, of course, certain rules to be obeyed and checks in place in order to present abuse - the most obvious being a prohibition on AdSense users clicking links on their own pages just to generate income.

Although the amount accrued per click is very small many site owners do make a considerable income from AdSense. Much depends on the popularity of the site, as well as the relevance and proximity of the advertising material. At the very least it costs nothing, provides additional web content, and creates a new potential income source.

Merry Christmas and a Prosperous New Year

We would like to wish all our visitors and readers a happy Christmas and a very prosperous 2015.

Focus Groups

One of the best ways of making decent money from very little effort is through focus groups, where the volunteer (i.e. you) is paid to attend a discussion, usually for an hour or two and involving a small handful of people, to offer thoughts and ideas about a product or service.

There are many research companies which pay good money to active participants, and the best way to locate these is simply to search via the Internet, making sure you target those locations to which you are prepared to travel. Typically market research pays between £20 and £35 per hour.

The downside is that focus groups are usually few and far between, and the rejection rate at the point of application is very high. To begin with you will be asked a few questions to ascertain whether or not you are suitable for a particular project. Much more often than not you won't be, and there are also sometimes restrictions on how many events one can attend during any given period.

Whilst rejection can disappoint, it is worth persisting as there is probably no better or easier source of personal income around.

Characteristics of Easy Money Making Ideas That Do Not Work

By David Lim

If a website tells you that it has an easy money making idea, what kind of idea would you expect? You would probably expect an idea that is so easy to do that an idiot can do it. In addition, you would also expect it to rake in a lot of money and be totally hands off. At least, that is what you would expect if you have been reading all the ads.

Well, I have news for you. I have tried all the easy money making ideas and they do not work. Either they require the skills of a rocket scientist, or do not make money, or you need to spend all your time on it, or a number of other reasons, but more often than not, they just do not work.

Some characteristics that identify an easy money making idea include:

* A graphic on the website that has palm trees, beaches, a cool dude or dudette in beach wear in a beach chair with a notebook on his lap.
* A promise that anyone and everyone can do it, in other words, absolutely no skills required.
* Pages and pages on how good their product is, and after reading everything, you still have absolutely no idea what the product is.
* A promise that you can earn a lot of money for work that a 9 year old can easily do.
* If the easy money making idea is a report or a subscription that has to be purchased, there will be many enticements to get you to buy. You may see a countdown timer with only a day or 2 left, or offers of bonus ebooks worth hundreds or thousands of dollars upon purchase, or a limit on the number of purchases allowed. More often than not, you will get all of the above.

Real money making ideas do exist on the Internet. But you do have to navigate through the minefield of "easy money making ideas" before getting to the real stuff.

David Lim is the webmaster of a site about realistic money making ideas, a site that goes into detail about how to implement the various online easy money making ideas featured. Take note that some basic skills, a little ingenuity and hard work will be required for success.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/2357764

Content Writing

If you are a decent writer who is competent in his or her native language there is money to be made by writing content for other people's websites and blogs. Sometimes blog owners will pay you to pen guest articles, however most of them are more likely simply to offer you a backlink as payment for your work. This is not to be scoffed at as the success of your own website depends to a large extent on its presence on the search engines, which in turn is largely dictated by the quantity and quality of the links that direct back to it. But in the short term this is not going to pay the bills.

If you can it is always best to seek out your own customers. These will be able to assess your work and agree a decent price with you for your efforts. Every one's a winner.

Many budding writers however will not have the resources or the contacts to enable them to do this. The other option therefore is to register with a freelancing site and then to place bids on writing job offers when they become available. There are a number of sites offering such a service, including Freelancer and Elance.

One strong word of advice would be set your own standards and stick with them. If you write good quality material, charge accordingly. One of the down sides of freelancing sites is that they are often populated with "writers" who are prepared to write 500 words of barely intelligible English peppered with a few "keywords" which are out of context and have barely any relevance to the article for a dollar a time. Don't get involved in an auction with these people. Any customer who would prefer their services to those of a quality content writer just to save a few pounds doesn't deserve your help. Wait your chance, some decent work will come your way you can be sure.

Selling Through Ebay

Even in the most Spartan household one would be surprised by just how much unwanted material can be found lying around the home. Furniture, second-hand books, CDs, old collectables - just about everything has value to somebody.

With an Ebay account it is usually possible to find a buyer if your item is priced cheaply enough. Remember to factor in the cost of postage and packing before deciding whether an item is worth selling. Some people report making hundreds of pounds selling items they had long forgotten they had.

We would advise that you first compile an inventory of what you have that is surplus to requirements, then research its likely value by looking at similar items that already appear on Ebay. Price yours competitively and wait for somebody to come along and buy it. Simples.

For the more adventurous there is the method of actually purchasing items from Ebay which have been underpriced, then readvertising them a little while later at a more realistic price. Special rules apply for "traders" so please do be mindful of what you are and are not permitted to do.

Sports Bonuses and Promotions

If you know anything at all about sports betting and don't have any moral or religious objections to having an occasional flutter there is real money to be made by exploiting sign-up bonuses and promotions offered by online bookies.

Forget about slogans and clichés about betting being a mug's game - we are not talking here about throwing good money after bad. Instead we are talking about taking cold advantage of the "catchpenny" offered made to potential new customers by most online sportsbooks to get you hooked on betting. Only the trick is you don't get hooked - you just take the bonus.

Generally speaking it goes like this - when you have opened an account with the bookie and deposited funds you will usually be eligible to receive a small bonus as a welcome present. Ordinarily it will not be large - typically in the region of £10-£50, or a percentage of your first bet - and there will be wagering requirements tied to the offer. This means that should your free bet win, or should the bet placed with free bonus money be successful, you will be required to wager the money again a certain set number of times before it can be withdraw back to your money account.

READ THE SMALL PRINT

Some such offers are unattractive. You have to read the terms - or rather the small print attached to the offers - carefully before you commit. Sometimes even free bets are tailored to make you fail.

The free bet is not a con as such, but rather a loss leader. The hope is that you will develop a habit and become a regular but unsuccessful customer. Making money out of free offers and promotions comes from taking the award (if it is viable) and running, once the terms and conditions have been fulfilled.

Another way of cashing in on free bets is to lay them at a betting exchange such as Betfair. Using this method the amount you will take home will be considerably smaller than the quantum of the free bet itself, but you will be guaranteed to be left in pocket.

Many players make several hundreds of pounds by opening accounts with each of the bookies and exploiting free bets and bonuses. Check with a reliable sports reviewer first though to ensure that the sportsbook is trustworthy.

Selling Online

Often we'd be surprised by how much saleable "junk" we have just lying about the home. Boxes in the attic, books on the shelf in the living room that we've been staring at for years without even noticing that they are there - many of these things, believe it or not, have some sort of value. The Harrison Lesser Watch it may not be, but an old book or a long-forgotten toy may be worth a few pounds - and you can clear some space in the bargain.

It seems like everybody uses Ebay these days, but take a look also at Craigslist which is another free resource for buying and selling in your own locality. Then of course if you have enough to get shot of there is the good old-fashioned boot sale, where a table can usually be bought very cheaply.

It sometimes pays to do an audit of what is sitting in cupboards or the garden shed. If you don't need it and somebody can be find to purchase it then sell it. It all adds up.

Dropshipping

Dropshipping (sometimes written "drop shipping") is the term given to the practice of selling another supplier's goods online without actually keeping any of them in stock.

These days it is relatively easy and very cheap to produce a website which has all the characteristics of a supplier's site. However it is often the case that the "company" fronting the website is a small or even sole trader, operating from home with a laptop and a £6-a-month web domain.

The dropshipper will have an arrangement with the true supplier in which any orders are passed on for delivery, keeping just a percentage of the sale price as commission. This arrangement suits the real supplier as the product will be advertised to new audiences, creating an impression of choice from a wider range of providers when all products are in fact the supplier's own.

Many small entrepreneurs are attracted to dropshipping because it is easy to do with a cursory knowledge of web building, and requires only negligible outlay.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a popular way of making some extra money through the use of the Internet. Although it is hard work at the beginning establishing a regular income, the big advantage with affiliate marketing is that once you have built up a network of affiliates your income will usually become bigger and more regular without you having to do proportionately more work.

When you become an affiliate for an existing business on the web you basically use your own methods in order to attract customers to the business. Affiliates are each provided with a unique tracking code so that the business will be aware when a visit to its site has come via your link as opposed to anybody else's. When that visitor makes a purchase you receive a percentage of the sale price, usually in perpetuity.

The challenge for affiliates is to find outlets for their unique affiliate code. It can be inserted into websites, sometimes too into blogs although check first with the provider of the blogging platform that affiliate links are allowed. Some online forums will also permit links with affiliate code, although usually within the context of a helpful written contribution - it is seldom acceptable to use somebody else's platform to post mindless spam.

All kinds of businesses offer affiliate services, one just has to apply for acceptance. Always read the small print as the terms and conditions can and frequently do vary. One good business for affiliates is the betting industry. Sportsbooks will give affiliates a percentage of all profits they make from new customers brought to them by that affiliate. With most sportsbooks that means of course that would be dependent upon the customer losing money, although with the betting exchanges it would simply be a proportion of the commission received - win or lose.

Many successful affiliates can reach a point where they are making a living from their work, although it would take many months and probably years to reach this point. Many more use it for extra money to top up their main income. Either way it is worthwhile, especially once the hard work is done and the income begins to flow.

Value Betting

Everybody knows that betting, in the commonly understood sense of the term, is a mug's game. There is a simple reason for this, and that is that bookmakers build in their own commission whenever they offer a price. This is known in the field as the "house edge".

The house edge is a very simple concept. What it means in essence is that the price offered to you, the customer, on any particular event is not the "real" price. Meaning that it is not an accurate reflection of the probability of your bet being successful.

EVENLY MATCHED

A good demonstration of this would be a contest between two players or teams who are precisely evenly matched in their sport. In such an event the "real" odds for either competitor would be 1/1, or Evens. However the bookmaker will always quote a price that is less generous than this, typically 5/6 or 10/11. The "missing" amount is the house edge. Please note that you still have a 50% of winning money on the bet. However as the amount that you win does not reflect the true value of the wager it follows that if you were to continue to bet on different events on the same terms you would ultimately lose and the bookmaker would win. In fact the more bets you place the more certain your making a loss would be.

Another simple example would be a random toss of a coin. Should somebody offer you 80p if the coin shows heads but demand £1 from you if it shows tails would you take it? You are, after all, just as likely to win as you are to lose. However, repeat the exercise ten times and you will probably be down on your money. Repeat it a hundred times and it is a racing certainty. The other person is certain to win because he or she has the house edge.

Bookies make their living by paying customers less than their winning bet is worth. That is the bottom line.

It figures then that were you to find a bookmaker who was prepared to consistently offer you a better price than the bets you are making are worth you will end up better off. This is not just a likelihood, it is a stone cold fact.

Other than through special offers and bonuses, it is unlikely that you will find a book that is knowingly prepared to offer you more than a bet is actually worth. However on rare occasions the bookie does get it wrong, and a price is quoted which is more generous than the facts would seem to require.

ODDS COMPARISON SITES

With the widespread availability of odds comparison sites it is often easy to spot a rogue price. It is always an inexact science because it is nigh on impossible to determine the exact probability of a particular sporting outcome. Some value betting companies like to try to work these things out by reference to a complex mathematical formula. The simple fact is that an element of it will always involve some guesswork.

When a price is noticeably out of line with those being offered by other bookmakers the house edge is effectively reversed. This doesn't make it any more likely that you will win your bet. But it does mean that, if the opportunity arises to repeat the exercise often enough, you will inevitably profit and some point. This is called value betting.

The ability to identify a value bet is sometimes quite an art form. It is further complicated by the fact that a bookmaker may have inside information that a particular athlete or competitor is carrying a injury, information which may not be available to others. With this information the price of the favoured party will drop and that of the injury victim will inflate. The value better needs to be wise to this possibility.

Anybody who is prepared to try to follow this path to potential success needs nerves of steel, and also a considerable amount of patience. Only bet when you know a wager is overpriced. Use a reliable sportsbook or a leading betting exchange and don't panic. If you are calculating the reverse in the house edge correctly you will be a winner overall.

Is This the End for Payday Loans?

By Sam Collin - Communications Manager, CDFA

It can’t have escaped your notice that Wonga has been back in the news. After its meteoric rise, it seems things have taken a turn for the worse for the payday lender.

The company has just posted a 53% drop in profits for 2013, though still a not-too-paltry £40million. Just a few days later, Wonga announced it would be writing off £220m of debts for 330,000 customers after putting in place new affordability checks.

The changes came after discussions with its new regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). Wonga’s new stricter lending criteria should mean it will accept far fewer applications from new and existing customers in future, and it has admitted it will be a smaller, less profitable company.

Is the FCA making an example of Wonga? It has certainly been the most high profile payday lender, and the one that has attracted the most criticism from the likes of the Archbishop of Canterbury. It has also demonstrated some of the worst practices. Earlier in the year it was revealed that Wonga had sent letters to customers in arrears from non-existent law firms, threatening legal action.

CRACKDOWN

The FCA’s crackdown on payday lenders comes after a scathing report into the industry from the Office of Fair Trading, which found widespread bad practice and lending to those who could not afford to repay.

An interest rate cap will soon be introduced, and the Competition and Markets Authority has just announced plans to bring greater transparency to payday loan products through price comparison websites. Could this be the end for payday lenders? The FCA is predicting 99% of companies will close down. Many people will be celebrating, but will their customers?

1.6 million people in the UK took out a payday loan last year. They borrowed a staggering £2.5 billion. Some of these people can afford to repay the loans on time. It is those that can’t, however, that roll over loans and see their debts and interest repayments climb out of control, that provide the profits for payday companies and that consumer groups want to protect.

It is the poor treatment of vulnerable customers that has caused so much outrage and distress. Ian Jordan of Southampton took his own life after running up debts of over £20,000 with payday loan companies. He couldn’t cope with the pressure they put him under, and his daughter is now demanding more be done to stop their behaviour.

So if payday lenders leave the market, is the problem solved? There is a fear that this could open the door to even more unscrupulous behaviour. The unregulated, illegal loan sharks could crawl back onto our streets.

There is some hope, however, that the ethical alternatives will take root and grow to fill the gap. Alternatives like credit unions and CDFIs. Credit unions are mutuals that provide savings and loans for members. They are well-placed to deliver services for the ‘safer’ customers who can save as well as borrow and benefit from low interest rates.

POOR CREDIT HISTORIES

The ‘riskier’ customers can turn to a CDFI (community development finance institution) that can provide loans to people with poor credit histories and no savings, as long as they can show they will be able to repay.

Last year, CDFIs helped 42,000 people with fair and affordable credit. They provided financial literacy support to 8,100 people and helped 4,200 people open a bank account – moving them to mainstream finance and away from cycles of debt.

The numbers are good, but they are a long way from meeting the current customer base of payday lenders. If they are to grow in scale and reach, CDFIs need a lot more capital. Last year they received only £2m of new capital funding (compared to £9million the previous year). This represents 5% of the profits made by Wonga. The funding, from public and private sources, is small change compared to the size of the challenge.

Loans are obviously not the only answer, and steering people away from short-term debt, helping with budgets and savings, accessing other support and advice and using longer term, affordable loans to manage finances better are all services on offer from CDFIs.

But to provide these vital services on the scale that is soon to be needed, will only be possible with a lot more support from local and national sources. Without it the loan sharks may be back.


Reproduced with acknowledgements to The Information Daily

Online Surveys

Completing online surveys is an easy way for anybody to generate a regular income from your computer. Just sign up to a survey website, give your details and within half an hour you can be making money.

It is important to understand that nobody ever got rich by answering survey questions on a computer screen. As an occupation it is poorly paid, and if you are eligible to pay income tax then you also need to bear in mind that survey income is tax deductable. A few pounds an hour, in cash or in store vouchers, is as good as it gets. However you can work your own hours, from home, whilst eating a meal or watching television. You are entirely your own boss. If you are at home and doing nothing, why not use that free time to supplement your income?

There is a whole host of survey providers who pay for your opinions. Amongst the better ones are YouGov, Populus Live, Valued Opinions and Ipsos, but there are literally dozens. One other very popular site with survey enthusiasts is Swagbucks, chiefly because there are a whole range of games and videos from which one can accumulate points.

An excellent source of further information on using online surveys is Money Saving Expert. There the top twenty or so survey operators are listed and linked to, and advice is given on how best to maximise income.

One word of advice is to use a dedicated e-mail address that is set aside for this purpose only. In this way you will save yourself the anguish of a whole load of spam in your regular inbox.

Money Making Ideas - An Introduction

Welcome to the Money Making Ideas blog - a new online resource for everyday people who wish to make some extra money.

This is not a site for big investors, speculators and share dealers. MMI is about simple ideas for ordinary people who just wish to earn a bit of extra cash to pay those bills or to supplement their main income.

We welcome input from readers who may have ideas of their own to offer and we will publish anything to this end that is literate, legal and constructive. Just contact us and give us your news and you will see it up here within a day or two.

We hope you will enjoy the blog. Please bookmark us and come back as this site will be updated regularly with fresh articles.