By Lilian Okado

The explosion of home business opportunities on the web has left many an internet entrepreneur? at a complete loss. Out of the hundreds of work at home online opportunities available it has become increasingly difficult to pick the bad from the good.

How does one differentiate the good, or fairly good jobs from the downright scams? Apart from Research, Research, Research? We have a couple of suggestions that will help with the weeding process:

1. Check out the top Five Work At Home (WAH) sites: All work at home websites discuss work at home opportunities; the good and the bad. Look out for the work at home opportunities most commonly recommended across a majority of the sites; note the word ‘common’. You want to see a program recommended by more than one site.  And, remember some (many?) forum participants may have their own agenda: to promote sites/products they are affiliated to – so be careful.  The guiding principle is to consider a work online opportunity suggested by a number of people across the top sites. AND still do your homework.
   Click here to read more

This is one of our last posts in the series we have written about Aymen and the Arbitrage Conspiracy; we hope you have learned something from the posts and you feel as though you have more of a handle on what the course can offer you. This post describes how the Arbitrage Conspiracy Team dealt with the concept risk management to maximise outcomes. In general the Arbitrage risk management strategies includes solid keyword research and capping PPC budgets to using free (and later paid) tools to monitor other campaigns. But the strategy we will focus on in this post is developing a solid relationship with your affiliate manager.

Aymen and the Arbitrage Conspiracy team continually raised the need to develop a ‘real‘ relationship with your affiliate manager at the CPA networks which makes sense – we all want good working relationships right? Aymen’s rationale for developing a good working relationship with your affiliate manager is to be in a better position to negotiate specific aspects of a given offer eg landing pages, pay outs etc. That aside, it also makes sense to develop a solid relationship with your affiliate managers because, as you know from your own experience, it is harder to overlook someone when you have a ‘real’ relationship. So when you take time to develop a relationship with your affiliate manager you are more likely, as a natural bi-product of that relationship, to find out those things that can/will make a difference to your business.

Click here to read more

By Lilian Okado

Can I really succeed as a freelance writer?

Considering the global economic downturn no other time is this question more frequently asked. Many are worried about the possible demise of online jobs as offline opportunities diminish and hard times set in. With this in mind it is reasonable for an aspiring writer to wonder whether a writing career is worth pushing or getting into knowing full well that loads of companies around the world are aggressively scaling down.

It is apparent that there already exists a huge market of already established writers on the web who have more experience and undoubtedly may command a significant share of the spoils. However let me point out the not so obvious: opportunities (read writing opportunities) are usually better in a down economy. So there is no perfect time to get started. I’m sure you have heard the phrase: “There’s no time like the present.”

Nevertheless we cannot ignore the fact that a receding global economy causes people to react and opt to seek out an extra income on the internet. Whether residing in an ailing market or not, the rules of success in any career remain the same.

Click here to read more

Hi All. By now hopefully you will have read all our posts on the Arbitrage Conspiracy and listened to the Shaun Casey webinar. As we have said before, we are going back in with Arbitrage Conspiracy for round 2, especially since we heard Aymen describe the improvements they have made for Arbitrage 2 in the webinar for affiliates. Despite not responding to our emails – the Arbitrage Team appear to have heard the feedback from round one participants and have made solid changes to the program. Anyway we are now more convinced than ever that Arbitrage 2 is a great option; we are ready to do this. You know, every time we listen to these guys we realise we have been thinking waaaay too small.

One encouraging statistic Aymen mentioned in the webinar is success ratios for business opportunities. Apparently a good success rate for business opportunities is between 2 – 5% i.e. between 2 – 5% of people actually succeed. Well, Arbitrage Conspiracy 1 achieved a whopping 20 – 22% success rate. That means 20 – 22%  of Arbitrage round 1 participants made money on the program. That really is an outstanding figure and a great achievement. We are part of that 20 – 22% success rate; we did make some money in round 1 – but not what we had anticipated. Like we have said before, our circumstances impacted on our outcome i.e. we were travelling and by the time we got home our kids got (and stayed) sick from nearly 2 months and so we lost momentum. And now? We are ready to do it – waaaay better this time.

Click here to read more

Hi All. We are on some major synchronicity at the moment. Just after I wrote the article Network Responsibility we received an email from Max Bounty telling us:

“Max Bounty has just been ranked one of the top 20 performance marketing networks by Revenue Performance’s Online Advertising BlueBook. Revenue Performance, originally named Revenue Magazine, is one of the leading sources of business strategies, innovative marketing methods, effective online advertising techniques and emerging trends in technology for internet marketers. Their Top 20 list is the result of aggregating expert views, traffic data, measures of industry influence and many other pieces of information that they have researched. You can view the full rankings…. it is a tremendous honor to be ranked in the top 20 alongside such companies as Commission Junction, LinkShare, and MediaTrust.”

Cool huh? So if you have been thinking about joining a CPA Network consider this recommendation. And like I said in the previous article we have had really good experience with our affiliate manager- much better than with lots of other networks we are registered with. Anyway, I’ll leave it with you – just thought you might like to know.

Hi All

Further to the post about the changes to the FTC and the interview organised by Tru-Guru with Linda Goodman we just thought we’d share our experience as to why it’s sooo important to stay on top of the changes across the industry.

As you know we are relative PPC newbies ourselves. Well, be warned. Google cuts no slack for newbies – we got slapped – big time. We had our Google account suspended – which actually means closed. Why? because we chose the wrong campaigns to promote. Perhaps we are slow or something – but we really didn’t make the connection… instinctively we must have made some connection but apparently it didn’t make it to the frontal lobes…

When we were choosing campaigns to promote on Google we would try and vet the campaigns ourselves by filling out as much of the offer as possible to see how it worked.  So, for example, in the case of some grants campaigns we ran – we discovered that prospects would be billed within a week, despite the landing page advertising a ‘free trial‘. So we wrote an article telling people why we thought the grants packages are a good idea in principal and then TOLD them subscribers would be billed unless they canceled within a week. We made every effort to be transparent and ethical. Evidently when Google decided to revoke our account they didn’t consider the whole account. And it shows no mercy for being gullible/stupid/trusting – you pick the descriptor.

Click here to read more