A friend of mine runs a small real business, and we get together to talk about how much the government bureaucrats charge him to make a living at his location. He is also very interested in finding some way to make money online while his wife runs their business. I admire his drive to succeed. He wants to find an effective, and free, way to make this money.
He's asked me about making money online, and I tell him there is no easy magic way to do it. I have been building websites since 1994, and at times I've had incredible amounts of money come in from the websites. And sometimes that money came in for months in a residual way, with me doing very little work to maintain, typically because of traffic being delivered to various kinds of affiliate programs from my websites. More than once I've hit pay dirt of my websites delivering $300 to $600 every day. It was so much fun to look at my stats at noon and see $100 had already come in, and by 6pm, another $100, and then another $100 in the evening hours. I could always tell when the office holidays were, because my income would dip. Apparently, people spent a lot more time at work goofing off buying things, then they do when they have a holiday at home!
But in recent years, it has been hard to generate a lot of traffic. One of the reasons is that there is a lot more stuff online! I read an article by some academic that estimated that these days close to a billion new web pages are created every day. And most of it is drivel with no real value, often stuff copied from other places by script kiddies.
Back in the day, I could write scripts to combine content from various places and create a real valuable mashup long before anyone gave it that name, but these days, Google is very good at getting rid of duplicate information, and not giving it prominence in search rankings. Unfortunately, these changes have affected real sites too. Some of my real sites, for example My Sleep Center, a hand written site, have suffered as a result. Some have gone from 1000 visitors a day to a dozen or less.
I've also been in various network marketing companies, both before, and after, the internet era. I've had very little luck attracting real internet traffic to any websites about the network marketing stuff. And even though I now have a real business selling quality childrens books, bibles, and health books, and online pages talking about the books, very little traffic comes there by itself. There are ways to get free traffic, but you have to spend a lot of time to build good content. And regularly update it.
Anyhow, I went to visit my friend and buy lunch from his real business, and see how he is doing with his online adventures. The last time I saw him, he said he was struggling with setting up an auto responder. That is probably something his online business mentor told him he should do, but it was not as easy to do as it seemed.
My friend set up http://www.MoneymakingSystem330.com and he wanted me to take a look at it. I teased him endlessly about what does the 330 mean, does that mean there are 329 others out there? Oh no, there are thousands he said. Good grief, he thinks that is a good thing. I then endlessly pretended to not remember his url. Did you say 303? 338? 33? My dyslexia always makes me forget the last digit of numbers? Did you say 30? Oh no, it's getting worse, now I'm forgetting the first digit too.
I asked him if the domain name for his new money making site ended in .GOV, and he and I had a good laugh, then he said if he had a website ending in .GOV, he wouldn't need a money making system, he could just use his GOV powers and tax and permit fee everyone to death.
Despite having this really great system to make money, that tells him everything he needs to know for just $50 a month, my friend asked me today "How can I get effective advertising for my new site?" Did maybe my friend miss a page in the manual they gave him that told him how to make effective advertising? I suggested google ads, and my friend responded, "Those cost money! How can I get free…" I interrupted him and reminded him that free is not often associated with effective.
My friend then gave me his email address, an email address associated with this money making site. I asked him if he decides to get out of the money making thing, then what email would he use? I advised him to get a free gmail email account, but he didn't hear my suggestion of something free, and more effective than tying his incoming email to the money making thing he is hopeful about. He claimed I could look at his site, and I would find his email there. I looked, and it wasn't there. Sigh.
My friend told me he is only paying $9 a month for hosting, plus about $10 a year for the domain name. Is this in addition to the $50 a month he told me about last week before he got the domain name and new auto responder website? I didn't have the heart to ask. Its probably just another reasonably priced extra service that his mentor offers for those who don't have time to research how to use Linux to setup their own auto-responder script, or find a free auto responder service. Oh, and my friend is really excited about the 30% commissions he will make if anyone else buys the web hosting. So what's another $10 a month compared to that potential?
Anyhow, I decided to look at my friend's website.
My friend's website is a video of a fellow talking endlessly about his world's best money making system. So I took some notes.
Notes on the video:
- "World's most powerful money making tape"
- Frank A. Trueblood
- Picture of "Training tape in area code 612"
Frank claims in the video to have
- Turned $5 into $300K
- Turned $100 into $235K
- System made $37K in a month, then $84,900 the next month.
- "I had created a true money making system that didn't care who was using it"
- "This system worked so well for making money that I had people calling me from all different types of industries…."
- Turn $100 into $235K every month
- Recruit 200-300 distributors for networking business every 30-45 days for your business, building downlines for network marketers, lets them build their downlines, even recruit whole groups
- 6:53 - System also works to produce steady stream of customers, affiliates
- Works for online business to promote existing product or service to the masses
- "Step-by-step real business system for making money"
I got about half way through the video before I decided to do some research for my friend.
Some links about Frank Trueblood:
- Official site - www.whoisdirectory.com/frankatrueblood/
- Scam warning link
- An honest review of the nun gold team - link
- As a person who has been marketing online for over 4 years. As an Ultimate member of Howie Schwartz and a student of two of Howie’s Apprentice Program, I can tell you right now that there is no magic bullet to making money online. When an internet marketer promises you that they “have a system” and never reveal it and keep leading you on, I can promise you you have found a scam artist.
- Here is a great article on the 10-15 ways to promote a product online
- Skeptical of becoming an internet millionaire in 15 minutes or less? You are not alone - link
Oh yeah....
I told my friend about my money making system that I follow. I got up at 6am, spent 20 minutes playing on the internet, 10 minutes thinking my computer wouldn't start up properly and I might have to reboot.
After the stock market opened at 6:30am my time, I found an overextended stock from Timothy Sykes watch list. He was long the stock, it is a financial stock breaking out on good news (DEAR). I didn't like how over extended it was, it looked to me ripe to fall back a little (retrace). So sold it short, watched it rise some more, sold some more short, watched it rise some more, sold a little more short, then watched it gasping, ready to fall over, and I shorted some more. I was willing to risk $200 or so. It did start falling, and as I was fumbling with the stop loss orders with my online software, I panic-ed and quickly sold out the position to lock in a few hundred dollars profit. In at about 6:40 or so, back out of the stock by 6:50am. If I waited a few more minutes, I could have made $1500 instead of $800 or so, but I was still happy, as I had other things I needed to do, like get ready to drive to work. BTW, I started the day with -$200 in a 200 share ABIO position from last Thursday that I thought I left open, and that stock had risen, so I sold some of that stock short too, averaging up my price. That one dipped to from the extra shares I shorted today, so I jumped out of that stock too, locking in a profit there also.
How did I learn how to do this? I bought courses on short selling of stocks from Timothy Sykes. Yes there is risk, yes I've lost money on various stock market related courses and books. But Timothy Sykes information is the only information that has made me as much as $1500 a day, several times! Tim specializes in recognizing the signs of stocks that are being promoted by shady manipulators, and he shows how to recognize when the promotion has reached it's limits, and the stock is getting ready to run down back to it's old levels, often even faster than it ran up. He teaches you to recognize these patterns, such as "supernovas", and how to profit on the downside.
Yes there is risk, you need to have money to put in a brokerage account, and yes you need to be watching the market, but it can be mastered. Tim turned $12,000 into $3 million or so in just two or three years, and he wrote a book about it, "An American Hedgefund". In the last two years, he started over, this time setting out to be totally transparent and show other how to do this. So far, he has turned $12,000 into more than $100K in two years, and now with his larger account, he is often making as much as $20K in a day. And all his stock trades, typically short positions, are fully documented for his students, in real time! He doesn't trade every day, and he doesn't expect you to trade often either.
But I am learning enough to make profits not only on the days Tim trades, by following along with his trades if they meet my criteria, but I'm also learning to make money on the days that Tim doesn't trade. And most of the money I'm making is via the short selling I learned from his courses. Now sometimes, I also make money on stocks Tim wouldn't trade, but I know the risks. And he, or his chatroom moderator Reaper, calls me a jackal for my efforts to make money not following his rules!
Anyhow, I'll probably give my friend another $3 tomorrow for lunch, along with a link to this article. I am sure instead of this article, my friend would probably rather I spend an extra $1 to buy a soda from him with my lunch, than for me to be negative about his chances with Frank, I admire my friend's enthusiasm. Maybe he'll pass out fliers for my health books to everyone who buys a hot dog, and I could pay him a commission on the sales! With a little effort, we could probably make much more money than he will spend with Frank.
Unfortunately, as for buying a soda with my hotdog, I don't need to buy soda from my friend, since I get free soda at work, and it would be better for me to just drink water anyhow, but I hate paying $1 for water, when I get free water at work too.
Maybe its the free soda and water that effectively keeps me coming into work everyday, just like a real world product, reasonably priced, for just $3 keeps me coming back to my friend for lunch. So I guess maybe free can be effective, as is delivering a product that people want for a reasonable price. My friend was trying to tell me about all the wonderful products behind his website, and how price doesn't matter so much. As you noticed, the only thing I found was a video selling Frank's supposed method to teach you to make money, if only you give up your email address for his auto responder bots to spam.
I don't know what products my friend is selling from the website other than Frank's how to get rich doing something info. But my experience with these kinds of products is that they are overpriced to support a commission structure. I asked a surveyor walking by if he would spend $30 to buy batteries from my friend's online store when Costco sells the same thing for $10, but my friend said "He's busy. And don't be negative" as I was talking about the batteries. I was so busy trying to make a point to my friend, I totally missed the pun he made. He probably missed the pun too.
Well, I'm sure I'll be back for more of my friend's hotdogs.
That and getting to talk about lazy government workers, a topic me and my friend can never talk enough about.
Oh, there is free dinner tonight at work. Time to go get in the chow line. Something else effective and free.