Some Gifts We Can All Afford

Image via Wikipedia

By now you've all seen a lot of email about some of the Thanksgiving and Christmas Giveaways going on this year. You may have also noticed that I haven't been adding any of them to the newsletter and wondered why.

The main reason I haven't is that while I still think they are a good way to help build your list I just haven't had the time.

Besides, many of us who've been online for awhile are tired of them.

So rather than join into the giveaway mania with everyone else this year I've decided to do some things a little different.

The first thing I've done is I've started an Exchange of Cheap Gift Ideas on my personal blog. The purpose of this exchange is to give some new ideas for good gifts that don't cost much. I've started the exchange with 10 ideas from my family however to make the exchange worthwhile we need your inexpensive gift ideas too. Please leave your ideas as a comment and you may include a link to your site.

The second thing I'd like to do is have this post be a digital gift exchange. Rather than have people become members of someone's list to get access and then sign-up to someone else's list to get the gift I propose we just exchange links to free digital gifts. The gifts can be just about anything that is totally free and could be of use to someone.

The only restrictions to our digital gift exchange are:

1. You must have the right to give the gift.


2. You may include your link however you may not require someone to sign up to get it.


3. Neither the gifts nor the links are allowed to promote hate, violence, sex or anything illegal. Gifts and links deemed inappropriate by the publisher for the general audience will be deleted.

Here are 3 gifts to get us started:

• The IDM Toolbox contains a screen capture tool, sticky notes, a color picker and more.


• 42 Free Online Image And Template Generators are listed inside this free PDF ebook.


• A free copy of "10 Internet Marketing Statements You Need To Understand Before You Give Up On Your Online Business" can be found at the bottom of http://www.susancarrollhome.com/prudent-resellers/

I hope you'll take part in our digital gift exchange by leaving a comment with your gift. And if you happen to find either a dead link or an gift that violates the rules please contact me by clicking on my name at the bottom of my newsletter.

To Your Success,
Susan

P.S. If you have a list feel free to invite them to participate in our gift exchanges. The more the merrier.

Please rate this idea. Thanks

Tags: cheap, inexpensive gift ideas, free gifts, gift exchange, gift idea exchange

"Don't Put All Your Eggs In One Basket"

You've probably heard this old idiom, "Don't put all your eggs in one basket" and know what it means - don’t concentrate all your assets or resources in one thing or place because you risk losing everything all at one time.

For internet marketing the more popular way of stating this idiom is to say, "Diversify." In other words, after you've mastered 1 form of advertising, go on to another or when you've started making money with 1 product or service add another. And the reason behind these types of statements is simple. If you concentrate all your efforts into 1 form of advertising or on 1 product or service then you risk losing all your income if that form of advertising or product is removed.

Now I'm sure my parents told me these words of wisdom at 1 time or another but the first time I heard the words and actually understood what they meant and how they should be applied was when an investment advisor said them to me. His advice was about how not to invest the money for my employee 401K. He said, "If you invest your 401K in the company you work for then your gambling 100% of your income and retirement income in that company because they pay your wages, manage your retirement program and all your 401K investment earning will come from their profits. Do you really want to put all your eggs in 1 basket and have 1 company responsible for everything? If something happens to them, you lose everything."

At the time these words were said I was working for the oldest and largest phone company in the world. It had been in business since the 1800's and had always been a growing and profitable business. However I am a very cautious gambler and since investing is a form of gambling to me, I decided to take his advice and invest in other things. As it turned out, this proved to be a wise decision since the phone company was later broken into smaller companies and the 401K investment stocks turned into stock for whatever company the employee then worked for. The smaller company I worked for started going through some very rough times and I saw the stock value go from over $40 a share to around $1 a share in a matter of days. Since many employees had put their eggs in one basket, you can only imagine the deep depression and anxiety that filled the workplace.

After the experience above, I am now a staunch believer in that old idiom and have used it to make many business decisions. Not only do I diversify my advertising methods and sources of online income but I also use it when choosing my online services.

As you know there are many places online that offer package deals like; domain registration and hosting, hosting plus products to sell and complete business packages with hosting, products and autoresponder services. I've joined a few of these memberships and used them because they're usually a good deal. However I've never used only the services from a single membership site for my entire online business because that would make my entire business dependent on one membership site.

And not being totally dependent on one source of services has saved my business several times. The last time was just this year when I had to move my list from a membership site autoresponder service to another.

In this particular case the membership site offered complete business packages with hosting, products, autoresponders and several other things. When I joined I couldn't afford to pay a lot for everything I needed to start my business so this membership seemed like a great way to get started. And it was!

However, I still followed the idiom's advice and used the services that cost the most (products and autoresponder) from the membership site and bought the less expensive service (hosting) elsewhere. Then when I started to make some money I invested some of it by finding other suppliers for my products. This turned out to be a good decision since the products from the membership site recently changed and I could no longer use them the way I had designed my business.

Now losing my autoresponder service was a big blow to my business however it didn't bring my entire business down. I still had my site and my products and could still make sales. I moved my list and put new forms on my sign up pages and had my business back on track in a couple of days. Imagine how long it would have taken had I needed to move my site and find new product suppliers!

When you're first starting your online business it's easy to fall into the trap of relying on one service or membership site to take care of your business. They have it all, provide good service and offer a great savings. And using them to get started is fine. However, as soon as you can, start diversifying where you get your services. When you're making money online don't risk losing it all by being totally dependent on one provider.

To Your Success,
Susan

P.S. Please leave a comment and share your thoughts about this tip.

Tags: don't put all your eggs in one basket, idiom, risk, risk losing it all, diversify

Holiday Tips

Although not everyone celebrates Christmas or even when the new year starts, this is the time of year when you'll be receiving a lot of mail, phone calls and emails asking you to spend or donate your money. And although I do support legitimate sale offers and charities, you need to be aware that not every solicitation for money is legit.

The fact is: this is not only the busiest time of the year for legitimate merchants and charities, it's also the one of the busiest and best times of the year for scam artiest.

Now I won't go into details about the newest scams since I can't keep up with them however you can see a list of some of more popular ones here and 1 of the latest ones here.

So rather than try to list the current on and off line scams, I am going to give you some tips on how to protect yourself, your credit cards and your money.

No matter where you live or what holidays you celebrate you need to know these things to...

Protect yourself from becoming a victim.

• Read the "21 tips to protect yourself from being a victim of credit card fraud" provided by ScamBusters.org.
  


• Read the "Security Tips and Fraud Prevention" provided by PapPal.com.
  


• Never, I repeat Never click a link in an email to access any of your online accounts that contain personal information. Always type in the web address yourself to access these accounts.
  


• Do not give out your credit card information to someone who has called you. While many legitimate charities do phone solicitations, you don't really know who is making the call or who may be listening. If you want to make a donation, ask them to send you a donation card or bill.
  


• When you make an online purchase, always make sure the payment site is a "secure" site.
  


• Impulse shopping is at it's highest during the holidays. Everyone and their brother is trying to sell something. And yes, some of them are really great deals and some are things you may really want to buy. However, you need to stay in control of yourself and your wallet and only buy those things you plan to use or give as gifts while staying within your means. No matter how good the deal or how much you really "want" to have it or "want" to give it away, if you can't afford it - don't buy it.
  


• Those convenient "Gift Cards" make nice gifts however:
  
  * Like credit cards, if someone has the card number and duplicates the card, they can use your gift before you've had the chance to give it.
  
  * The stores love you to purchase gift cards because they make money whether the card is used or not. And there was a lot of money made last Christmas with unused gift cards and there will be more made this year.

Please use the above information to protect yourself not only this holiday season but through the next and future years.

Please feel free to leave your comments about this tip and offer any additional suggestion you may have.

Wishing you a prosperous 2008!
Susan

Tags: scam, fraud, credit card, paypal

1 Way To Lower Your Home Office Expenses

When you have your own online business you get to be the one who pays all the bills and buys all the supplies. So this week's tip isn't about how to make money but rather on how to same some.

As you learn how to design web sites, how to build a list, how to write copy, etc. you have probably gotten some ebooks, reports and articles that contain information that helps you. And you may have even printed some. I know I do when I find a good one and want to make notes or have it available when I am not at my computer.

But soon you discover that you're going through printer paper and ink faster than you can afford to buy it. Plus, the shelves and file drawers are soon full and you run out of places to store what you've printed.

So today let's talk about how to save ink, paper and storage space for all that wonderful material you want to print.

The easiest way to save ink, paper and space for your printed material is to print more than 1 page per piece of paper. No, I don't mean printing front and back although you can do that too. I mean printing 2 or more pages on the same side of a single piece of paper.

Now unfortunately the ability to print multiple pages on a single sheet of paper is not available for ebooks that are .exe files or at least I haven't found a way yet. However, it is possible to print multiple pages of a pdf ebook on a single sheet and here's how:

To print some or all of a pdf ebook and have multiple pages on 1 sheet of paper:

1. Go to the file menu in the upper left corner of the ebook and click print.




2. When the Print popup box appears find the area labeled Print Range. You can select to print All, Current View, Current Page or a Subset of the pages in the ebook. All is the default and will print the entire ebook. Current View is the part of ebook that is showing on your screen. Current Page is the complete page for what is showing on your screen. To print a few selected pages of the ebook simply select Pages and enter the page numbers of those pages you want like 3 - 5 or 5, 6.




3. Next, find the area labeled Page Handling and set Page Scaling to "Multiple pages per sheet." The default for this field is "None" so if you don't change it, you will only get 1 printed page per sheet. In the next field, select the number of pages per sheet you want.




4. After you have made your selections you can see how the printed page will look on the right side of the popup box and when you're happy with how it looks you can click the print button.

Printing long articles and email reports requires a little more work and the use of a word processor like MS Word or OpenOffice Writer.

1. Highlight the text of what you want to print by placing your mouse at the beginning of the text you want to copy and then while holding down your left mouse button, drag your mouse to the end of the text you want. When the text is highlighted release the left mouse button and either click the right mouse button and select copy or do a "cntl c".




2. Open a new document in your word processor and paste the selected content onto the page by either going to the Edit menu and selecting Paste, doing a "cntl v" or clicking the right mouse button and selecting Paste.




3. When you have all the content you want in the document, under the File menu, click Print Preview or Page Preview.




4. On the tool bar there's a button for doing multiple pages. If you don't recognize it, slowly slide your mouse over the buttons and read the labels.




5. After you've selected the number of multiple pages, simply click the Print button.

Printing multiple pages on a single sheet is a great way to reduce the amount of ink, paper and shelf space required for your printed material and a great way to cut your costs without giving up any of the benefits of having printed copies. Also, by selecting the pages you print you can quit printing the unnecessary pages that are often at the beginning and end of an ebook. Instead of using 65 sheets of paper to print a single ebook you can print only those pages that contain the information you want and print them 2 or more to a sheet.

To Your Success,
Susan

P.S. If you found this tip useful, please leave a comment.

Tags: home office, print, print ebook, print multiple pages, save paper, save ink, save space, save money