This is part of the Mac Book Pro Challenge series, why don’t you join us and reach your goal.

Why start with a goal

Or better still what is your goal? if you said to earn money, then why are you looking to earn money?

For many the ultimate goal is to leave their jobs, live on a yacht, and go to fancy parties! This is probably described as a dream rather then a goal. I’m not saying you can’t achieve it after all humanity has an amazing ability to achieve and punch well above its evolutionary status so if we can all do it you can on a more personal level.

For now though lets concentrate on the first goal a milestone you can be proud of. Having a fixed goal allows you to be focused in your efforts it’s that little carrot to keep you on the path. It doesn’t matter if your writing a multimillion pound business plan or simply trying to diet after Christmas our life is driven by goals and milestones. You could argue that life itself is a sequence of milestones and goals, birth, marriage, (divorce), offspring, retirement, death sadly not always in that order.

Goals vs Dreams

So how do we determine a realistic goal vs a dream? are not all goals dreams until they are reached?

A goal without a plan is just a wish - Antoine de Saint-Exupery / Larry Elder

I would add a further extension to this famous quote goals with wishes are dreams.
A planned goal that relies on happen stance (winning the lottery) or without deadline or time scales relies on wishes you cannot plan to win the lottery, only how you would react when you win. Consequently such goals that contain wishes are dreams.

So for now I want you to put the dreams to one side and join me in the Goals.

Goal driven affiliate marketing

So bringing this back from the meta physical and back down to the affiliate marketing side of things why join an affiliate marketing scheme that doesn’t pay out per purchase/click?
The obvious answer is the sum is greater then the parts how many affiliate schemes pay $75 per signup? without you or the signer needing to spend a penny?
The answer is very few, of course the reason they can afford such high rewards is that very few people will reach them. Many people will give up at the 5 to 10 people mark. Out of those 2 will have not read the small print and were charged at least 1 month for a trial. Companies do not produce such schemes to lose money.

High reward low risk, I think for an affiliate marketer looking at the long game a high reward but with little or no risk is a sure thing. The problem is while the risk is low the result is time consuming. After all while $75 per signup is an amazing given what you have to do, sell one flat screen television for any major affiliate and you can be looking at 5 to 10 times that amount.

So we have to look at such things not in their value of a per signup but as a total, $1800 or indeed a Mac Book Pro! When I introduced the challenge I started by explaining how having a wireless laptop changed the way I live my life wow that’s a big thing, a piece of electronic changed my day to day life! But it really did I’m writing this down by the lake in my favourite spot, my wireless card is in and I’m on the internet. As its a beautiful day and I plan to be here a little while, I have brought along my solar panel to keep the laptop charged and my camera .

If you haven’t already experienced this sort of freedom might I suggest this as a great goal to start with? If not a laptop think of a singular item or service that will even in a small way change your life make it the goal.

A Goal without a plan…

Congratulations you hopefully now have a wish, it’s time to turn it into a goal with a plan, so let’s get started in the next part of the Mac Book Pro Challenge!

Mac Book Pro Challenge
For those following us on the Mac Book Pro Challenge is your wish/goal a Mac Book? if not what is your goal? If your not doing the Mac Book Pro Challenge why not? but hey even if your not defining a goal and having goals over monetary targets will inspire and encourage you.

We so need to kick start the blog again, and how better then by helping you guys get a Mac Book Pro Each!

Why do you need a laptop?

When asked what is the single most important change in my life on the Internet I always answer my first laptop purchase with a wireless connection. Suddenly the world changes, now you can remain online in your own cocoon environment where ever you are in the world. I do not leave the house without a laptop, my laptop has gone with me to festivals, conferences, Hackdays, clients locations and even the shops!

If you don’t have a laptop then now is the chance to grab one, if you do have a laptop is it a Mac Book Pro? It is? ok well then you can just play for the cash!

The Challenge

So here is the challenge find 25 people and get them to join a site where they to can win a laptop each person to sign up needs to complete a single offer. When all 24 have completed 1 offer you receive a free Laptop or Cash!
Simple huh

Don’t panic it’s coming!

I bet most of you are chomping at the bit for the website address but I want you to hold on just 2 seconds more.
Before you sign up we want you to know we are here for you! over the next few weeks we are going to discuss not only the various offers, but ways to get people to sign up. In other words we are going to hold your hands through the whole thing!

One final thing before the address

One last thing before you sign up, it won’t cost you a penny! please, please make sure you read the small prints of offers but for everyone their is a free option so you do not have to part with money to take part* don’t be pressured into parting with cash on an offer unless you want to!

Let’s get started

Remember to successfully complete the challenge you will need to sign up 24 people, for Notebooks4free and have each person complete an offer.

Legal bits

We are not responsible for your earning potential, and while we will help as much as we can we can’t do the work for you. This is not a pyramid scheme it is a single tier affiliate program, we are using an affiliate link but any affiliates you recruit do not count towards our total. Please please please read the small print on the Notebook4free website. Only one entry per household etc. Finally not all countries can receive laptops in such cases the cash alternative is offered via Paypal.
Remember with free trials and offers always cancel them if you do not want them to continue!

*If in doubt sign up for Notebooks4free and stay tuned for ways to complete free offers even if you don’t have a credit card.

So who is ready to take on the challenge and join us on this simple but effective challenge? It doesn’t matter if your an affiliate marketing newbie or guru this is a great way to get a laptop or cash and what could be simpler then getting 24 friends together?

Taking the challenge to the next level!

• Goal driven challenges
• Creating your sales person

Before I start this post I would like to appologise to our readers for my long absence from payment blogger. I am in the army for the last 3 months (and I will be there for 9 more months) so time is very limited.

Anyway, enough with me, let’s talk about making money with forums. In this post I wont tell you how to monetize a forum web site, but how you can earn money by selling services and products on other forums. Personally I use these techniques frequently with webmaster forums to sell sites or ads. It doesn’t matter if you are looking to sell a site, an advertising package or some ebook you wrote there are a few things you should take care of.

Reputation

Everything in the business world is reputation. In forums this is even more important as reputation is “trackable”. Most forums have the reputation badge, while others (like DP) have a specific user rating for transactions with other members called itrader. So let’s say you start right now with a forum, you have registered an account with the forum and you are ready to sell your product/service. At that point I would suggest you to stop what are you doing and pay attention to your reputation. Without a strong reputation in the forum it doesn’t matter if you give gold for free because none is going to buy from you.

Building a “name” in the community

Ok that part is time consuming, but it is very important as long as you wish to earn some money in the forum you have just got in. Bellow are a few things that you have to do before posting any offer:

Post in the forums

A member with no posts is not a member. You need to make as much posts as you can. Don’t post stuff like “Thanks, I like this” but try to be informative and helpful to the other members. By showing them that you know about what you are talking will create trust from the community.

Give something for free

People is going crazy when you offer them something for free. It doesn’t matter if this is a 2 page ebook or a descriptive article on a technique you are using. If you give them something for free your reputation will increase so give it a try.

Buy stuff from the marketplace

If there is a marketplace with itrader, then you should buy a few things before try to sell something. This is because this way you will be able to have a positive feedback itrader that you make you look more trustful to your future buyers.

Time to make some money

Ok now you are a well known member in the community with reputation and itrader, so you can post an offer. At this part the most important factor is of course the product you are selling, but still there are a few things that you can do to maximize your chances:

• Try to be as descriptive as possible
• Rate your own thread (yeah people like to see 5 stars in the top of the thread)
• Make people bump your thread. How? Just leave a bit of information for pms so everyone will post “Please pm me details”

That’s it, I hope this article was helpful enough

Blackhat SEO: Simply means techniques that might get you penalised or banned from a major search engine. Blackhat is a very generic term and the Blackhat Forums do often include email marketing techniques that most would consider spam. This is not an endorsement of such techniques.

Quadzilla opened up his SEO Blackhat forums on Christmas day for a limited time as a Christmas present so I spent half an hour looking round, I was pretty disappointed and I left feeling sorry for those members who spent their hard earned cash on membership.

Let me put some background to this post, Quadzilla Blackhat forums cost $100 a month membership fee, not to steep but enough to make most people think twice. For the $100 you are promised a forum that has some top notch experts and to be fair there are some pretty impressive guys in there. The issue I have is they are not talking.
So what if you are a;

• Newbies – If you’re a newbie then you are after questions being answered, so it was disappointing to see lots of unanswered questions, sure most of them were very newbie’ish but still this is not the place to find answers.
• Intermediate – You probably will want to go straight to the parasite hosting and large database section and will be disappointed, Syndk8 and Wickedfire have discussions all at a similar level.
• Advanced – You will want to go to the labs, to see the sophisticated cutting edge stuff and yep you guessed it nothing sophisticated or cutting edge mostly old posts.

The overall feeling was one of depressing lingering and slow death, which is a shame because it could have been so much more. Of course with 30 minutes I did not read every post and I’m sure there are a few gems but if I’m going to spend $100 a month I expect a forum that is organised, is moderated, has question answered or at least be told my question wasn’t appropriate. I would want to see stickies with the cutting edge latest ideas. I would not want to shift through posts looking in vein for a thread which might answer my question though to be fair this would not take to longer, in that respect it does keep one of its promises, their are not 100s of threads to crawl through.

Quadzilla forums are not the only places to find Blackhat/Greyhat SEO information as already indicated Wickedfire and Syndk8 are both excellent places to find information on various techniques, Wickedfire also offers a paid for area, which is either invitation only or by paying $55 a month which is significantly less.

There is one good thing to come out of the Christmas day present, it reminded me to resubscribe to SEO Egghead a fantastic blog, so not all bad.

I have held off talking about about Entrecard until I had tried it for a couple of weeks but the results are in.

What is Entrecard

Put simply its a 125×125 banner exchange but you banner is displayed only once per day per site, you pay a certain number of credits to have your banner displayed on a specific site. Credits are gained based on people dropping cards on you and you dropping cards on other sites.

Stats according to Entrecard

Specific stats

Card Drops

Advert Clicks

Organic Clicks - Those coming from Entrecard

Is it worth it?

Well we have had some pretty targeted traffic from Entrecard but its also a lot of work chasing after credits, its very much a case of the big sites get bigger and the smaller sites have to work harder. But it doesn’t have the flaws of a scheme like BlogRush, and no money swaps hand, overall I think its not a bad system but I suspect at the end of the month we will remove the badge depending on how it goes. My Font site has had very little traffic so its currently very much geared towards money making blogs.

Want to try it without working hard?

We have a few credits to give away for those who want to try it, so for your chance to win simply tell us your thoughts either in a comment or trackback to this post or one of the follow up posts marked with win logo!

• First price - 150 credits
• 3 Runners Up - enough credits to advertise here

small print; what I say goes, credits given only for valid comments or trackback if your comment doesn’t get published you will not win, winners will be selected at random from valid entries and contacted via email for comments, or via the sites contact form if trackback. hey you get the idea! Good luck
Closing date oh shall we say a weeks time which would be Christmas day! 25/12/2007