Whether you are sending or receiving money via PayPal you can minimize their extortionate fees to a maximum of $1. So when somebody is about to transfer a large sum of money to your PayPal account you can ask them to use this trick. You simply need to take advantage of their mass pay option. Here is how this is done:

Instead of fiddling with Excel files, how PayPal instructs you to do, you can do this your own way.

1) Open a text pad

2) Type the following information, separated by tabs (use tab key, not
spaces).

An example of a payment text file:

example@whatever.com 1800 USD

After uploading the text file to PayPal it should trigger a payment of $1800 to example@whatever.com

Save the textfile as anything you like.

3) Log in to your PayPal account and click on the tiny “mass pay” link at the bottom of the page.

4) Upload your saved text file to PayPal and enter your email address.

Your payment has been sent for only $1. You have just saved yourself $70 or so bucks depending on your account type.

Please note, this trick will only save you fees when you receive money. Therefore you will need to ask the person sending you money to use this trick. Works well with your business partners or relatives. Basically people you know already.

I discovered Freecycle a year or so ago and thought it was a really great idea. Basically instead of throwing away various items you no longer have any use for you simply give them away for free and by doing so decrease your impact on environment.

The other week a friend of mine picked up a brand new sofa worth £700 (Around $1400) simply because some rich jerk’s spoiled wife did not like the colour and asked her husband to get read of it. Then another friend of mine picked up a supposedly faulty, half a year old 37″ LCD TV which simply needed a new fuse.

I have decided to have a closer look myself. Fair enough, there was a lot of junk on offer but I was able to find a bunch of valuable items as well. I have actually managed to pick up a 5.1 surround sound PC speaker set from this guy just down the road from me and sold them on Ebay for just under £30 ($60). The only difficult part is being quick. You need to claim the item pretty much as soon as the listing is posted because somebody else will usually beat you to it. If I had all day I would sit in front of my screen and do just that. Every now and then you would see real quality items up for grabs and if you lucky enough you can make some real money. You can always just keep the item for yourself too. Good luck!

Whenever I see a page that clearly violates Google AdSense TOS I tend to ignore it. To me, I’m better of working on my own websites rather than going around grassing people up. A friend of mine on the other hand is a big AdWords advertiser and he can’t stand people getting away with click fraud, which is more than understandable.

One day he ended up on some website that asked people to click on their AdSense ads. Outraged, he contacted the AdSense advertisers who appeared on these ads by entering the url in his browser and informed them about the click fraud. Advertisers in their turn thanked him for the warning and went ahead to complain to Google and ask for a refund. Turns out one of the guys has actually lost thousands of dollars with that particular campaign. Soon they have received a full refund from Google. A friend of mine was then contacted by one of these guys and was offered $1000 as a thank you for saving the company a lot of money.

Apparently a few guys go around doing this full time and earn good money. I assume they are a bit more shameless and actually ask for that “thank you”.

Affiliate marketing is not easy money as you probably know. You need to have the right flow of the right people to buy the right product. Even when all 3 are just right you can still struggle to sell because you can’t get your visitor to switch into the buying mood. When the person does not want to buy a product any attempt to sell will only drive them away. When the person is in buying mood however you can even sell them 3 products in the raw. It has been proven that one of the best times to sell someone a product is straight after their first purchase, while you customer is still in the buying mode, with his/her credit card out.

So what if you already had a customer looking to buy one product or another? All you had to do was to find that product for them. Seems to good to be true? Not at all! I introduce you to Yahoo answers. What you do is simply scan for the right question. For example: “What spyware cleaner should i buy?”. That person has a problem and needs a solution. In this case he wants to buy a spyware cleaner. What you do is jump into your clickbank quickly. Go to marketplace and find a nice spyware cleaner. Create your hoplink and answer the guy’s question: “Hey! Here is a very good spyware cleaner i use -link-. Never had a problem with it. bla bla bla”. Then go and find some more questions. You will usually be able to find a nice product for most questions.

Think quality rather than quantity. Take your time to write a natural looking answer that does not look like a sales pitch. It is a good idea to cloak your affiliate links too. You can create a quick blog on blogger and then use the following code in your template to redirect people to your affiliate link: < meta HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" content="0; url=http://ww w.youraffiliatelink.com">. Now you can use your blogger url as your referral url in Yahoo answers.