MyMoneyBlog posts:
Six easy ways to make money:

1) Earn interest on your idle cash.

Open up a high-yield savings account that links up directly with your existing checking account and pumps up that piddly interest rate you’re getting now. At around 5% APY, with every $2,000 in cash you can make $100 more in interest a year. Banks with local branches like Washington Mutual and Citibank are even in the game.

2) Earn some quick bucks for signing up for accounts.

You can get up to $250 upfront just for signing up and making a purchase with several credit cards. Just put them away afterwards, there’s no need to pay a penny of interest. I’ve certainly made thousands of dollar this way.

3) Get cash back whenever you make a purchase.

If you are responsible with credit cards, you should really use a credit card that gives you cash back or other perks when buying everyday purchases like groceries, gas, and everything else. Here’s a list of my favorite rewards credit cards. You can easily get back $100 a year without changing your spending patterns.

Read the rest

Hiring a virtual assistant can seem daunting, but the benefits are well worth it. The following are a few tips to help you get started:

First of all, it’s important that you know exactly what you’re hiring them for and how much you can afford to pay them. It is a good idea to write it all down in a contract type form so that there won’t be any surprises.

You can start by posting about your exact needs on elance or guru so that freelancers can find you. You can also choose to post on Craigslist or post on forums. If you express that telecommuting is OK you may find that your ad will appear in many work from home websites and job boards.

It is a good idea to check on the future applicant’s work and website. Check for appearance and professioanlism on their own sites and ask for portfolios or testimonials from past clients.

It may take awhile to find a virtual assistant, but well worth it. You’ll find yourself less stressed and overwhelmed, and most importantly, your business will grow faster and more efficiently.

Angei poses the question. When can you honestly say “I have made it?”

Sarah writes about her experiences as a stay-at-home mom.

Elpasotimes.com writes about the growing phenomenom of companies offering house based positions. The companies screen their potential customers to see if they are suited to working at home. Employees working from home allow businesses to save up to 30% on investments.

IDC estimates the United States now has 150,000 outsourced home-based agents, and says the number is projected to grow to 300,000 by 2010.

Datamonitor, a London business information company, estimates that more than 47,000 outsourced home-based agents working at least 20 hours a week are employed worldwide, more than 90 percent of them in the United States. It
Advertisementprojects that number to grow to more than 223,000 by 2012.

The numbers from both forecasts are for home-based agents working for call-center contractors. They don’t include home-based agents working directly for product and service companies, such as airlines, banks and telephone companies.

Even with the dramatic growth in home-based agents, traditional call centers are
expected to continue as the biggest chunk of the customer-contact market.

This dynamic creates a friendly workable environment for disabled and home bound employees.

Penelope Trunk is a columnist at the Boston Globe and Yahoo! Finance. She suggests that in the near future things will change.

The end of office life

People will work from home, from their friends’ homes, from the beach, all the time. The need to have a home office will decrease because Generation Y will never really learn how to work 9 to 5 in an office anyway. They grew up blending homework and friends while they multi-tasked in their bedroom, and once they enter the workforce, they extend this behavior to everywhere — work life and home life will be blended in a way that makes each more rewarding.

We can already see a growing movement of mobile jobs where people can work at any time they choose from any location. Think back to NBC’s recently run feature of an entire large sized office where all employees were excused in order to work from anywhere they wished and only come in for meetings.

source: BrazenCareerist

Lisa posts a cute comic about google AdSense.

Cindy writes about the great flexible work opportunities there are for women who would like to work from home.

Many webmasters have learned how to make a sizeable amount of money on their sites through posting google ads. They learn how to put in high paying keywords in order to keep their page ratings high and have people clicking on their ads. Yet, many times the money does not just roll in after putting up the supposedly correct keywords to generate maximum growth.

The answer lies in a simple secret: location, location, location. An easy navigation system which pulls readers to the correct pages is what is lacking. Having the pages with the high placed keywords is one thing, getting your traffic to click and go to those pages is entirely another thing.

The links on your pages which lead to the desired pages you want your readers to navigate must be attention grabbing and look interesting. It all comes down to good marketing skills in advertising your links and a good navigational site which contains a menu on each page and is easy to go through.

One way of doing this is by placing those links on the pages which most of your traffic comes to. It is a good idea to test this option by choosing a few high earning pages to link to. Come up with a catchy and unique name for that link. Think of something which will trigger the readers curiousity. And don’t forget to use interesting graphics on your site.

Many sites these days have lists of “hot pages” and “most read pages.” Get to know which lists websites are using and try to come up with your own version of a unique style. Try putting different texts on different pages. Doing a little trial version with mixing things around is a great idea to test your site out. Put links both on top and bottom and see which links are being ignored and which are being clicked.

Test and track until you find the site navigation style that works best for your site.

In today’s competitive world, how can you stand out and shout to the world “Look at me, my business is worth coming to?” It sounds like one of the biggest challenges of internet marketing, and yet the solution is remarkably easy. It’s called “branding.”

Branding is when your personalize your business and your site in a way where it becomes synonymous with what your personality reflects.

How can this be done? Number one, you can start through having original content instead of just copying and pasting what’s on the web. Original content means that you yourself thought up the ideas and wrote your own articles. If you aren’t confident enough in your writing ability you might want to look for an editor just to offer insight into your writing, but the writing should still be yours.

Your site should boast your personality; your voice, your colors, your clothes. Your home business was created from your experiences, your talents, and your skills so in a sense your website is you.
A Brand is like a human being, there is not another one in the whole world who is the same.

The brand is something which can be built over a period of time. It is an emotional relationship between your website and your visitors and over-time it will get stronger and stronger, especially if it is not changed.