Every year at least three million people fall victim to work-at-home scams. The sad part is that avoiding scams is not that difficult if you heed the advice of work-at-home professionals.
It’s my opinion that people fall victim to scams for one (or all) of the following three reasons:
1) A lack of knowledge and understanding about working at home: By reading free articles and website resources about working at home, checking out work-at-home books from the library, and talking with others who work at home, you can learn about common scams to avoid, as well as what working at home is really about. By knowing what’s really involved in working at home, you’ll focus on real opportunities and avoid the bogus ones.
2) Looking for the wrong types of work in the wrong places: When you learn about working at home (#1), you discover that typing and data entry jobs are nearly all scams, that telecommuting is real work and must be earned not bought, and that home businesses are a great way to make money, but that they can't be done completely on autopilot (there is no money for nothing). Many people get caught in scammers’ web because they buy into the idea that you can pay a job or get paid to do nothing at home. Remember, it’s called work at home, work being the operative word.
3) Allowing emotions to override common sense: Sometimes the desire to work-at-home can take on a desperate tone. When you find something that sounds just perfect, ideal for your situation, your desperation can lead you to send the money before your common sense can question it. You can’t fall for the hype no matter how good it sounds. Real work-at-home opportunities may be simple to run, but they won’t make you rich tomorrow (heck they probably won’t make you any money by tomorrow), and cannot be run by someone else or completely on autopilot.
To avoid scams you must make a promise to yourself not only to learn about working at home, but to also use what you know to critique and analyze work-at-home options, and don't let your burning desire to work-at-home override your common sense.
Here are some things you need watch for:
1) If its envelope stuffing, assembly work, email processing, payment processing, typing and data entry, it’s a scam. To be honest there are some legit data entry work and occasionally typing (although it’s not called typing it’s called transcribing), but most of them are scams. Home businesses that don't have a product or service, and any “guarantees” of income or the ability to earn big money doing nearly nothing are also likely to be scams.
2) If it’s advertising for a JOB, but asks for money, it’s a scam. Legit employers never charge to hire you. Ever! But watch out. Many people use this rule incorrectly. It’s only for ads from companies that indicate that for a fee you can work for them. It doesn't apply to business opportunities, work at home information resources, or even job boards.
3) If a company asks to use your personal bank account to do business, it’s a scam! Don't do it. It can cost you thousands of dollars and the loss of your bank account until the debt you owe is paid.
The best way to avoid scams is to be informed, take the time to research and understand work-at-home opportunities, and always let your head, not your heart, do the deciding.
About the Author: Leslie Truex has been providing work-at-home advice and information online since 1998. Get the Jobs Online Toolkit and other free resources with a subscription to her free weekly newsletter. Visit Work At Home Success for details.
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Thursday, October 4, 2007
Affiliate Marketing Secrets - This One Maketing "secret" Could Make you Rich, if you Apply it
Posted by EditorsChoice
Tuesday, 02 October 2007
It seems as though every new person that comes online wanting to make money is looking for those coveted affiliate marketing secrets or looking for that secret way to "crack the internet code" or somehow get rich quick. Well, that's all wishful thinking, however, I'm going to have to burst your bubble on a couple of these theories. For one, there is no "internet code" to crack, nor is there really any get rich quick button. There are however, some well hidden affiliate marketing secrets that are so powerful that some affiliates won't share them for any amount of money or they'll only share them with a choice few individuals that are in their circle of influence.
I want to share something with you right here and now. Although there are people making huge amounts of money using well hidden tactics, it's not absolutely necessary that you know these secrets in order to make money online. Let me repeat that again. You don't have to know anything "special" in order to make money as an affiliate. You will have to learn some basic to intermediate computer skills and you'll need to learn a lot of marketing basics, but the secrets can wait.
The main affiliate marketing secret that you need to remember is not a secret at all, but a marketing fact that has been proven to work, time and time again. It's called "Traffic + Conversion = Sales". This means that the more TARGETED traffic that you send to your affiliate website, the better chance you'll have of CONVERTING it into SALES. This means that if you're marketing t-shirts then you don't want to send people to a page about dog training, you only want to send them to a page about your t-shirts. Does that make sense? Once you've grasped onto this concept you'll be able to pretty much write your own ticket my friend. Read it, learn it, know it and live it because it applies, not only online, but offline as well.
http://pr-gb.com
Tuesday, 02 October 2007
It seems as though every new person that comes online wanting to make money is looking for those coveted affiliate marketing secrets or looking for that secret way to "crack the internet code" or somehow get rich quick. Well, that's all wishful thinking, however, I'm going to have to burst your bubble on a couple of these theories. For one, there is no "internet code" to crack, nor is there really any get rich quick button. There are however, some well hidden affiliate marketing secrets that are so powerful that some affiliates won't share them for any amount of money or they'll only share them with a choice few individuals that are in their circle of influence.
I want to share something with you right here and now. Although there are people making huge amounts of money using well hidden tactics, it's not absolutely necessary that you know these secrets in order to make money online. Let me repeat that again. You don't have to know anything "special" in order to make money as an affiliate. You will have to learn some basic to intermediate computer skills and you'll need to learn a lot of marketing basics, but the secrets can wait.
The main affiliate marketing secret that you need to remember is not a secret at all, but a marketing fact that has been proven to work, time and time again. It's called "Traffic + Conversion = Sales". This means that the more TARGETED traffic that you send to your affiliate website, the better chance you'll have of CONVERTING it into SALES. This means that if you're marketing t-shirts then you don't want to send people to a page about dog training, you only want to send them to a page about your t-shirts. Does that make sense? Once you've grasped onto this concept you'll be able to pretty much write your own ticket my friend. Read it, learn it, know it and live it because it applies, not only online, but offline as well.
http://pr-gb.com
Monday, October 1, 2007
A conversation with Richard Russo
The Pulitzer-Prize winning author of 'Empire Falls' talks about his landscapes and characters and the difficulties encountered in writing his new novel, 'Bridge of Sighs.'
By Susan Salter Reynolds
September 30, 2007
On a fall afternoon, the harbor at Camden, Maine, is glistening, splendid, with wooden boats and white sails and the small sounds of sea gulls and halyards and rigging. All roads into Camden funnel onto one main street that leads first to the library and then, just a few doors down, to Richard Russo's house. Toward the center of this street is the Camden Deli, where Russo wrote much of his sixth and newest novel, "Bridge of Sighs" (Alfred A. Knopf: 528 pp., $26.95).
Russo keeps an eye out for visitors on his bright, glassed-in porch. His is a house of doorways that lead to hallways within hallways. The author, compact and almost always smiling, likes to watch visitors disappear into closets and reappear, perplexed. How old is it? Even Russo doesn't know. "So old," he says, "it could have a ye in front of it." This sends him.
It would be difficult to imagine a setting more distinct from the working-class upstate New York of many of Russo's novels, including "Bridge of Sighs." It is also difficult to imagine such a happy man writing such a deep, dark book, a tapestry of a novel with so many threads that a reader worries, like a small child, that they might not be properly woven by the end.
For one thing, the novel's main character, a civic-minded 60-year-old named Louis Charles Lynch (otherwise known as Lucy) has inherited such a thick veneer of blinding optimism from his father, Lou Sr., that he may not be up to the task of unlocking the secrets of his childhood. His old friend Bobby Noonan, now a well-known painter living in Venice, has been on the run from his own past -- particularly his memories of a cruel father -- for so long that he lives in a haze of denial that has become rich fodder for his art. Lucy's wife, Sarah, also a painter, had to choose between two men when she was younger (trustworthiness over passion), and it is not at all clear that she made the wisest choice. Lucy's mother, Tessa, meanwhile, kept her own dark secret, outwardly bearing the burden of her parents' small-town dreams and prejudices.
As a child, Lucy transferred from public to parochial school. To get home, he had to cross a bridge over a river so toxic with chemicals from the local tannery that the water often ran red. The local bullies, like trolls, presided over the bridge. In a defining moment, Lucy was attacked one afternoon and put inside a trunk. From that moment on, he has occasional "spells," periods of disassociation that are pleasant enough for Lucy but frightening to those who care about him.
Nothing less than the enormity of consciousness -- the myriad elements of selfhood stretching over generations, DNA and nature and nurture, not to mention cultural pressures and behavioral patterns -- is what makes "Bridge of Sighs" so precarious, so unwieldy and so fascinating at once. Lucy's hours in that trunk exert a centrifugal force on the plot, sucking children and paintings and lovers and landscapes into its maw. As in most of Russo's novels, there is a cosmography of good and evil, an American mythology (work hard, build a better life for your children) as well as a more Jungian sensibility in which secrets are the seeds of selfhood and we separate ourselves, stroke by stroke, from family, carving out our own identities.
Such ideas transfigure the novel in various ways. At one point, Noonan's dealer-manager, Hugh, put off by a particularly dark self-portrait, says: "Well, it's all worm, isn't it," by which he means, "the worm in the apple, the small, off-putting detail that registered in the viewer's subconscious and undermined the overall effect, the too-pale white spot on the skin that hinted at malignancy beneath." Another new painting contains, off in one corner, a dark likeness of the Bridge of Sighs, "which connects the Doge's Palace in St. Mark's Square to the adjacent prison. Crossing this bridge, the convicts -- at least the ones without money or influence -- came to understand that all hope was lost. According to legend, their despairing sighs could be heard echoing in the neighboring canals."
"Bridge of Sighs" was a difficult book for Russo to write. He couldn't find the structure, and the conclusion eluded him for far longer than those of his other novels. "I knew certain things about the characters," he explains, "but not about the plot. Often with a novel, I'll have an idea, a feeling." With "Empire Falls" -- which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2002 -- it was dread. "I knew something bad would happen," Russo says, "but I didn't know it would end with a shooting."
Often, Russo feels a kind of lightness when he completes a novel. "Straight Man," for example, represented his goodbye to teaching, and it left him elated. Yet after "Bridge of Sighs," he felt exhausted and depressed. "Usually, when I finish a book, I start another one right away," he notes, but not this time. "I've never doubted these characters. But it's a book about despair. I had to cross the Bridge of Sighs myself. I felt like Lucy coming out of a spell."
Although he's recognized for his ambitious novels (ambitious in scope, ambitious in plot and context), Russo has rarely, in his own life, known what would happen next. "I thought I'd be an archeologist, then maybe a scholar," he says before trailing off: ". . . or just unemployed."
His grandfather was a glove-cutter, a self-educated man and a big reader. "There was no money for anything when I was growing up," Russo recalls, "even clothes for high school." In families like his, you feel the weight of your parents' dreams. It was only after his first novel, "Mohawk," appeared in 1986 that he was able to pay off his college loans.
Could Russo have written "Bridge of Sighs" at any other point in his life? "I wanted to write an intimate personal narrative and place it in a larger political context," he explains. (Issues of justice and citizenship and bearing witness exert their gravity on the characters and the plot.) A novel like "The Risk Pool" (1988) has "a more straightforward narrative, an intimate story without the larger context. These characters are older; they are turning 60 when we begin to look for the figure in the carpet, to ask the question, 'How did we end up here?' "
In many ways, "Bridge of Sighs" goes against the grain of contemporary literature, which often tends toward a smaller scope (a relationship or an event in a character's life). But one of Russo's heroes is Mark Twain, granddaddy of the great digression. Although contemporary readers are "less tolerant of digression," Russo's devotees are legion, perhaps because in his hands they get a double whammy: breadth and depth.
What's next? "I'm going back to North Bath," Russo says, like a man with travel plans, although what he's talking about is the upstate New York setting of his 1993 novel "Nobody's Fool." "Officer Rainer might be my next main character," he laughs, referring to a minor character in that book. "And while I'm there, I want to see what Sully" -- the novel's protagonist -- "is up to."
It's no wonder that Russo talks about his landscapes and characters as if they were real. On a chilly October evening, one might turn a corner to find Lucy or Sully or Noonan staring out at Camden Harbor, hands shoved deep in pockets, or sitting at that bar with the warm, yellow light on High Street, enjoying a beer, waiting for someone to tell them what to do. *
Susan Salter Reynolds is a Times staff writer. susan.reynolds@latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com
By Susan Salter Reynolds
September 30, 2007
On a fall afternoon, the harbor at Camden, Maine, is glistening, splendid, with wooden boats and white sails and the small sounds of sea gulls and halyards and rigging. All roads into Camden funnel onto one main street that leads first to the library and then, just a few doors down, to Richard Russo's house. Toward the center of this street is the Camden Deli, where Russo wrote much of his sixth and newest novel, "Bridge of Sighs" (Alfred A. Knopf: 528 pp., $26.95).
Russo keeps an eye out for visitors on his bright, glassed-in porch. His is a house of doorways that lead to hallways within hallways. The author, compact and almost always smiling, likes to watch visitors disappear into closets and reappear, perplexed. How old is it? Even Russo doesn't know. "So old," he says, "it could have a ye in front of it." This sends him.
It would be difficult to imagine a setting more distinct from the working-class upstate New York of many of Russo's novels, including "Bridge of Sighs." It is also difficult to imagine such a happy man writing such a deep, dark book, a tapestry of a novel with so many threads that a reader worries, like a small child, that they might not be properly woven by the end.
For one thing, the novel's main character, a civic-minded 60-year-old named Louis Charles Lynch (otherwise known as Lucy) has inherited such a thick veneer of blinding optimism from his father, Lou Sr., that he may not be up to the task of unlocking the secrets of his childhood. His old friend Bobby Noonan, now a well-known painter living in Venice, has been on the run from his own past -- particularly his memories of a cruel father -- for so long that he lives in a haze of denial that has become rich fodder for his art. Lucy's wife, Sarah, also a painter, had to choose between two men when she was younger (trustworthiness over passion), and it is not at all clear that she made the wisest choice. Lucy's mother, Tessa, meanwhile, kept her own dark secret, outwardly bearing the burden of her parents' small-town dreams and prejudices.
As a child, Lucy transferred from public to parochial school. To get home, he had to cross a bridge over a river so toxic with chemicals from the local tannery that the water often ran red. The local bullies, like trolls, presided over the bridge. In a defining moment, Lucy was attacked one afternoon and put inside a trunk. From that moment on, he has occasional "spells," periods of disassociation that are pleasant enough for Lucy but frightening to those who care about him.
Nothing less than the enormity of consciousness -- the myriad elements of selfhood stretching over generations, DNA and nature and nurture, not to mention cultural pressures and behavioral patterns -- is what makes "Bridge of Sighs" so precarious, so unwieldy and so fascinating at once. Lucy's hours in that trunk exert a centrifugal force on the plot, sucking children and paintings and lovers and landscapes into its maw. As in most of Russo's novels, there is a cosmography of good and evil, an American mythology (work hard, build a better life for your children) as well as a more Jungian sensibility in which secrets are the seeds of selfhood and we separate ourselves, stroke by stroke, from family, carving out our own identities.
Such ideas transfigure the novel in various ways. At one point, Noonan's dealer-manager, Hugh, put off by a particularly dark self-portrait, says: "Well, it's all worm, isn't it," by which he means, "the worm in the apple, the small, off-putting detail that registered in the viewer's subconscious and undermined the overall effect, the too-pale white spot on the skin that hinted at malignancy beneath." Another new painting contains, off in one corner, a dark likeness of the Bridge of Sighs, "which connects the Doge's Palace in St. Mark's Square to the adjacent prison. Crossing this bridge, the convicts -- at least the ones without money or influence -- came to understand that all hope was lost. According to legend, their despairing sighs could be heard echoing in the neighboring canals."
"Bridge of Sighs" was a difficult book for Russo to write. He couldn't find the structure, and the conclusion eluded him for far longer than those of his other novels. "I knew certain things about the characters," he explains, "but not about the plot. Often with a novel, I'll have an idea, a feeling." With "Empire Falls" -- which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2002 -- it was dread. "I knew something bad would happen," Russo says, "but I didn't know it would end with a shooting."
Often, Russo feels a kind of lightness when he completes a novel. "Straight Man," for example, represented his goodbye to teaching, and it left him elated. Yet after "Bridge of Sighs," he felt exhausted and depressed. "Usually, when I finish a book, I start another one right away," he notes, but not this time. "I've never doubted these characters. But it's a book about despair. I had to cross the Bridge of Sighs myself. I felt like Lucy coming out of a spell."
Although he's recognized for his ambitious novels (ambitious in scope, ambitious in plot and context), Russo has rarely, in his own life, known what would happen next. "I thought I'd be an archeologist, then maybe a scholar," he says before trailing off: ". . . or just unemployed."
His grandfather was a glove-cutter, a self-educated man and a big reader. "There was no money for anything when I was growing up," Russo recalls, "even clothes for high school." In families like his, you feel the weight of your parents' dreams. It was only after his first novel, "Mohawk," appeared in 1986 that he was able to pay off his college loans.
Could Russo have written "Bridge of Sighs" at any other point in his life? "I wanted to write an intimate personal narrative and place it in a larger political context," he explains. (Issues of justice and citizenship and bearing witness exert their gravity on the characters and the plot.) A novel like "The Risk Pool" (1988) has "a more straightforward narrative, an intimate story without the larger context. These characters are older; they are turning 60 when we begin to look for the figure in the carpet, to ask the question, 'How did we end up here?' "
In many ways, "Bridge of Sighs" goes against the grain of contemporary literature, which often tends toward a smaller scope (a relationship or an event in a character's life). But one of Russo's heroes is Mark Twain, granddaddy of the great digression. Although contemporary readers are "less tolerant of digression," Russo's devotees are legion, perhaps because in his hands they get a double whammy: breadth and depth.
What's next? "I'm going back to North Bath," Russo says, like a man with travel plans, although what he's talking about is the upstate New York setting of his 1993 novel "Nobody's Fool." "Officer Rainer might be my next main character," he laughs, referring to a minor character in that book. "And while I'm there, I want to see what Sully" -- the novel's protagonist -- "is up to."
It's no wonder that Russo talks about his landscapes and characters as if they were real. On a chilly October evening, one might turn a corner to find Lucy or Sully or Noonan staring out at Camden Harbor, hands shoved deep in pockets, or sitting at that bar with the warm, yellow light on High Street, enjoying a beer, waiting for someone to tell them what to do. *
Susan Salter Reynolds is a Times staff writer. susan.reynolds@latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com
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