Justin D Reed's: justin-reed.com blog!

“Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.” (Gertrude Stein)

Affiliate Marketing – Never Put All Your Eggs in One Basket

Affiliate Marketing - Never Put All Your Eggs in One Basket - LTD, Niche Blitzkrieg Review

To skip the background and jump down to the my reviews:

Background

My parents gave me the advice a long time ago to never put all your eggs in one basket, and it still holds true today. I understood the basic concept even when I was young because if you put too much in a basket, quite literally the bottom could fall out, which results in no basket and a bunch of broken eggs. This analogy also happens all the time in people’s lives when they have only one source of income. The problem is not that most people only have only one job, the problem is when every month we spend all of that income. We tend to count on that next pay check to put food on the table and to maintain our lifestyle. In my personal life, I have occasionally noticed that some months my expenses creep up on the income I made for the month. Each additional dollar that is spent than the previous month just makes the basket less stable and as a result, our financial foundation is less stable. Even worse is when we spend more than was earned for obvious reasons. The worst case scenario when someone looses a job is that the basket is completely taken away, and unfortunately the bills still come in. One way most people start their second basket is through savings, whether it be a nest egg for retirement or even just for a rainy day. However, unless the baskets are consistently being filled at a rate greater than being spent, the problem still remains where if your main basket is taken away, problems arise quickly being able to support your current standard of living.


The Solution?

Put your eggs in multiple baskets to create a spare-income to protect yourself and create a safety net. There are a ton of businesses popping up everyday in the world, however, unless it is a franchise based system, there is a low chance for success after the first 5 years. In addition the average costs to start a business is $54,000 that it. McDonald’s franchises cost over $1.2M in the US, but also typically see yearly returns of over 250k per year after year 4.


Affiliate Marketing Online

Something that anyone can do is affiliate marketing online because . If you are reading this, then you have the skills to get around the web, and you have the potential to make huge profits. There are a lot of work-at-home businesses out there these days and they are growing at an astronomical rate because of the low overhead and the ability to make virtually any income you want. Although the way income is generated is simple, this is not saying these types of businesses are easy, because they do require a desire to learn and succeed. I have been told 98% of success in anything is attitude and the remaining 2% is the mechanics of how it works. In a nutshell, if you have a good attitude and determination to succeed, you will and if not, then I would recommend looking for a second job to fill that extra basket. With affiliate marketing online, you can have virtually and unlimited amount of baskets to fill, and they are only limited by your creativity and desire. I have some recommended books on success, if you are wondering what it takes.

When I started playing around with these concepts, I had no idea how to do this on my own and the information on the web was overwhelming. As a result, I looked to several systems that were already put in place that walk you each step of the process to yield maximum results. Of the systems I have been involved in, there are two which I highly recommend due to the extremely low start up cost and the high level of personal coaching.


Niche Blitzkrieg

The Niche Blitzkrieg System is, in my opinion, the #1 system to success in setting up online affiliate niche web sites. The best part of this system is that it works great for people, even if they have extremely limited time or knowledge of coding web sites. niche blitzkriegAlso, throughout his system Michael provides both video and screen shots that walk you through every step of the process. Most people are concerned about these systems having reoccurring hidden costs, the great part about the Niche Blitzkrieg System is that there are both paid and free options given at every step that are extremely effective even for people on a tight budget. Personally, I have used both methods within his system, and have landed in the top ten of Google for several of my sites, which have resulted in many sales. It is a really cool feeling to get an email while I’m sleeping that shows someone purchased a product through my site. The owners of the system have been very attentive and have answered any of my questions typically within a day on their forum. This system is constantly being updated and improved on. I was able to get a link that offers a special rate and a free trail period to test the system out.

See what the system is all about


LTD

The other system that I highly recommend, and am also very involved in, is LTD. It is a system of business owners that have been helping people become successful for 50 over years. The concept that LTD uses is simple: buy the things you are already buying, but switch to companies that pay you for it and show other people how to do the same thing. This system is also available online, however it has more of a personal touch and absolutely zero online experience is required. People in this system only purchase things they need and don’t store any products, however there is also the ability to sell products if desired. similar to the niche blitzkrieg system above, the purpose is to simply connect things people are going to buy any way to what they need. This system also includes free personal mentoring through every step of the process in addition to a 100% money back guarantee for 6 months. For more information on this system checkout http://www.justreed.com and feel free to shoot me an email to justin@justin-reed.com.

Justin’s Hostgator Review vs Godaddy PLUS 1And1 & DomainDiscover


HostGator Web Hosting

Background

It seems like today everyone wants to put up some kind of a web site or blog, and wants to know which service is best for hosting their content. While this is not a comprehensive review of every provider on the web, I am going to provide my experiences with some of the big hosting companies that I have experienced. Personally, I have tried a number of services for hosting my files and domains including 1and1, DomainDiscover, GoDaddy, and HostGator. Each of these services has their pros and cons. While you can implement the most of the same features on each provider, such as hosting multiple domains and php sites with a mySql database, each service is different when it comes to reliability, service, and ease of use.

Domain Discover Review

Domain Discover Review
The first domain I ever purchased was with DomainDiscover because it was recommended to my by a friend, and at the time in 2000 it was on a short list of credible services I trusted. Overall they provide a good product and it was a simple process to get my domain up and running, however it was not a simple process to make changes to the nameservers and hosting options because those features were buried in the interface. Since then, they have improved their interface greatly, however they are far from the least expensive option out there.

Trusted by over 7 million customers!

1and1 Review

Over 7 Million Customers!
A few years later, while I was in college, I wanted to get my first blog up and running and needed to buy another domain. Since money was tight, I simply looked for the cheapest domain hosting service possible and came across 1and1. Their service was exactly what they promised, it was cheap. In this case, it was definitely true that you get what you pay for. However, this wasn’t really a big deal since the domains were cheap and I could still host them how I wanted. The biggest problem with this service was with their billing department. At some point, they stopped billing my credit card and I received no communication, email or snail mail, from them. Unfortunately, I didn’t notice until they put a lock on my domain and all my visitors only saw the default hosting page instead of my blog. When I called their billing department to resolve, they said I had an outstanding charge (of less than $10 I believe) and I would need to talk to their collections department to reactivate the domain. When I called their collections department, I was told there was no lock on my domain and that they couldn’t accept payment. On two separate occasions over the course of a week, I asked to speak to a manager and was hung up on. Since my blog was dead in the water, I decided to do a domain transfer to GoDaddy because of their reputation for being a domain leader online. It was during the process of trying to transfer this locked domain that I discovered all domains are intellectual property and no hosting services have no legal right to hold them from being transferred. Bottom line, 1and1 is the cheapest, but you get what you pay for.


Introducing GoDaddy.com Marketplace

GoDaddy Review

Go Daddy $7.49 .com Sale
Once I had transferred my blog’s domain to GoDaddy, I found it fairly simple to add additional blogs and niche web sites to their service. Also, their hosting interface was extremely easy to use for the cost. It was $7.99 per month for their economy hosting service to have 150GB of storage for an unlimited amount of domains and 25 MySql databases, which I figured was a great deal considering the cost of hosting a site on my own servers, as I had done previously. Over time, I had over 10 domains and blogs hosted on GoDaddy and started to notice that more frequently my visitors were coming across a “Service Unavailable” error message. After Googling the problem, this is apparently a common issue with GoDaddy because unless you buy their more expensive Server Hosting package, that you are actually sharing capacity with other people who also pay for the service and sometimes it cannot handle the bandwidth. Lets be clear though, I only had a limited number of simple Wordpress blogs online, nothing that was too bandwidth or cpu intensive. This problem started costing my money when Google started penalizing my search ranking due to the service unavailable message. Although they are great and inexpensive at hosting domains, I had mixed results with their web hosting. So, even though I use GoDaddy exclusively for domain hosting, I needed to look for another php file hosting service for my sites.

HostGator Review


Finally, I turned to HostGator at the recommendation of a friend. They provide unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth in addition to a static ip to host your sites that makes administration 100% easier. Since I had been burnt before, I was very cautious to simply move all my blogs to another service, so I just moved one at a time. Fortunately, since they offer the first month of their service for only a penny with a promo code, I figured that there couldn’t be any harm in giving the service a try. Wow was I surprised when I logged in the first time. The control panel was laid out in a very organized fashion and it was easy to find all the features I used most often. At first it was almost overwhelming with all the features that they offered in the control panel… some of the features I had wished the other service providers offered. In the CPanel, there were even indicators that showed process usage of my sites in addition to real time visitor stats. When I had the first blog up and running, I was impressed that the speed was at least 2x that of GoDaddy with every single test. This service was a little bit more than GoDaddy after the first month at $9.99, but the extra 2 bucks are well worth the reliability and additional traffic that has resulted.

In Conclusion

I am now a loyal HostGator user and would highly recommend it to anyone looking to host their site on a reliable service that is easy to use and also has all the bells and whistles … plus they have a promotion to try their service for only one penny with no obligations the first month. Since, it is tough to beat GoDaddy’s cheap domains, I recommend purchasing your domains from GoDaddy and pointing the DNS to your HostGator hosting service! Although, if you just want the cheapest thing possible, 1and1 is the way to go, just be careful to read all the fine print.



So I decided to play the Subway scrabble game this year

Free Subway Scrabble Codes 2009
http://asdfhj.com/subway-scrabble-2009-free-codes/134

My scrabble game board:

Current Reading – Hung by the Tongue

Just to keep us all on the same page, below is a daily breakdown of Hung by the Tongue to follow. The chapters are very inconsistent in length. I’m simply providing this so we have natural starting and stopping points while we read the book. The length of many of these reading sections will not come close to out 15-30 minute standard for reading. However, at this point, it’s more important to reinforce the reading habit.

Read my comments on Hung by the Tongue

Here’s the Hung by the Tongue breakdown.

Day

Chapter 1

# Pages

1

Ch 1

7

2

Ch 1

7

3

Ch 1

4

4

Ch 1

5

5

Ch 2

8

6

Ch 3

5

7

Ch 4

9

8

Ch 5, 6

5

9

Ch 7

5

10

Ch 8, 9

6

11

Ch 10, 11

6

12

Ch 12

6

13

Ch 13, 14

6

The next book will be The Magic of Thinking Big.

My First Indoor Soccer Experience … Coming Fall 2009

You heard it! I am going to join my first indoor soccer league this fall with a bunch of the guys I played soccer with this Summer on the Trojans Co-ed team (photos). Looks like games will run from October thru December, so come and check us out! Here’s the league web site with more details:All Stars

What a Great Labor Day Weekend!

Cookout at Mom & Dad’s, a huge bonfire, lots of family time, plenty of soccer games, and oh yeah … helping Kara move! It was a gerat 4-day weekend (took Friday off work too), but it went way too quick and I could definitely use another day to relax from the weekend! lol Here are some of the photos from some of this weekend’s events!

Sunday 9/6 – Labor Day Cookout and Bonfire & Mom & Dad’s:

Full Album

Sunday 9/6 – Cousin Stephen’s Art Soccer Tournament Championship Game:

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Saturday 9/5 – Stephen’s Soccer & Pizza at Grandma’s:

Full Album