What is Autosurf?

If you are new to the Internet world, you will probably find it a bit hard to understand what is Autosurf. This is because it is a unique investment scheme that is not found in our day to day life but only in the Internet virtual world.

Here is a simple example to let you understand what is Autosurf:

1. You sign up with an Autosurf operator (e.g. http://www.autosurfoperator.com)
2. You invest an initial amount (e.g. $1006) in your account with the operator.
3. You are then required to view the advertisements in the operator's website. They are supposed to get those advertisements onto their website just like a TV channel would get advertisements from merchants.
4. You will be rewarded N% (e.g. 12%) of your invested amount each day you take the trouble to view the advertisements. The idea is such that they attract people like you to view the advertisements by rewarding people. They also attract advertisers because you will be delligent in viewing the advertisements.
5. After M days (e.g. 12 days), you can take the money out and if you did not missed any day viewing the advertisements, you would get MxN% (144%) of your invested amount (144%x$1006=1448.64). That means, you get a reward of 44% return in investment. Normally, the yield is very quite high - in the range of 1% per day to 5% per day.
6. In addition, because they would hope to have more people to view the advertisements, you will be rewarded handsomely, for example 10%, for each friend you refer to sign up with the operator. Hence, you will get more than 44% return if you refer friends to sign up. For example, if you refer 2 friends over the 12-day period, you will get a return of 44%+24%=68% in total.

You can read up more on Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autosurf

Sounds like greate investment schemes, right?

Make money with HYIP?

Based on my research on past 5 years' statistics, you have a 95% chance of losing your money completely! Hence, you need to be extremely careful with HYIP. In other words, many of these are scams. Once they take your money, you have no way to chase them back for your money.

The interesting thing to note is this: You are likely to start investing small to try them out. They are likely to pay you back in a few days for the small investment you make. This give you confidence. But once you started investing more, that's where they will not return the high yield you are expecting and you have finally become their prey.

Simple recommendation: stay away from HYIP.

If you want to still try your luck, you can take a look at hyip monitor sites like Money Monitor http://www.money-monitor.com/.

You can also learn a lot more in Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-yield_investment_program

What is HYIP?

HYIP stands for High Yield Investment Program. There are different types of schemes and programmes. However, basically, they work like this:

1. You invest some principle amount just like investing in bank's fixed deposit
2. Unlike bank's fixed deposit which typically takes 6 months to a year to mature and you only get a miserable 1% to 10% return, HYIP gives you as high as 60% to 300% within a very very short time like within 3 days to a few weeks.

Sounds like good investment isn't it?

Go ahead and have a look at some of these HYIP sites to get a better idea via this HYIP monitor: http://www.goldpoll.com/.

Warning!

Before you invest in any HYIP, please make sure you read more on my blog on this topic to safeguard your money. Otherwise, you are likely to lose a lot of money!

Sell online without product?

What product can I sell online? I don't know!

Now, it seems that for every problem you have, Internet always has a solution. There are people who run warehouses which stock up thousands of products and expect people like you to setup online stores and sell for them on the Internet! Look at SMC for example: http://www.smcorp.com/.

Best of all, many even offer to deliver to your customers directly from their warehouse under your company name!

This is really great isn't it? You don't have to worry about sourcing, stocking and inventory management, logistics delivery, so on and so forth. All you have to do is to setup an online store and sell and you pocket the profit of the products!

But this is your likely outcome:

You are likely to find many of them are scams whom after receiving your money for the so-called starter kits, you heard no more from them or they will give you all kinds of excuses when you call them.

For those who are genuine, you will realize that there are already many people having similar online stores selling similar set of products from the same company like SMC at similar prices. You are not likely to be able to offer any further price discount to your customers. And the Internet is a very cruel world as people can easily search and do price comparisons. Soon, you will realize that after paying SMC for the starter kits, you make 0 dollars from it and become frustrated.

The key here is, if you want to become successful in this kind of game, the game is similar to any other traditional distributor-retailer relationship business model. You must offer value add other resellers do not have or weaker than you. For example, you can bundle the standard products with some unique products which you get from other sources or your own self-created products. This is called cross sell or up sell technique in the field of sales. In addition, you need to sell with some hypes. Create stories which make people feel unique, precious, jazzy, sexy, classy, lucky, good fortune, ... about your product. This is called motivating or closing the sales.

In a nutshell, brush up your selling skills if you want to engage in this kind of business venture. Don't carry with you a mindset that just create an online store and money will start flowing in. You got to work hard on promoting and adapting your products and marketing strategies. You also need to work extremely hard to make your site rank high in search engines so that more potential customers will come to your site.No easy money. Work hard!

Cheap, reliable web hosting?

A lot of web hosting companies nowadays advertise that it only cost a few (US) dollars (like 5 USD/month) to setup a website. Many come with sweeten deals of an online store, shopping cart and/or content management software included. You may feel that it is really easy and low cost to setup a eCommerce website or online store. What's more, perhaps, you can setup an online store, do your selling online, without having to pay for a physical shop rental till you drop and without quitting your full time job!

Sounds really great, isn't it?
But wait!

You need to be very careful with which web hosting company you sign up with. You have a 95% chance that you will be misled by how good and how cheap they are based on the information on their websites as well as many forums and review websites you visit or referenced by them. In fact, many review websites are own by the hosting company themselves which you cannot tell even if you do a whois investigation on the domain. Alternatively, the review company could be 'paid' to do good review on the web hosting company. Therefore, many reviews cannot be trusted.

The best way to find out if a hosting company is good or not is probably by means of a search in Google using keyword of the company name and the infamous word 'problem' or ‘issue’ or ‘complain’ like this: 'Web hosting company xxx problem".

If you see really a lot of complaints from many places, chances are that's a bad web hosting company. Otherwise, you may give it a try. Note that many comments that you found via Google search, bad or good, from forums could potentially be posted by competitors who want to comment bad about their competitors or by the web hosting company themselves talking something good about themselves. So you need to really exercise your own judgment call before coming to any conclusion.

Alternatively, I can recommend you to checkout http://www.webhostingbluebook.org to select a good web hosting company. From my observations, most websites recommended by this website are pretty descent and not too many complains from a lot of people who have used them.

The quest has begun

The Internet is a fascinating world!

You can spend days and nights on it for whatever you want to do - including making lots of money from it or losing lots of money from it. You got to be really careful as there are just millions of scams and ingenuous cheaters and liars out there.

Having been through many learning sessions - the hard way, I have decided to start this blog to share my experience, studies, and findings about the dream of every living human being today - how to make money on the Internet!

Yes! That's your dream, and my dream too!

I started using Internet since 1990. Those were the days when the Internet has just begun to be commercialized from its pretty academic and military background. In just a few years time, the Internet took the world like a forest fire. Now it has become an essential part of the live of many, including myself, just like what TV has done for us. (By the way, I have more or less thrown away my TV due to the massive junk programmes. I find more useful information on the Internet than the TV programmes nowadays - believe it or not!).

Through the years of using Internet, I have always been fascinated by how some people can really make lots of money from the Internet. And like you, I too tried to follow trails of the many techniques published by the so-called gurus whom had made their pods of gold. Yes! Most of the time, they never worked out quite as effective as the gurus would claim. Till today, I am still trying ... and I am sure I have learn quite a bit to be able to share with many people.

Using this Blog, I will share with you what works, what doesn't, which gurus are liars (there are too many of them) and who are genuine, what more you and me can try, what you and me need to watch out for (both risks and opportunities) and so on ...

I also hope that in my attempts to share my experience, you too, can share with me your experience and feedback, so that we can mutually learn from each other and become more successful together.