I received an invition in the mail this week. It was from the US and is for a free Internet Income Training conference for me and a guest.

The letter informed me how i can make money online using Google, Yahoo, eBay and msn. The course is run by StoresOnline.com. It includes a 90 minute conference followed by a dinner and a free business organizer for me and my guest. A $120 value.

OK, i never been to one of these so what have i got to lose.

Not so fast!

Maybe i should do a search first and find out a bit more about StoresOnline.com

Lucky i did. Here is just a little of what i found.

Apparently it is just a scam. It is just a hard sell for the internet. They claimed e-commerce software costs 10’s of thousands of dollars. Well I know some that are open source and some that are maybe $500 or so but 10’s of thousands. I don’t think so. They charge $2800 a year to run your web site but of course there is no talk of the other charges and fees when you sell something.

Here is a sample of what StoresOnline.com offer,

SINGLE OFFER:

1 Stores Online Pro Web Site
Merchant Services
E-Store Toolkit $3199
ECI Merchant Account $1800
Bootcamp $399

Total $5399 (this amount had a line through it)

Today’s offer ONLY $2700*

Plus Hosting and Support $29.95/Month

PLATINUM OFFER:

6 Stores Online Pro Web Sites
Merchant Services
6 E-Store Toolkit
**First Site programmed - No Cost
6 ECI Merchant Accounts
Bootcamp

Today’s offer ONLY $5998*

Plus Hosting and Support $29.95/Month per ACTIVE Web Site

Here is some more info i found on http://forums.whirlpool.net.au.

I would like to know what had changed from last year when the ACCC made Stores Online pay back the money they took from people in Adelaide when there was a class action taken against them. Just do a ‘google’ on ACCC and Stores Online and you will see what I mean. They try and trade and ecomm trainers but when you get there the whole presentation is for Stores Online.

To cap it off, we received a 3 course meal, yes I suppose you would call it 3 course. It was a rock hard pear (1 course), 1 dry sandwich (1 course) and 1 chocolate brownie (1 course) served on a plate in your chair where you pass the plates along the row. I cannot see how this equated to $50 and I must say that this was not only a bad reflection of Stores Online being stingy but also a very poor advert for the quality of food at the Hilton.

Now do i go and tell them i do exactly the same thing with my online zippo store FREE, make $200 profit a month and all it costs is $7AU for hosting. I would love to go to something like this and really piss of these scammers trainers.

And if anyone wants to do the same thing free, just try joomla and virtuemart.

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How much is Money worth?

I am happy to announce that AdsenseAddict has bought Money Beer Stock. Check out the picture below.

Its not actually real stock but web pages that allow you to buy into a “shared percentage” of their total web traffic. When you purchase Beer Stocks, you become co-owners of shared web traffic received by Sitehoppin.com.

Here is how Beer Stock works as quoted on SiteHoppin.com

Basically, these Beer Stocks increase in value since each Beer Stock will get more web traffic along with the traffic growth of SiteHoppin.com.

Beer Stocks can be used to drive traffic to any website. Beer Stock gets 33% of our total web traffic divided by number of Beer Stock pages. For example, if Sitehoppin.com gets 100,000 unique visitors per day and there’s 100 Beer Stocks bought, each Beer Share gets 100,000 / 3 / 100 = 333 unique visitors per day.

You can get 25% off your Beer Stock purchases here or click the cool looking logo under Entrecard.

There are many ways to make money from buying our Beer Stocks at our initial offering price of $1 per non-vowels and $10 per vowels.

1. You can keep your Beer Stocks until they rise in value through our web traffic growth. The Beer Stocks automatically come loaded with content from Google, Yahoo, YouTube, etc…etc… as you can see an example here.
2. You can immediately start selling your stocks as soon as you buy them on our Beer Stock Market.
3. You can sell them on eBay, SitePoint, or any other marketplace, we don’t control how or where you sell them.
4. You can use our Wiki editor to promote your blog, website, business, services, or products by completely customizing your Beer Stocks.
5. You can also embed your blog, e-store, or any other website into the Beer Stocks and benefit from the share of our webtraffic. More Traffic = More Profits for you

Sitehoppin.com also has an affiliate program. They offer you 25% of all Beer Stock Sales Profits plus anyone who uses your affiliate link will get 25% off their Beer Stock purchases.

So how much is Money worth?

At the moment Business is selling for $500, SEO $300 and Cash $200. Do i sell at $1000? $10,000 Na. I might hold onto Money Beer Stock for a while and see how much traffic it brings to my site.

To be honest i don’t really care. This is the first time i have bought into something like this online besides the odd thing on ebay. The only reason why i did by Money Beer Stock is because i like this crazy guy, watching his video posts really crack me up. It reminds me of when i was young, all that beer. mmm beer! And you never know it might make me rich.

Dont forget about the 25% discount on Sitehoppin Beer Stock here and make some money online.

You can visit Sitehoppin.com/Money to see what a basic one looks like.

Good luck Max and SiteHoppin.com

Starting April i have decided to to trial Tnx.net for a month.

Now i know there is a lot of talk about Tnx.net and how Google frowns upon ‘paid links’, but if used correctly i think it could have major benefits.

In this post i will describe a little bit about how Tnx.net works, but also my tips on how to use Tnx.net and hopefully make some money online and not get into Google’s bad books.

Publishers

One of the main advantages of using Tnx.net is that you can sell links on every page of your site, instead of just the main page.

Whenever a link on your site is sold to one of the tnx.net advertisers, you get paid in points. When you collect enough points you have three options available on what you can do with these points

Build up points and watch the price grow.
Sell points back to Tnx.net or any other member.
Advertise your website.

Tnx.net has a special offer on digital point forums where you can receive 5000 points to advertise on 5000 websites.

But if you would like to make money online with Tnx.net, the price at last look was about $0.61/1000 points. $5 is the minimum payout for Tnx.net and is paid via paypal.

Tnx.net also has a affiliate program which offers 13.3% of all Tnx points he/she earns in the future.

Advertisers

Once you have collected enough Tnx points you can use these to get backlinks from 1000s of sites.

- 20 000 different PR0 pages from different websites
- 400 different PR1 pages from different websites
- 200 different PR2 pages from different websites
- 100 different PR3 pages from different websites
- 40 different PR4 pages from different websites
- 20 different PR5 pages from different websites

Tnx.net also offers a free tool for advertisers to make paid links look natural. Tnx.net also has some good tips which helps advertisers to rank #1 on Google for highly competetive keywords.

My tips for using Tnx.net

Please don’t quote me on this, but i remember reading somewhere Google’s Matt Cutts commenting on ‘paid links’,

“We are concerned with paid links that flow PageRank and attempt to game Google’s ranking. We are not worried about links that are paid but do not affect search engines. Google likes clean and relevant search results”

What you need to do as a publisher is only have relevant paid links on your site. Tnx.net allows you to approve advertisers, so make sure you only have relevant links showing on your site. You can read more about this feature here

Tnx.net currently has 50 672 users with daily growth: +0.26% so you are bound to find something in your niche.

As an advertiser your first impulse is to go out and buy 1000s of back links to your site. DON’T! Google likes clean and relevant links (there’s that relevant word again, but sorry i can’t stress its importance). Again, only advertise on sites relevant to your niche.

Also do not go and buy links to 1000s of sites at once. Google will not like the sudden appearance of 2000 back links to your site. So try and limit your advertising to a maximum of 8 relevant sites a day and have a total of about 80 links to your site going at once.

So we will give Tnx.net a go for a month and will let our readers know the outcome May 1st.