The Colour of Money

I’ve recently come across a great way to make money online. It’s called Build a Niche Store (or BANS for short) and it really is a fast and effective way to get a potentially money-making website off the ground in a matter of hours.

The idea of BANS is that you use the highly successful eBay affiliate scheme to make money via the internet.

Like may big companies, eBay has an affiliate scheme whereby they pay commissions to affiliates based on the revenue generated by visitors that you send to their site. So, if someone visits your website, clicks one of your affiliate links to go to the eBay site and then wins an auction, then you will get a percentage of the fees that eBay earns from that auction.

The simplest way to do this would be to have one or more webpages that explain what eBay is and how it works and then have affiliate banners on those pages which promote eBay and allow your site visitors to click through to eBay and hopefully bid and win an auction.

To be honest, the chances of such a haphazard approach actually working are slim. But that is where BANS comes to the rescue. Read the rest…

We have all seen the papers and watched the news and they are all saying doom and gloom, but only 19% of construction companies are fearing the worst. Overall the construction industry seems optimistic about the future. Construction order books are full for 2008 and with the shortage of housing still a major concern within the UK it looks to still give good returns for companies working in this sector.

For those companies working in the commercial and private housing sectors its looks slightly bleaker with a sharp drop in people buying properties and with banks offering less attractive mortgage products they will do well to escape the current conditions unscathed.

On the other hand a plus side for property maintenance companies as more and more people opt for rented accommodation. With landlords having to keep up maintenance on all their properties we could see a sharp rise in this sector.

Most at risk are Subcontractors that have paid for materials and labour up front and are awaiting payments from companies. Banks are not lending money as freely as they have been, so will be reluctant to lend money to bridge this gap.

Subcontractors who are keen to ensure they don’t end up short of work can sign up to Subdirect and gain themselves maximum exposure on the web for just £10 a year.

As far as I can see, the Post Office credit card really is one of the best all-round credit cards available at the moment.

For a start it offers an interest free credit card balance transfer facility for 10 months. So, if you have got debts on your existing credit cards, you can transfer the balance to the Post Office card and not pay any interest on the transferred balance for 10 months.

Usually a credit card is either good news for purchasers or good news for people doing balance transfers - but seldom good for both types of credit card user.

But the Post Office credit card scores well on both counts. Because as well as the 0% balance transfer feature, it also offers an interest-free deal for new purchases for the first three months. After the three month introductory period, the interest rate is 1.385% per month (unless of course you clear the balance each month in which case there is no interest to pay). Read the rest…