One of the most trusted online gurus on the web is Jim Cockrum. I have known Jim for about 8 years and we have worked together for the past 5 years on a number of projects.

Jim and I were discussing a very unique eBay niche market that is earning people thousands of dollars per month. It is easy to do –requires a very minimal investment –and works quickly. You can source these products in a few days and sell them on eBay your first week.

Jim and I are putting on a special one-time workshop, where we will show you how to enter this niche and how to start making money from it your first week. We will show you how to source the products to sell and how to sell them quickly on eBay for markups as high as 500%. This is a perfect niche for anyone from a raw beginner to the experienced seller who wants to boost their eBay income.

I encourage all of you to at least take a look at this unique opportunity. Don’t wait –this is limited to the first forty people and there are only a few slots left..

My apologies to my overseas readers. Although most of what I teach works anywhere in the world, this niche only works in the US.

Here is a note from Jim that describes the workshop. 

Can I pay you $100 to check something out?

For over a year now the dozens of people that I’ve shown this one secret strategy to, have ALL flourished.

I’m only taking on a handful of people – Please visit this site to get the details: http://budurl.com/ebayniche

o No tech skills
o No business skills
o No Internet skills

Jim Cockrum
Top Ranked Internet Income Expert
www.thesilent-team.com

P.S. I’m putting my number one industry reputation on the line here. I believe in this biz and am doing it myself quite
successfully!  You’ll see MY PERSONAL EBAY ACCOUNT as part of this training! That’s a rare offer!

Bonus – When you sign up for this one-time workshop, you will also receive a 45 minute recording Jim did with an eBay seller who is making as much as $5000 per week in this niche. He will reveal everything –where to get the merchandise, exactly how much to pay for it and how he sells it.  Click here to learn more: http://budurl.com/ebayniche

Interesting article in today’s online Wall Street Journal about the senior employment market and how, depending on your state, seniors may not qualify for unemployment benefits.

By ANNE TERGESEN
Older adults losing jobs not only face one of the worst job markets in recent memory. But depending on the state in which they reside, they may also face the possibility of losing some of their unemployment benefits. Here are some of the rules you need to know…. Read Full Story

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NEW!  –  How  To Make Money Blogging From Home by Skip McGrath & Marsha Perry

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Here is a story from a woman in Florida who barely escaped having her car broken into or stolen: 

“I locked my car.  As I walked away I heard my car door unlock.  I went back and locked my car again three times. Each time, as soon as I started to walk away, I would hear it unlock again!

Naturally alarmed, I looked around and there were two guys sitting in a car in the fire lane next to the store. They were obviously watching me intently, and there was no doubt they were somehow involved in this very weird situation.  I quickly chucked the errand I was on, jumped in my car and sped away.  I went straight to the police station, told them what had happened, and found out I was part of a new, and very successful, scheme being used to gain entry into cars.  

Two weeks later, my friend’s son had a similar happening….While traveling, my friend’s son stopped at a roadside rest to use the bathroom.  He locked the car with the locking button on his key fob. When he came out to his car 4-5 minutes later, someone had stolen his cell phone, laptop computer, GPS navigator, and briefcase.

He called the police and since there were no signs of his car being broken into, the police told him he had been a victim of the latest robbery tactic — there is a device that robbers are using now to clone your security code when you lock your doors on your car using your key-chain locking device..

The thieves sit a distance away and watch for someone to lock their car with a keychain locking device. When they see you go inside of the store, restaurant, or bathroom they now have a few minutes to steal and run. The police officer said to manually lock your car door-by hitting the lock button inside the car — that way if there is someone sitting in a parking lot watching for their next victim, it will not be you.

When you hit the lock button on your car upon exiting, it does not send the security code, but if you walk away and use the door lock on your key chain, it sends the code through the airwaves where it can be instantly stolen.”

Look how many times we all lock our doors with our remote just to be sure we remembered to lock them — and bingo, someone has our code…and whatever was in our car.

This is a short post today. Just wanted to point out a great article in the Washington Post that breaks down all of the tax implications for retirement. 

The states with no income tax include seven states: Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas, Washington and Wyoming.   New Hampshire and Tennessee tax only dividend and interest income that exceeds certain limits.  But there is more to the story. You also need to look at property taxes, sales taxes and the cost of housing and transportation and medical care.

Here is a link to the article in The Washington Post that breaks down some of the confusion:

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Don’t forget to check out my latest book, HOW TO MAKE MONEY BLOGGING FROM HOME.

I have often felt that selling used books on eBay, Amazon and the Internet was one of the best home business opportunity for seniors or really anyone who wants to make money online without a lot of risk and upfront cost.

In my first book in the Official Geezer Guide series on starting an online business, I wrote about the used book business extensively. Because unlike the current generation, we seniors grew up reading and loving books and we seniors are now the fastest growing online market for all goods and services –but books in particular.

The used book business is a $6 Billion a year business and the online portion of that is now at almost 50% and growing every month.  Used books also do well when the economy is challenged as it is today because people still want to read, but they have to save money when they do it.

Last year I wrote a book on my main website, How To Make Money Selling Used Books on eBay, Amazon and The Internet.  I recently updated the book and added new bonus materials. How To Make Money Selling Used Books….is still one of the best-selling eBooks on the web and may soon surpass the Complete eBay Marketing System as my personal best-selling book of all time. The reason is simple:  It works!  I get tons of email from readers telling me about their successes.  In most cases the email are from people who are using online used book sales to generate extra money –but I also get email from folks who are making substantial amounts of money each month.

One of the markets I covered in How To Make Money Selling Used Books…was eBay’s Half.com, which is a fixed price site where you can sell books, movies and music.  Last week I discovered a great new selling tool called ScanLister.  There are three parts to ScanLister:

1. A small Scanning device that plugs into the USB port on your computer.
2. Scanning software that reads the scanned info and instantly creates a listing (with photo) that you upload to Half.com with the click of a mouse
3. An excellent training manual by a woman that consistently earns over $4000 a month on Half.com. Not all books and products sell well on Half.com, but she knows the ones that do and tells you where and how to find them.

I recommended ScanLister in my monthly newsletter at www.SkipMcGrath.com. Within a few days I Started getting email from my readers thanking me for the recommendation. One, who is a fairly experienced book seller said she was thrilled and thinks that ScanLister will save her hours a day and allow her to make money from a lot of otherwise slow-moving books and tons of DVDs she has sitting around the house.  Another person wrote that ScanLister paid for itself within 5 days.

So if you know nothing about books and would like to learn about this great low-cost, low-risk business, check out my training manual, How To Make Money Selling Used Books Online and once you are set up and running, check out ScanLister.

Blogging may be the perfect business for seniors who need to make a little extra money and want to work from home. My latest book, How To Make Money Blogging From Home was just published today. You can read more about it here: http://budurl.com/blgbook

I teamed up with WordPress expert, Marsha Perry. We wrote the book in two parts. Section 1 by me, is all about blogging, how it works, how to get your blog read and we cover six different legitimate ways to make money.  Section 2, by Marsha, takes you step by step through settinng up a low-cost hosting account and launching your blog.  Marsha’s instruction are very simple and very low-tech. If you can point, click and type then you can set up your blog and start blogging in about one hour of work.

This is a great business for seniors. Not only can you make hundreds or even thousands of dollars per month –you can have some fun, connect with others and feel the joy that comes when you help people.

How To Make Money Blogging From Home is $27 and comes with two free bonuses. Click here to read more about How to Make Money Blogging From Home.

The book is available now on www.skipmcgrath.com and we will be coming out with a Geezer version in a few weeks.

Skip McGrath
Head Geezer

Learn How To Become Debt Free

If you are retired or about to retire soon you want to reduce or eliminate as much debt as possible. Here are some resources. Most are free but a few are available at a moderate cost.

When Will You Be Debt Free? – This calculator from CNN Money is very simple to use.  Enter your current credit card balances, interest rates, minimum payments, and the date you want to be debt free.  The calculator will calculate how much extra you need to pay, each month, to achieve your goal.

Debt Reduction Guide – Free eBook that downloads in PDF

Debt Snowball Calculator over at What’s The Cost – This free online tool will help you quickly create a debt repayment plan.

iPhone and iPod Touch Debt Snowball Application – Created by Blunt Money, this application, which sells for $2.99, will help you create a debt snowball using your iPhone or iPod Touch.

Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice Calc Debt Reduction Calculator – If you prefer to work with Word or Open Office, here’s a free debt reduction spreadsheet.

Mortgage Payoff Calculator – From DinkyTown, this calculator helps you calculate the impact of extra mortgage payments.

Calculating Average Daily Balance Spreadsheet – A spreadsheet that calculates how timing payments can affect the amount of interest charged.  Works with Excel or OpenOffice Calc.

An interesting arrticle by Nayla Kazzi and David Madland from the CFAP points out the current bleak prospects for seniors who are still employed. The increasing umemployment comes at a time when seniors are seeking work or trying to stay employed to replace retirement savings lost in the banking crisis.

The articles states:  “Workers 55 and older have a higher unemployment rate than anytime since 1948, and those who are unemployed are staying unemployed much longer. Given employers’ reluctance to start hiring again, it is likely that older workers will have to continue looking for work for months before finding a job.

Unemployment reaches record levels

Unemployment among older workers has peaked in the current recession. There has been a 134-percent increase in the number of workers over the age of 55 who are looking for work since December 2007, up from 843,000 to 2.0 million last month. In June 2009, the unemployment level of this age demographic peaked at 2.1 million—a number higher than anytime since 1948 when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking that data. And the oldest workers—those over the age of 65—have also seen their unemployment levels rise, up to 447,000 last month from 197,000 in December 2007—a 127 percent increase.

In comparison, prime-aged workers—workers aged 25 to 54—saw their unemployment levels increase by 118 percent over the last 21 months, rising from 4.2 million to 9.1 million in August.”…..keep reading the rest of the article here.

In a few days I will be releasing my latest book, How To Make Money Blogging From Home.  The first version will be released on my home website www.skipmcgrath.com. It will be released as an eBook, but if you want a printed version, we will be releasing the Official Geezer Guide version in a few weeks on this site, where you can order a printed version.

I am often asked the question from the title; “Can I really make money with a blog?” The answer is yes, if you follow some simple rules.  Since the book will show you how to create and launch a blog and how to make money from it, let me point out here the top 5 reasons that bloggers fail:

1. Choosing a Bad Niche  — This is probably the biggest reason new bloggers fail. They pick a topic that is too narrow and there are not enough interested followers to sustain a blog. Or they pick to big a topic –one where there is just too much competition from other bloggers. So spend some time researching your niche or main topic.

2. Going for The Gold – There is nothing wrong with starting a blog to make money, but that has to be a secondary consideration if you want to be successful. If your blog is just one big advertisement or plastered with advertising, they readers will abandon you and other bloggers won’t link to you. Keep your advertising and affiliate programs discreet and don’t overdo them.

3. Content is King – I know you have heard this hundreds of times, but this is one truism that is really-really true. You don’t have to be a great writer to blog successfully, but you do have to have good ideas, good content and you have to help people solve some type of problem or you have to entertain them. If you can help and entertain, your blog will rocket to the top.

4. Lack of Focus – We are all guilty of this from time to time. Its easy to lose focus and broaden your topics. If your blog is about digital photography tips, your readers don’t really care what you think about fluoride in drinking water –positive or negative. Staying on topic is critical to a successful blog.

5. Becoming Lazy or Giving Up Too Soon – Let’s face it, blogs are work. If you want to make money blogging, you have to do the work. Set a schedule and a goal. When you are starting out you should do post every day for at least the first three to four weeks. After that you can back off to 5X per week but I would never go below 4 times per week if you want your blog to consistently make money. And most importantly, if you are not growing your readers and starting to make money –don’t stop. Some blogs have overnight success and others take weeks or months to get traction. But once you get traction, you will see your readers grow and your income will climb steadily month by month.

If you don’t want to wait for my book, and would like to get started now, one of my blogging mentors is Yaro Starak. He has just published a free eBook called Blueprint to Blogging. You are still going to want my book, but Yaro’s stuff is a good way to get started –and its free.  Click here to get the Blogging Blueprint.

Next week I am going to introduce my newest book, Make Money Blogging From Home.  When I was doing research from the book, I came across this great article by Yaro Starak about how to make money blogging. Yaro offers a complete course and a free newsletter for bloggers who want to make money blogging from home.  Yaro is the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time.To get more information about Blog Mastermind click this link:

Here is the article:

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Making Money Blogging by Yaro Starak:

In every bloggers life comes a special day – the day they first launch a new blog. Now unless you went out and purchased someone else’s blog chances are your blog launched with only one very loyal reader – you. Maybe a few days later you received a few hits when you told your sister, father, girlfriend and best friend about your new blog but that’s about as far you went when it comes to finding readers.Here are the top 10 techniques new bloggers can use to find readers.

These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling.

It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to help you create momentum. Eventually once you establish enough momentum you gain what is called “traction”, which is a large enough audience base (about 500 readers a day is good) that you no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers. Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth.Top 10 Tips

10. Write at least five major “pillar” articles. A pillar article is usually a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good “how-to” lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn’t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.

9. Write one new blog post per day minimum. Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. The important thing here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new. This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog feed.

You don’t have to produce one post per day all the time but it is important you do when your blog is brand new. Once you get traction you still need to keep the fresh content coming but your loyal audience will be more forgiving if you slow down to a few per week instead. The first few months are critical so the more content you can produce at this time the better.

8. Use a proper domain name. If you are serious about blogging be serious about what you call your blog. In order for people to easily spread the word about your blog you need an easily rememberable domain name. People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world (that’s the offline world, you remember that place right?) so you need to make it easy for them to spread the word and pass on your URL. Try and get a .com if you can and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than worry about having the correct keywords (of course if you can get great keywords and easy to remember then you’ve done a good job!).

7. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller articles your blog is ready to be exposed to the world. One of the best ways to find the right type of reader for your blog is to comment on other people’s blogs. You should aim to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.

Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name/title linked to your blog when you leave a comment. This is how people find your blog. If you are a prolific commentor and always have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and hence click through to visit your blog.

6. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts. A trackback is sort of like a blog conversation. When you write a new article to your blog and it links or references another blogger’s article you can do a trackback to their entry. What this does is leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry – it’s sort of like your blog telling someone else’s blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks often appear like comments.

This is a good technique because like leaving comments a trackback leaves a link from another blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something very important – it gets the attention of another blogger. The other blogger will come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you and if you are lucky some time down the road they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.

5. Encourage comments on your own blog. One of the most powerful ways to convince someone to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If they see people commenting on your blog then they infer that your content must be good since you have readers so they should stick around and see what all the fuss is about. To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. Be sure to always respond to comments as well so you can keep the conversation going.

4. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival. A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival enjoy a spike in new readers.

To find the right blog carnival for your blog, do a search at http://blogcarnival.com/.

3. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com. To be honest this tip is not going to bring in a flood of new readers but it’s so easy to do and only takes five minutes so it’s worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it. You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1-10 incoming readers per day with this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all helps!

2. Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com. This is another tip that doesn’t bring in hundreds of new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it’s worthwhile because you simply leverage what you already have – your pillar articles. Once a week or so take one of your pillar articles and submit it to Ezine Articles. Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their website or in their newsletter.

How you benefit is through what is called your “Resource Box”. You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). Anyone who publishes your article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.

1. Write more pillar articles. Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers however all of the techniques I’ve listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them if you do everything above you may bring in readers but they won’t stay or bother to come back. Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers.

This article was by Yaro Starak, a professional blogger and my blog mentor. He is the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time.To get more information about Blog Mastermind click this link: