Make Money Online

Interesting Ways to Make Money Online

4th November 2016 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

Quick NavigationBlogging / Website Monetisation Social Trading 2016 Review Matched Betting 2016 Review eBay Droppshipping What Did I Achieve in 2016?How Will I Make Money Online in 2017?

I can’t believe it, but it’s been almost a year since I started this blog so I thought it would be a good time to look back and see what I have achieved, what I haven’t achieved and whether it was possible to make money online in 2016.

I’m also going to be fully transparent about my earnings from this year, just as a benchmark for the future.

My intention last year as described in my first article was to dedicate my time across 3 ways to make money online:

In this post we’ll look at each of these in turn as well as my latest business venture with eBay Dropshipping

Blogging / Website Monetisation

Well I came into this as a complete newbie and a year later, I’ve got 2 websites up and running and have learnt an incredible deal about internet marketing, SEO and how you can make money through websites online.

I always knew that you could make money through advertising if you had a successful site, but wasn’t sure about the details of:

How you make a site successful
What a successful site looks like
How you make money through a successful site

I’m no expert but I think I’ve got a much clearer picture of all 3 of these things now, and after a year of learning, I need to start applying this knowledge to my sites.

In my mind the answers to these 3 questions are:

Through keyword research, great content creation and link building

High quality interesting content, generating over £1k of income per month with growth potential

Pay per Click (Adsense), Affiliate Revenue (Amazon), Building e mail lists

Content Creation

From the information that I have digested I’ve learned that making money in this way is a lot more complicated than it was a few years ago, where you could just throw up a website that focused on long tail keywords, create some product reviews, generate some links from a Private Blog Network and you’d be in the money.

Now, the focus is much more on providing great content that is actually useful and solves people’s problems rather than just promoting products.

There’s been a shift in thinking from creating niche websites to building broader authority sites that you grow with time, and as they grow in size they have the potential to bring in much bigger revenue streams.

This shift largely came after a couple of Google updates, that basically wiped out the traffic of a lot of the niche sites.

Your typical site such as ‘bestpaintbrushes.com’ that was made up of review articles and was stuffed with affiliate links would have got one of Google’s ‘Thin Content Penalties’, which effectively removed it from the search listings as part of Googles purge on poor content.

The key now seems to be really finding a niche that you can develop and grow over time, and put systems in place so that others can do a lot of the more labour intensive work for you.

This includes outsourcing things like content creation, link building and formatting of blog posts to free up your precious time.

Website Monetisation 2016 Summary

It’s been great learning so much, but I really need to put this in practice. The main issue here has been time.

I’ve had so much going on that trying to write, publish and promote articles is something that I’ve had to neglect and hence I’ve made no money at all from this idea this year.

I think I’ve got a solid base to move forward, next year and with a bit of luck I’ll have more time to dedicate to this next year as it’s definitely something I want to pursue.

Money Made this Year:

£0

Earning Potential:

Passive Rating:

Social Trading 2016 Review

I’d never heard of Social Trading before I stumbled across an article on it and thought that it looked like an interesting idea.

I’ve got a bit of experience with investing in the stock market, but Social Trading seems like a novel way of investing your money.

I’ve done a full review of my year here but if you haven’t heard of it before, social trading or copy trading as it’s also known, is where you invest in traders and make the exact same trades that they do, in proportion to the amount you invest.

This means that you don’t necessarily need to know too much about markets, commodities and forex trading as you can leave that to the experts, but rather you invest in traders based on their performance and other indicators such as their attitude to risk and the maximum amounts they’ve lost in a single day or week.

There are a number of sites out there but I’ve been using eToro as it’s got a really great user interface and is easy to start to use.

They have a virtual portfolio that you can use to start with where you can invest virtual money in your traders before you throw your hard earned cash at it.

I do quite like the Fantasy Football nature of this idea and it makes trading a lot more accessible to people who wouldn’t otherwise be interested, however, I can see how people could get carried away and lose a lot of money as well.

On an initial glance you can see a lot of the traders reporting really high yields, however, when you drill into their stats you soon find that a lot of these investors have lost big at some point as well.I invested $2500 at the start of the year and am probably going to make a maximum of $100 at the end of the year, which isn’t a great deal, however, at least I haven’t lost anything.

Social Trading 2016 Summary

Realistically, I don’t think this is a great money making scheme and out of everything I’ve tried this year it feels a bit like you are investing more out of hope than judgement, so probably isn’t something that I’ll pursue in the future.

By the same token I didn’t spend much time on this after my initial research into the shortlist of traders.

Money Made this Year:

< £500

Earning Potential:

Passive Rating:

….Find out more about Social Trading in my Beginner’s Guide

Matched Betting 2016 Review

This time last year, I’d barely heard of matched betting and thought that this was either some kind of scam or was a gateway into gambling.

I’d read lots about people reportedly making thousands each month from this, so thought I’d give it a go, and a year later I can say that it really does work, and IT’S NOT GAMBLING!

The process is quite simple and is built on the principle that bookmakers are giving away lots of free offers, and by placing bets on both results happening you can extract a certain percentage of that bet as your profit.

For example, Betfair have a sign up offer where if you bet £10 they will give you £30 in free bets, so if you select your bets well at the bookmaker and the betting exchange you’ll be able to extract about £25 out of that total bet. I explain this in more detail in my Matched Betting Beginners Guide.

There are heaps of accounts that you can sign up to and make up to £1500 just by working through these accounts, but then you get to the next level…. reloads.

For every given day there are 10 – 20 different offers available across the different bookmakers, that you can keep earning money from. For example today, there is an offer with Ladbrokes where if you bet £20 pre-match they will give you a free £10 in-play bet. The trick is to keep repeating these offers and you’ll be suprised how much it adds up at the end of the month.

On top of this, you can then extract money from accumulator bets using either Accumulator Generator or Oddsmonkey’s Acca Matcher Tool.

If this wasn’t enough for you, then you can go a step further and make money from the horse racing offers and things such as the Oddsmonkey Eachway Matcher which will guarantee you returns from races, regardless of the results.

Matched Betting 2016 Summary

Not only have I made money through matched betting this year, but I’ve actually enjoyed doing it. There is nothing more rewarding than getting money for free and as long as you are careful and gradual learn what you are doing this is a great way to earn a little extra money.

The only downside is that it can start to become a bit time consuming, but overall if you’re looking for a bit of extra pocket money, then matched betting is a great choice for you.

Money Made this Year:

£3500

Earning Potential:

Passive Rating:

eBay Dropshipping

When surfing the web and looking into ways to make money online, you come across a lot of rubbish and a lot of people claiming their idea will make you a fortune. In most cases, if it sounds too good to be true, then it usually is.

However, every now and then you come across something that might just have potential and in my mind, as long as you’re not investing a lot of time or money into that stream to test if it works or not, then some times its worth a shot.

… so that’s how I got into eBay dropshipping.

I’ve been listening to a podcast called Travel Like a Boss (which is awesome by the way) and on one of his episodes he talks to an entrepreneur called David Vu who offers the following course on UdemyeBay Drop Shipping with No Inventory Guide

His course teaches you the basic principles of dropshipping and how you can list a product on eBay, and when someone buys the product from you, you buy it from someone else (at a cheaper price) and they send it to the person who bought it from you.

Sounds complicated? Well it isn’t and the best thing about it is that you get to keep a healthy mark-up on each product and you never have to worry about stocking products yourself.

eBay Dropshipping Summary

I’ve been doing this for a couple of months now, and yes, this really works and after you have done the hard work to set up all of your products in eBay, it becomes fairly passive.

The only work you need to do on an ongoing basis is processing your orders, responding to any queries, and making sure you can always purchase a product somewhere if someone purchases it from you.

The model is simple… the more products you list, the more sales you make, the more money you earn, and you don’t need to invest a penny up front.

Money Made this Year:

£500

Earning Potential:

Passive Rating:

….Read my detailed eBay Dropshipping Review

What Did I Achieve in 2016?

Overall 2016, has been an amazing year and I’ve learned soooo much, and discovered so many things that are both interesting and are potential ways that you can make money online without necessarily being tied to a specific location, or needing to slave away for 8 hours a day.

I feel that I’ve put the groundwork in this year, for some of the ideas that I want to focus on in this next year and the more that I have learned, the more options and business models that I have discovered that have been proven to work, and are attainable if you just put in the hours to start with.

If anything, the hardest thing that I’ve struggled with this year is having the time to dedicate to the different streams of interest, especially as I have a demanding full time job to attend to as well.

I guess the main thing that people care about is how much money I made this passed year. It’s not a huge sum at all, but it’s given me money to invest and build on next year and is a great starting point….. drumroll please……

How Will I Make Money Online in 2017?

I had planned to take 3 months out in February so I could focus on these business ideas, but my work has declined this request, so instead I’ve requested to go down to 4 days a week. This is probably the safest option in the short term, until I can get these ideas fully off of the ground.

I’m swamped with ideas at the moment and there are soooo many things that I want to get working on, that it is driving me crazy, however, my shortlist is:

eBay Dropshipping – Build my store up to 1500 products and employ a Virtual Assistant to work on the product listings to build the store even further and automate the processes. Once this is set up this should give me a steady stream of income, which will allow me to work on other things.

Focus on Niche Sites – I have 1 Adsense site that I have already built and written 10 articles for and since neglected, that I really want to dedicate time to and see if I can start to get this to rank. I also have 1 site that I have bought from Human Proof Designs which they are currently building and will need some of my time to market.If all goes well with this, then I’ve got another great niche that I want to get into

Amazon FBA – This has been pretty much the buzz and excitement of the year, with many people making a great source of income by whitelabelling their own products from China and selling them via Amazon, who also hold your stock and manage all of your distribution. Could have huge potential, but requires a bit of up front investment and research.

Drop Shipping Store – I’ve heard a lot about setting up a dropshipping store with Shopify and would really like to take the Drop Ship Lifestyle course at some point. Again, this one will consume a lot of time, however, I really like the idea and am interested in learning more about this business model, especially as more and more business is going online!

A Year Learning Website Monetisation

31st October 2016 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

I remember that I read somewhere that it would be easy to set up a travel blog and make money from it, which kind of got me started on this whole adventure in the first place.

So over this last year, I’ve been furiously looking into what it takes to monetise a website or a blog and the different strategies you can employ to create an ongoing stream of revenue.

3 Things I learned about Website Monetisation in 2016

I was really keen to find out how that’s possible and whether I could do the same thing, so here are the key things I’ve learned this year

Keyword Research Is Key

If you’re going to start a blog or a website then you have to remember that this is a huge investment of your time, so you really need to get an idea of whether this is going to make you any money at all before you head off writing content.

The first thing that you’re going to need to do is to research a niche.

I’ve written about this in detail before, but they key is finding a niche that:

• You’re interested in

• Has low competition and high volume keywords

• Is a broad enough niche that you can potentially expand this into an authority site in the long term

Get any of these things wrong and you’re going to end up with a blog that is going to be nothing but hard work giving you very little in return.

For any website venture that you’re about to start on I would recommend that you invest up to a month in planning the growth of your website.

• Create a keyword matrix and identify long tail keywords that you will target initially and higher volume keywords that you might want to target in the future

• Consider how your site is going to generate revenue. Are you going to be using Adsense, Amazon Affiliates or other affiliate programmes to earn your bucks?

• Check out the competition in your niche and look at how you could potentially improve what they have created

• Think about how much time your website will take to manage in the future and whether this could be outsourced. The worse thing is that if your site becomes really popular and you have set up systems where you need to be involved in all parts of the business, then the more popular it gets, the more of your time it will use

You can’t Take Shortcuts

Unfortunately, there are no real shortcuts that you can take to building up a successful website.

I’ve read a lot about Grey and Black Hat SEO tricks such as using Private Blog Networks, however, whilst these might get you success in the short term, in the longer term you’re likely to get banned from Google, and ruin your business.

If something looks too good to be true like a gig on Fiverr promising 50 top quality links for $5, then you know it’s going to be dodgy so steer clear.

Yes, there is nothing for it, but hard work and putting in the hours initially.

You’re going to need to write a lot of your content to develop your own voice, manage your own website and then most importantly learn how to market your website and generate traffic, all of which can be hugely time-consuming.

On top of this, you can’t expect instant results as your new website will go into Google’s sandbox and won’t start ranking for 3 – 6 months anyway.

Content is King and Links Are the Queen

The days where you could just throw up an article of a few hundred words for niche keywords and expect to rank easily are long gone.

Now you’ll need to put a lot more work and thought into this.

The content that you generate will need to be:

• Unique (Either a fresh idea or a vast improvement on existing content)

• Interesting (Needs to be made shareable)

• In-depth (Minimum of 1000 words per article)

• Answer a question / Solve a problem

The digital landscape is now so crammed full of content for every conceivable subject, you’ll even find in depth 2000+ word reviews of toilet seats, so you have to make sure your content sticks out somehow.

Once you’ve written this killer content, the hardest part is generating links to this content, which seems to be the biggest single factor in 2016 for ranking your content.

There are plenty of strategies all over the internet on how to do this, but once again, this will just consume a lot of your time.

What Did I Achieve?

On a positive note I have to say that I achieved a great deal in this sphere over the last year:

• I set up 2 websites, www.mylifestyledream.com and a niche website

• I have learned a good understanding of SEO and different tactics

• I’ve learned a lot about internet marketing

• I’ve learned about affiliate marketing and the different tactics that people use to monetize websites

Overall I’ve got a great foundation now in both my knowledge and my websites to build on over the next year.

I haven’t been able to focus as much of my time as I wanted to on the niche website, but plan to switch focus back on to this next year.

Low Light of the Year

I think I’ve found a great niche with low competition keywords, however, it’s not the most exciting niche and is quite hard to write articles for.

I’ve written about 8 so far, however, have kind of lost heart a little bit, because even though some of the keywords that I am targeting are sub 20 Keyword Competitiveness, I still don’t rank in the top 100 for these keywords, which I find really bizarre.

I think the answer to this problem, is that I just need to put in more work, build out more articles and start my link building activities then the site should start to grow in traffic.

Highlight of the Year

The best thing for me with building out these sites has to be the amount that I have learned about SEO.

I find this dark art really interesting and is definitely something that I want to learn more about and spend more time perfecting in the future.

How much Time did I spend?

With a full time job in front of a computer screen, I’ve also needed to research and practice these 3 ways to make money online as well as write about them, all of which takes a huge amount of time.

In reality I’ve needed to just focus on one thing at a time, or free up more time, which I intend to do next year.

How much Money Did I make?

A big fat £0

In fact, by the time I take hosting and themes and domain names into account I’ve probably invested about £150 so far.

However, I feel that I’ve put in a lot of the groundwork with which to monetize these sites in the future.

Was It Worth the Effort?

Yes, absolutely. I feel that I’ve started a new path that I’m interested in and could potentially reap rewards in the future.

Out of all the things I’ve looked at this is most likely to be the idea that comes closest to giving me real passive income in the future.

Social Trading 2016 Review

28th October 2016 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

Looking back to last year, I knew nothing about Social Trading and even though I’ve got a good understanding of investments and have dabbled in the stock market before, Trading in general and Social Trading were a completely new thing to me.

I’d read both amazing reports of how people had made money without having to do much at all as well as articles describing how it’s impossible to make any money at all from Social or Copy Trading due to the way the platforms are set up, so the only way to get an answer to this was to try it myself.

For those of you who have never heard of Social Trading or Copy Trading before, this is a relatively new phenomenon, where instead of investing in the stock market, currencies or commodities directly, you invest money in a trader and copy a relative percentage all of the trades that they make.

This means that you are effectively trusting in the knowledge of the trader and invest in their strategies rather than doing this yourself.

There are no fees to do this, apart from the small percentage of each trade that the platforms will take.

3 Things I Learned About Social Trading in 2016

Spend Time to Research your Traders

There are many different platforms out there, each with thousands of different traders for you to choose from, so how do you know which one to invest your money in?

Personally I opted for eToro as it’s a fairly easy system to understand for the beginner and has a simple to use interface.

I also received a $1000 bonus for signing up with these guys when I invested $2500.

Each trader on the eToro platform has a profile, which gives you different metrics about their performance, what they invest in, the amount of assets they are managing, the maximum they’ve lost in a single day, their trading history since they’ve been on the platform and most importantly, a risk level, which is a metric that eToro generates to determine the traders appetite for risk.

My advice is to set up a virtual account to start with, choose a number of traders to follow with virtual money for a few months and only when you find a trading profile and risk level that you are happy with should you jump in and invest in them.

If possible try to interact with the trader themselves to see how rational they are, after all they’re going to be in charge of your money.

Create a Balanced Portfolio

It’s easy to get tempted and stick all of your money on a trader who’s seen massive profits over the last month or even 3 months, however, BE CAREFUL.

I have found that traders who bring home incredible returns for a few months are the same guys who will blow up their account and bankrupt themselves. The reason for this is their attitude to risk.

They’ll often have a high leverage and will risk a large portion of their account on single trades, which can either make them a killing, or ruin their account.If you’re going to invest I would suggest that you split your money out across a minimum of 5 traders, who have varied profiles.

By this I mean are split across:

• Their risk level – In eToro I would invest in anyone with a risk level over 7

• What they invest in – Split between commodities, forex and stocks

• The size of assets they manage

• The maximum drawdown level

• Whether they are a short term day trader or more of a longer term investor

Avoid The Most Popular Profitable Traders

If you base your investment decision solely on the basis of who is making the most profit, then you’d be crazy.

However, a lot of people will do this and see traders who are showing wild profits of hundreds, if not thousands of percent of profit.

Most people will see this, their big, fat, greedy eyes will light up and without thinking about it much will invest their money.

What happens next?

You guessed it, sooner, rather than later the trader is going to take one too many risks and their account (and therefore your investment) will become worthless.It’s strange because often these guys will have a lot of copiers as well, so a lot of people will be affected when these accounts are blown up.

The key lesson here, is learning to manage your appetite to risk.

What Did I Achieve?

I feel that I’ve got a good understanding of how Social Trading works now, particularly on eToro and I managed to make a bit of money from this.

It was interesting researching into the various traders, trying to understand their strategies and it was always a bit of a thrill when I logged into my account to see how much money I was making or losing.

Low Light of the Year

I’d been following Mister G who writes a blog about Social Trading and seemed to have a good knowledge of what he was doing, was quite responsive and cared about steady, long term growth, which is what I was looking for.

For some reason as soon as I invested in January he seemed to go a little crazy and was taking bigger risks with his investments.

This meant that in Jan he lost 20% and Feb 15%.I can accept this but this was different to his risk profile and what irked me most is that for someone who was very responsive in the community previously, after he lost a lot of his own and other people’s money, he went pretty quiet and didn’t respond to questions around his investment strategy.

Luckily I only invested $350 in him and ended up losing about $60 of that.

How Much Time Did I spend?

The good thing about Social or Copy trading is that once you’ve done your research you don’t need to invest too much time into this.

Whilst it’s definitely good to keep an eye on the traders that you’ve selected, I wouldn’t recommend switching around too often, as if you’ve picked a good trader they will have a strategy that lasts a few months rather than trying to make a quick buck.

This means that you might need to suffer a bit of a loss in some cases before you can make a gain, so just be patient.It’s also a good idea to have a watch list and look for other traders who you could potentially invest in, in the future.

Overall you don’t need to sink a lot of time into this, which is a massive benefit.

How much Money Did I make?

Well, to be honest I’m not so sure about this at the moment.

I invested a total of $2500, from which I got a $1000 bonus.In my account at the moment I have a total of $3541 equity.

I’m not sure if I can withdraw the full amount so at a bare minimum I guess that I’ve made a whopping total of $40

Was it Worth The Effort?

Well, the good thing is that there is not too much effort that you need to put into this, however, there is a certain amount of risk that you are playing with.

Most of the traders that I invested in were fairly low risk, hence my reward being fairly low as well.

To be honest, apart from doing some of the research, and not having too risky a portfolio, this does feel a bit like gambling to me.

I don’t think there is a massive amount of skill involved at this level and you are kind of pinning a tail on a donkey, but it’s a bit of fun.

Chapter 6 : A Year in Matched Betting

23rd October 2016 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

I’ve always been a big sports fan and have partaken in the occasional punt on a horse, but only recently came across Matched Betting.

Like I said in my first article last year I have no interest in gambling but I had seen reports of people earning £1000+ a month from Matched Betting without putting in too much effort, so I was more than tempted to look into this.

The basic principle is that you place a bet at one Bookmakers that an event will happen, then you place a bet at a betting exchange that the event won’t happen.

Whatever happens in the event means that you will make a small loss, however, the trick is that in a lot of cases you will be given a refund by the bookmaker if that event doesn’t happen.

Examples would be:

• If the game ends 0 – 0

• If the horse finishes 2nd

• If there is a red card

On top of this there are over 40 bookmakers who will give you free bets when you open an account with them.

3 Things I learned About Matched Betting in 2016

Start Slowly and Learn the Basics

The concept of matched betting may take you a while to get your head around to start with, however, there is plenty of useful information available and as long as you pace yourself then you should be ok.

As I said in my recent article I think there are roughly 5 stages to matched betting:

• Stage 1 – Signing up to the bonus offers

• Stage 2 – Playing the account reloads and daily offers

• Stage 3 – Laying off bets in an accumulator

• Stage 4 – Expanding out into other sports eg Horse Racing

• Stage 5 – Moving into trading / arbitrageTo start with I would recommend having a maximum of 2 offers that you are trying to complete open at the same time, otherwise it gets too complicated for the newbie.

Take on the easy offers first and use a service like Oddsmonkey where they give you step by step guides to the offers.

Spend a couple of months at least, going through these offers and then you can start to try out the reloads, when you have a good understanding of what you’re doing.

Try to Act Like a Regular Punter

Photo by tvol / CC BY

The most important thing for a matched bettor is keeping your accounts open so you can continue to take advantage of the reload offers.

As soon as you start to win a lot or exhibit strange betting patterns, then for sure your accounts will be restricted.

Unfortunately, the bookies are clever folks and with the help of their spying software (which is tracking everything you do) they have a pretty clear picture of what kind of customer you are.

The typical pattern that they will look out for is:

• A customer who only ever bets when there is an offer available

• A customer who places a bet at low odds to qualify for an offer and

• A customer who places a bet at high odds when using their free bet

Remember, bookies don’t like to lose money!!!

There is no exact science to it and you are still going to lose accounts at some point but you can help minimise the chance by:

• Not playing every offer

• Adding stakes above the maximum that you’d get back on a free bet for an offer

• Not taking the best match available

• Placing random bets not associated with free offers – Now you can use something like the Eachway matcher to make this profitbale

Never Bet When You’re in a Rush

Most of the mistakes that I have made over the past year have happened when I’ve either been in a rush or in a scenario that was not relaxed or where I couldn’t focus.

Examples would be:

• When a deadline was approaching eg the start of a race or kick off time

• When I was not in front of my PC, so mainly trying to place bets on the move on an Iphone

• When I was with friends of when someone was waiting for me to go out

• When I was on a lunch break at work

In all of these situations you can’t fully focus on what you are doing and try to rush, which will lead to mistakes.

You’ll either back the wrong horse, add the wrong stakes, or completely forget to lay a bet, so whatever you do, make sure you’re in a stress free environment to place your bets.

What Did I achieve?

After a year I would now class myself as a fairly experienced matched bettor, who understands most of what they are doing and have played out all the different offer types.

I’ve now tried to refine my time to only partaking in offers that are worth my while with either guaranteed profit, or a good chance of making a return.

Previously I would end up spending hours going through all the different offers and only making a few pounds profit here and there.I’ve managed to make a decent enough profit and still have some of the major accounts left open, although not as many as I would like.

Low Light of the Year

There are few lowlights that come to mind including the multiple gubbings on some nice accounts, which always hurt and missing the Bet365 Grand National offer as I read the rules incorrectly, but the lowlight has got to be a mixup with Smarkets that cost me a few hundred pounds.

For some reason when I tried to lay a horse in the Smarkets exchange it got the lay odds completely wrong.

I’m not sure how this happened; it was either a data entry error or a glitch in the system but instead of laying at odds of 8, it went up to 80 and of course this was snapped up in the exchange.

At one point I stood to lose £1500 but thanks to people in the Matched Betting Forums, I managed to minimise the loss down to about £300, but it was extremely stressful!!!

Highlight of the Year

Getting into horse racing and the racing festivals such as Cheltenham was fun, even though it was really stressful at the time, but the highlight for me has to be the discovery of the Eachway Matcher and playing the Extra Place Races.

The good thing about the Eachway matcher is that you can use this with gubbed accounts and can make a tidy profit.

I used this a couple of times recently to pick up £200 profit on a couple of extra place races where my horse came in fifth which was a real buzz!

How much Time Did I spend?

So, this is the big thing for me. I think because I kind of enjoyed it and also because you can see immediate gains from your actions, I ended up spending hours and hours sorting through offers and looking for close matches.

In fact, I think because of matched betting, I was able to spend less time on the other activities that I wanted to pursue such as the websites.

However, I’ve learned that you can limit this and you really should do if you want to have any kind of life left!!!

How much Money Did I make?

I started making detailed accounts of every transaction that I made to start with, however, in the end this was taking too much time so I just run a spreadsheet, which has details of:

Withdrawals
Deposits
Balance

From this I can tell that I’ve probably made about:

£3500 tax free profit

from matched betting during the course of the year, which isn’t too bad.

Was It Worth the Effort?

This one is really difficult to say. Overall I have enjoyed the thrill of matched betting and making money out of nothing, however, at times this can be really stressful and also quite addictive.

There is no gambling involved however, there is something quite addictive about making small wins all the time.

I think I’ve spent too much time doing this over the year to justify continually doing this, so I’m going to limit this to a few hours a week moving forward.

I’ve also lost a lot of my accounts so am getting limited on which offers I can play at the moment.

Also, it seems like matched betting is becoming a lot more popular so the bookies are not putting so many decent offers out there like they used to do.

I think in general the best days of matched betting are over, but there is still some money to be made from it.

eBay Drop Shipping with No Inventory

19th September 2016 By martinos74 10 Comments

I haven’t made many updates to the site recently as I’ve been focusing mainly on my latest make money online scheme… eBay dropshipping. EBay whatshipping I hear you say, well let me explain!

If you’ve never heard of dropshipping before, then simply explained the following happens:

You advertise a product somewhere
Someone buys the product from you
You buy a product from a manufacturer
They send the product directly to your buyer

Simply put, you make money by charging more for the product than the manufacturer sells it to you.

Basically you are just acting as one massive middleman, who passes the product from the buyer to the seller.

You’ll find examples of dropshipping everywhere from niche websites, to Amazon and EBay and strangely enough some of the large high street stores are actually just big dropshipping agents.

Yes, that’s right, if you buy from some of the UK’s major retailers, you’ll find that their products are bought and shipped directly from a third party…. That’s dropshipping.

In most cases dropshipping will involve building up a relationship with a dropshipping supplier, however, there is actually a much simpler way to do this, which I learned about on David Vu’s course: eBay Drop Shipping with No Inventory Guide

The approach that is taught to you on this course, is that you don’t need necessarily to bother with a dropshipping supplier, and instead you can just sell products from any online retailer.

That’s right you can simply go to a major retailer like Argos, or Walmart in the States and resell their products on EBay, and if you add a decent enough markup, you’re going to make some money!

David Wu’s model is quite simple:

You list a product on EBay with a mark up of 40% on top of the retail price
You optimise your product titles so you can attract as many people as possible
You sell a product, deduct 10% EBay fees and 3% Paypal fees
You get to keep the remaining cash

Ok, so the reality is that the products that you are selling are going to be a lot more expensive than the same product listed either directly at the source, other websites and even other EBay sellers, so you’re probably thinking why on earth would someone buy your more expensive product?

Well there are a couple of reasons really:

1 – People are stupid and lazy – Most people will only buy a product from the first 5 listings that they see on EBay, so if you have good feedback and well optimised titles then there is a good chance you’ll be in this top 5. People who come to EBay are still under the mindset that they are getting a bargain, so won’t always check other sources online before purchasing on EBay.

2 – Reach – If you use the full 80 characters available in your product title field and optimise your title, then you will reach a lot more people than other listings for the same product might reach, which could mean you would appear as the only listing for certain search terms. For example the following title [insert example] would reach a lot more people than this one [example]

3 – EBay’s Global Shipping Programme – This is something that EBay recently introduced and most EBay sellers do not take advantage of yet. If you click a checkbox to sell via the Global Shipping Programme this means that your product will also be listed on other EBay sites around the world and you will be listed as an International Seller. You would have seen examples of this on listings before where it would say ‘Shipped from China’ for example. The good thing about this is that all you have to do is pay the postage to the UK EBay distribution centre, and they will pay the rest of the charges around the world.

Well, in truth a lot of the retailers aren’t so happy for you to resell their products and a lot of them will cancel your order if you send it to the Global Shipping Programme address.

I find this a bit bizarre really, because you are giving their product free promotion and sending sales to their websites, so why on earth would you try to limit this?

I guess the reason is that they still want to retain a certain amount of control over their pricing policies so aren’t so keen with this practice.

In the past I’ve used Argos, John Lewis and Homebase without a problem

However, if you do a bit more digging there are plenty of other suppliers out there who will be willing to ship your products.

There’s nothing illegal about this practice, but you want to make sure your supplier doesn’t mind you selling their products, otherwise you might be stuck in a situation where someone buys a product from you and you can’t fulfil their order.

I’ve only be doing this for about 3 months now but I can say that it does actually work.

The graphic is from my actual account and so far I’ve sold over 30 products in the last 2 months. If you take out eBay and Paypal fees you’ll probably make about 20% of the sale price.

The beauty of this money making tactic is, that the more products you list, the more you’re likely to sell, so you just need to beef up your store with as many listings as possible.

Realistically I think you need to have about 1500 products in your store to be able to make £1k a month from this business model.

The idea is then that after you get to a certain threshold you can then keep scaling up and pay a Virtual Assistant to do a lot of the mundane chores such as listing products, fulfilling orders and even providing customer service.

2018 Update: I currently have about 4000 products in my store and am making about £500 a month profit after I take out expenses. This isn’t a huge amount, however, I invest very little time in this at the moment. I have a team of listers who add the products for me and all I day is deal with customer service and managing the orders.

Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet to success and like any other way of making money online, you’re going to need to put in the hours.

Once you’ve chosen the product to add, it typically takes about 10 minutes to add a new product listing to eBay and to correctly format the titles and source the images.

On top of this you’ll also be spending time on the following:

Buying the actual product (10 mins per sale)
Uploading tracking numbers and comms with the buyer (10 mins per sale)
Answering customer service and product enquiries
Managing stock levels (Yes, even though you’re not stocking any products you need to ensure that the retailers don’t run out of stock, otherwise you’ll be left with no product to ship)

This all sounds great so far, but there are a number of things that aren’t so great when you get involved in this:

If you don’t have an old eBay account and need to set up a new one, then you are initially limited to listing only 10 products. You can contact eBay to increase this limit after one month, and then every following month you’ll need to contact them again, which is a minor irritant
It takes a long time and is a really laborious task to source products, copy their pictures, add all the product details and optimise your listings titles
Trying to monitor stock levels is a major pain and you’ll often find that you’re supplier is out of stock, which can leave you having to source the product from a more expensive alternative or a less reliable source, which could risk your reputation
Once you start building up your eBay dropshipping empire, you’ll quickly realise that this is going to tie you down too. One of the key metrics that eBay uses to give your seller rating is whether you ship your products out within your specified timescales and how quickly you can add tracking numbers. Basically this means that you need to be able to get access to the internet at least once per day, or risk running behind on orders and affect your ratings.

Overall, out of everything I have been looking into this year, I really would recommend this way to make money online for a number of reasons:

You’ll be able to make your first sale really quickly, which is really motivating to see how you can make money out of nothing really easily
You won’t need to fork out loads of capital to buy stock, as you only buy something when an order comes in
You get to learn how eBay works and also which products will sell well, which can be an essential education for other money making strategies
It has potential to become fully automated once you build the business up to a certain level and can be generating the ultimate goal of passive income.

The best thing about this is that you can get started in next to no time and it won’t cost you anything, so what are you waiting for?

Give it a go and let me know how you got on!!!

Matched Betting Calculator : 6 of the Best Calculators

21st July 2016 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

Unless you’re a maths genius then you’re going to need a matched betting calculator whether you are a novice or a pro, to help you figure out your lay stakes, profits and potential under or overlays.

There are a variety of calculators out there ranging from the basic calculators to help you calculate your standard qualifying bets and free bet lays, up until the more advanced matched betting calculators, which cover more advanced techniques like underlaying and ditching.

I’ve picked the best calculator to use for each of the different stages in your matched betting career:

Quick NavigationBest Matched Betting Calculator for Complete Novices Best Beginners Matched Betting Calculator Best Basic Matched Betting Calculator Best Intermediate Matched Betting Calculator Best Advanced Matched Betting Calculator

Best Matched Betting Calculator for Complete Novices

Well, it sounds like hard news for you, but if you’re just starting out I would completely recommend that you make your own calculator! This isn’t Blue Peter, but if you’re getting into matched betting then understanding how to make a spreadsheet and understanding the underlying mathematics involved in matched betting is essential.

Creation your own matched betting calculator will really help you in the long run. It might hurt your head a little bit to start with, but trust me, once you’ve run through the steps and figured out the maths behind this,it will really pay dividends.

And as if by magic, here’s one I prepared earlier to show you the kind of thing I’m talking about: Sample Matched Betting Calculations

Best Beginners Matched Betting Calculator

You’ll find that pretty much every matched betting service offers a basic free calculator of some sort, and they’re all based on the same underlying calculations, so a lot of this is really finding the calculator that is right for you.

After all you’re going to be using this calculator time after time, so you want to find something that is easy to use.

Save the Student

http://www.savethestudent.org/matched-betting-calculator

I personally started off by using the calculator at Save the Student, as this is really easy to understand what’s happening: Initially if you choose the easy sign up offers it will pull through the different matches available without you needing to go to any odds matching software and this then gives you step by step instructions of where to go and what bets to place:

Matched Betting Calculator Save The Student

Once you’ve done the basic offers you’ll need to migrate to finding these matches yourself, but they also have a pretty decent basic matched betting calculator that you can use for qualifying bets and free bets:

Matched Betting Calculator Save The Student Automatcher

Best Basic Matched Betting Calculator

Matched Betting Blog

http://matchedbettingblog.com/matched-betting-calculator/

A tiny bit more complex to use but one of my personal favourites due to its simplicity and the fact that it updates without having to click calculate is found on the Matched Betting Blog.

As you can see in the screenshot below, this has 3 modes:

Qualifying Bet
Free Bet – Either Stake returned or Stake not returned
Risk Free Bet – Which comes in useful for some offers like Bet365’s 4/1 horse racing offer, where you get a risk free bet on the next race if your horse wins the race

Matched Betting Blog Calculator

Best Intermediate Matched Betting Calculator

ODDSMONKEY CALCULATOR

http://www.oddsmonkey.com/oddssearch.aspx

You’ll see this calculator in a lot of places as it’s built by Oddsmonkey, who you now need to create an account with to use. At the time of writing you can still access the free version on Mbassist site: http://mbassist.co.uk/calculator.aspx

This calculator has 2 modes:

Simple Mode

You can add your normal, free bet (stake returned) and free bet (stake not returned):

Mbassist Matched Betting Calculator Normal

Advanced

As you can see from the screenshot we now have a few more options to this calculator:

Underlay – This is where you don’t put the full value of the lay into the exchange

Overlay – This is where you put more than the full value of the lay into the exchange

Custom slider – This helps you adjust your lay stake to a custom value

Mbassist Matched Betting Calculator Advanced Mode

As you can see from the screenshot, adjusting these values dramatically changes the potential wins at the bookies or exchanges and is a common tactic used by more advanced matched betors to help with things like reducing qualifying losses.

Best Advanced Matched Betting Calculator

Trickybet

http://www.trickybet.net/lay-calculator

Moving up another notch in complexity is the Trickybet Matched betting calculator, which has a handy odds converter, a standard basic calculator and both a Dutch 2 way and Dutch 3 way option.

I also really like the advanced Lay calculator and the extra options that it provides:

Trickybet Matched Betting Calculator

You have the under / overlay options but on top of this if you have a bet that has only been partially matched, and are having a mental meltdown about what to do next, you can use the ‘Part lays already in place’ fields to determine what your lay bet should be.

This can be priceless if an event is starting shortly and you haven’t managed to get a full match.

SUMMARY

Let us know which is your favourite calculator to use and if there is any calculator we’ve missed!

« Previous Page

Make Money Online

Blogging / Website Monetisation

Content Creation

Website Monetisation 2016 Summary

Social Trading 2016 Review

Social Trading 2016 Summary

Matched Betting 2016 Review

Matched Betting 2016 Summary

eBay Dropshipping

eBay Dropshipping Summary

What Did I Achieve in 2016?

How Will I Make Money Online in 2017?

3 Things I learned about Website Monetisation in 2016

Keyword Research Is Key

You can’t Take Shortcuts

Content is King and Links Are the Queen

What Did I Achieve?

Low Light of the Year

Highlight of the Year

How much Time did I spend?

How much Money Did I make?

Was It Worth the Effort?

3 Things I Learned About Social Trading in 2016

Spend Time to Research your Traders

Create a Balanced Portfolio

Avoid The Most Popular Profitable Traders

What Did I Achieve?

Low Light of the Year

How Much Time Did I spend?

How much Money Did I make?

Was it Worth The Effort?

3 Things I learned About Matched Betting in 2016

Start Slowly and Learn the Basics

Try to Act Like a Regular Punter

Never Bet When You’re in a Rush

What Did I achieve?

Low Light of the Year

Highlight of the Year

How much Time Did I spend?

How much Money Did I make?

Was It Worth the Effort?

Best Matched Betting Calculator for Complete Novices

Best Beginners Matched Betting Calculator

Save the Student

Best Basic Matched Betting Calculator

Matched Betting Blog

Best Intermediate Matched Betting Calculator

ODDSMONKEY CALCULATOR

Best Advanced Matched Betting Calculator

Trickybet

​SUMMARY

SUMMARY