Getting the Best Online College Education

While there is always a lot of debate as to whether an online college education is as good as a traditional college education, the answer is really very simple; there are good institutions that offer an online college education and there are bad establishments that offer an online college education. The same holds true for traditional college degree programs.

So, just as when you are looking for an offline course, you need to do the same kind of your research when you are looking for the best place to pursue an online college education.

Of course, you normally won’t care where the college is located unless part of the online program involves off-line meetings. Usually the physical location just doesn’t matter. However, a lot of the other points that you would consider before attending a traditional offline college or university should also be considered before you enroll with any organization offering an online college education.

The growth in the numbers of people pursuing an online college education has led to increased competition among institutions to attract students. The best way to assess the credibility of a site advertising that they have the best online college education is to ask about the accreditation of its courses. Accreditation means that some governing body for a particular field has endorsed the course. This can be extremely important in helping you to decide who to trust with your online college education. If a course is not accredited then you need to find out why.

There may be a number of courses that have not yet received accreditation from an appropriate association or governing body but still offer a good online college education. For example, the establishment may have applied for accreditation but not yet been assessed. In that case you can actually check with the particular accrediting agency to be certain that they actually are in the process of assessing the application for accreditation. Another reason may be that there is no appropriate accrediting body for a course. This is less likely but, nevertheless, could be a valid reason and doesn’t necessarily indicate that the course offered is not going to be worth taking to advance your online college education.

If, however, you find that the online college education institution has been refused accreditation, then they are likely to try to tell you that accreditation is not important. And that simply isn’t true. An online college education from a non-accredited institution is not going to be viewed as positively as one from an accredited establishment. Choose where you go to get your online college education with care to ensure that you are not wasting your time and money by having a nearly worthless qualification.

Another factor related to accreditation has to do with professions requiring some form of governmental license or certification. You need to be certain that any college degree or other course certification will be acceptable to whatever licensing body has authority over the profession in the location you live and work in. For example, a course which is accepted in one state, may not be accepted by the authorities in another state.

You need to think of the online college education arena as a marketplace. You are the consumer and as in any marketplace, you need to check the quality of the product and the ‘merchant’ according to the circumstances that apply to you and your area of study. While this may seem like a lot of work at times, it is your future, your time and your money that are involved. So take a little extra time and verify the value of any online college program (or any type of online learning) that you are considering.

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How To Make Money In A Home Based Business With Free Online Tools

There are thousands of free resources on the internet that are available to anyone who wants to use them. Many people are discovering that they can use these free tools to make extra money working from home in their own part time business.

Once you know about these free tools and learn to use them, you can offer to provide your services to business owners who would gladly pay you to help them market their business online. Most small business owners don’t have the time to learn and use these resources.

If you do, you might be in a great position to start your own part time home based business. And because you are using free online resources as your product, you can actually start your business without having to spend a dime.

As long as you have a computer and internet access, you have everything you need to start your own online consulting business.

All you really need from there is for someone to point you in the right direction to the right free tools, and I will do that right now. Some of my favorite free online resources are from Google.

Here is a list of my top five free Google resources (that could be used to start your own business):

1. G-mail: Free email from Google.

2. Google Sites: Free website from Google.

3. Google Images: Access to free photos, artwork and clipart from Google.

4. YouTube (yes, Google owns YouTube): Free YouTube account to create free advertising.

5. Google Places: Free business listing on the number one search engine on the planet.

Using these free resources, many smart entrepreneurs are starting their own home based business where they set up free email, website and marketing for local business owners.

They help small business owners create an online presence using nothing more than the free tools and services that are available online.

Basically, they become online marketing consultants.

Starting your own online consulting business is not as easy as falling off a log, but it’s not rocket science either.

For most people, it’s just a matter of becoming familiar with a few of the free online tools.

Facebook is another free online resource I’m sure you are familiar with. Thousands of people have started home based businesses simply offering to create Facebook Fan-pages for businesses.

Like anything else, once you learn the basics of how to create an email address or upload a video to YouTube, you can almost do it in your sleep. Turning that knowledge into a nice part time income in your own home based business is just a matter of letting people in your area know what you do.

The hard part is getting started. But once you’re up and running, this is a business that will run mostly on word of mouth advertising from one business owner to another. And that is the best free advertising you can get!

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How to Succeed in Your Home Based Business Opportunity

During my time online, I have come across lots of people looking for the ideal home based business opportunity to work in. There are certainly lots of things you could do to make this work for you, but you should understand that what works for one person may not work for another.For instance an internet home business could be built out of several different income streams. And I think this is by far the best way to go. Why rely on a single stream of income when you could be earning from lots of different ones?One important thing to remember is that it takes time to succeed, no matter what kind of home business you want to set up. A lot of people are impatient and I think this is the biggest reason why so many of them fail. Yes, there are people who succeed in creating their own work at home business in just a few days or weeks. But for the most part it takes longer than this to set up something you can look forward to earning real money from.If there was one really important thing I could recommend to anyone who wants a successful home based business opportunity, it would be this – do something you love. This gives you the determination to persevere and make it work.For instance, let’s say you know someone who is making a mint at blogging. They create lots of different sites they update now and again and populate with AdSense ads. This is all very well and it would be tempting for you to join in, wouldn’t it? But if you hate blogging it will never really work for you, because you’ll look on it as a chore to keep all those blogs updated. If you even get that far, that is.I know how tempting it is to want to dive straight in to the first opportunity you come across. But you don’t just have to ask yourself whether it’s legit or not – you also have to ask yourself if it is right for you.I really do think that passion has a lot to do with who is successful with their home business and who isn’t. If you have the passion for what you want to do, it will carry you over all kinds of different obstacles. Working from home can be a drive for some people in itself, but I know that being able to work at doing what I love is a big reason for my own success online. Could it work for you too?The point I’m making here is not to rush into anything too quickly when you want to build your own business from home. This is going to set you up for failure, just as it did me when I first tried to start along these lines. By spending more time figuring out what I was good at and interested in, I ended up picking the right home based business opportunity for me.

Legitimate Home Based Business: How to Spot the Good From the Bad

Scams and frauds happen every hour and victims swindled out of their hard-earned money are piling up by the minute. Don’t be one of these people who had to fall for these scams. Take the time to study the home based business that you are planning to join to make sure that it is a legitimate home based business. Better take the time to research now rather than cry buckets for lost money later.If you don’t know how to spot a good legitimate home based business, here are some ways for you to segregate the good from the plain rotten.Look beyond the confetti marketingMost scams, frauds and weak businesses with weak products and services rely on the hype of marketing to attract would-be partners. This is why it is important for you to look beyond the marketing strategies of most businesses. Don’t just easily buy into what they say – whether it’s the number of members or just how much their members earn. Make sure that before you believe whatever they might say, you look for facts first. To begin with, how long have they been in business? Some members might be able to earn whooping amounts but can you replicate that success and do they equip you to replicate that success? Marketing will be their biggest weapon to blind you into joining them so always be wary of how they market themselves, particularly if they tend to over-market and give suspicious and unreasonable guarantees.Ask about the business planA legitimate home based business will have a solid and tested business plan that will help you navigate your way. You shouldn’t have to experiment on what works and what doesn’t, a legitimate home based business should have already studied this for you. As a newbie in the business field, you shouldn’t have to go around reinventing the wheel and fumbling your way through the business. It will be best if the organization or group can provide you with a system that is already proven to work and is simple enough for you to follow. A good business plan should include the marketing strategies, sales strategies and more that you will need in order to achieve your goal.There are even more ways to spot what’s legit and what’s not but in the end, you really just have to rely on your instinct. If you think that an offer is too good to be true, then it’s probably not. A good business system realizes that a successful one needs a great product or service but that it also needs a good, steady hand to manage it.

Internet Fax – How Can it Benefit Your Home Based Business?

It’s hard to run a business out of your home, but it’s even harder when you’re not using the right tools. Home based businesses need to use technology as an equalizer. Most home based businesses usually have between one and three employees, along with smaller budgets. They often have to compete in markets with large corporations that have hundreds of employees and huge budgets. Luckily, the 21st century has provided a lot of great technological tools to deal with the challenges that home based businesses face.One such service is Internet fax, which has quickly gained immense popularity among businesses of all sizes – especially in home based businesses. Internet fax works through a user’s existing Internet service, and, as its name implies, allows all the functionality of a fax machine from the user’s computer. Faxes can be received, sent, archived and printed with ease, allowing for a high level of organization and functionality without a huge investment.There are many reasons that the Internet fax is such an appealing technology. For home based businesses, a well-implemented Internet fax system can give the impression of a very large company. Multiple fax numbers can easily be set up for a home company’s various “departments.” Additionally, since faxes are received electronically through broadband connections rather than through a dial-up modem, there’s no possibility of a missed or returned fax. Hundreds of pages can be easily and instantly sent to potential clients, less expensively than through a traditional fax machine. This is because no paper or ink is ever used when faxing over the Internet, unless a business owner should decide to print out a few pages to have a paper copy of an important document.Internet fax services also allow home based businesses to greatly improve their output and increase sales from the day they’re installed. Since Internet fax services can handle multiple faxes simultaneously and operate through normal email systems, any orders for products or services received via fax can be easily corralled into a home business’s normal workflow. This can greatly improve a home business’s revenue, especially when orders are received en masse due to advertising, promotions and other marketing efforts. For home based businesses that market through fax, an Internet fax service also provides a cheap, simple and highly efficient way to contact large amounts of potential clients. They enable creative ad campaigns, and a simple way to stay in touch with repeat customers and partners.Of course, a good organization system is a very important element in running a home based business. Internet fax services are a great aid in this area, as well. Faxes received through the systems are infinitely more search-able than their paper counterparts, as text can be easily scanned for keywords using typical word processing software. Received faxes from an Internet fax service can be easily and cheaply stored on a user’s computer, making large, unwieldy filing cabinets completely unnecessary. This also provides a form of insurance in case of fire or other natural disaster – a home based business owner can easily back up the faxes to an external hard drive, jump drive or through an Internet back up service, so that even major damage to his/her home and business won’t result in lost orders or records.As with any new technology, there are costs associated with the installation of an Internet fax system. These costs are low by most standards, and are paid back through lower faxing costs. Many business owners find the systems far less expensive than owning and maintaining a fax machine, simply due to paper and toner costs. In addition to cost, there’s also a very small learning curve when adapting to the new technology. This is because received faxes are opened in the same manner as email attachments and outgoing faxes are sent through an easy-to-understand computer dialog.Regardless of a home based business’ field, faxing over the Internet provides an inexpensive and flexible way to compete with larger companies on a professional level. The possibilities are only limited by the creativity of the systems’ controller. As all home business owners know, staying up to date on the technology front is an important part of staying in business. With that in mind, it’s difficult to recommend traditional fax machines while Internet fax services are available.

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Owning and Operating a Home Based Business: The Number 1 Reason Most People Fail

Owning and operating a home based business and creating a legacy for your family to enjoy for generations; this is a major part of the American dream isn’t it?The popular figure quoted is, 125,000 people starting a new Home Based Business every week.That’s every week folks, not every year or every month… every week!There are hundreds of thousands of Network Marketing companies in existence and while many of them are outright Scams and Pyramid Schemes there are also legitimate corporations who use the network marketing business model to distribute their goods and services, and have been doing so successfully for many years.There are well known companies specializing in the Legal, Medical and Communication industries as well as Health and Wellness or Fuel and Energy that offer time tested, patented products that are very effective.So, why is it that more people aren’t successful at owning and operating their own home based business and enjoying their slice of the American Pie?Why is it that the average person who starts a home based network marketing business fails within their first 3-6 months?As we delve into this topic we must first understand a fundamental truth in Network Marketing which is, most people fail simply because most people quit!The people who choose to stay with their Network Marketing Company and follow the success system laid out by those who have gone before them almost always succeed!So, the real question being discussed and answered here today is why do most people in their first 3-6 months quit trying to own and operate a home based business?What’s so discouraging about this industry that the average person gives up shortly after starting?Well, here’s what I’ve discovered about owning and operating your own home based business.The average person who begins a home based business with a Network Marketing company is someone who is fed up with their job and simply wants to escape the 9-5 grind. They can’t take what they’ve been getting and they want out!But here’s what nobody told them.When you start a full-time Home Based Business you have two distinctly separate jobs, you’re the Boss and you’re the Employee and if you’re starting it part-time, then you have three distinctly separate jobs!You’re still an employee at your 9-5, that’s one, then you’re an employee at your new home business, that’s two and you’re also your own boss at your new home business, that’s three!Whenever you start a home based business YOU are your own Boss and YOU are your own Employee – that’s two extra jobs!The reason most people fail at owning and operating their own home based business is because they lacked the skills, characteristics and qualifications necessary to succeed at one job but now they have three!Of course they’re going to fail!If they couldn’t handle one job successfully, how in the world are they going to handle three?Nobody explained to them that it’s going to get much worse before it gets any easier.Before that wonderful network marketing business opportunity starts paying you tons and tons of money as if on auto-pilot it’s just another J.O.B. that you have to clock in and perform at consistently, day after day.It’s a job where you determine the kind of boss you’re working for.You can work for a boss who lets you off easy every time, who doesn’t care what time you show up for work and doesn’t really correct your bad habits and is very agreeable with everything you do.But if you have a boss like that then your performance will be shoddy, your income will be non-existent, and if you’re not making any money, eventually you will quit!But remember, the choice is yours!In network marketing your income is precisely commensurate with your performance… both as the Boss and as the Employee!If you choose to have a boss who will not let you off the hook whenever you feel tired, or when you feel frustrated with the lack of immediate results, but rather pushes you beyond your perceived limits and encourages you to find new ways to achieve more with the resources you have, then you just might find yourself generating that income you promised yourself and enjoying your slice of the American Pie.A very good principle to remember in owning and operating your own home based network marketing business is this.To become successful at Network Marketing you need to recruit people who are already successful at what they do, people who have the necessary skills, characteristics and qualifications to succeed at their chosen profession or occupation.This is a very good indicator that they also have the necessary skills, characteristics and qualifications to own and operate their own home based business successfully.And even more important than this, YOU need to become that person yourself because another network marketing truth is… like attracts like!You attract people to your business opportunity who are… just like you!So, to attract a higher quality prospect YOU have to become a better quality leader.As the well-known Network Marketing adage goes, ‘If you’ll be the toughest boss you ever had, you’ll be the wealthiest employee you ever had!

Small Business Marketing Successes

The 21st century and the global recession have certainly put the cat among the pigeons where small business is concerned but there are many straightforward no-cost and low-cost solutions for small businesses to maintain and even increase market share.As small retailers find they cannot compete against giant conglomerates they eventually close their doors unless they can offer more to their clients. This is only done with smart promoting and offering more value and a better experience to the local shopper.So, what’s the answer for small business survival?People who’ve got a brick and mortar business have a huge challenge on their hands particularly if they sell anything that is also at the giant chains.To sell the product successfully, you have got to be an expert in your field and unique in what you do. You must provide best buyer services to attract and retain clients.3 of the things large box stores don’t offer are uniqueness, experience and buyer service. These are the same 3 things that a local business can and should provide.Shopping at small local businesses is a matter of small community sustainability, because they’re the core of a community. they family, neighbors and friends, they are invested in the community professionally and personally.Its astonishing how many small businesses don’t consider it necessary to have a website. They perhaps are not aware Google essentially loves small business and always will pull a small business to the apex of a search page, just by somebody putting in the name of a town and whatever they are on the lookout for.This is an enormous advantage to a business owner. Make use of local directories, for example through the local Chamber of Commerce, where you can list your internet site, frequently for a small fee or for free.Many small business owners are convinced that starting and maintaining a site will cost them a lot of money and is difficult. But that is not correct.Cheap construction and upkeep of website has itself has now become a small scale industry. There is often a local resident who would love to support the community by assisting you with a very low cost business online presence. Some communities have taken this on to revive and support local community amenities.You will need to buy a domain name (GoDaddy is a good option) for your website address to get started, then the rest is just a simple process of getting hosting for a small monthly fee (I like to use HostGator for this) You can set up your website directly from HostGator.com. Now you are in business onlineNow All a small local business needs is a Google map of where they are, a page explaining what they do, a section that gives opening hours and contact details, some great photos and perhaps a history of the business and that is it!Add an opt in box and you have provided yourself an opportunity to promote a monthly newsletter to send out, coupons can be sent and sales announced, and with the addition of some affiliate advertizing the site can basically make the business owner some additional money even after covering the minor costs concerned.The goal of marketing is always to build a list of loyal customers that can be contacted and provided with information about the best deals available at your local small business.A business website must provide exceptional customer service, helpful info and must market itself as a unique brand like any other businessWhile it is often difficult to compete with big business, tough competition means you must use well thought out online marketing ideas and SEO strategy, particularly to build a subscribers list.Keep in mind that the goal of marketing is always to build a list of loyal customers that can be contacted and provided with the best deals available right at your back door in your own community at your local small business.

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Home Based Business vs Online Business (Part-3)

Types of Low Investment Home Based Business

In the previous two parts of this series, we had seen that online home businesses have more chances of success than their more well-known counterparts, namely traditional home based businesses. We had first seen the cons of traditional home based businesses and their corresponding pros of online home business. We then went on to explore some of the good online business opportunities that a person can do. Now, I will take you further and show you some good online home business opportunities – that which require minimal investments from your side.

Introduction

There are enough opportunities and ideas to start a home based business. The fact is that you just need to look around and see what best suits you. Below are some ideas for starting a home based business. Although, these businesses require minimum or low investments, they are not suited for anyone looking to get rich quick. But rest assured, the home based businesses discussed here would yield a good living provided you are ready to work hard making it a success.

1. Online Auction

You can actually start a home based business with eBay. If you have products and want to sell them, there is no better place than eBay. With eBay you do not need to set up an online store. You would require placing your product on eBay and then waiting for buyers to place bids on your product. You would need to educate yourself on online buying and shipping. The internet is a wonderful resource for this. If you are not comfortable with online auction, you can set up an eBay store online.

2. Secretarial Services

If you have a good printer and computer you can start a secretarial service as a home based business. You can offer your services to small businesses in your area. A few advertisements in local newspaper should do the trick.

There are many online sites where you can register yourself as a virtual assistant. These sites will regularly send you work and pay you on an hourly basis. It is worth setting up this type of home based business.

3. Web Designer

If you know HTML coding and are creative, you can think about becoming a web designer. With the internet booming, this can be a profitable home based business. There are many people looking for freelancers who can design good websites for a reasonable cost. Sites like elance.com and getafreelance.com might be worth your while to find freelance web designing contracts.

4. Proofreader

If you have excellent spelling, grammar skills and an eye for details then proofreading can be a lucrative home based business. There are many companies that hire proofreaders to edit their brochures, manuals and other text documents. You can advertise your service in the local newspaper. The other alternative would be to get your own website and advertise your services in high traffic sites.

5. Affiliate Marketing

There are many companies online that will pay you for marketing their products and services. You do not have to pay to become an affiliate marketer. However, some investment is required in terms of advertising your affiliate link or website. Currently this is the hottest home based business and many affiliate marketers are making a sizeable income.

The fact about home based business is to start small with low investment and to gradually build a multiple income stream so that if one fails, you have another to fall back on. You can think about writing an ebook. There is always a demand for well written and informative ebook. You can think about starting a niche site which gives content rich information to people. You can monetize this site with advertisements from other companies.

There are many ways that you can create multiple streams of income. You need to search what is best for you and what you are enthusiastic about. That is the secret for success for any home based business.

Yahoo Small Business – The Many Benefits

When a person starts a small business, there are many preparations to be made to ensure the overall success of the business. Some of these preparations include setting up a webpage, developing a domain, implementing emails for the business, getting internet access that is appropriate to the needs of your business, as well as developing a marketing strategy. If you implement the use of Yahoo Small Business, you can get all of this and more! In this article, you will be introduced to a number of benefits when it comes to using Yahoo Small Business.

One of the main benefits of using Yahoo to assist you with your small business needs is the Yahoo Small Business Web Hosting service that is offered. With Yahoo, you can enjoy a multitude of wonderful features. The first being that you can design your website with a great deal of flexibility! You can also implement the use of the many professionally designed templates, or pull a template from a 3rd party.

In addition to this, Yahoo Small Business Web Hosting service gives you a lot of web hosting space for your products. Each month, you are permitted to have an unbelievable 200GB of bandwidth in which data can be transferred to your customers. You can also enjoy a large 5GB of web space to effectively design your website.

When you sign up for Yahoo Small Business Web Hosting, you can get a free domain name in order to brand your website. If you already have a domain name, that is no problem! Yahoo will allow you to bring your own name with you! In addition to outstanding features that come with your web hosting subscription with Yahoo, you can enjoy the comfort of knowing that there are specially trained professionals available to you every hour of the day of the week if you have questions, concerns, or issues with your service or website.

Many small businesses enjoy the Yahoo Small Business Web Hosting service because the subscription runs on a month to month basis, and there are no contracts involved in which you must commit to a certain term of service. Furthermore, the prices are quite competitive. You can have all the benefits of this service for as little as $7.77 for the first 2 months, and then $8.96 per month thereafter! This is an exceptional value!

When using Yahoo Small Business, you can enjoy a variety of marketing features. Marketing is a key component to the overall success of your business. One of the most popular methods that many business owners use is advertising in Yahoo! Local. You can display your business logo, describe your business, advertise your products, and more by implementing the use of this effective marketing strategy.

Individuals who take advantage of the marketing tools in Yahoo Small Business can submit their website to the Yahoo search engine. Many business owners also submit their website to the Yahoo Directory, and promote their products in Yahoo Shopping. By using these various marketing tools, a business can gain exposure, increase their search engine ranking, and potentially earn an outstanding income. Yahoo Small Business works to make every effort to ensure that each business is successful in their endeavors.

Internet access is often very important when it comes to the productivity of the small business. While there are numerous providers of internet service available today, if a business decides to use Yahoo as their one stop business solution, they can enjoy the collaboration of Yahoo and AT&T. This collaboration can provide you with an inexpensive way to ensure high speed internet access with great reliability. For as little as $14.95 a month, one can enjoy exciting features such as enhanced business security, effective and reliable connections, and many tools that allow you to communicate with your clients, customers, and coworkers.

The Finer Points of Internet Auctions

WHAT IS A PENNY AUCTION?

Penny auctions have exploded in popularity with the massive growth of the internet. However, few people know the true origins of penny auctions.Beginnings actually stretch back to the Great Depression. Those were hard times for everyone, but even harder for farmers. Farmers struggled to bring in steady income because of droughts and crops not selling as well as they had previously. As a result, the banks would foreclose on the farmers who couldn’t keep up with their mortgage payments.

The banks weren’t satisfied with just repossessing the house, they wanted to raise as much capital as possible, so they resorted to selling off the possessions of the owners of the repossessed houses. There was not much the farmers could do about it so they began bidding ridiculously low prices, pennies, on the items while threatening others who dared to bid higher than a few pennies.

The auctions of today hardly resemble their tremulous beginnings. Being part of a penny auction today is exhilarating, fun, and addictive. It combines the selling format of auctioning with a little bit of chance factored in.Auctions are a game of strategy but also a game of luck.

The premise behind penny auctions is giving people the chance to win an item at a drastically reduced price.Auctions make that possible by spreading out the cost of the product among multiple bidders. In order for a person to take part in an auction, they must pay a set price for each bid. For example, if a person wanted to bid on a fifty dollar Amazon gift card then he would spend a dollar for each time a bid placed. If he ended up winning the gift card, then he would only have spent a few dollars for a fifty dollar gift card. Usually penny auctions sell bids in packages.

HOW PENNY AUCTIONS WORK!

The main foundation of penny auctions is the pay-per-bid format. It is the key that allows bidders to win items at the fraction of their retail value and allows the auction owners to keep their site profitable. Most y auction sites run on the same premise: people pay a set amount for each bid, whenever a person places a bid within the closing seconds of the auction time will be added, the last person left with a unique bid after the clocks runs out will win the item. There are a large variety of items that can be won, but they tend to be popular electronics or gift cards to popular stores.

There are two types of auctions: lowest unique bid auction and highest unique bid auction. Lowest unique auction sounds confusing but it is actually quite simple. A unique bid is when only one person has a bid at a certain price. Bids usually start at one penny, a bidder can then place a bid at two pennies. Until another bidder places a higher bid, the most recent bidder will be the lowest unique bid because that was the only bid at two cents and nobody bid higher. However, penny auctions generally don’t stop at one penny. It is not uncommon to find auctions that end up at a couple hundred dollars based on the popularity of the item being auctioned. However, the same principles apply for those auctions. Highest unique bid auctions follow the more traditional auction format such as eBay. The person with the highest bid at the end of the auction wins the item.

Auction site owners turn a profit by selling bids. Say twenty people are bidding on a ten dollar gift card at one dollar per bid, at the end of the auction if there were twenty bids placed in total then the site owner would have made twenty dollars with a ten dollar profit.Auctions do seem like a win-win situation:The site owner makes money while the bidder gets an item for dirt cheap. However, not everyone wins in penny auctions. The people who paid one dollar each bid but left with nothing to show for their investments will not be so happy.

HOW TO WIN!

Penny auction has a lot of chance mixed into it, but one can incorporate strategy that will help raise the chances of winning. Playing smart can make all the difference between gambling and auctioning.

The first crucial tip to winning penny auctions is to know how to manage your bids. Your goal should be to win as much as possible without spending a ton of money buying bids. Managing your bids means that you should already know how much you are willing to risk in order to win an item. The amount of capital you are willing to risk will determine how many bids you can use. Once you know how many bids you have to spend on an item, then you will be better able to manage how and when you place a bid. That will keep you from blowing away all of your bids in the first few seconds of the auction.

The next tip is to practice time management. When fighting in the trenches of penny auctions, you have two enemies: other bidders and time. Knowing when to bid is a must if you want to have success. Placing a bid when there is a lot of time left on the clock is never a good idea. You have to remember that the key to winning a penny auction is being the last one standing when the clock runs out and that each bid increases the amount of time left. It would be a good practice to wait until the last few minutes of the auction before you begin to bid.

The final tip for successful auctioning is to keep your emotions under control.Auctions have a lot of similarities to gambling, and just like gambling, your spending can get out of control. If you keep your emotions level, it will keep you from making rash decisions and blowing loads of cash. Keep your mind clear so that you can gage the behavior of the other bidders and outsmart them.

HOW TO AVOID SCAM SITES!

Penny auctions are a great addition to the web whether you want to win an item that otherwise you wouldn’t be able to afford or if you simply enjoy the thrill that comes with bidding in auctions. Unfortunately, scam sites have tarnished the reputation of the legitimate penny auction sites. However, there are ways that you can protect yourself from scamers and enjoy your auctioning without having to worry about losing your money due to dishonesty.

Checking the reputation of the auction site before you start spending your hard earned money is always a good idea. Chances are other people have tried the site before you and some of them have left reviews. The reviews are your way to gage whether a auction site is trustworthy or not. If a site is getting overwhelmingly negative reviews, then that is a clear indication that you should steer your business elsewhere.

Another tool you can use to protect yourself is checking the Alexia ranks of the auction sites. Alexia rank will give a solid view of how much traffic the auction is getting. If you see a huge difference in the amount of traffic Alexia is projecting and the amount of active bidders on the site, then warning signals should be ringing in your head. Some auction sites have been known to set up robots that automatically bid on projects in order to keep the auction going and inflate the price. That is known as shill bidding. You can sniff out those sites by comparing the traffic the site should be getting to the amount of users using this site.

CONCLUSION!

New legislation may come out later down the road that will officially make penny auctions gambling, but until then, it is a fun, exciting auction that allows one to win the item they’ve always wanted but couldn’t afford.Auctions are also quite lucrative for the site owners because of the pay-per-bid strategy they’ve incorporated. Penny auctions had humble beginnings with farmers who just wanted to get back at the banks who kicked them out of their house. More recently, auctions have enjoyed an explosion in popularity with the rise of the internet.

There are two main formats fora auctions, lowest and highest unique auction, however they both run on the same premise where the last unique bid wins the item. Winning a penny auction will require a certain amount of mental tactic and a bit of luck. However, you can increase your odds of winning by practicing certain techniques such as managing your bids wisely, learning how to work with the time, and keeping a level head and your emotions under control. When you combine those three strategies to your bidding plan, you will find that you win a lot more often.

It is important that you do your due diligence to protect yourself when participating in auctions. Not every auction is run by honest and trustworthy people. There are people out there who just want to take your money. You can protect yourself by ensuring that you only bid on sites that already have a very positive reputation from real users.

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