Smorty - blog for money service

As part of my posts about blogging for money services, I will discuss about another such website today. Smorty is one of the get paid to blog services that connects advertisers and bloggers. Advertisers pay bloggers to put links on blogs and write about their service to get traffic and create buzz. A regularly updated blog has good chance of getting accepted. They, however, reject blogs if the content is not updated frequently, is not indexed by Google and Yahoo, or is not at least 3 months old. This service is only available for blogs in English.

Smorty's interface is easy and any publisher can easily set up an account. The offers for review are priced based on the Page Rank of a blog. More Page Rank sites gets higher paying campaign offers. They also have a combined score called smarty score based on Google Page Rank, Alexa ranking, return rate of given tasks, approval rate of completed tasks and the number of completed tasks. Blogs scoring higher get higher paid offers.

One advantage of Smorty is that one can submit as many blogs as he/she wants unlike some other blog for money services. This is greatly beneficial for small time bloggers. Another advantage is the payment which is a weekly system. So bloggers get paid every week for the previews done last week through PayPal. One can apply from any country for Smorty's service.

One of the limitations of Smorty at present is that one can't submit more than one blog from the same account. One has to create as many accounts if he/she wants to submit many blogs as a publisher. They say they are working on fixing this issue. Also, it seems there are limited number advertisers for blog advertising at Smorty. This puts it at a disadvantage as compared to other more established names in the blog for money services. Hopefully, as the service gets older, more advertisers will register for Smorty.

Mortgage loan guide

I was reading a blog post by Deepak Shenoy the other day in which he mentioned some terms in the US that are unique and not used elsewhere. One of the terms mentioned was Mortgage. It's used when a person applies for a loan to buy a house in the US. It is pretty expensive to buy a house and so most people would find it impossible to pay the price in cash. Not to mention, the tax man would come calling if someone did pay cash.

Mortgage is a common term used in the US for house loans. There's a useful website with links to many useful articles to learn more about mortgage. Mortgage Loan Place has articles ranging from FHA loans to Reverse mortgage to Mortgage insurance and Refinancing. Some of these are complicated terms (e.g. Reverse mortgage) and there are many articles in the guide to make you understand them better. I found the articles interesting to read even though I went to the page to do this review.

The guide gives information on any policy changes and housing market. Buying a house is a dream for most people and one of the most important decisions in their life. Being well aware of the current situation in the market is a must for anyone. The articles in Mortgage Loan Place are one of the easiest way to learn more about loans. The articles are free to read and updated regularly. Anyone interested in knowing more about the housing loans can go read them.

Cashunclaimed

I'm reviewing of a very interesting website today. It's called Cashunclaimed. For the US people, it seems like there's some kind of central database of all the money that is lying without being claimed by anyone. This website offers a service to find if you have money lying somewhere without your knowledge. It offers money-back guarantee that the legitimate owner will get their money.

One can search the website for free by First name and Last name if they have such money. It could be some inheritance, some savings account, or some other source. The search is free, but if you get some unclaimed money on your name and want to search the records to find where the money lies, you have to pay a fee of $11 per month to Cashunclaimed. You can do anything you want for this one month.

Being sceptic, I entered my first name and last name, and there was no money unclaimed for me. I entered Bill Gates, and his namesakes have some money. Note that there is a big chance that the unclaimed money doesn't belong to you but to some other person with same name as yours - or a person with some variation of your name. There would be only one person or a group of such persons with legit claim on the money, but hundreds others with similar names. So, one has to be careful before registering in such sites. Try to make sure you are likely to have been left with unclaimed money from somewhere. Otherwise, the website will make money.

Review - Compare credit cards

These days credit cards have become a sort of necessity for consumers. Be it shopping, eating out, or simply booking flight tickets online, many times there is no other option but to use a credit card. With the abundance of credit cards, it would be good to have a website that compares the different types of credit cards available in the market. Today I will review one such website .

There is a website aptly named creditcard.org.uk for credit cards available in the UK. It compares credit cards based on different categories. There are different categories of cards like Gold cards, Cashback cards, Platinum cards, 0% purchase cards, etc.

There are so many options to chose from the available credit cards that such a site for comparing credit cards is useful for anyone planning to get a new credit card. The home page of the site has 'Compare credit cards' menu from which one can select any category to compare. The user can compare these cards based on offers such as rate, duration, cashback, rewards and choose the best one.

Even though there are different categories of credit cards to choose from the drop down menu, I had a feeling that it doesn't have information on all credit cards. For example, I chose cashback cards but the result showed only one card. Similar was the case with Gold cards. That is very unlikey, even impossible, that there's only one bank offering such cards in the UK. Similar was the case for some other categories as well. To be truly useful to a user, all available cards should be available in the result so that he can select the best.

UK finance forum - a review

Finance Markets recently changed the look of their website and UK finance forum. They wanted to get a review of the new look forum of their website. So I registered on the forum to experience how it is like before reviewing.

A forum dedicated to discussions on finance anywhere would, expectedly, have similar kind of discussions. The forum is no exception and has all kind of threads of discussions. The discussions are divided into three main categories - Finance, Investing, and General. Each category is then further subdivided into different groups e.g. in Finance they have Banking, Loans, Mortgage, etc. I feel while it is nice to divide them into so many different groups, it somehow fragments the category too much and browsing the forums becomes more cumbersome. Instead, if they had just the main categories, it could be better. Since it is not a heavy traffic forum yet, this could give users a better experience.

The topics of discussion in the forum vary from "how do I save money to invest" to "where should I invest", to any other topic one could come up with related to finance and investments. In addition, the "General" category has threads on other non-finance topics as well.

The look and layout of the forum is not intuitive. In fact, one would immediately feel he has seen such layout many times in other forums. It looks like this is the most common format for online forums.

There are a few hundred registered users in the forum. The traffic is not high; there are entire stretches of weeks with not a single posting in some groups. That is one of the reasons they are pushing on getting the word out about the forum. People interested in Finance and Investment, specially in the UK, could register and might find their answers in this forum.

Super affiliate Zac Johnson

Today I am reviewing the blog of super affiliate Zac Johnson. The term super affiliate means they run their own affiliate networks and obviously earn quite $ome money online. Well, quite a lot, actually. Zac's network of affiliates is called Moneyreign network.

First thing I did, which I hope every reviewer does, was to go spend some time on his blog. The blog is lively with daily updates on interesting ways to make money online through affiliate marketing. Zac has a lot of experience in online money-making (10+ yrs experience in online affiliate marketing is like doing business on earth since prehistoric time. Afterall, the real thing started with companies like Google, Amazon, and Ebay that weren't around 10 years ago).

One of the things I like most in a blog, apart from the quality of posts, and which keeps me subscribed is the frequency of posts. It should be frequent and Zac does it almost daily which is a big plus. His postings are mainly about money making schemes but there are some personal posts as well, along with pics. Such postings makes the blog more attractive to readers and breaks the monotone. Afterall, there's more to write than just money even if the site is named 'Make money with Super Affiliate Zac Johnson'.

The blog posts are nicely aggregated into categories which a new reader to the blog should find useful depending on his/her topics of interest. Archives of his blog shows that he started the blog in March 2007 which means it is only a few months old. Still, it is generating a lot of traffic and comments. I guess it should have a loyal feed readers, though the number isn't yet shown on the site(maybe Zac want the number to go up to few thousands before putting up that chicklet showing xxxx readers).

There are few ads on the site. In fact, I observed only some affiliate links in the blog, some of which are very wisely converted into tinyurls. The lack of ads on the site indicates he is focussed on increasing the readership of his blog.

Overall, the blog is interesting for those wanting to learn how to make money online. Since I am one of them, I have subscribed to his blog and intend to read it with interest.

Merchant account processing website

I have decided to review some websites as a filler to this blog i.e. When I don't write about investment, I will try to keep this blog updated frequently with such reviews. These reviews may be of interest to some of you.

Today I am reviewing a website that deals with merchant accounts It provides merchant account processing services to small and big merchants. If you don't know what a merchant account is used for, read it here.

The website accepts Visa/Mastercard processing and also accepts Credit Card Payments processing. Retailers who accept such cards from their customers are expected to have a merchant account. Without a merchant account, a retailer has to wait for weeks for invoice to come and more for the payment to clear. With such accounts it is a matter of days when payments get cleared. Merchant account are provided by banks as well as third party like the website being reviewed. Banks are very selective in opening such accounts, so third party solutions are the best option in that case.

As far as the website is considered, it is decent with every page having at least three links at various places to "Apply now" link. The navigation could be improved though. For example, there is a FAQs section, but it would take some serious effort to locate it. Similary, the help/tutorial/information section is difficult to reach from the main page. These two sections should be on the homepage. Sitemap is not the most obvious place to place those links, and many readers don't even click it.

Overall, it is a good website to go look out for more info on merchant accounts and to get in touch with a processor of such accounts.