Now, as we’re all aware, you need to be careful and organized about it. People who misuse credit cards soon learn the error of their ways, but if you’re willing to be mature about their use and pay them down whenever possible, credit cards can be a real lifesaver.

Have you signed up for a new credit card recently? How about considering the credit cards in your wallet? If you’re like most people, you’ve probably had your cards your years and don’t really pay too much attention to the rates or the benefits you receive.

But this can be a real mistake. Credit card comparison sites like Know Your Money can reveal some shocking information. You will be able to see just how good a deal you could really get if only you’re smart about it and are willing to make a change. Suddenly all the “tricks” and gimmicks that card companies use to attract new customers are there for all to see - and you can finally compare all the various deals to see which would really be best for you.

For example, why not swap any existing balances onto a 0% APR card for 6 months so you’re only paying off the balance rather than the interest? How about getting extra benefits in terms of points and rewards? If you use credit cards, it would be well worth taking a look at this comparison site to see just how much you could save.

Infact, here’s an interesting little secret you may not know…

Not only are there direct insurance companies offering policies, but they also try to increase their reach by offering these same policies at “wholesale” prices to a number of nationwide brokers. These brokers then sell these policies on and the difference in cost between what they buy them for and what they sell them for they keep as a profit.

This means that as with travel agents, you can sometimes find the same product available for a different price depending on who you speak to as that particular broker may be willing to accept a lower commissions rate.

In the past, even if you knew about this loophole (which I didn’t!) then actually using it to save money was difficult. A considerable amount of legwork was required in researching and then telephoning as many brokers as you could find to compare their deals. Let’s also not forget that each time you had to give the same endless list of details so they could quote you.

What I’ve recently discovered is a website that concentrates on getting you the cheapest van insurance possible which makes the whole process much more convenient. It amazingly includes the ability to search through a boatload of brokers, providing you with 15 different competing quotes after you enter in your details just once.

It is therefore not only incredibly time-efficient for you (far less shopping around needed to find a good deal) but of course also has the potential to save you a considerable amount of money.

But here’s the thing. Not so long ago, with a bit of time of my hands, I thought it might be fun to enter one of two competitions. Surprisingly, I won. So I entered a few more. And I won one or two more. Over the last 6 weeks or so I have now won 2 camcorders, $100 in cash, $400 worth of books, free advertising on a popular website, a t-shirt and a piece of software worth over $100. The total time spent on all this was around half a day of effort. That’s pretty amazing, don’t you think?

And so I thought I’d draw your attention to all the free stuff I’ve been winning and how you can do the same if you’re willing to apply yourself.

In my experience, the best competitions are where you have to do a little something. Where all you have to do is add a comment, the competition will likely get hundreds, even thousands of entries. But if you have to do something a little harder, 90% of the people who hear about the competition won’t bother entering. I’ve written articles, I’ve completed surveys and that sort of thing. Not hard, but enough to count out the majority of my potential competition.

I myself wouldn’t bother entering a competition where I had to do loads of stuff, just enough to make a difference. Personally I wait until the competition is drawing to a close to see how many people have applied. If the competition finishes in a couple of days and there are only half a dozen entries I jump straight in. And it’s a method that seems to have worked well so far.

So why not get out there, visit some blogs (BlogCatalog.com is my favorite place to find them) and get entering some competitions. And if you win anything, please let me know!

Grab It Now is an exciting new concept with one focus - they offer one great deal each day. The deals aren’t generally repeated so in order to get that deal, you have to grab it now, hence the name.

The actual savings available are huge and the site shows you comparable costs with other retailers and I personally think they’ve offered some great products recebtly like cordless headphones, mp3 players and the like. The savings are all substantial and this looks like a perfect place to shop for birthday or Christmas presents if you’ve got the time and patience to keep an eye on the site over time.

They offer both an email newsletter and an RSS feed so you can stay updated with their latest offers without having to keep logging into the site every day to make life easier.

As if the prices and products weren’t enough the site is also very attractive to look at and simple to navigate.

Incase you can’t tell - I really like it!

Snap up a bargain today at GrabItNow.com

Be aware, of course, that even the most generous merchant account provider will require some details - often proof of i.d., bank account details and so on but fortunately some providers in the more competetive markets such as the US will open you an account automatically when you fill in a few basic details, then expect you to follow up in a reasonable timescale later with the necessary paperwork. This paperowrk is course as much about legal requirements as it is about your merchant account provider making life difficult for you.

In order to accept credit cards instantly you should have as many details to hand as possible when applying, thus speeding up the application process considerably. Normally just a few short online forms, you’ll be set up in moments if you have the informationeasily to hand. They can of course take quite a bit longer if you have to root around for details of when your business was formed, bank account details and so on.

After the short application process which may involve a simple credit check on you or your business, you will be provided with your own password-protected control panel from where you can administer your new merchant account.

From here you can easily integrate your merchant account facility into the rest of your website and be accepting credit cards online within minutes of signing up.

I think my own record for a test was five minutes from first visiting their website to processing ym first credit cartd order when my old processor packed up just as I was launching a new site! A quick scrabble around and we were back in business in minutes!

You can learn more at Merchant Account Forum

We’re celebrating today. Our recent article on how to make money using video has won the very prize we told you about - yes we’ve won a video camera, courtesy of Click Consultants.

Which leads me onto the point of this article…

It took probably an hour of so from beginning to end to understand what they were looking for in a winner, then writing, editing and submitting the article. But we won.

So in essence we exchanged an hour of our time for a camcorder, which doesn’t sound like such a bad deal, does it?

If you look into competitions online you’ll find there are a whole host of them around from winning the most random things (like someone I know who won a years supply of Oasis drink!) to BMW cars and more. It’s all available if you’re willing to put the time in.

I’m not a heavy competition-enterer myself, so I couldn’t tell you where your chances of success are greatest, but if you’re spending plenty of time at home because you have children, or you’re ill in bed, or you just have one of those jobs where you can spend plenty of time online and you don’t want to get into actually setting up an online business with all the effort it involves, you might want to consider entering some competitions to see what you’ll win.

I have entered probably 10-15 competitions in the last month and won 2 of them so while I don’t have a huge amount of data to go on, the key *seems* to be to find competitions with few entries and that require some effort to enter.

An example of a bad competition to enter would be one on a popular website like MSN that receives hundreds of thousands of visits each day, and to enter all you have to do is type your email address into a bix and click the button.

Too many people, too easy. That means your odds of willing will be slim to none. And the prize is likely pretty small.

Better to find a new website, product or blog that is looking to get noticed, and so decides to run a competition where you have to take a photo, write an article, make up a poem etc. Something creative that will cost you nothing to do, but is enough to scare off 90% of the competition.

Good luck - and let me know if you win anything

Indeed, if it really is just temporary you could easily qualify for what is known as a “payday loan” which basically offers to lend you some of the money you’ve earned this much and will get paid literally in the next few weeks - but you can get it now.

Payday loan companies will ususally be able to turn around a loan in 24 hours or less so they act fast and help to get you out of a difficult squeeze when you most need the help. Even better, their rates tend to be far better than if you put the charge onto a credit card, and of course they’re lending you cash. Some surprise bills simply can’t be paid using a credit card and cash is the only way to go in these situations.

One example of such a company, serving those readers in the USA is Payday One, who offer State Licensed Cash Advances at short notice, even to borrowers with poor credit (because you’ve already earned the money you’ll pay them, so they are at less risk).

Also, unlike many other companies offering payday loans they don’t require you to fax off all sorts of pieces of information which can be very impractical and really slow down the application process as you try to find everything they want and then find someone with a fax machine so you can send the details over. Instead you can apply online, at any time of day, using a simple, secure form on their website.

So if you’re based in the USA and you could use a payday loan, why not check them out today?

Check the ad is on your page, and press this button to confirm that the

From a marketing perspective, online video has a number of benefits over traditional text.

1) Different Learning Styles

We all appreciate different modalities. Some people like to read, others to watch and others still like to listen in order to absorb information. By having the content on your website available in only one format - like text - you are severely limiting the uptake of your content. In contrast, having content in video format means those visitors who prefer either video *or* sound are catered for, greatly increasing the reach of your message.

By having content in the format best suited to your visitors, you will increase the results you generate as you will find your messages are “taken to heart” better.

But it’s not just this modality element. Even for people who like text, video is the perfect format to show somebody how to do something. Let’s say you’re trying to train your dog to roll over. You can read about it on a web page, even see pictures of it, but it’s not until you see someone *do* it in video that you get the “Aha!” moment.

This problem-solving element can be powerful in helping your affiliate sales. You can show someone how to put up a shelf for example, then show them the tools you used, how much you like them, and where to get them from. You’re providing a useful service, and they may well end up buying the same drill as you and in doing so, earning you a commission. This “show and tell” element can be applied to almost limitless processes and products.

2) Video Is Easy To Share

Thanks for online video services such as YouTube and Google Video it is easy to share video using email, social bookmarking and/or embedding videos in your website. In that way, your message can spread rapidly if it is interesting enough to pass on. Visitors to your videos will send the link to their friends, add it to their MySpace page etc. and your viewer numbers can grow rapidly.

3) Video Ranks Well Organically

At present, Google seems to love video content, which isn’t surprising bearing in mind they are the world’s most visited search engine *and* they own YouTube, the world’s most visited video site. This turns out to be a killer combination and videos are now achieving excellent ranks for numerous keywords.

For long-tail keywords, often making a short video, then publishing it to a video sharing site and social bookmarking it to build a few trusted links to it can be enough to hit the top 10 results for a given keyword phrase and start building organic traffic to your message.

What’s more, try to get your text-based website to the top of the organic search engines for phrases like “mortgage” or “dog training” and you’ll likely fail. Competition is so hot in many markets now that it can be hard to get a foothold in many verticals.

With video, in contrast, the playing field is still wide open in most areas. You can often gain visibility not just in Google, but in YouTube, Viddler, MSN and a host of other sites by using video. It’s a “short cut” to search engine traffic and this is the perfect time to make use of it.

4) Video Builds Trust

The internet suffers from being an anonymous place. You don’t know who is behind any website. We’ve all heard horror stories of people making off with a boat-load of cash after conning some innocent people on the Internet. It’s hard to tell who is legitimate, and who is a fraud. Who *really* is a dog training expert offering solid advice, and who is a teenage kid trying to steal your credit card number?

Video helps to bridge that gap by showing “the person behind the HTML”. Videos, like blogging, help to build rapport and to show your visitors *who* they are dealing with. And as we all know, people buy from people they like.

These four essential elements boil down to a golden money-making opportunity - and the time to harness it is right now.

From my point of view I have done some screen capture videos which have done quite well but using a video recorder like the Creative Vado will help me ramp up the results even more and create some truly impressive presentations.

Here’s the basic plan to help make more money online using video…

1) Look For Problems In The Market

Look for niches, questions, problems. The sort of things people are researching online and are desperate to find a solution to. An excellent guide on finding niches like this is Desperate Buyers Only. Let’s take an example here just to help show the process - and that is “How To Lose Weight Fast”. Nobody wants to lose weight slowly - they want a quick solution to get into a wedding dress, bikini or trunks in the next month.

2) Find One Or More Solutions

Go looking for related affiliate products like weight loss pills (a hot topic), weight loss patches, diet books on Clickbank and so on. Compare and constrast them to find those which you think will convert the best and really get to know the products well. Then register related domains for those products and cloak them so that, as an example, www.HoodiaDietPills.com actually forwards through to the highest-converting Hoodia offer you can find and so on.

3) Create A Process

This is where the “show” not “tell” element of video comes in. Don’t just say “to lose weight fast, buy these pills”. No, make it educational and informative. Try out some diet pills. Ask people on weight loss forums which ones work best. Ask for opinions. Email people who have tried them and then stick all this opinion together to make an educational video about which diet pills work and which don’t. End each video with one or more of your cloaked domains where viewers can get more information on the products mentioned.

4) Collect The Profits

By making your videos genuinely useful people will visit the sites you mention when they finish watching your videos. What’s more, if it really is useful, you will quickly generate word of mouth for your videos, build traffic and ultimately create even more sales.

This is a process I am already using on a small scale, but having the use of a video camera such as the Creative Vado would help me ramp up this process massively, pumping out video after video and quickly generating a considerable number of carefully-targetted visitors to my offers.

If you want to find out more about the Creative Vado video camera or this post has inspired you to get making videos, you can enter a competition at present to win one of these cameras. Find out exactly how by visiting Click Consultants or The University Kid - both of which list full details for entry.

If so, then Bills.com which I recently discovered may be well worth a look. This easy to navigate website offers help with all aspects of debt relief and debt consolidation.

Reassuringly registered with the Better Business Bureau which monitors standards, and billing themselves as the “one stop resource for saving money”, their site is split into a number of clear areas such as mortgages, debt help and insurance and features a handy savings calculator.

Simply enter a few details about yourself into the online calculator and it will tell you how much money you could be saving with their advice.

Their site also offers information on how to remortgage your house if the monthly payments are eating you alive or how to consolidate debt if you have a number of outstanding creditors.

In short, this is a really nice, simple to use site that provides lots of benefits for those seeking debt and money-saving advice.