That is until you meet the first person who gladly  shakes your hand and looks you straight in the eye and then writes a worthless check. Here are some GREAT TIPS and a great resource to help. The links to Amazon are affiliate links. Thanks for your support!

If you accept checks as a form of payment, remember that accepting checks doesn’t come without some element of risk.  Some businesses don’t like to deal with “bad” or returned checks so they don’t accept them as a form of payment.  That is one way to limit your credit risk in relation to checks.  Here are some things you can do to avoid getting bad checks:

·           Don’t accept checks – accepting checks is a privilege extended by you to your customer

·           Don’t let the check writer rush you.

·           Don’t take any check or person for granted – ALWAYS obtain proper ID

·           Don’t accept pre-written personal checks, at least the signature should be written in your  presence.

·           Don’t accept unsigned checks.

·           Don’t accept starter checks.

If you do decide you will accept checks, make sure to:

·           Check that the name, address and phone number are imprinted on the check.

·           Accept checks with the current date only

·           Compare the ID picture with that of the person cashing or writing the check.

·           Make sure the check signature marches the ID signature

·           Make sure the phone number is a working phone

·           Ask for a physical or street address if only a PO box is listed

Writing a bad check is a crime in every state, and is punishable by a fine and/or imprisonment. There are an estimated 450 million bad checks written every year.  This includes checks written without sufficient funds or upon accounts that have been closed.

Bad check laws do not apply when an individual stops payment on a check unless it can be proven that the issuer of the check intended to stop the payment on the check when he or she presented the check for payment.  Some states authorize the receiver of a bad check to collect a service charge to compensate for bank fees and/or any costs incurred as a result of receiving and collecting on a bad check.  Be sure to check your states statutes for the current fees or laws on what you can add to a bad check balance legally.

Michelle Dunn is an award winning author and columnist frequently featured in the Wall Street Journal, CNN and Forbes. She is the author of “The Guide to Getting Paid, weed out bad paying customers, collect on past due balances and avoid bad debt”, available here…

When I have gone to pay online the last few months, I’ve noticed AT&T’s catchy phrase that pops up frequently as the transaction is processed.

It says “RETHINK POSSIBLE”

I’m sure that’s supposed to mean something GOOD.

It’s supposed to remind us that we live in an age where adult stem cell transplants do marvelous things to repair damaged bodies.

It’s supposed to remind us that it’s cheaper to buy a new technology that’s twice as powerful as our old technology (projectors, laptops, etc) for about the same price.

Et cetera.

Et cetera.

And by implication when you do business with AT&T something equally marvelous is about to happen.

And I might have believed that if my wife and I handn’t spent a year trying to resolve constant overbilling with our landline phone.

We’d call month after month, get temporary fix, after temporary fix.

Get rebilled the erroneous charge.

Talk with someone new.

Get threatening letters about cancelling our service.

Call again to somebody new.

Finally at the end of the ordeal the billing issue seems fixed only to have our line develop this background hum that makes it virtually unusable.

We just keep it for emergencies now.

So when I see the little sign “Rethink Possible”… I do that everytime before I pick up the phone to call AT&T.

I ask myself – is getting help possible?

I rethink that a bit and usually conclude… No.

Beware the catchy motto you use for your business.

Your customers might just do what it says and decide it’s not worth trying to do business with you.

I guess when you hear this story, you’ll think “I hate it when that happens!” The entrepreneur who missed this opportunity will live to see it destroy his core business it seems.

From Dane’s Blog

Warning, this is controversial. I’m not suggesting you copy it (though you could). But I’m suggesting you recognize how currently “HOT” news can become a way to make money rather quickly via Kindle.

First of course you have to know how to be a Kindle Publisher!

But once you know that, you’ll see how easy it is to do what this person did.

What’s all over the news today (December 9th, 2010)?

Wikileaks

Guess what? Amazon UK is selling at least excerpts from the Wikileaks cables as a Kindle book already.

Now you may not agree.

That may make you mad as you-know-what.

I’m not saying you should do the same thing at all.

What I’m saying is that if there is something in the NEWS and you know how simple it is to be a Kindle Publisher, you can turn news items into revenue on one of the busiest sales platforms in the world!  How much will you make? Don’t know. How long will the money come in? Don’t know.

But what I do know is that if you find a trending topic and know millions have their minds focused on the subject, a Kindle book can be a fast way to test that market and maybe cash in.

I tried to do this for one subject and never made the first $10 so it doesn’t ALWAYS work. But at least you know how to “get in the game”. Put the “buzz” to work for you!

Have you heard about the new TV show Storage Wars?

It’s a “reality show” that is about people who bid on the contents of storage buildings whose owners have defaulted. You hear about this from time to time in the news when someone doesn’t pay their monthly fee and some “missing husband” turns up.

The sad part is in this economy that the people who aren’t able to pay are people who’ve lost everything… and these are often valued possessions.

The industry standard is that after three months of non-payment, the contents are put up for auction to recover those costs and clear out the building for a paying customer. The bargain hunters find things to resell  in one way or another.

A&E presents the new original real-life series “Storage Wars,” which follows four professional buyers and their teams as they scour repossessed storage units in search of hidden treasure. Part gamblers, part detectives, these seasoned veterans have found everything from coffins to the world’s most valuable comic book collection, paying as little as ten dollars for items valued in the millions.

Want to read more? Check out “Mini Storage Auction Secrets” (Affiliate Link)

I worked for nearly three years from home doing eBay, back in the beginning when you could sell a bag of Florida sand for a profit. Everything sold, things were out on the street every day to buy and turn for a good profit. I sold antiques and vintage stuff, my background is antiques.

Those days slowly started petering out and the money got less and less so, stupidly, I bought my own antiques business and for 7 years went through hell. I dreaded the end of the month – bill/rent time, and in the last few months I began to hate most of the people that came into the shop. They were cheap or had no intention of buying anything, or just came to waste time. I left that business with a large debt.

Being used to spending hours on line with the eBay stuff, I decided I would try to earn a living online but wasn’t sure how. I found a good company that showed me how to build a website properly, but I chose a subject that was unprofitable, and when someone asked me if I would sell the site, I jumped at the opportunity.

Now what to do? By my estimation I spent 2500 hours online within a couple of short months, searching for something bona fide that I could do. I bought tons of Guru BS programs and sent all but three of them back.

After looking at all the schemes and “secret” tips and ways of making money online, I decided to go first with Tiffany Dow’s PLR ATM course. Then I discovered Brian Johnson’s Commission Ritual, then somehow I discovered Matt Carter. Dan Brock’s Lazy Affiliate complemented Brian’s course nicely.

I strongly suspect that Google will eventually slap all the little niche sites that promote affiliate products, especially Amazon and the like, but I have a few sites up that are starting to show a trickle a trickle of income, so if I am wrong, good. They have only been up less than two weeks to date, so I am pleased with the results. If they do get slapped, I can go back to article writing and PLR.

The key to working from home and earning from the internet IMHO, is discipline and not putting all your eggs in one basket, and, most importantly, finding people you can trust. Any of the people I have mentioned above take the time to answer questions and are good, honest, helpful people.

My recommendation FWIW. Find what you like to do, and stick with it. I spent yesterday unsubscribing from all the other Guru comedian’s email lists and I feel so much better, that’s freed up an extra hour a day. I can’t get conned into watching 90 minute USELESS webinars either, I was getting invitations nearly every night. Most of these webinars tell you very little and are just long-winded promos for stuff you don’t need anyway. Another 6 hours a week saved.

I wish everyone good luck with their enterprises, just concentrate and work hard and you will succeed.

Chuck’s Wrap Up Click here to find out how the Internet Guru’s are ripping you off! (free info, but this is an affiliate tracking link)

A humorous YouTube video made all the difference and now the product – a toungue brush to stop bad breath – is finally making a come back. You Tube accounts for a million in sales already according to the New York Times article.

Sales slow?

The danger is that you might SUCCEED and not be able to accomodate your orders.

But if you can accomodate the new business, producing a humorous YouTube video could boost your sales.

Have you tried it for your work at home business?

I’ll be offering more tips soon on how to do just that.

I remember one time I ran a financial ad that had my voice mail box so filled with leads I didn’t know what to do. I spent money, got great results, but after that I found I couldn’t deliver. The ad was so sensational no human product or service honestly presented could live up to it I guess. But at least I knew I could write an ad!

It was a new technological concept for me… (this was before the Internet)… I used a newspaper ad to offer a free report and had people call a toll free number to hear another screening pitch and secure their mailing address.  As I said, my actual performance sucked, but at least the ad was a success!

I remembered that when I ran across this post called “Groupon in Retrospect” . Groupon of course is the company that emails local customers and gives them an email coupon local companies hope will build their customer base.

So what happened?

As you may have guessed it DIDN”T make them rich.

In fact, it COST them $8,000! Why? Groupon doesn’t just charge per 1,000 to blast their email list. They do something that in one sense makes sense. They only get paid when they deliver paying customers to your business. They are paid up to $100 of all revenues earned by the retailer for sales under $10 according to this retailer!

This retailer negotiated a lower fee – 50%. Their groupon was for $13 in value for $6 in revenue. $3 for every coupon sold was payable to Groupon.

After 1,000 Groupons pouring in over six months, they figured they had lost $8,000 and that the advertising campaign had cost them more than it returned.

She conceded that for a service business that only uses otherwise “lost time” (if you’re a massage therapist for example and you schedule appointments when you don’t have paying customers anyway for example) Groupon could be great.

I wonder if her opinion will change over time?

She said some  of the people Groupon brought were nice folks, not merely jerks wanting something for nothing.

Let’s say of the 1,000 redeemed coupons 500 were bad apples.

But the other 500 were decent people she’d like to have come back.

Will there ever be a chance that these 500 will buy enough to make her investment pay off?

I don’t know her “numbers”, but it seems to me this still could turn positive. If the average customer is worth $500 per year in sales, she might still see another additional $250,000 per year. (I get that by calculating 500 x $500.)

I don’t know what her profit margin is, but if you can’t make $8,000 back from $250,000 something is messed up!

But let’s examine the “worst case”.

Let’s say her profit margin is 10%.

That 500 would only have to purchase an average of about $3.50 per week for the next year (each) to recover that cost. All future purchases would be “pure profit”.

I’m not sure her Groupon purchase was such a bad buy. It least it holds the potential for breaking even unlike my little adventure.

But beware— sometimes success can be a “bear”!

Read it all at “Groupon in Retrospect”

There’s a problem out there.

Scammers posing as “Internet Marketing Gurus” are sucking thousands of dollars out of the pockets of unsuspecting and often desperate people on their last leg financially.

That happens with all sorts of “business opportunities”.

Internet marketing is an especially lucrative field though because the products are normally “digital”… 100% profit… not even paper and ink to smudge your fingers!

They prey upon your desire to live the Great American Dream for yourself.

They paint an amazing picture.

By the time they’re done, you’ll believe that just before you started reading their sales letter they were a penniless janitor without two nickels to rub together. In fact, they didn’t even have pockets to put the nickels in!

But after sharing the same frustration YOU had at all the failed methods, all the lies you’ve been told, and all the people bent on robbing you of success, they’ll tell you how they discovered a little known niche that they are going to share with you along with a few million select friends.

The initial price will seem reasonable, then once you buy you’ll be pitched deal after deal after deal promising more and more and making your feel like a more and more useless fool if you dare click “No thanks I realize I’m dooming myself to a perpetual penniless hell if I do not part with every cent you claim I need to spend!”

Of course this a letter written by the guy who wrote something very similar for the last 20 little products and charged $5,000 per campaign for the privilege of making you believe you could beat the system just by opening your wallet… almost no work required you know!

And even though you know what the technique is, the possibility that you could live the “Internet Lifestyle” overwhelms your good sense.

After all who WOULDN’T want to wake up at Noon, work 10 minutes checking your stats, clicking a few buttons and spend the rest of the day surfing or sipping mixed drinks on the beach?

Unfortunately that too can be a complete lie… in fact you’re about to learn the name of a man who made his money selling the internet lifestyle while actually living a lie.

Interested? Check out :How To Keep Internet Marketing Guru’s From Ripping You Off – it’s TOTALLY FREE!

Want more? Read the rest of : How To Keep Internet Marketing Guru’s From Ripping You Off | ChuckHuckaby.com http://www.chuckhuckaby.com/special-offers/internet-marketing-gurus-ripping-you-off