Do you think you know a lot about money? Maybe you do. Maybe you don’t. But let’s see if any of the following facts are in any way surprising to you:

1. More of our fantasies are about money… than sex.
2. If we could have any luxury in the world (and money didn’t matter) more of us would choose to spend money on a butler and a maid than anything else.
3. 90% of Americans who own pets buy them Christmas gifts.
4. Money is the leading cause of disagreements in marriages.
5. 65% of Americans would live on a deserted island all by themselves for an entire year for $1,000,000.
6. For $10,000,000 most of us would do almost ANYTHING! Including abandoning our family and friends and our church. A very high percentage of us would, for that same amount of money, change our race or sex. And, 1 in every 14, would even murder someone for ten million bucks.What’s really strange about this is, the statistics remain the same whether it’s ten million dollars all the way down to three million. For three million bucks, most of us would do the same horrible things we would do for ten million. But, guess what? Few of us would do these things for a “measly” two million.
7. 92% of us would rather be rich than find the love of our lives.
8. Here’s a weighty one: Money (or the lack thereof) is the biggest stress inducer in the lives of Americans. We worry more about money than our marriages, our health, or even who’s going to win the Superbowl Game or come out on top in the latest Survivor TV show.
9. If you get your money out of a Hitachi ATM machine in Japan, it will be laundered. The way they do it is, they briefly press the bills between rollers at high enough temperatures to kill most bacteria.
10. Women have very fixed ideas on how much they are willing to spend on a bra. 38.3% of women won’t spend $30 for a bra. 28.4% won’t spend $50. 10% would pay as much as $75. And, only 3.5% would shell out $100. But, you know what? Almost 20% of women say they would pay almost anything for a bra. This is because they consider (and I guess so do a few men) that the contents of what those bras are encasing is of extremely high-value.
11. Nearly half of the people who sell their houses with furniture included will take all the light bulbs out of all the lamps when they vacate the premises.
12. Most people won’t bend over to pick up money lying on the sidewalk unless it’s at least a dollar.
13. Most Americans think pennies are a pain in the ass and the U.S. Mint should stop making them.
14. There is about 405 billion dollars in circulation. Only 32 million of that amount is counterfeit. That means, the percentage of counterfeit money in America is .0079%. And, $20 bills are more often counterfeited than $100 bills.
15. Do people care if their bills are crisp? Indeed, they do. Fresh, crisp, clean bills are considered much more valuable than those which are old, wrinkled and dirty.I once sent a ‘dollar bill thank you’ letter to a guy who sent a sincere letter back to me bitching the free $1 bill I sent him was wrinkled instead of crisp as I had described in the letter.
16. Let’s flip a coin and try to guess whether it will come up heads or tails. Three times as many people guess ‘heads’ than ‘tails’.
17. Here’s one I personally think really sucks: One out of every four Americans believe their best chance of getting rich is by playing the lottery.
18. How about this one for a shocking fact: 5% of lottery ticket buyers buy 51% of all tickets sold. (Trust me, none of these people belong to the “Einsteins of America Society”.)
19. A staggering 74% of us are influenced by how much we can win in a lottery as opposed to the odds of us winning.
20. That’s a good thing for the Government because the odds of winning a lottery jackpot are about 10 million to 1.
21. A person who drives 10 miles to buy a lottery ticket is 3 times more likely to be killed in a car accident while driving to buy the ticket… than… he is to win the jackpot.
22. Sunday newspaper coupon inserts are the second-most read section of the paper, after the front page.
23. Few people know it but, you can buy single-disease insurance.
24. Only 6% of people in America regularly buy clothes tailor made just for them.
25. Here’s one that’s really important: 63% of us decide NOT to buy a product advertised on the Internet… because… we think the shipping and handling charges add too much to the order.
26. Eight times as many Americans would rather use an ATM than deal with a real live teller.
27. This one’s going to blow your mind: 83% of Americans still pay with checks instead of credit cards!
28. Almost 30% of us say we would need 3 million smackaroos to feel rich. This ties in with the fact most of us would do anything for as little as $3 million… but… not nearly as many of us would do those identical things for a measly $2 million. (Hey, here’s your chance to take advantage of that situation. If you only want to pay $2 million to have something done, ask me if I’ll do it. The chances are, believe it or not, I WILL DO IT.)
29. Here’s another fact which is really, really important: 80% of Americans say giving personal information (especially their credit card information) over the Internet scares the living shit out of them.
30. Two-thirds of Americans say they wouldn’t let their spouse spend the night and have sex with another person for a million dollars. Many of these people are liars. There’s a big difference being asked if they would do it for a million dollars… as opposed to… handing them a paper sack containing the million fungolas and simply saying, “Here, you can have this if you’ll let me sleep with your sweetie tonight.”
31. The average wedding in America costs a staggering $20,000.00.
32. More than one-third of American women consider money more important than good sex to the success of a marriage.
33. According to Employee Benefits Research Institute 96% of all people who have jobs right now won’t be eligible for their full Social Security benefits when they reach age 65.
34. When it comes to houses, more than anything else, people want a state-of-the-art kitchen.
35. When people shop for a car, what they want more than anything else is reliability for the best possible price.
36. One of the best ways to raise money for a charity is to have a free dinner for a lot of people and have an empty envelope tucked under their plate… for the express purpose… of making whatever size donation they want.
37. People tip more on sunny days than they do on dreary days.
38. More than 80,000,000 people call the I.R.S. Information Hotline phone number every year. One-third of those calls go unanswered. And, according to the Treasury Department itself, 47% of the answers the ‘get-through’ callers receive are incorrect.
39. Almost two out of three people have modified their financial behavior because of their fears.

Source: TheGaryHalbertLetter.com

Want to modify your pictures and make them fun? Don’t know how to edit those photos using picture editing software such as Photoshop?  Well don’t worry because there are many websites out there that will do all the hardwork for you and produce fun pictures that you can plan with.  These websites are great to checkout if you are bored and want something to do.  They are also very fun to play with if you just want to make your pictures interesting and exciting.  There are probably even more than the 15 mentioned below but check these fun websites and see what you can do with your pictures!

One thing to keep in mind is that most of these websites are FREE! That is one of the great things about the Internet.  Most people don’t want to have to pay for 15 fun websites that can edit your pictures.  Luckily for you that most of these are free.  So check them out below!

1) PhotoFunia – This is one of the hottest photo editting websites out today! What it allows you to do is to add cool backgrounds to your photos or it puts you in the background.  You can select from a large list of effects and then all you need to do is add in your picture and it will put you into that effect!  You can also see premade ones that other people have done.  This website is all hosted in numerous languages.  Below is an example of an effect I did on myself:

2) Fun Photo Box – Very similar to PhotoFunia.  However if you aren’t able to find the effect you wanted with the previous website you should definitely check out this website because it has a wide of of additional effects you can use on your photos!

3) HairMixer - Ever wondered what you or a celebrity would look like with a particular haircut?  Well ponder no more.  With this website you have the ability to mix and match hair from two people.  You can select a photo on the left and a photo on the right and then you can mix their faces and hair to see how it would look.

4) Photo505 – This one is very similiar to the first two but has more effects! So if the first two websites weren’t enough for you I’d consider checking out this website for fun effects that will keep you busy for days on end!

5) YearBook Yourself – The title of the website itself so make it pretty clear what this website is all about.  Basically what you do with this website is you register with the website and then you have the ability to select a picture of yourself and put it in the yearbook.  It is a pretty neat tool.  Check it out and see what you look like in the YearBook!

6) Loonapix – This website is a bit different then the rest of fun picture editting websites because it gives you the ability to do effects to your pictures, face effects, photo frames, ad photo trims.  So there is a few more options with this website that is sure to keep you busy for hours!

7) Magmypic – This one is a lot of fun!  You can take a picture of yourself and use it to create a magazine cover! There is also a section on the website where you can rate other peoples magazine covers! You also have the ability to select either magazine or comic book covers.

8 ) Your Own Wired Cover – This one is similiar to the website above but has additional options.  You are able to choose the logo color, create cover headlines, and upload a photo.  If #7 above did not give you what you wanted then check this one out and see if you can find what you are looking for!

9) Hollywood Hair Makeover – This feature is pretty neat because you can stylize a picture of yourself with celebrity hair and makeup.  All you need to do is upload your photo, try on new star styles, try on tons of lipstick, and try the best beauty buys from their annual list.

10) Write On It – This website is fun because you can create multiple types of pictures.  You can create captions, fake pictures, and fake magazines.  You also have the ability to battle other people on the website for who has create the best image!

11) Dumpr - Like many of the other websites above you can use this website to apply many effects to your pictures. There are lots of great effects here to try so check it out.

12) Montagraph – This website allows you to take an original picture and then erase part of the picture where the face was and then add in your own picture to make a new picture.  See below for an example of how this works.

13) My Heritage – This website uses advanced face recognition technology to produce celebrity morph pictures and many other pictures.  My Heritage also has fun effects such as Celebrity Morph, Look-alike Meter, Celebrity Collage and Tag Photos.

14) Letter James – Letter James is a website used to put writing effects into your photos.  So if you have a photo of say a beach and you wanted to add writing to the sand you could do so with this website!

15) Personalized Money – Have you ever wanted to put your face on a dollar bill or even better a $100 bill?  Well here is your chance to do so.  With this website you can choose the type of money (dollar, yen, etc), upload your photo, optionally re-position the photo, and then download the final image!

Many of you may be wondering with a niche mini-site is.  A niche mini-site is a website that focuses on a very particular topic and it has only a handful of articles on it.  The point of a niche mini-site is to make it quickly and focus on a specific keyword / topic that is very profitable with publishers.  When trying to make money this way there are a few steps you need to consider before you start building your website.

Keyword Research

Before starting your niche mini-site you need to do a bit of research on the niche you are going to focus on.  There are many niches out there but it might not be the right choice for you if there is too much competition and the niche doesn’t pay very well.  The whole point is to make the website very quickly and then market it and then repeat the process with another website.  One great tool for keyword research is SEO Tools.  What this allows you to do is search for a keyword you are interested in and see how much traffic it receives.  If it doesn’t have enough WordTrackers that have traffic over a 100 daily searches it might not be worth your while.

Once you have found your keyword and it has plenty of searches a day you need to check if it pays well.  You can do this by going to Spyfu.  You take your keyword and you put it in the search at the top and check what the Cost/Click amount is.  If this amount is at least a minimum of a $1 a click then it is most likely worth your time.

Buy A Domain Name and Hosting

It is important that once you’ve picked your niche that you get a proper domain name and hosting for your website.  There is nothing worse then seeing a website on one of those free hosting company websites where they advertise all their own stuff on the website.  What you need is a catchy domain name that people can remember and that is easy to spell.  A good place to get domain names is either NameCheap or GoDaddy. Once you have got that you need to get some hosting for your website as well.  A good place I use is HostGator.  They have cheap hosting that is reliable.

Creating A Website Design/Template

This part can be a little tricky if you are not familiar with web designing or programming.  If you are then this should be a breeze and you should be able to setup a template that you can use multiple times with different colors for most of your niche mini-sites.  If you are unfamiliar on how to do this I recommend possibly purchasing a template or maybe using a blog program like Wordpress.

Creating Content

Next step after having your website all setup is creating quality content for your mini-site.  Do some research on your niche and spend the time to make quality articles.  If your articles have no real value to the readers they won’t be very inclined to stay at the website for a long period of time or ever revisit the website.  So for this step take your time and do it right.  Spell check your articles and get a decent number of articles on your mini-site (7-15 articles should work).

Putting Ads On Your Site

Once you have created content on your website the next thing you will need to do is add some ads to your mini-site.  This is your source of revenue and most likely the reason why you are making this mini-site in the first place.  There are many different ways to advertise but probably the easiest one to start with is Google Adsense.  It is very easy to signup and it only takes a short period of time to be accepted.  All you need to remember is that you follow their policies and guidelines so that they do not shut down your account.

Advertising Your Niche Mini-Site

This step is very important.  If no one knows about your site they will not visit it.  You cannot expect to put a website on the Internet and have it automatically become a smash hit.  It takes months of SEO and online marketing to generate traffic for your mini-site.  Unfortunately with a mini-site you don’t spend that much time working on the site so what you need to do is market your website for a few weeks and just let the site sit and see how the traffic slowly builds with the website.  The older the website the more likely it will get traffic because of various factors such as: links to the site, site age, indexed in search engines, etc.  When advertising your mini-site there are numerous ways you can do this such as: article submissions, social networking/bookmarking, posting on blogs/forums, link exchanges, etc.

Final Step

Just wait a few months and hopefully if everything is done correctly money will start coming in.  Don’t expect to see money right off the bat because you need traffic before you can generate income.  In the meanwhile you can work on creating other mini-sites and do the same process on those sites as well.  If you can create a whole group of these mini-site eventually you will get better at the process and start to see the returns you are looking for.

So try it out for yourself.  Do the research and create yourself a niche mini-site and see how it goes.  Remember to not give up and keep at it and eventually you will become very successful making money online!

Are your curious to know who some of the biggest Google Adsense earners are? I know that I was interested to know who the best are so I could check out their websites and see how I could possibly earn as much money as these people do. I realized from most of these sites that sites with user generated content usually ranked pretty highly for Google Adsense earners. It seems that these “community” type sites do tend to get a lot of traffic and we all know that traffic = money. So without any more delay here are a list of the top 8 Google Adsense earners as collected from online resources.

1. Markus Frind – PlentyOfFish.com – $300,000 per month

If you haven’t heard of this guy yet you should check out the website plentyoffish.com.  He is the person who created this free online dating website from his appartment all by himself.  His website soon become one of the largest dating websites online.  I have actually tried out his website myself and can see how it can be interesting and attract a lot of visitors.  The graphics and layout of the website is nothing fancy at all but the functionality is all there and its fast to use.

There have been many of doubts that he wasn’t making that much money so he made those people silent by posting this on his blog.  According to his blog this represented two months worth of Adsense earnings.

2. Kevin Rose – Digg.com – $250,000 per month

Kevin Rose started Digg.com in December 2004.  It is a social marketing site that is mostly news, video, and pictures that are submitted by users for other users to read about and view.  Basically what happens is you can signup for an account and you can submit a “news story” and other people can view it and if they like it they can “Digg it” and this boosts the rating of the post.  If it gets enough Diggs it will appear on the Frontpage of the site and will get tons of traffic.  Digg has both Google Adsense ads and Federated Media ads.  It is estimated that he earns roughly $250k a month from Adsense alone.

3. Jeremy Schoemaker – $140,000 per month

ShoeMoney is considered to be one of the greatest Internet Marketers out there.  He is very good with search engines and knows how to setup his sites to get optimal traffic to them.  In one of his best months with Google Adsense ShoeMoney earned $132,994.97.  You can imagine it was probably pretty difficult for him to cash a check of that size!

Unlike most of the other Google advertisers ShoeMoney makes his money from hundreds of sites and thousands of domains.

4. Jason Calacanis – Weblogs, Inc. – $120,000 per month

Jason Calacanis is the creator of Weblogs.  Weblogs is a network of blogs and it was apparently making roughly $4,000 a day from Google Adsense!  He eventually sold the company to AOL for a reported $25 million.  He also announced his retirement from blogging earlier this year (July 2008).  He is now focusing on his email campaigns instead.

5. David Miles Jr. & Kato Leonard – FreeWebLayouts.net- $100,000 per month

According to a Washington Post article these 20 year old’s claim to be making $100,000 a month from their site FreeWebLayouts.net which offers free Myspace templates. That is pretty impressive for a couple of young guys that are offering free Myspace templates!

6. Tim Carter – AskTheBuilder.com – $30,000 per month

Tim Carter is a licensed master plumber and carpenter with his own radio show.  He started his website up in 1995 with his primary focus to cater to an avid following of fellow builders on the site.  In April 2004, Carter learned about Adsense for content sites and he put it on his site.  With minimal effort and time he optimized his website and his Adsense earnings grew from $1,500 to $7,500.

There was a Google case study done on Tim Carters earnings with Google Adsense.  You should definately read it by clicking HERE.  Read the results section because it gives a bunch of helpful tips on how he increased his revenue with Google Adsense.

7. Joel Comm – e-book – $24,000 per month

Joel Comm is a get rich quick guru.  He wrote an e-book, What Google Never Told You About Making Money with Adsense. With his e-book and his website he earned $23,458.46 between Nov 2005 and Dec 2005. Check out his Google account stats here.

8. Shawn Hogan – DigitalPoint.com – $10,000 per month

Shawn Hogan is the creator of the forum DigitalPoint.  This forum is a very usual forum with lots of information about: Search Engines, Marketing, Business, Design & Development, and Products & Tools.  In a New York Times article it stated that he was making roughly $10k a month with Google Adsense.

The members of his forum speculate he is now making around double of what he was making in 2005 when this report was published in the New York Times.

So there you have it, the Top 8 Google Adsense earners.  This list might be slighty out of date and there could be some new people in this list but this is the list I was able to pull from collecting information on the net.  So check out these sites and see if you can strive to earn as much as these people do with your website or blog.

When using Google Adsense there are some keywords that pay a lot more the other keywords.   You may wonder why that is. There are a few factors involved in the pricing of the keywords such as: how many people search for that keyword and how much information there is about it on the web.  If you are curious to know what keywords pay more then others here is a list of 25 keywords that pay a lot in Google Adsense.

$82.92 – austin dwi
$74.93 – car insurance quotes
$67.34 – student loan consolidation rates
$59.21 – consolidate school loans
$51.26 – auto quote
$48.87 – structured settlement company
$48.65 – san diego dui
$46.54 – 125 equity
$44.87 – malignant mesothlioma
$43.50 – bank of america equity
$40.41 – botox training
$37.49 – dwi lawyer
$37.22 – champion mortgage
$35.64 – mesothelioma lung cancer
$33.32 – washington dui
$31.59 - apply for mortgage
$30.39 – safeco insurance
$29.53 – credit cards consolidation
$28.95 – equity consolidation
$28.64 – dallas personal injury attorney
$28.04 – mortgage for people with bad credit
$27.25 - 21st century insurance
$26.56 – american equity mortgage
$24.63 – lasik las vegas
$22.82 – excalibur hotel casino