Getting Started: Self-Traders

Your first step should be to educate yourself about the market and trading in general. Read books, take a course, learn strategies, and practice, practice, practice! Most brokers offer demo accounts which will allow you to practice trading without risking real money. The downside of that is that you often don’t trade the same way that you would if you were trading with real cash! For a general background on the foreign exchange market, see the Forex Market Snapshot.

Trading Tips

Rule #1. Learn or Develop a Profitable Trading Strategy
This is rule #1. Without it, you are not going to go anywhere! For strategies and system ideas, please visit forex ebooks, forex courses, forex books and manual forex systems sections.

Rule #2. Use Low Leverage
Using excessive leverage may be the most common reason why many traders blow out their accounts. A good rule of thumb would be not to leverage your account more than ten times its value. For example, if you had a trading account of $1,000, you would not open trades worth more than $10,000. For a more detailed explanation of leverage, see forex basics.

Rule #3. Only Use Risk Capital
What this means is that you should only use money that if lost, would not affect your lifestyle in any way. Though it has been said many times before, this is a simple rule that can avoid any harsh lessons being learned further down the track if learnt now.

Choosing a Broker

Surprisingly, this may be one of the most important decisions you make outside of developing or learning a profitable strategy and not over-leveraging your account. You need to find an ethical broker who will not play tricks with their pricing and stop you out of your trades in order to fatten their wallet. This is typical behaviour of unethical market makers who have an economic incentive for you to lose when they are on the opposite side of your trade. Not all market makers behave in this way, so it is a good idea to do your research on all market makers and brokers before opening an account with them. Visit the Forex Broker Ratings section of this site for some useful assistance!

Managed & Semi-Managed Investments

Some market participants may prefer not to take the self-trading route but instead opt for a managed forex account, automated trading system, auto-trading platform or trading signal provider. Each one of these approaches doesn’t require much input from you, as most of the decision making process of when to open and close trades is left up to others. Your decision making rests with choosing a system, adjusting your leverage, placing trades, or determining which trading signals to take. If you choose to open a managed account, find out how much leverage they use when they trade your account. Excessive leverage could lead to large drawdowns that could wipe out your account.

If you decide to use an automated system, autotrading platform or forex trading signal provider where you set the level of leverage, be sure to keep it to a manageable level. See rule #2 above for more information.

It is a good idea to diversify your investments amongst several managed account providers and/or systems to even out your returns – When one account is up, the other may be down, and vice versa.

There are of course many other factors and questions to consider when opening a managed forex account or choosing an automated system or signal provider, however, these ones should hopefully help you avoid any unforeseen circumstances!

With those ideas in mind, this site has been arranged in a way to take you through many aspects of the retail spot forex market so you can learn at your own pace and visit the sections that interest you most.

I have been asked this question so many times in the past few weeks that I thought I should write something on the topic. It seems increasingly bloggers want to try to cover their hosting and ISP costs with some revenue from their blog – and increasingly they’re doing it and are able to make a few (or quite a lot) dollars on the side. Many are turning to Google’s Adsense program.

Covering costs of my Free Templates Site is why I originally signed up with Google Adsense – blogging can get expensive when you have high levels of traffic and a lot of pages.

Whilst the agreement you sign with Google stresses that you are not allowed to give specific information about your earnings from the program I can say that I’m glad I’ve signed up because its well and truly covered my costs – and then some. In fact I think its quite feasible to expect that Adsense coupled with other strategies for making money from Blogging could quite easily generate a decent living. It takes time and hard work, but I think its very doable. (Update: Since writing this series I’ve revealed that I am now looking at making over a six figure income this year in 2005 from blogging).

So how do I make money from Google Adsense? Let me share some AdSense Tips that heve helped me.

This will be the first in a series of posts on this topic. Let me say up front I’m no expert – there are a lot of people out there making a lot more money than I am using Adsense – however most of them are not telling their secrets – well not for free anyway. I’ve got no secrets to hide and am willing to share what I’ve learnt since I signed up for the program 8 months ago. If you want a REAL expert’s opinion on Adsense I’d recommend buying Joel Comm’s What Google Never Told You About Making Money with Adsense E-Book. Joel earns $15,000 per month from Adsense and has some good things to share.

I know some bloggers are put off or offended by the idea of making money from blogging so I’ll try not to let these posts dominate my blog – however if you are not interested in the topic, simply skip over these posts.

I am going to assume a few things in this series to cut down the amount of introductory comments I have to make. Here is what I am assuming:

• You have a blog. Whilst most of the following tips will apply to other types of websites I run Adsense on blogs and will speak from that experience.
• You have (or will) read a basic overview of Adsense and have some understanding of what it is.
• You have(or will) read the program policies as outlined by Google. These give details of site eligibility, ad placements and other requirements for using the system.

Enough introductory comments – lets get stuck into the Adsense Tips for Bloggers!

Direct Sponsorship – this has paid off well for me. I sell different packages and have most sponsors pay a monthly fee through PayPal subscriptions. The bigger clients are invoiced regularly. Tip: put an advertising page on your website and a note in your signature about your special packages. Mine reads: Want to reach more small business owners? Reply to this email with ‘EC-Promo’ in the subject line and get a special discount off of our Advertising packages.

Exelate – this is a company that contacted me on behalf of a major client of theirs. They want to reach small business owners and we worked out a CPC arrangement. They have been great to deal with so far.

Kontera – they do inline ads. My CTR is just over 1% with them and I’ve found it to have very low payouts per click compared to AdSense. I have reduced my involvement with them but still have some pages with Kontera.

Chitika – I tested them out but found I was not getting a good CTR. My website is about small business and not products though so it may not be a good fit. I still have some pages with Chitika but it is not very prominent.

ReviewMe – I’ve tested this with one of my blogs and have had some success but not enough to make it meaningful – I will continue testing.

The other programs I have recently signed up for an am testing are: adbrite, adify, right media, auction ads. I read about them in business 2.0 or online. I have only done limited testing but so far none of them have brought in the kind of numbers I’m looking for to expand with them. Again, it could just be my site and the content I have on it.

I have also tested affiliate programs like ClickBank and CommissionJunction but have not had too much success here in compared to the other programs I have already mentioned.

The key is to test, try it out, optimize the best you can, see if it works, and if it doesn’t move on to something else.

Overall the web has been good for me. It supports me, my building, the people who work for me and lets me create my own work schedule.

I’m looking forward to seeing what everyone else has to say about what works for them!