Strictly Money!

If you’re finding it tough to keep up with your payments and are up to your eyeballs in debt, here are 10 tips to help you get back on-track:

1. Keep a tight grip on your credit cards. As useful as they are, credit cards make it too easy to buy things we don’t need. For instance, people who put their meals on plastic typically spend 30 percent more than those who pay cash. Also get into the habit of paying off store cards immediately or as soon as you can. Or even better, put your card in water and freeze it in the freezer! No, I was just kidding.
2. Rethink your automatic expenses. Go down your list of debited expenses and ask yourself what is absolutely necessary and what you can do without. Can you do without that satellite television subscription or this magazine subscription that you just signed on to? You can always sign up again once the economy normalizes.
3. Cut out unnecessary luxuries, like takeaway meals. Put the brakes on impulse buying.
4. Create a budget or ‘spending plan’. Firstly, track the money you spend over the course of a week or a month and also factor in any infrequent payments. Look closely at your discretionary expenses, like travel, entertainment, and eating out. These are expenses that are flexible (as opposed to fixed expenses such as your hire purchase repayment or rent, which you don’t have as much control over). Then you can decide where to cut costs. The tip would be to cut down on all those itsy bitsy expenses that you really didn't have to spend in the beginning.
   
5. Get the family involved in your money-saving mission. Saving money as a family can teach your kids some valuable life lessons. It would help them understand to value money more.
   
6. Get organised. Most of our lives are hectic and so bills tend to be the last thing on our minds. So it’s a good idea to schedule one day a week to pay them. If you stay organised you will also save money on late fees and charges. And your life will be a lot less stressful!
7. Pay yourself first. Yup, that’s right, you can save money by paying yourself. Give yourself a limited weekly ‘allowance’ to use for whatever you want. But once that money is gone, you don’t get any other money. Paying yourself an allowance to save money will at first be quite hard. But once you get used to it, you’ll begin to be far more prudent with how you spend your allowance.
8. Make more money. Think of things that you could sell online, or perhaps you could take on extra shifts at work. Be creative who knows you could land up making some extra money online!
9. Get professional help. Talking to a qualified professional (at no fee) will help you determine the quickest way to settle your debts.
10. Deal with the most urgent payments first. Look at all your expenses and determine what are the most costly and pay those first, such as store cards.

If you are new to blogging or have a website that's rich in content rich and are looking at ways to generate an online income or some extra cash from it then I'd suggest you check out Google Adsense. Google over the past few years have added various streams of online income to the Google Adsense portfolio which I will be highlighting further.

So What's Google Adsense?

Google Adsense is an advertisement application run by Google. Website owners can join this program to enable text, image, and video advertisements on their websites. These advertisements are run by Google and generate revenue (income for the website owner) on either a per-click or per-impression basis.

Different Google Adsense Streams

Let’s have a look at these 5 current online money making streams that Google Adsense have to offer:

• Adsense for Content - Display ads that are targeted to your blog or site’s word content, this is a great way of generating some extra money online.
• Adsense for Search - Offers your users site searches or web searches while earning revenue from ads relevant to their search terms from your blog or website.
• Adsense for Feeds - Place relevant ads in your Blog’s feeds which Google manages for you. If you have a high number of subscribers to your feeds then why not benefit from their earning potential and earn some additional income through your feeds.
• Adsense for Domains - Have you got some domain names that are sitting around doing nothing then why not utilize these domains and make extra money by displaying ads on your parked domains.
• Adsense for Mobile - Mobile internet browsing is becoming popular on mobile devices like the iphone, you can unlock your mobile sites revenue potential with targeted Google ads.

So there are lots of forms of revenue to be made through the Google Adsense program. If you are new to this program, then just visit Google and find out more about the program in a bit more detail or you might be a more advanced Adsense user and was not aware of some of the other Google Adsense streams that you could apply to your mobile site or to your Feeds to help increase your online earnings.

If you have any ideas or tools to share on how to increase your Adsense earnings please leave a comment. All ideas are welcome.