I was recently looking for some good quality graphics for my site and had a hard time finding a decent pack for a reasonable price.

Basically I wanted some professional looking images to make my websites and sales pages look great – to “jazz them up“!

A lot of graphics are, admittedly, great but you just can’t be sure that you are buying royalty-free images.

Use them without knowing who owns the copyright and you could end up in some hot water.

The solution? Well, have a look for yourself…

[removed – site no longer online]

I’ve covered this system a couple of times on my site and both times I have pointed out the very low quality of the products and the lack of any real guarantee:

The “Earn Cash at Home” Package from earncashathome.co.uk

This past week I got an email from somebody who bought the product advertised at earncashathome.co.uk:

“Hi,

I wonder if you can help me out – I, stupidly, thought that the above was a genuine offer – but as you say on your review page, there is nothing in it that can make it work.

I have been trying to get my money back – a full moneyback refund is promised – but I get very aggressive responses and when I stated that I would take it up with the appropriate authorities (having sent several emails, which were never responded to), the aggressive emails started to come in – not salutation, no sign-off, just sharp messages telling me not to threaten them and to apologise.

I have only asked for a refund as per their advert, but it does not seem to be forthcoming, although the emails are now! Any help or advice??

Thanks

[name removed for privacy]”

Unfortunately it’s very unlikely you’ll get a refund for a couple of reasons.

Number 1 – These people know that you can’t really do much if they refuse to refund you

Number 2 – They accept payment via NoChex. NoChex do not intervene when there are problems between customer and seller, they leave it for the two parties to sort out themselves. They’re pretty useless in that respect.

Perhaps the owners of Earn Cash at Home use NoChex for this very reason.

If they used PayPal, customers would have more luck getting their money back.

What you need to do is go to your credit card company. If you didn’t pay by credit card then you can’t do much unfortunately.

However, if you paid by credit card, ring your credit card helpline and explain that the merchant did not provide what was promised and is also refusing to honour their guarantee.

The credit card company should side with you and chargeback the fund from the owners of Earn Cash at Home.

When I bought the extremely poor “Get Rich at Home” package I paid by debit card and so I could not get my money back at all.

I chalked it up to experience and moved on.

Now I always pay with a credit card.

Unfortunately, some marketers will continue to try and sell poor products but it will get harder and harder for them to make sales. In the end they will disappear, probably with less money than they started with.

1999 – the tech bubble is in full swing and I missed it all as I was in my third year at uni without a penny to spare…

Fast forward to 2007 (soon to be 2008) and, according to some, we are in another bubble which is now called Web 2.0.

At least I won’t miss out this time!

I found this funny, certainly worth a couple of minutes of your time to have a look:

http://availabledomainnames.com/2007/poking-fun-at-web-20/

After attending a seminar in April 2007, I decided to get into the domaining business i.e. to start buying and selling domain names for profit.

There is a fortune to be made from this particular investment class because of the nature of domain names. I suppose you could compare them to licence plates on cars. Each one is unique.

However, if you were to invest in a car licence plate, it’s likely that you would be limited to buyers in the country in which you reside. Not so with domain names – a good dot com can be used the world over and so anybody from any country is a potential buyer.

Bearing this in mind, I decided to jump in at the deep end and buy a collector’s item – a three letter dot com domain name. The plan is to buy now in the hope that the value will rise considerably over time.

LLL.coms are rare and so they are expensive.

As of the 1st of December 2007, the minimum price you should expect to pay to get one is $6,000. And that’s for a LLL.com containing poor quality letters.

If you can find a 3 letter dot com for less than $6k, snap it up because you will probably find that you can flip it fairly easily for a profit.

I bought one back in June of this year for what seemed like a ridiculously large price of $5,800.

At that time the minimum wholesale price for an LLL.com was $4,400. Fast forward 6 months and the minimum price has increased by over 30% to $6,000 so even if I overpaid when I bought my little dot com gem, it is worth more than I paid for it already.

Whether prices will continue to increase is a matter for debate but one fact remains – no-one is making any more three letter dot com domains so the supply is drying up. If the demand remains then surely these collector’s items are a good investment?

My strategy was simple: buy the domain on a credit card then transfer the balance to a 0% interest card. Natwest were only too happy to give me 13 months interest free so I will simply be paying a little each month to service the debt and will assess my position when the interest-free period is coming to a close.

£3,000+ on a domain name – am I mad? We will have to see. In the meantime I am toying with the idea of getting some more…

I’ve been testing the Lazy Lay system now for a few weeks and have seen some strange behaviour on the Betfair betting exchange. Horses that are odds-on favourite on the Racing Post’s website at, say, 2/1 (3.0) are then quoted to lay at huge prices.

Today I am trying to lay one particular horse which is favourite in the betting forecast at 2/1 (3.0) but on Betfair, just 30 minutes before the race, the best price I can get is 12.5!

That’s between 11/1 and 12/1 – way out of line from what I saw on the RP’s site.

Oh well, if the price doesn’t change sharpish then that particular race is ignored but I do find it strange that Betfair is so far out.

Or is it the Racing Post that is wrong?

Or, most likely, has general opinion changed and created a new favourite?

Whilst on the subject of Betfair, if you do not already have an account and were thinking about joining, use the following code to get a free £20 bet. Simply enter it when filling out the registration form under ‘Refer and Earn’.

Betfair Free Bet Code is:

CVEHKGCGF

(NB: Terms and Conditions apply, please see Betfair.com for details)