11 reasons NOT to trade stocks!

How many persons do you know who trade stocks but should not touch them at all?

I know several persons who are my relatives, friends and from my the work with our clients in the tax accountant office who have in the end no real clue in what they are investing their money, how risky it is or how much time it needs to earn money with stocks.

Here are my personal 11 reasons when you should NOT trade stocks at all:

1. Afraid to lose money.
2. Doesn't like risks.
3. Being too emotional.
4. Need to know everything before making a decision.
5. Feeling not confident behind your own decisions.
6. Have trouble drawing your own conclusions.
7. Need to be told what to do or believing everything what others tell you
   
8. Awful at managing money.
9. Think it's an easy way to make money.
10. Get stressed too easily. Can't handle stress.
11. Experience difficulty getting over past events.
    Bonus:
    
12. Make lists of why others shouldn’t trade stocks… guess we ignore that one :)

What are your reasons to trade stocks or NOT to trade stocks?

Sponsored Tweets - Is it the end for it?

Since the last year several companies took advantage of Twitter's ad-less service and introduced their service to advertisers and publisher (members of twitter). It seemed to be a prosperous business for everyone who jumped on the bandwagon - publisher, advertisers and the companies who handled the transactions - be it Ad.ly, Sponsored Tweets, MyLikes, Magpie, Revtwt, Twivert, Twittad, Paymetweets and many more.

Some of the mentioned services pay you

• a fixed price for each tweet, no matter how many clicks your tweet received (Sponsored Tweets has ClickWatch enabled which means, if the target of 1,50 $/click is not reached, the tweet will be sent out 24 hours later again),

other services pay you

• for each click the given link received,
• for each follower that views your tweet
• or for each sale a user that your given link generates.

In the last months Twitter officials already announced that they themselves want to introduce advertisement in Twitter. In the last few days more details got into the light that Twitter will offer its own ad platform.

It's not that clear yet how it will work out as they are just in the Beta phase but it seems like the ads will be published in your tweet depending on what you tweet (keywords & #hashtags).
A Twitter official told on a press conference that it will be explicit clear that a sponsor paid for the ad and it will be made relevant and useful, so the user doesn't think of an ad!

With 50 million tweets per day, around 600 tweets per second, it's a big opportunity for Twitter to start earning money instead of losing money. But it seems like Twitter will allow users to opt-out of Ads in their own twitter time line for a small fee.

In the end it all depends if the users of Twitter accept the "paid ads" or if many will leave Twitter as soon as they discover ads in their time line (depending for which company). Not sure if this will also lead to a kind of "click fraud" as the users may not know for which company the shown ad will be, if the user can delete this ad like any other tweet you have sent out to your follower and if the pricing of Twitter's own ad platform might be competitive with the ones who are already in the market.

If you think of Kim Kardashian who seems to charge 10.000 $, Holly Madison which charges 1.250 $ or Shoemoney who gets 176+$ for a Sponsored Tweet, they will opt out of this service but it seems that Twitter has to look themselves in which user account they can place the appropriate ad not only depending on keywords and Hashtags but also followers and the activity of these followers (click-through rate).

What do you think?

• will you stop using Twitter when they built ads into your twitter stream?
• will you pay a small fee to get rid of Twitter's own ads?
• will it affect your use of sponsored Tweets in the future?

Adgitize: Merchandise - earn more points and promote your products / services!!

Aditize offers a new possibility to earn points and to let other Adgitize members know about your products and services!

This could be a great way for many Etsy-Shop owners and persons who want to sell additional some of their products (ebooks, blog review, 125 x 125 ad badges, web design and so on).

Highlights:

Members who buy products can be offered a special discount and additional points in Adgitize for a 31 day period. In the beginning there three items available. The points you can receive daily are between 6 and 25 points if you buy one of the products.

The seller pays 5$ for displaying its ad for one month and gets additional 15 advertiser points (written in the detailed rules & regulations).
A small part of each sale will be transferred - after a sale of an Adgitize member has been made - to Adgitize to cover the cost of the given merchandising points for each of the buyers of the product / service.

Seems to me its a new great way to get more exposure for your products and to earn additional points for the buyer and the seller!

More information on the Adgitize blog!
Here is the Adgitize Merchandise Store and here you can get the detailed information about the Adgitize Merchandising requirements, rules and regulations!

Apology to ALL ENTRECARD MEMBERS!

Real life and the hospitalization of our baby boy left me behind with my apology for the falsely accused EntreCard members!

I want to apologizes to everyone who has been accused, who read and commented on the last two posts of this blog!

ALL PICTURES HAVE BEEN NOW DELETED, no matter if real Ghost dropper or not!

Yes, indeed i published it in a hurry!

Yes, i checked afterward some members and compared with Google Analytics. It seems that on one day members didn't get counted but could click and on the other day they got counted. This must be one of the effects of cache browsing as on 9th February a new blog post was visible for everyone and mentioned in EntreCard's Blog and in their E-mail to me!

Like i mentioned in the first post about the Ghost droppers:

Everybody shall judge by themselves if this is true or not.

In my case it seemed to be true as i didn't receive any comments for the duration of the existence of the blog (5 1/2 months) from these accused member. I know for sure that other members get comments from some of these accused members, so they are NOT ALL FAKE droppers or cheater or scamming other members!

Some of the members used just in the period when i made the experiment the quick drop pages, in the past they dropped regularly on my blogs from their blog roll, EntreCard Toolbar or from the Inbox.

I didn't know that EntreCard would pat me on my back for this investigation or that they even would mention my post.
I didn't send them the link, i just wrote them -as i wanted to get the Travel-Blog reinstated- that over 60 members could drop on that blog without a widget.
As they wrote themselves in the blog that NOT ALL mentioned members are Ghost droppers, it seems non-sense for me to link to my post.
I asked EntreCard to remove the link to my post as it's absolutely not necessary - (EntreCard removed now the link from their blog!).

The real Ghost droppers who used the previous quick drop system seemed to be wiped out (or perhaps it's just me who get less of their drops).


Accusations against me who are written in the comment section of Ad Master's post that i have tried to hack in a user's account or that i'm the person who distribute the click trojan are definitely NOT TRUE!

Another accusation which i received in the previous post is related to the disabling of the quick drop pages (the commenter built one of these quick drop pages):

I think there is no one to blame as EntreCard didn't and doesn't allow to do this kind of dropping and now they took action so that EntreCard members get again REAL VISITORS to their blogs.

UPDATE:
You can read in EntreCard's help files about illegal activities which are NOT ALLOWED by EntreCard and can lead to account closing, loss of ECs, ban of user!

It's clearly stated that these actions are not allowed (since September 2008!)

• Use of any automated program/script that drops for you
• Any drop done through any means other than visiting the blog, and dropping through the widget found on that blog

Update End

His argumentation that we have to suffer now more often from 100% Bounce rate without this kind of cheating may be correct but i doubt that these members will put much effort in dropping cards when they can't finish it anymore within 15 minutes.
As long as you can attract your visitors to read your content and comment, you may even gain now a new reader instead of letting them just drop on the yellow box!

UPDATE:
Cheating with yellow boxes is also cheating the advertisers who wants to buy an ad as they think you get such a big amount of visitors when they compare the popularity points with other members.
Without cheating the Alexa ranking can improve as the members HAVE to visit you now!
As of now (22nd February) the effect of less ghost droppers shows that the 5 most popular blogs in EntreCard "lost" between 300 and 400 popularity points. This shows that there have been indeed a lot of members who took the shortcut to use quick drop pages.
A small loss of popularity points (up to 75 points) is from active members who left EntreCard in the last week.
Update End

EntreCard: Responses of Ghost Droppers

Some words to the previous mentioned experiment of Ghost Droppers in EntreCard & the E-Mail of EntreCard:

I believe EVERYONE would wonder if someone shows up in the Inbox of EntreCard when their website would be down due to a server problem or virus.
How would you react if you would see the same amount of "Droppers" in your Inbox like i saw in the previous days (just with a purposely deleted widget)?

On the 9th February (short after EntreCard resets the drops) i wrote about the results from the 63 dropping members of 8th February in red color. So the members should have been already warned that it's an experiment to see who dropped cards even when the EntreCard-Widget is NOT AVAILABLE. But they still kept dropping cards.

11 of the accused members responded and their comments have been released now (they are mixed chronically within the other comments).

Here are some of their reasons:

One of these droppers said, using a cached Google search was his method to drop during these days as he couldn't find the EntreCard-Widget. It was well meant from him and he is doing it usually when a website is not reachable or the EntreCard not visible on the actual blog version for not loosing his Top dropper status (the user had been removed from the previous list as i saw it in my logs that he indeed came from Google).

Greetje greets you commented with an explanation on the Best travel pictures in the world blog. She uses each month the blog version from the first of the month (Browser cache) as another Dutch blogger told her previously to keep her browsing more secure.

I wonder now why do i and everyone else update our blogs/ the travel pictures blog (in the past) almost daily when now several of these accused members use old versions of my blog to drop their cards.

Anonymous (would have been nice to know who you are):

Erm... I use a cached browser? It caches sites and only updates when there is an update? You can use Google's cache to do the same thing. Hence anyone with any sense knows how to do you a favour when your site is sluggish and still manage to drop. Still this sort of slander is the last straw - to be honest many of us have invested years in dropping and I for one see this as a good time to leave for good.

My response to this - like mentioned above the blog was updated on 8th & 9th, so your browser should have loaded the newest version of my blog WITHOUT my EntreCard.


It's for sure if several members use only cached sites

• we won't receive any comments and
• the bounce rate from this members should be 100% as they look always at the same OLD POSTS or
• is it even worse and it doesn't count as page visit as these cached blogs are not accessed directly because they are saved on their local hard disks? GRRRRRRRRR!

Is there a reason to drop on them when they treat your blog and your updates in this way?

Something like this can make you as angry as when they would be real Ghost droppers.


Other member's comments:

Laane:

Well, I think you're not seeing things the way they are. In fact,I visit your blog every day at least once, but sometimes 5 or more times.
Why? Because I adgitize too.
So I think you're making mistakes.

Maybe I should start spending whole days commenting, so you can see I'm at the blogs.

Well, I;ve been face at entrecard with so many things the past years, this can be adeed, I guess.

I just would like to know how you could drop the card when it wasn't available on the two days! This has nothing to do with Adgitize as the Adgitize ads have been available and we don't have an Adgitize Inbox.
I know you had issues with viruses in the past and you said you made yourself an own drop list after this incident (around End of September/beginning of October 2009).

Julie @ Momspective:

I was out of town the dates listed and when I travel I outsource my drops. I only drop on those who drop on me and will speak with those individuals who I outsource my dropping to while I'm gone. I visit each site regularily, comment if I can (lately I can't much due to travel and medical issues so I do suck there) and buy ads on those sites as well. It takes me 9 hours to drop on my these sites throughout the day either using the snaplinks multiple web browser opener or the EC toolbar if I didn't get enough drops using my favorites list, who are people who drop or have dropped on me while I write, email and social network so I am taking this accusation very seriously. I appreciate the information and will be sure to look into it.

You outsourced the drops of your cards? Did you know that John from Make nothing online catched Momspective Reviews last week in his experiment, too, for three days?

Paul from Hacking the Hacked

1.Comment:

Wow what a funny post, I see one of my cards on your list, and here I am commenting. I also see at least four cards of other members who comment on one of my blogs. And, I see quite a few cards from members who also use Blog Catalog, I know they use Blog Catalog because their avatars show on my BC widget after they have visited one of my blogs.

I have been thinking of leaving EC because the bounce rate from members who actually do visit one of my blogs only to drop a card and then leave, is far more harmful to my blogs ranking than someone who uses a "ghost dropper list." This post might be the straw that broke the camels back, so congratulations to you on suceedding at something might be in order.

2.Comment:

Me again, sorry but I am upset that my card appears on your fake droppers list. I follow a few members who have been quick to jump on your bandwagon through the Google friend connect widget, wich I will remove myself from now. Those that I regularly visit like The English Wildernes, I wont anymore. I am very sorry that I spent so much time on this blog the other day reading your posts about increasing blog traffic.

I am using my url/name in my comments so people can see that members on the cards above do visit EC sites, see who is making comments on my blogs for yourself.

Paul, thanks for reading some articles in the past! Sorry to say Paul, i'm sure i never visited your blog in the past. My visit and commenting today was the first time. You see a lot of the accused members at the moment in my Blogcatalog list, some appear there again for the first time after a long time. Most of them came from an alarming e-mail from their friends when i can trust some Analytic programs from Google and Live Feedjit.

UPDATE:
I REMOVED THE MEMBERS WHO COMMENTED AND SOME REGULAR DROPPERS OF MY BLOGS WHICH COULD FALL UNDER THE in EntreCard's Blog and in their E-Mail mentioned cache issue!!!

Everyone should make for yourself a picture if these members interacted with you in the past or not.

If they did interact with you, continue to support them with dropping on them.
If they didn't interact with you, it might be the same "problem" like in this case, they just use a cached version of your blog or have been really ghost dropping with the use of

• a script
• a bookmarked Drop-Widget link
• quick ghost drop pages (which have been now disabled)
  

EntreCard members get scammed by these members!

Like written on the Best travel pictures in the world blog, i made a "secret" test on 8th and 9th February 2009 to see who is gaming EntreCard's Dropping System.

For this test i had to remove the EntreCard widget to see if some members still are able to appear in my Inbox. I'm sorry if i caused a lot of members problems as many of you tried to search for the EntreCard-widget several times a day (it was for the best means of us).

To my shocking surprise it wasn't just a handful of members who fake drops in our inbox, it has been more than 65 members who never visit your blog.
They just use a Ghost dropper list or a program that is dropping only on the yellow drop box. With this method you can finish dropping 300 blogs in less than 15 minutes.

I decided now to show off these FAKE members who didn't physically visit your web site, so that you can decide by yourself if you still want to support them or if you dump them (no more dropping on them) to show them that WE DON'T ACCEPT CHEATERS IN ENTRECARD.

Several hours ago EntreCard deleted the Best travel pictures in the world blog from their system. But after 3 1/2 hours i got the blog reinstated and you can drop again on the Best travel pictures in the world blog!

EntreCard even wants to look now into the matter of Ghost drop lists and how to change the code, so that we members get REAL VISITORS and not FAKE DROPS IN OUR INBOX!

One list which i suspect has played the malicious part for so many fake drops, has been deleted after i told EntreCard about it and they suspended the account of this person (or warned her that it will get suspended if she doesn't remove this list).


Here have been the members who scam us regularly in EntreCard, like you can see there are a lot of TOP Droppers who actually never come to your blog but a lot of you give them even a FREE LINK each month.

UPDATE:

The Responses of the accused members have been published in the comment section a choice can be seen on Responses of the Ghost Droppers.

For the members who didn't believe me!
This is my single Dropbox of this blog which could be used everywhere to cheat on me!
EntreCard made this kind of cheating after this experiment NOW UNAVAILABLE!
So there is no more reason to display the picture of these members who used this system!

Read my apology for the falsely accused EntreCard Ghost droppers

Removed Dropaholics widget

Due to my current issues with the Internet Service Provider P1 WiMax (slow connections, several reloads until widgets are loaded, commenting in forums is a pain because of the time outs) which let me do only occasionally dropping in EntreCard with one or two of my blogs, i removed my Dropaholics widget rather late :)

Will have a look that i can honor my Top Droppers in the Sidebar with a RSS-FEED as soon as the internet connection is stable again in the coming days.

Guess you came from Behindthebitblog.com and wanted to read this story but they directed you now to another post or do you like to read the Apology for the falsely accused Ghost droppers?