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More Americans are attending and departing college in debt. Are you one of those students? Reportedly, compared to a decade ago, there are many more students borrowing large amounts of money to pay for college than ever before. Almost 10% of College Graduates are graduating with at least $40,000 in college debt. Getting caught up in debt because you are borrowing to pay for college is bad but coupling that with credit card debt is the worst thing you can do. Your credit score is negatively affected by large amounts of debt.
1. Don't Abuse Your Credit Cards
Credit cards come easy in college. Paying them off comes hard. Having some credit is not bad. Using it carelessly and not paying at least the minimum payment each month is financially reckless. While in college you wonder why a bank would send you a credit card and you do not have a job. But you grab that card and go on a spending spree, then when the bill comes you remember again that you do not have a job. If you can not pay at least the monthly minimum you are going to get yourself and your credit in big trouble.
2. Pay on Your Student Loans
This may seem obvious to most but when the bank offers you a deferment it is easy to keep putting off making any payments to your college student loan. Remember you can't be in forbearance forever and the payments will have to start being made. If you have the money to make the payments pay your student loans each month. The interest continues to accrue while you are in deferment so you are increasing your student loan debt when you do not make the payments. Don't get me wrong; if you can't make the payments by all means ask for a deferment. The other option is a credit disaster. Student Loan Defaults are very high in the USA. Not making payments and not communicating to your bank when you get behind will be reported negatively to all credit agencies. This will ruin your credit score before you have a chance to build it.
3. Get Professional Financial Advice
Making a financial plan is very important. Meet with a Financial Planner before, during and after you finish college to discuss your debt and your income. Knowing what you are making and how much you can pay out each month will help you make a road map to be debt free. A financial advisor will also explain how your credit score is determined and what will hurt and help it. Knowing this before hand will help you plan how to achieve the ultimate credit score.
More than half of College Freshman have at least $1,500 in credit card debt. All indications lead to the conclusion that the balance will more than double by the time those students are seniors because interest charges for credit cards is much higher than student loans. College Debt is a serious matter and it deserves your full attention. Making bad decisions about loans and credit cards while in college can set a pattern for a financial disaster that can ruin your life. Learn about credit, obtain your credit report, determine what it means in your life and only borrow what you need. Finally, pay back all debt on time and if you run into any problems, communicate with your lending institution immediately.
So you've got the vision. You know that with this thing called 'the Internet' you can earn money and get better and better at it as time goes by until one day you'll be able to fire your boss. With so many people online and more and more getting online all the time, somehow you know you'll be able to get enough of them to buy stuff from you for you to make a living, but how do you get started? What are the essentials to making money marketing on the Internet? Below I've listed what I believe are the 3 most important essentials to Internet marketing and the good news is, they're all within your reach!
1. Have your OWN website.
Don't be discouraged if you think you cannot successfully accomplish this because you probably can. This Internet marketing essential is listed first because it's the most important. If you think you can't afford it or that learning to design your website will be too difficult, then you're probably mistaken. Hosting can be had for between free and extremely cheap, and there are free templates and free html editors readily available on the net as well. Now that I've quelled your fears somewhat, let me tell you why having a website is so essential.
If you intend to be successful at Internet marketing you need a foundation upon which to build. Having your own website accomplishes just that. With it you have a base of operations on which you can build a reputation and a customer base akin to your brick and mortar counterpart. In this way your success can (and probably will) start out slow and increase over time as you become more and more well known and build traffic and a reputation. Which brings me to the second essential of Internet marketing; traffic.
2. Get qualified, targeted traffic to your website.
Everyone knows what Internet traffic is even if you've never considered marketing on the Internet, but not everyone knows how to best obtain traffic. If you're just starting out in online marketing, you probably have little hope of gaining traffic by getting listed on page 1 or 2 of Google (or any search engine for that matter) without paying a lot of money to contract the job out to an SEO (search engine optimization) company.
So, how do you do it on a shoestring budget? In a word, 'articles.' Simply put, you write short articles (400-700 words), put your name and website URL in the resource box at the bottom and submit them all over the net. The search engines will eventually index them, so you might get some traffic that way, but what you really want to try for is getting an online publisher to pick up your article and publish it on their website with your resource box included.
3. Build an ever-growing list of prospects.
Having a list is about equally as important as having your own website and traffic, the only reason I listed it last is because you need to have the others before you can begin to build a list. When I say 'list' what I'm talking about is a list of people who are going to be more interested in buying YOUR product than the general public.
How do you build a list? Again, to put it simply, you get an autoresponder (which can be obtained for free) and you exchange something that a person interested in YOUR product would highly desire for his email address. This thing must be of high perceived value, but need not cost anything. Excellent freebies to give in exchange for email addresses are free reports, e-books (which can be as short as 10 pages) and e-courses. All of which you can create by yourself for nothing more than the time it takes you to create them.
To summarize, when you have your own website you can better reap the fruits of any labor you put into your marketing efforts by building on past successes. Any traffic you may have had in the past may return and you'll be able to increase the chances of that happening by getting them to subscribe to your list, which is another way you can build on past successes. When you put these three things together, you have the makings of a solid long term business that's potential is almost limitless. The bounds of your imagination and the time and effort you put into it are the only things holding you back, so get out there and make it happen!