What is Oddschecker.com? If you put a large enough group of professional gamblers in a room, eventually they will disagree on something. Probably everything. This is because the nature of betting for a living is a dynamic and ever changing affair. Furthermore, people like to bet on what they know.

One person might ardently follow Tranmere Rovers and as a result, has a firm understanding of football in the lower leagues. On the other hand, some gamblers may rigorously research and break down a horse race.

The point I am trying to make is that there is no right or wrong way to operate as a professional gambler. It is important however to highlight one constant that almost any gambler will agree on which is that betting is all about the profit.

With bookmakers all online nowadays (and if you believe some of the more questionable corners of the internet, engaged in a shadowy cabal), it is inevitable that odds are going to become a more restricted thing.

Let’s start the review….

Product: Oddschecker website odds service.

What They Offer: An odds comparison website

Website: www.oddschecker.com  – please read the review first, because it took me ages

This is in part because bookies work on mathematical principles and numbers don’t lie, they don’t change. So one bookmaker and another are fundamentally going to come up with the same result. Nowadays though, they can also check that other bookmakers have reached the same conclusion.

They can also look at what the betting markets are saying and which way people are betting, not just with themselves, but across the board. This allows bookmakers to keep a very tight grip on their odds.

Why is all of this important though? Put simply, if you are placing a bet, you want to get the highest possible return. With the number of bookmakers online this is an almost impossible task to carry out manually.

A search for “online bookmaker uk” on Google returns over 1.2 million results and whilst not all of these are going to be bookmakers, it highlights how large the market is.

If you were manually trying to check each bookmaker, I would put a pretty hefty bet on your odds having changed with the first bookmaker by the time you had checked the last. So how do people ensure that they are getting the best odds? They use an odds comparison website, of which arguably the biggest and most well known is Oddschecker.

What is Oddschecker?

Oddschecker is a free to use website that constantly monitors what odds bookmakers and betting exchanges are offering on a given event.

Literally anybody can visit the website whereby you are instantly presented with a comprehensive list of all of the most popular bets as well as a list of “Big Event” bets (something that really helps to keep Oddschecker relevant as I will discuss later).

The company was founded in 1999 and was the first odds comparison website on the internet. Over the years it has grown substantially and now rests in the hands of BskyB. Whilst these are perhaps best known for their satellite TV service, BskyB already have a pretty big hand in the betting arena with Sky Bet.

This means that taking over Oddschecker wasn’t a massive jump for the group.

Of all the odds comparison websites on the market, I would probably say that Oddschecker is the easiest to use. It is also arguably the biggest with more bookmakers signed up with Oddschecker than any of the competition.

For those who perhaps aren’t familiar with what an odds comparison website is, it does pretty much what it says on the tin. It lists the odds that various different bookmakers are offering so that users can get the best possible odds.

Oddschecker covers a massive variety of sports, several of which I wasn’t aware were even things. This is something that is important to a number of gamblers as it can often be more productive to focus on a niche sport where you can often “know” more than the bookmakers.

In terms of the operation, whilst anybody can go to Oddschecker and have a look to see what odds are available on a given day, in order to really get the most out of the site you should make an account. This is entirely free and opens up a host of additional options for users.

These include features such as allowing you to view your bets (both past and present), alter various settings such as whether odds are displayed as decimal or fraction and finally you can list what bookmakers you wish to use.

Whilst it may seem counter intuitive to not want access to every bookmaker, any professional will tell you how easy it is to have an account closed. When this happens, you don’t want to spend time comparing odds that aren’t available to you.

Which Bookies does Oddschecker Work With?

Oddschecker works with all of the major online bookmakers and several that I was not really familiar with as well. These are:

• Bet365
• Sky Bet
• Bet Stars
• Boyle Sports
• Betfred
• Sporting Bet
• Bet Victor
• Paddy Power
• Stan James
• com
• Ladbrokes
• Coral
• William Gill
• Winner
• Betfair Sportsbook
• Betway
• Betbright
• Net Bet
• Race Bets
• 32 Red
• 10 Bet
• Marathon Bet
• 188 Bet
• 888 Sport
• Black Type

Odds are also taken from the following betting exchanges:

• Betfair
• Betdaq
• Matchbook

As you can see, in terms of the selection of bookmakers, Oddschecker doesn’t really put a foot wrong and I would say that most gamblers will have an account with one or another of these bookmakers.

The inclusion of betting exchanges is an interesting one however I am rather disappointed to see that Smarkets is not available (although this is a reflection of the betting exchange rather than Oddschecker).

As well as listing all of the odds, Oddschecker also makes available information on whether or not there are offers from a bookmaker. This includes sign up offers and special offers, although Oddschecker does make a distinction between the two.

This is something that is particularly handy for those who are involved in matched betting and are looking for betting opportunities.

How Do I use Oddschecker?

Fundamentally, using Oddschecker is a cinch. You simply go the website, find the desired event that you wish to enter and click on it to bring up the odds that are available and the bookmakers that are offering them.

Clicking on the odds that you would like to accept will then bring up a betting slip which you can use to place your bet with the relevant bookmaker.

You can also choose to go to the bookmakers website and place the bet manually rather than using Oddschecker’s built in betting slip system.

How Does Oddschecker Work?

Oddschecker uses its own API in order to access the latest odds from bookmakers. For those who don’t know what an API is, it is a way of programming something so that it accesses the features and/or data from another company.

In the case of Oddschecker, the data that they want to access are the odds, however this isn’t all that the API can do. It can also be used to place bets through a 3^rd part bookmaker and this is why something like Oddschecker is so useful.

As a gambler, you can simply log into your Oddschecker account, find what you want to bet on and place the bet all in one place. This essentially allows you to use Oddschecker as something of a betting hub, so long as you are OK with being somewhat restricted in terms of the bookmakers that you are able to use.

What Else Can I Use Oddschecker For?

As well as simply listing the odds that are available, there is a surprising amount that you can do with Oddschecker that would help some gamblers out. One of the most interesting things that Oddschecker offers is information on the most popular bets as well as the odds that have been taken up. All of this information is presented in a neat little pie chart which can be seen in the image below.

What this allows you to do is, at a glance, see where people are putting their money. This is something that whilst not necessarily important to a gambler with an established system, may well be used by a trader.

The other thing that Oddschecker does rather well is it shows you what is happening to the odds, in real time. The best odds that are available on a given horse or outcome (in the screenshot below, it is a horse race) are always highlighted in bold and underlined.

This is what most people will look at, however this is also only a part of what Oddschecker can tell us.

In the above screenshot you can see that there are 4 coloured boxes, each of which tells us something very important about the odds. Each column shows the odds that a given bookmaker have available on that particular outcome, this is important to know for reasons that I will explore below.

The pink boxes show that those odds are drifting or lengthening. This is generally an indicator that information has come to light that means that outcome is less likely to happen.

The blue boxes on the other hand are where odds are shortening. This means that generally speaking, something has occurred which suggests that a given outcome is more likely to happen. This is something that is important to consider when you are trying to get the best possible odds as it can dictate when to place your bet as well as where.

The other two types of box that you will see are white and orange. The white boxes are essentially neutral and mean that there is no strong feeling one way or another about the odds on that horse. The orange boxes indicate that the odds on that particular event are changing in real time.

It is important at this point to address something that can happen with Oddschecker and is the reason that whilst it can be helpful to see what the odds are doing, it is by no means definitive and that is bookies disagreeing.

When you get close to a race there are naturally more changes in odds as bookmakers start laying their bets and recalculating based on real time information.

This can mean that whilst some bookmakers may be shortening odds on an outcome, another may be lengthening them.

Your Oddschecker betting slip is a tool with many purposes and whilst I have touched upon using it simply to place a straight forward bet without going to the bookies website in questions, there is much more you can do.

One of the most touted features of the Oddschecker betting slip is the ability to build accumulator bets. This si something that many bookmakers offer and so in many regards, is a long way from anything new.

What is interesting about the approach that Oddschecker take to this is that they compare the odds that you would get on that accumulator and recommend the best. This means that you can massively increase your winnings without really taking on any extra risk.

As you can see in the above screenshot, Oddschecker takes all my bets and tells me that Betway is the best place to place my accumulator. It also includes the odds that are on offer overall as well as the odds on each game.

To give you an example of how powerful this tool is, I went to sky bet and for my hypothetical 7 fold football accumulator I would have been offered just 17.27. This is a loss of almost 3 points for me as a gambler on the exact same bet.

Oddschecker Market Reports

As well as the odds comparison side of things, Oddschecker can also be a useful analytics tool as the website has a whole section dedicated to marketing reports. For example, you can look at the top steamers and drifters in a variety of disciplines. These are the top bets that have drifted one way or the other. This is something that to those with the right approach to betting can be massively valuable.

There are a few other nifty things that you can use the Oddschecker market reports for that I will cover here. Firstly, there is the ability to sort events by the best “book”.

I won’t go into too much detail about what a book is as it is rather complicated, but suffice it to say that lower numbers are generally speaking better as they represent a “fairer bet” (at least in terms of realistic odds). By using the Oddschecker report, you can look at which races have the fairest odds.

You can also use the Oddschecker market reports to look at the odds variance on a given event. What this means is that it looks at the highest and the lowest odds available and calculates the difference as a percentage. This means that by looking at this figure on Oddschecker, users can essentially see which events bookies think have a “most likely” outcome.

Betting Outside of Sports

One of the most interesting things that I have found about Oddschecker is the odds that they cover outside of sport. Whilst it is important to highlight that these are niche markets, it is interesting to look at these for insight into the views of the general public.

In fact, chances are that when you hear on the news that “odds have been slashed”, it has come from somewhere like, if not actually, Oddschecker.

This can be interesting for those who like to bet outside of the usual field. For example, Oddschecker tells me that the bookies favourite to be Prime Minister after a General Election is Theresa May. That the next pope favoured by bookies is Cardinal Luis Antontio Tagle.

It also tells me that Daenerys Targarayen is the favourite to rule the fictional land of Westeros once Game of Thrones ends. It is an eclectic mix of bets to say the least.

The point that I am raising here however is that Oddschecker is something that isn’t just about traditional betting. There is something here for most people with an interest in betting, no matter what they like to bet on.

How does Oddschecker Compare to the Competition?

During my research into Oddschecker, I have found that whilst there is some competition out there, it is generally not as well executed. The fact is that of the examples that I looked at, there were two recurring themes.

The first was that the websites were badly designed. They were cumbersome and made finding the event I was looking for rather difficult. It is also worth noting that several of these websites offered no real comparison as such, simply the “best” odds that are on offer.

Whilst there were other odds comparison websites that were more familiar to Oddschecker, these were of a noticeably lesser quality. There were less bookmakers and betting exchanges listed and when you are considering an odds comparison site, this kind of variety is key.

How Much More Money Can I Really Make?

Now to somebody who bets casually, you might be wondering why getting the best possible odds is such a big deal and mostly, it comes down to volume. Professional gamblers will generally place an average of at least 2-3 bets per day.

Some will place hundreds of bets per day. When you start to calculate over the number of bets placed, the additional profits can be huge.

To take today as an example, I am going to look at the difference between the total best odds for a “favourite” win, an “outsider” win and a draw for tonight’s football. This means 9 games, 8 of which are Premier League.

Favourites Win – Best possible return: 15.34. Worst possible return: 14.57

Draw – Best Possible Return: 41.25. Worst possible return: 37.48

Outsider Win – Best Possible Return: 68.6. Worst possible return: 55.35

As you can clearly see, there is quite a significant difference in the total profit made, even in the case of “favourites”. Whilst it might work out at just 0.77 points, and this may be an “ideal scenario”, by using Oddschecker you could have made 281.05 points of profit in your betting, all with no extra work involved aside from checking a website.

Oddschecker is an Affiliate Site

The bottom line is, that although Oddschecker offers a hell of a lot of features for free, they are an affiliate site, and get paid commissions by people clicking on their featured advertisements, usually from bookmakers, and the likes, so there is no altruism involved here, they are a business and make money from their readers, and readership.

Conclusion on Oddschecker

Whilst Oddschecker is not the only odds comparison website online, it is arguably the biggest and in many respects, as a result of this, the best. In fact, there is only really one aspect of Oddschecker that springs to mind and that is the possibility that you may get marginally better odds through a bookie that isn’t with them.

The beauty of Oddschecker is that it is entirely free. It is free to look at in the morning and it is free to register and read their market reports. It is free to see what odds are doing in real time and these are all things that to me at least, are important or useful. This makes it (for my money) one of the best tools online for a gambler.

The only criticism that I have really seen when it comes to Oddschecker is that there is a lot of advertising from bookies, and I will agree. As I’m typing this I can see 6 adverts for bookmakers on just one page.

The fact is though that a lot of the “adverts” for bookmakers come with extra offers, for example at the moment I can see an advert for bookmaker Bet on Brazil (who I haven’t ever heard of before now) offering 50/1 on United and Newcastle to win (both massively favoured) plus your original odds.

Aside from the fact that a company has to make money, they are doing so in a fashion that benefits their userbase as well.

I think that my final thoughts on Oddschecker is that it is exactly the kind of thing that you just don’t see online very often. It is free, and it is very efficient in terms of what it does. Given that it means making you more money, I don’t see a problem with a few adverts.

The fact is that Oddschecker is the longest standing and most complete odds comparison website online, and whilst there will always be some contrarian saying otherwise in a betting forum, I would probably say that they are just wrong, and probably jealous of their success

The post Oddschecker.com Review The Betting Odds Comparison Website appeared first on Money Makers Reviewed.

Jolly Lock is being advertised as the saviour to all matched bettors, and gamblers alike, but is it the real deal? It was supposedly Benjamin Franklin who famously said that there are only two things in life that can be certain, death and taxes. To the modern professional bettor however, it is only the former that is true.

However, there is seemingly another certainty that is starting to rear its ugly head in the betting industry, and this is account closures. Let’s not mince words here, the bookies hate to lose. With the increasing popularity of things like matched betting which guarantees profit, account closures are at an all time high.

It is easy to write in jest about the bookies spitting their dummy out when they lose, but the fact is that matched betting has changed the landscape of betting forever. For the first time since betting became legal in the UK bookmakers are on the back foot.

In fact, we did a detailed review on how to avoid banned bookmaker accounts just recently on the blog, which generated a lot of interest and emails from readers who knew exactly the size of the problem in the UK,a nd amongst UK bookmakers taking liberties with their customers.

Just how on the back foot are they? According to the subject of this review, Jolly Lock, matched betting and free bonus abuse is costing the betting industry around £20 million per month. These are not small numbers.

Product Title: Jolly Lock

Price: £25 starting subscription, with various other options offered for additional licences.

Guarantee: No Guarantee Found

What You Get:

• A licence for the use of the Jolly Lock application/software

• Full support from the owners.

What Use Does Jolly Lock Have?

For an industry that was worth over £7 billion in 2014 alone, this is small time money. Unfortunately, bookmakers see themselves of the victim here and I have to (very) begrudgingly admit, with some justification.

The use of matched betting operates in a very grey area in terms of taking advantage of free bonuses and the like. You aren’t allowed multiple accounts for example, but who is to say that your Great Aunt Ethel really isn’t taking advantage of the latest slot machine offers to get £50 of free horse racing bets?

In this war on bettors profits, bookmakers have begun to employ increasingly sophisticated methods of minimising the risk of abuse. I won’t go into any substantial detail on these here as I do intend to cover the topic below in a little more detail.

Needless to say, as bookies have upped the ante, a lot of people involved with matched betting have stopped as their profits have dropped and doors closed. There does however seem to be a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel.

Jolly Lock may well be to punters what iesnare is to bookies (for those not familiar with iesnare, I will explain shortly). This new piece of software has the potential to revolutionise matched betting as well as simply successful betting in a simplistic and user friendly fashion.

Bluntly, Jolly Lock may well be a bit of a game changer, however in order to explain why, I will first have to look at the ways bookies monitor your betting.

Why Do Accounts Get Closed?

I don’t want to stick on this subject for too long so I will try and keep things pretty light, but the fundamental answer to this question is because you are costing bookies money. This has been the case for years with some of the more notorious names banned even today from money made in the 90’s.

This used to be a pretty uncommon occurrence however and you had to be making a lot of money to appear on the radar as it was mostly your local manager monitoring your winnings or a telephone betting team.

Online bookmaking has changed everything with accounts available to more people than ever before, and furthermore, it is easier than ever before to open one up. This means that straight away bookies are more defensive in terms of monitoring who is joining them.

These are the kind of messages that are popping up all over the internet:

Combine this with the number of people who are joining with the intent of using bonuses for matched betting and you can see why things like IP addresses and betting patterns are rigorously monitored.

There is also the devil of the betting industry, iesnare. This is a little application that is being installed in the guise of cookies or other standard internet data applications to your computer. What it actually does is logs your internet usage with a view to monitoring and highlighting to bookmakers anything in this usage that may indicate matched betting. This can be you logging into a matched betting site, using multiple accounts through a bookmaker or even simply having a bookmakers website and a betting exchange open at the same time.

It is all very scary stuff and any indication from this software that you are involved in matched betting can result in restrictions or account closures. Of course this is hugely unethical and of dubious legality, and whilst punters are fighting back, it is going to be a long time before bookies are held accountable. Removing the software is possible but it is complicated and offers no long term guarantees.

There is however a newly launched product that deals a lot of the cyber security that bookies have in place and it looks set to be a cracker of a piece of software. It is called Jolly Lock, and now that I have created some context for it, I will look at the product itself.

What Is Jolly Lock?

Jolly Lock is one of the more innovative and interesting products that I have looked at in the last few months. I would even go as far as to say that it is one that I am slightly excited about. It is a new piece of software that helps to cover your online identity in such a way that the bookies methods of monitoring you simply don’t work.

Put simply, Jolly Lock can be viewed as a very specialist and very simple to use VPN or Virtual Private Network.

What this essentially means is that when you connect to the internet through Jolly Lock, your actual details are shielded and replaced with an IP address provided by the software. Furthermore, because of how Jolly Lock works with its virtual desktop, there shouldn’t be anything nasty (read iesnare) downloaded onto your computer.

Of course there have been ways of getting around this to some degree in the form of traditional VPNs however Jolly Lock improves upon them in a number of ways. With a traditional VPN, you may be assigned an IP address that has already been used and banned.

Unfortunately, you tend to be stuck with this. Even if you do have a working IP, using anything on the bookmakers website that runs Adobe Flash instantly exposes your actual IP address. These are both massive problems when trying to remain anonymous.

Jolly Lock however gets around almost all of these problems. First and foremost, all IPs that Jolly Lock issues to users are UK based (which also means that you can use the software to bet from outside the UK) and on the off chance that an IP that is assigned to you doesn’t work, then the team will replace it for you. This is all very good, but in some respects standard fare.

For my money, the biggest things that Jolly Lock gets right is allowing you to use Flash without compromising your IP address. Those who engage in matched betting will no doubt know that a lot of the casino games on betting sites use Flash. This can mean that for the security conscious, you have to choose between losing out on free betting opportunities and keeping yourself hidden.

How do I use Jolly Lock?

I like to consider myself pretty to be pretty competent with computers and so for me using Jolly Lock wasn’t difficult. Honestly, even if you only know the basics of using a computer however, using the software shouldn’t be difficult at all. When you sign up you are given an instruction sheet which comes as a downloadable PDF. This talks you through everything that you need to know, what to do and how to do it.

Once again, if you find that you are struggling with Jolly Lock, the team are friendly and helpful.

Once you have installed and set up the software, you simply launch Jolly Lock, log in to the portal and you will be taken to your virtual desktop. From here, you simply use Jolly Lock as you would if you were betting on your home computer. There is an internet browser preinstalled on the drive (Google Chrome, albeit an older version but it should still work for your betting needs) and there is also a small amount of space for you should you need to save anything.

When you are all up and running, you can use Jolly Lock in a number of different ways. Realistically though, you will be using Jolly Lock to visit any betting website where you don’t want to leave a footprint. This could involve visiting matched betting sites and betting exchanges through your virtual desktop and actual bookies through your actual desktop.

Ultimately however, you can use Jolly Lock pretty much however you want (within the Terms and Conditions naturally).

There are a few things that I do feel that I need to address if you are going to use Jolly Lock. There is no denying that this is one hell of a tool and it does a lot to advance the ability of the punter. You do however have to ensure that you still follow some basic rules to keep your betting accounts open.

As good as it is, the software is only as clever as the user. What I mean by this, is whilst Jolly Lock can hide your identity and stop bookies logging what you are looking for, if you leave an obvious betting trail with them, you may still find your accounts are closed.

How Much Does Jolly Lock Cost?

Jolly Lock is only available on a monthly subscription basis however there are options for multiple licenses. The first option is a single user licence which costs £25 per month (although your first month is available for just £15 at the time of writing). If you want a licence for 3 users, it is available for £69 (£23 per user). For 5 users, a licence will cost you £105 (or £21 per user).

There is no money back guarantee in place for these options however you can cancel whenever you want by simply cancelling the recurring payment through Paypal.

Conclusion on Jolly Lock

The war on the punter is one that has been well documented with even the mainstream media weighing in on a problem that would usually be condemned to betting forums. The problem up to now has always been that as a punter, fighting back against the bookies you are massively up against the odds (pun not intended). Jolly Lock is a game changer in this regard.

I have known about VPN’s before now and whilst I have looked into them, I have always felt that they don’t offer quite what a bettor really needs. Instead, it this option felt simply like the best on the market. With Jolly Lock however, there is finally something that will suit anybody. This is a piece of software which is simple to use, does what it claims to and gives some sort of edge back to bettors.

If there is one area of betting that can’t really afford to miss out on Jolly Lock it is those who are involved with matched betting. Bookies are really angling to close down this method of making money online and their vendetta is unlikely to stop until the whole concept is eradicated.

With this in mind, I don’t see why you would want to turn down an opportunity to protect your revenue stream, especially when the cost is hardly bank breaking compared to how much you can earn with matched betting.

On the subject of costs, Jolly Lock is slightly more expensive than a VPN but you have to keep in mind that this is a highly specialised tool which has been designed to do a highly specialised job. One that it does very well.

As I said at the start of this review, it isn’t very often that I get really excited about a product however Jolly Lock falls pretty firmly into this category but this is definitely something that has piqued my interest.

This is a reasonably priced game changer and I have absolutely no problem with recommending Jolly Lock to anybody who takes their online betting seriously.

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There are so many ways of making money online that it is very difficult to really know where to start. In the case of this particular article, I intend to look at gambling as a whole. This is a rather intensive topic to tackle if I’m honest. There are so many variations of betting and gambling that it is difficult to know where to start.

Given that gambling is often mentioned as a numbers game, perhaps the best place to start is with the numbers. It is estimated that by 2018 the online gambling market will be worth over $56 billion dollars. An increase of almost 25% on the current figures of $45 billion. No matter who you are, that is a very large pie and there is plenty to go around. This is something that internet marketers have picked up on  and a search for even something like Tipster will generate over 10,000,000 results.

All of this is interesting as it shows just how much gambling has changed since those early days of legalisation of bookmakers in the UK or even earlier, the development of Las Vegas in the US. Gambling is something that is at your fingertips 24 hours a day, seven days a week and there is an increasing number of “professional gamblers” here in the UK (in part down to the abolition of gambling tax in 2001). Furthermore, gambling is much less stigmatised than it once was with more than half of Britons spending £50 per month on gambling.

Obviously gambling is just that and there are as many people will lose as win.

What types of gambling are there?

Gambling itself is a hugely broad term. The Oxford English Dictionary describes gambling as “The action, practice, or pastime of playing games for stakes, as cards, dice, etc., or betting money on the outcome of particular events”, however it also goes on to define gambling as being “more generally: the taking of risks in the hope of gaining some advantage, benefit, or success”.

This really opens up the doors in terms of what constitutes gambling and how you can make money on it, but in the main, there are a few key disciplines that I will look at below. These include things like sports betting, online casinos and even some more obscure methods of betting. For the purposes of this article I will mostly be looking at online gambling as well as making money online is what interests me (also, I find most bookmakers depressing places that seem to bring out the desperation in people).

Sportsbook Betting

Here in Britain, “sportsbook” betting is the daddy of all gambling. This all harks back to the days when horse racing was really the Sport of Kings, and more specifically, the rise of the horse racing track. Here bookmakers started to ply their trade and ultimately became what we Brits associated with gambling. Nowadays, you can bet on so much more than horse racing and a quick look at one of the larger online casinos shows 44 different sports that you can bet on. These range from handball and Gaelic Sports to horse racing and football.

Betting is often preferred as a method of making money online as you are essentially competing against a person when you place a bet with a bookmaker. Somewhere, there is an odds compiler who has decided what the outcome of a game is likely to be and the odds that are offered reflect this. For example, at the time of writing this, Manchester City are 1/14 to qualify for the Champions League ahead of Steaua Bucharest (a frankly very safe bet).

There are some people whoever who know a sport well enough to bet against the grain (it is very unlikely that this would be a good example of that though). A reasonable example of this might be where a horse has consistently placed but never won, and in a particular race there is a horse that has won every race that year. But let’s say for example, that the placed horse has been dropping half a second each race whilst the favourite has been gaining half a second and their times are now similar. Odds compilers may miss this whilst a professional bettor looks out for exactly this kind of opportunity.

The obvious place for betting is of course with bookmakers, of which there are many online. These range from high street names to specialist online bookies. As well as this, there is also the option to utilise increasingly popular betting exchanges. These allow punters to bet against other bettors as well as “lay” bets which allows you to bet against outcomes (I have written extensively about this subject before now).

When you are betting, the key to making it profitable is to know your sport. The more you know about a sport, the higher your chances of betting successfully. The more you know the easier it is to spot when an odds compiler has possibly made a mistake. This is something that plays nearly into one of the most important aspects of making money through betting, value. Value is where an outcome has been overlooked and is priced better than you think it should be.

There are very strong pros and cons to betting as a form of income. If you know what you are looking for, it is definitely possible to gain something of an edge. Unfortunately, when it comes to betting you are also leaving a large degree of your income in the hands of others. This aspect of luck is something that realistically applies to all betting however it is arguably more obvious with some examples than others.

Make Money From Casinos

Online casinos are a relatively modern phenomenon here in the UK and it is important to understand their popularity and how they fit in with profitable gambling. There are 3 main ways of betting in an online casino and these will be forced upon you at every turn. Casinos are unabashedly aggressive in how they promote their games and this is mostly down to the fact that online casinos have fixed odds.

The first are slot machines. There isn’t a lot to know about slot machines. You can’t influence results and there is a set payout probability (usually between 70% and 80%). Slot machines are entirely fixed in terms of outcomes and this makes them a very bad option for anybody who is looking to bet professionally.

The next option is blackjack. Blackjack is perhaps erroneously often thought of as a casino game in which you can gain an edge. This is down to the notion of counting cards, something which is possible when playing with a real deck. In an online casino however, you are back to fixed odds which mean that the deck is never “loaded” as each draw is entirely random.

Finally, you have roulette. Roulette is perhaps most well known through fixed odd betting machines in bookmakers (a massively controversial and ongoing topic) however the software that they use is remarkably similar to playing roulette in an online casino. Roulette is another casino game like Blackjack that people perhaps feel they can gain an edge on. This is down to things like wheel bias and spreading your chips, however the fact remains that the house always has an edge.

Gambling through casinos is fun. It is a quick and easy fix and I can think of no other form of gambling (with the exception of lotteries) that offer so much potential in terms of how much you can win from such small bets. That having been said, there are some online casinos that are better than others. They offer better pay out rates with some of them going as high as 98%. It is because of this that it is always worth looking around if you are going to engage in casino based betting.  This does mean though, that no matter what the pay out percentage is, you are still hypothetically giving away £2 in £100.

If you do want to make casino betting profitable then you have to follow two of the oldest rules in betting. The first is that you should be prepared to lose. The second is that you should quit whilst you’re ahead. Betting for long enough through an online casino will eventually eat your bank balance and unlike betting, there is nothing that you can do to influence the numbers.

Make Money From Poker

Poker is one of the few methods of gambling that is almost entirely mathematically sound. This is because there isn’t really a house “edge” as such. This means that when you play, you are literally only playing against your opponents and a skilled player can very quickly work out their games. The reason that this is able to happen is because a lot of online poker companies make money by taking a cut of the pot rather than charging users directly. This is often just a few dollars at a time which means that most users don’t miss it. They may also look to charge for tournaments where there is an overall prize as well.

The fact that people can make a lot of money through poker is easy to see. A simple look at the top earning poker players shows that some have made tens of millions of dollars as a prize for just a single competition. These aren’t the only people making money from poker however. There has been a strong interest in this method since online poker launched which is down to the fact that you may not become an overnight millionaire, but there is still a fair amount to be taken away from the game.

There are a number of different strategies for playing poker and it is one of the only methods of making money online where I would avoid paying for anything. This is because there are literally hundreds of thousands of free guides online. The thing about poker however is once you have learned to calculate your odds, that is the majority of the work done. How long this takes will ultimately depend on things like your aptitude for numbers, however I believe that online poker is one of the few methods of making money through gambling that can be seen as a life skill.

Lotteries

Lotteries are arguably the most socially accepted method of betting in the UK. Unfortunately, they are also the least likely to come in. Lotteries are able to entice people in with the knowledge that if you win, you win very big. The problem is that the odds definitely reflect this. At the time of writing the odds of winning the lotto in the UK are around 14,000,000/1.

There are plenty of people who will tell you that there is a way to improve these odds. These range from things like identifying “patterns” such as the fact that there has never been a sequential win on the lottery, or that certain balls are more likely to be drawn as they have been drawn before now. The fact is that lotteries are created to be as random as possible and this only highlights how strong the gamblers fallacy can be.

Personally, I see lotteries as being something that you have to be “in it to win it”. Entry is a few quid a week and the prizes are potentially genuinely life changing. That having been said, it is something that should be approached as a “what if I win” rather than a “when I win”.

Scratch Cards

At first I wasn’t going to write about scratch cards. They’re something that somebody might buy to round up their shopping to an even number or on an impulse if feeling lucky. Scratch cards certainly aren’t something that would likely appeal to any form of “serious” bettor. I have however unfortunately seen an increasing number of scams online that involve scratch cards and so I think that it is important to address this issue.

In and of itself, a scratch card isn’t a bad gamble as such. They have fixed odds usually ranging from a one in four to a one in three chance of winning. The big prizes are life changing and there is a reasonable scope for winning a bit of beer money.

The problems with scratch cards come from the various “business” opportunities that can arise.

Many of you reading this will be familiar with a pyramid scheme. This is where people at the bottom of the pyramid are encouraged to sign other people up for a service, whilst those above take a little bit of money from each layer below. This is an environment that is rife for exploitation. When applied to scratch cards, a person has to buy a certain number (usually 5 or 10) which are then distributed up the pyramid, as are any winnings.

An easy demonstration of this could work thusly. You are told you must buy 10 scratch cards a month in order to join a “syndicate”. You use 4 for yourself and then send the others up the pipeline with 3 going to the person above you, 2 to the person above them and finally 1 goes to the person above them.

This is sold as you only needing to recruit 3 people in order to be getting free scratch cards and free chances of winning. Not every scratch card service will ask you to share your winnings however many do and when this does happen, it will be in a similar fashion to what I have described above.

Make Money From Binary Options

Binary options are something that I have looked at before in great detail and to call them a mixed bag is a huge understatement. If you want to read more extensively on this subject, you can see my article on binary options here however I will also summarise this for you.

When you talk about binary options, it is almost impossible to not talk about binary brokers. These are the various companies that allow you to trade binary options through their proprietary platforms. Consider them as the bookmakers of the binary options world and you aren’t a million miles off.

Treat Binary options with care, as there are many Binary trading scams out there, as I discuss on another review.

Binary options are often sold to users as a form of trading rather than as gambling however this isn’t true at all. For example, binary options brokers aren’t regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority who cover anybody offering a financial service. Instead, they are covered by the Gambling Commission.

As a concept, binary options are not in and of themselves problematic. In fact, the best way to sum up binary options is that you are betting on whether the value of stock or commoddities will rise or fall over a very short space of time. It is something of a crap shoot however and the time scales that are involved remove any ability to make an informed bet, however they are (at least in theory) fair.

Unfortunately, there is evidence to suggest that binary brokers manipulate the numbers if they stand to lose a lot of money.

Racing Tipsters

In looking at tipsters we really star to get our teeth into the meat of making money through gambling. There are literally tens of thousands of tipster services currently operating online (a Google Search for the term reveals 10,500,000 results). These vary in so many ways that it is rather difficult to compare and contrast from one to another. Instead, I will look at the concept of tipsters as a whole and what you should and shouldn’t look out for.

For those who don’t know a tipster is somebody who provides you with betting advice, usually in the form of a specific outcome, for example a horse to win a race or a team to win a football game. The quantity and quality of selections varies hugely from one service to the next which can make knowing where to start looking a difficult thing to do.

Now, what you have to look out for is tipsters manipulating their results.

When considering a tipster, there are a few things that I feel it is necessary to really consider. The first is the cost. To start you should work out how much you can afford to bet per point (how much you can stake per bet) and see how many points of profit you need to cover your subscription cost. It isn’t worth paying £50 for a service that will net you 10 points of profit at £5 per point. Once you have established this, it is important to look at the ROI or the return on interest. This tells you how profitable a service will be compared to your investment.

Moving away from the financial side of things a little, there are two other things that I consider to be important when looking at a tipster service which are the strike rate and the consistency. It is important to highlight that there are some similarities between these two things however a high strike rate doesn’t represent good consistency and vice versa. A high strike rate is generally a good thing however you have look to see how often a service loses as well. What kind of losing streaks will there be? This is important as your betting bank will have to be able to absorb these losses when you aren’t winning.

The final (and arguably most important) thing that any reputable tipster will provide you with is proofing. This should be a list of all the bets that they have placed over a period of time and whilst dry, it is always worth pouring over. Proofing is important because it helps to gauge whether a service is genuine or not. What you want to be looking out for here is to check that winners are real (I usually randomly spot check 10 or so supposed winners). That there aren’t any obvious patterns that might stem from something called back testing (this is where you apply a system to historic results to see if it would have won).

Betting Systems

A betting system is – by definition – just that. It is a system that is designed to identify bets that have an increased chance of winning. The types of systems out there are incredibly numerous and as such, it simply isn’t possible to examine them all here. A lot of bettors who want to develop a system will usually start by identifying a very specific niche. This may be a certain type of horse race, for example flat races under 1 mile or races with 8 horses under a certain weight.

The reason that bettors will set out to develop a system for such a small niche is that whilst it is almost impossible to garner a better understanding than the bookies across everything, it is possible to know more than them on one topic. It is simply a case of you spending an hour on something that a bookmaker may spend just 15 minutes on.

As well as betting systems that work based around understanding, there are some that are much more numbers based. Again, these are hugely varied but will typically rely on betting based around a statistical likelihood rather than examining particular variables. To pull an example out of thin air (and one I would add that is likely to fail so shouldn’t be used), one may decide to lay the horse with the highest odds in a race, so long as the odds are below 7.0 and where there are more than 6 horses running. Statistically, the odds of this horse coming in are very low percentage and so it could be viewed as a “safe bet”.

I did a detailed review on Horse Racing Systems, and the benefits here.

When it comes to betting systems, as well as working on your own and developing your understanding of betting, there are plenty of betting systems for sale online. These vary in terms of the sports and events that you will be betting on as well as the bets that you will need to place. In my experience, however, there are two main types of betting systems that are offered for sale.

The first is what I would consider to be a high volume system. These are based around backing at low odds and winning a lot of the bets that you place. This kind of system can be used to great effect however they can offer carry significant amounts of risk. For example, if you are only making 0.8 points of profit on a race, a string of losses can very quickly eat away at things. An example could be the one cited before when talking about the statistics of bets.

The other kind of betting system that you often see involves extracting the most possible value. This links in more with the type of betting system that I first mentioned. This kind of betting generally looks at finding an event whereby the bookies have given longer odds to an outcome than is actually realistic. Generally, you will find the best value to be had in horse racing where there are often anomalies that can be exploited.

With a purchased betting system I always recommend exercising caution and there is one very good reason for this. Betting systems can work very well when you understand them fully. Unfortunately, not all betting systems are easy to follow and there is often very little indicator that they will be complicated in the sales material. With this in mind, you should always be on the lookout for a money back guarantee, especially given the fact that some of these “proven” systems can run into the hundreds of pounds.

Betfair Trading

Trading is a method of betting that exclusively takes place on betting exchanges suchs as Betfair. When you are trading bets, you aren’t necessarily looking to profit from the end result, but instead to make money by cashing out before or during a race. Trading is interesting from a gambling perspective as much of it is entirely numbers based in its approach. This means that it is very easy to take out the “emotion” of gambling.

One of the biggest downsides of trading is that you do have to be say in front of your computer and there aren’t really any shortcuts available either. With a betting system, you can buy something and start tweaking the idea, a tipster takes that process out entirely. Trading however is a skill that you can only develop by continually trading. This means that when you are starting out, it can be expensive and you have to be prepared to supplement this for some time if you want to be able to make consistent money.

All of that having been said, I feel that trading is one of the few methods of betting that is a life long skill. Once you know how to successfully trade, it isn’t unreasonable to expect to pop online, have a look at the markets and start to make some money.

The very best Betfair trading product we have come across, and that I have traded myself is the Betfair Scalper Betfair Course.

Matched Betting

Matched betting (sometimes known as bonus bagging) is a method of gambling that has only really made itself known in the last few years, but what an entrance it has made. Matched betting works by betting in such a way that you get bonuses from various bookmakers that allow you free bets. You then use these free bets in conjunction with lay betting in order to make a guaranteed profit. There have been reports of users making some very substantial profits through matched betting with the most recent email from a popular service claiming to have a user who made over £100,000 in 4 years.

Matched betting isn’t flawless however. Bookies have started to become much more aware of the process and I have seen numerous reports of people getting bookmakers accounts closed for doing this. This means that a once risk free method of betting does now come with a degree of risk. It is also worth considering the sustainability of matched betting as a method of making money online. Whilst there are a number of services available that will show you how to get around this, you have to keep the possibility in mind that the bonuses may dry up. If this happens, then so does your income.

The one matched betting service we do advise above all others is Mike Cruickshank’s Profit Maximiser Product.

Arbitrage Betting

Arbitrage betting is a bit of a side note in the big book of betting that involves betting in such a way that you are guaranteed to make a profit. Matched betting is to a degree a form of arbitrage betting, but where matched betting involves betting with the bookies money (therefore eliminating risk that way), traditional arbitrage betting involves identifying two sets of odds that allow you to guarantee a profit. There is also an extension of this known as dutching which involves placing multiple bets on a single event. By using the correct stakes, it is possible to guarantee a profit/minimise loss depending on your betting philosophy.

What Should I do to Make Money Through Gambling?

If you want to make money through gambling, there are a few core tenants that you really need to stick to. The first one is perhaps the most obvious and that is you must be prepared and willing to lose money. The thing with making money through gambling  is that even the best system, the best services in the world will all have losses and you have to be able to absorb those losses in the long term.

I have looked at numerous services before now that have had month after month of profitable betting only to have several months of losing bets. If you had joined the services at this time, then you would find that even a decent betting bank of 100 points can be lost. Any successful bettor will tell you that you are better off starting out making and losing pennies and upping your stake when you can afford it rather than blowing it all pursuing a big win or chasing losses.

This brings me to the second rule of making money through gambling. Don’t let your emotions get the better of you. This is applicable to various aspects of betting but in the main I see two things that most bettors who are starting out do wrong. The first is the concept of superstition or luck. Some for example won’t bet against their football team or will change a bet because the 33/1 outsider is named after their Aunt’s cat so it must be a sign. When you are taking the professional approach to betting, all that matters is your profit and loss sheet at the end of the year.

The second area where you categorically cannot let your emotions run away is when it comes to chasing losses. If you are only betting what you can afford to lose, a loss shouldn’t affect you and as such you shouldn’t be chasing it. Personally, I would avoid any system that talks about loss recovery as I have seen people lose their entire banks through these methods, sometimes in just a few bets.

The third rule of making money through gambling is don’t get your accounts closed. I have actually written extensively on this topic so I won’t go into it in detail here, but essentially you should be aiming to move your money and your bets around as much as possible. Bookies can close down your account for no reason and in some cases, they have seemingly done so. By keeping as many accounts open as possible you can get the best odds and the best offers. My full review on keeping bookie accounts open can be seen here.

If you are looking to use a system or a tipster, try to find something that will suit you. For example, if you work 9-5 and you’re looking to make a second income through betting, a trading based system isn’t going to work for you. Likewise, if you want betting to become a sustainable form of income for you, then you wouldn’t go to a tipster as they do all the work for you. When shopping around for systems, I would strongly recommend contacting the content creators to speak to them about what they offer as well,

Finally, I cannot stress enough that one of the best things that you can do if you want to start making money through gambling is to engage the community. There are literally thousands of forums online and there are much more experienced bettors who are willing to share their experiences and knowledge. The fact is that one of the smartest things that you can do with betting is learn from other people’s mistakes.

What is Value?

At first, it wasn’t my intention to talk about value in too much detail as this is something that has been covered more times than I can shake a stick at, but I also think that it is important to dispel some myths about value betting. The core concept of value is being able to get better odds on an event than the likelihood of it occurring. This is something that is usually applicable in horse racing and occasionally football, particularly in the lower and more obscure leagues.

What you must keep in mind with value however is that there is still a low win rate with this approach. What most people won’t tell you about value is that you are backing an “8/1 horse” at 11/1.  Whilst it is great to get those extra 3 points out of a win, it is hard to ignore that the odds are still against that horse. You certainly aren’t going to be getting race favourites at silly prices.

Sometimes, value in odds can also be a very small change. For example, you might get a team to win at 2/1 instead of 9/5. This seems like a miniscule difference and honestly, if you are betting £10 then it is. But if you are a professional bettor and are staking hundreds or even thousands of pounds (and people do bet these kinds of numbers every day) it makes a difference. For example, using the numbers above and a £100 bet, you would make £180 profit at 9/5. At 2/1 this would be £200 profit which represents a significant increase.

Value isn’t the be all and end all though. I have looked at value based services before that produce some massive winners and that can make hundreds of points of profit per month. They can also have long sustained losing streaks.

It is my hope that by highlighting the negatives of a value based approach, it encourages people to explore all options. The fact is that value is a term that is particularly well worn in the betting community and a big part of this is content creators. Value is painted as being a win win situation, and if you were looking to place a particular bet anyway, then value is something to look out for. It isn’t however a betting strategy in and of itself in my opinion.

Conclusion on Making Money From Gambling

So there you have it. I have tried to be both informative and opinionated on each of the methods of betting, something that can be quite difficult to do objectively. The fact of the matter is that there is money to be made online through gambling. To suggest otherwise would be folly and there are literally thousands of people who make money this way every day. What is less commonly explored is the risk that comes with gambling.

There is the obvious risk, which is placing a bet. Whether that be on black, a double down on 11 or the 2.45 at Cheltenham. Almost every bet has a chance to lose, and all you can do as a professional is aim to minimise that chance. There is also the risk of your discipline failing. I am a firm believer that you should only gamble with what you can afford to lose. It is hard to ignore the fact that some people are unable to do this and when you start chasing losses, you an lose a lot of money very quickly (if you feel that this does apply to you please visit http://www.gambleaware.co.uk).

The thing about gambling is there is also a lot of unwritten risk and this comes in the form of products that people are selling. I have looked at hundreds of betting related products in my time and there are very few that I would call a worthwhile investment. The old adage that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is still very much stands up. If you are considering a product, try and find reviews for it, contact the content creator. Do as much research as you possibly can on the service. If you are dealing with a reputable producer of content, there will be plenty of this information about.

When looking at gambling it is very easy to focus on the negatives. But this is a balanced review and whilst I would say that it is foolhardy to overlook them, there are a lot of positives too. Making money through gambling is easier than ever (some may call this a bad thing) and I genuinely believe that now, more than ever, Joe Average has more information available to him in relation to betting than ever before.

It can be difficult filtering through the crap but it is worth it for that rare gem. I have come back to tipster services and seen year on year growth in terms of their profit. I have watched people make some really decent money on the side that has helped them to achieve things that they wouldn’t have ever dreamed possible (all tax free of course).

As difficult a thing as it is to admit, betting can also be fun. No matter how many times you win, no matter how many bets per day you may be placing (either manually or through software), it is hard to ignore the exhilaration that can come with a big win. Sure, you might not make anything for a few days afterwards, but a few hundred in profit in your pocket feels very good.

The thing about gambling however is so long as you remain disciplined, it can be very easy money. It is far from perfect, and you really do have to be willing to commit to gambling as though it were a business if you want to be successful. There is often a disclaimer at the bottom of some of the more questionable products I look at (ironically enough) that says “Even though this industry is one of the few where one can write their own cheque in terms of earnings”, but this is a truth of sorts.

Truthfully, gambling isn’t for everybody. As I have alluded to several times throughout this article you have to be disciplined and you have to be sharp if you want to be able to make money, especially in the long term. If this isn’t you, I would advise looking elsewhere before you begin as betting based on emotion will only lead to ruin. If you do fit the bill however, it is worth starting as soon as you can.

The beauty of gambling, especially when it comes to identifying betting systems, is that you can bet on paper at absolutely no cost. When you have something that works, you can start to bet small and compound your stakes and winnings. This does provide a strong advantage over a lot of other methods of making money online, many of which require you to pay out somewhat substantially if you want to get started.

So is it possible to make money through gambling? Absolutely. Some people are happy to top up their income enough to go out on a weekend, some may want to quit their day job, others want to be multimillionaires. The fact is that with the correct approach, all of these are hypothetically possible, so long as you keep the right attitude and remain are of the risks that are involved.

The post How To Make Money From Gambling, What is Really Possible? appeared first on Money Makers Reviewed.

Cymatic Trader Software. Since Betfair was founded all the way back in 2000, people have been looking for ways to gain an edge in trading markets. The fact is that as with any type of trading, money can be made and lost on split second decisions and being able to see trends emerging.

Whilst the Betfair exchange does a reasonable job accommodating the abilities to do this, it seemed inevitable that somebody would come up with something better, and so betting bots were born.

For those who aren’t familiar with the term, a betting bot (which is what Advanced Cymatic Trader is)  is a robot that is designed to bet for you. These aren’t physical entities however, but simple pieces of software that you can programme and configure to place bets on your behalf in accordance with certain rules.

This type of approach to trading is something that has been seen rather extensively in the world of Forex for a number of years and with good reason.

The fact of the matter is that when it comes to betting, bots are the perfect gambler in some ways. They will stick a system with a ruthless efficiency that people simply can’t match. Automatically placing bets and trades and cashing them in when profitable, all without emotion.

There is no error in a betting bots trading other than those that people have programmed it with. On top of this near flawless approach to betting, bots can do so faster and more efficiently than a human hand.

Betting bots are also tireless and do not require sleep or have doubts about a bet. In fact, I have known of people who run a betting bot with a successful betting system programmed in on a private server.

This means that their bots are running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, quietly making money on autopilot. All those people had to do was log into Betfair to withdraw their money when they wanted it.

Review Product Name: Advanced Cymatic Trader

What is it: Betfair Trading Software

What You Get: Access to the Cymatic Trader Platform download.

Price: £59.99 per year.

Where To Buy: www.cymatic.co.uk

There are however some problems that come with betting bots and the biggest one is that if you haven’t programmed them correctly, then they will haemorrhage you money.

I have myself set up a system before on a betting bot (funnily enough it was the subject of this article, Advanced Cymatic Trader) and having came back an hour later to find that I was losing money.

Fortunately, I was betting just a few pence and it wasn’t left alone for long, but had I been at full stakes, I would not have been best impressed.

There are other issues that can come with leaving a bot to bet for you as well, namely things like power outages, losing an internet connection etc. All things that a user will identify and correct, but a bot cannot carry out this task.

There are plenty of betting bots available on the market and I plan to sit down and have a look at a great deal of them, however I am choosing to start with a betting bot called Advanced Cymatic Trader.

I have used this piece of software before and so I am reasonably proficient with it, however this isn’t the main reason that I am looking at Advanced Cymatic Trader first. Instead it is because it is one of the better known and more widely used betting bots. So with a that in mind, let’s get down to brass tacks.

What is Advanced Cymatic Trader?

Advanced Cymatic Trader is one of the better known betting bots on the market and this is with good reason.

In many ways, I feel that Advanced Cymatic Trader is something of a “jack of all trades” in so much that it does pretty much everything that other betting bots do, however it is much less specialised than some of them (different betting bots like to put more emphasis on certain features than others).

The Advanced Cymatic Trader software itself is computer based unfortunately only compatible with Windows natively from Windows XP with Service Pack 3 all the way up to Windows 10. It is also fully compatible with Windows Server 2003 (with the latest updates) as well as Windows Server 2008 R2.

If you have a Mac, there are a number of options available to you with the Advanced Cymatic Trader team providing some advice on different ways you can run Advanced Cymatic Trader through a version of Windows on your Mac.

Finally, if you are a Linux user, there is plenty of support provided in the forums to get Advanced Cymatic Trader up and running.

As a company, Advanced Cymatic Trader was founded almost a decade ago in 2007 following creator Gavin Porter developing an interest in creating an online software platform for online betting and financial trading.

Given his degree in computer science, it makes sense that his career would ultimately lead to this kind of avenue and actually, it is something that I personally find reassuring. I have looked at and used some betting bots before now that have been built by third party software developers and the results have been very mixed to say the least.

More than this though, it means that the person calling the shots knows what the right thing to do is.

As well as placing bets, Advanced Cymatic Trader can also be used to trade bets within your set parameters as well. Whilst this may not seem like a significant difference, to some bettors it can be everything.

Betting is and of itself, is a relatively straight forward affair and honestly, this isn’t why betting exchanges are successful. Where betting exchanges come into their own (and product like Advanced Cymatic Trader with this) is in trading.

Trading on Betfair can be as straight forward or as complicated as you want it to be and whilst there are some fantastic guides and systems available (I would recommend Betfair Scalper trading course), there are also some absolute disasters that I have seen. This is because trading can be a volatile thing by its nature.

Advanced Cymatic Trader is a good example of a betting bot because it allows you to set trade parameters as well as betting parameters.

This means that as well as simply waiting for a bet to run itself down, you can configure Advanced Cymatic Trader to utilise stop loss methods etc. which mean that the software will actively try to minimise your losses etc.

How does Advanced Cymatic Trader Work?

Advanced Cymatic Trader works in the same way as a number of betting bots, namely through Betfair’s own API. This stands for Application Programming Interface, and it allows a software developer to directly interface with Betfair’s exchange, as well allowing the software to place bets for you.

What all of this boils down to is that when you tell Advanced Cymatic Trader to do something, it carries out your orders directly through Betfair.

This happens almost instantly (and more often than not is quicker than actually using the Betfair website due to refresh rates etc.) and also allows for a number of additional features to be implemented into software, such as betting under the minimum stake of £2.

As a user, this means that instead of using your Betfair account and a web browser for trading, you can use Advanced Cymatic Trader to carry out all of the tasks that you would typically.

In practically all other respects, using Advanced Cymatic Trader as a day to day method of interfacing with the betting exchange isn’t really any different to how you would usually use Betfair.

As I will explore, there are some features that you can use to modify the experience for you, and in many cases, automate a process that you may otherwise try to do. Generally speaking though, if you are at home on the Betfair browser based exchange, Advanced Cymatic Trader will not feel too unfamiliar.

What Features Are Included?

There is a lot that Advanced Cymatic Trader is capable of doing and whilst most of the basic features are essentially things that you can already do on the Betfair betting exchange. There are however some very specific and important differences which help Advanced Cymatic Trader to edge ahead of Betfair in terms of abilities.

One of the best examples of a Betfair feature that is not just included with Advanced Cymatic Trader, but is improved upon is cashing out a bet, referred to in Advanced Cymatic Trader (and a lot of other betting bots) as greening up.

When you cash out in Betfair, you lock in the profit calculated by Betfair. This is typically done either before an event starts where there has been a huge market surge and a bet has turned profitable already, or in play.

With Advanced Cymatic Trader however, you can green up in a few different ways, many of which allow you to improve your profitability and maximise earning potential. For example, you can choose to simply green up on a single horse rather than all bets that have been placed.

You can also green up all bets on a runner at the best available price. Advanced Cymatic Trader also allows you to set a value at which the software will green up for you, if certain odds (and resultantly profit) are achieved.

Whilst not technically, a feature that Betfair offer, there are however improvements in terms of how data can be presented. For example, on Betfair’s browser exchange, everything is presented in a format that Advanced Cymatic Trader refers to as a ladder.

This shows the horses, odds etc. in a spreadsheet like layout with odds constantly swapping and changing. Advanced Cymatic Trader is however able to draw that information into various charts and graphs providing a visual of what has happened in terms of odds movements, prices etc. All information that traders will find useful in making a decision.

The main thing that you will likely use Advanced Cymatic Trader for that you couldn’t carry out on the exchange is for automated trading.

There is in fact an inbuilt programme with Advanced Cymatic Trader that can bet for you entirely automatically. Whilst it isn’t flawless and I would recommend carrying out your own research and trials before jumping in, this is fundamentally built on sound principles.

• 14 days FREE TRIAL
• Certified by Betfair
• Unbeatable speed
• Support –
• Training Mode (Demo)
• Grid Interface – single click trading, compact Betfair-style trading grid.
• Ladder Interface – full depth of market, single click trading, queue position (see below) and built-in robot.
• Position In Queue (PIQ) – provides a real-time estimated PIQ, arguably the most important and unique feature of our ladder!
• Excel Integration – view realtime prices in Excel, trigger bets from Excel and even build your own completely automated trading robot!
• Automated Trading Robot – included is a unique Betfair bot, watch it trade on the ladder for you!
• Multi-Market – trade several different markets simultaneously.
• Managed Markets (Guardian) – works in the background to gather data from multiple ‘managed’ markets and maintain offset bets.
• My Markets – a list of markets that you have bookmarked.
• Tick Offset – automatically sends an opposing bet, after you get matched.
• Stop Loss – automatically limits your losses. Trailing Stop Loss can also protect profits.
• Fill or Kill – automatically cancels a bet if not matched with a specified timeframe
• Greening (Cash-out) – a single click to lock in your profit (or loss) regardless of the outcome.
• Racing Autopilot – it can automatically select each horse race and move forward.
• Football Odds Predictor – calculates the expected odds statistically, to help you identify trading opportunities when market prices are misaligned.
• Betfair Live Video – watch live sporting events in a compact resizeable window.
• Advanced Charts – possibly the most comprehensive integrated charting available in any Betfair application.
• Betfair Charts – automatically refreshing Betfair price/volume charts.
• Customize – easily customize ladders and charts. Save unlimited layouts to files. Choose colours.
• API Monitoring – for real-time overview and management of internet and exchange issues.
• Instant Email Notifications – of errors and API Monitor reports.
• Supports multiple monitors – perfect for viewing multiple ladder windows.
• All market types – works with all Betfair market types.
• Accounting – downloading/filtering of betting history and account statements.
• Intuitive – designed for professional traders, but easy for novices too.
• Languages –  English,  Portuguese,  Russian.

How the automated robot within Advanced Cymatic Trader works is actually rather clever. When certain conditions are met, the software will automatically try to join on both sides of the market, at the best possible prices.

These are selected to be unmatched initially with a view to getting the bets matched in such a way that there is guaranteed profit. The parameters that trigger this condition are pre programmed into Advanced Cymatic Trader however you can adjust these yourself if you find that there is too much risk etc.

A very interesting thing that Advanced Cymatic Trader can do that isn’t directly related to your betting is provide predicted football odds. Using its on board football odds predictor, Advanced Cymatic Trader users can see what the “true” odds for a number of different football betting markets.

Using mathematical formulae and statistics, the software compared predicted odds with prevailing odds on the Betfair exchange. This can then be used by traders to identify potential opportunities.

One of the features that isn’t linked with an existing Betfair feature is the ability to configure Advanced Cymatic Trader to use stop loss. This is a term that perhaps won’t mean much to anybody who has a background in betting in the traditional sense as it actually comes from trading on Forex.

Put basically, a stop loss is whereby the software will automatically close a trade to help you to minimise your profits. This can also be inverted so that the software will automatically lock in profits at a certain amount.

I don’t wish to turn this into a tutorial (the Advanced Cymatic Trader website does a fine job of providing this information), however I do wish to explore this concept in more detail.

The fact is that even within stop losses, there are a number of different examples that you can employ which range from choosing a bet to place if prices hit a certain point to flexible stop loss points that move with the market price. By utilising these various tactics, Advanced Cymatic Trader is able to ultimately protect your betting bank.

Advanced Cymatic Trader also allows users to takes advantage of something that is referred to as tick offset. When this option is selected, the software will automatically place an opposing bet at a value of “ticks” away from your original odds.

You can also offset with “green”, which will then look to offset a bet at a stake that will allow you to distribute your profit across all possible results. Whilst this sounds very much like a “win win” scenario, offsetting bets is very much dependent on the movements of the exchange.

This means that bets must be accepted in order for this to work and that profits will generally be minimal.

One of the final features that should be mentioned is “fill or kill”. What this does is allows the software to cancel any unmatched bets a specified amount of time after your initial bet was placed.

It may seem obvious but this feature does need to be active before a race starts and it does not close bets which are used for offsetting or greening.

By far and away however the most powerful thing that you can do with Advanced Cymatic Trader is to link it up with Microsoft Excel.

I am loathe to go into too much detail here as there are plenty of tutorials on how to connect the two up (including on the Advanced Cymatic Trader website) and going too in depth will simply descend into a tutorial.

What the Excel link essentially means is that with the right spreadsheet and the right knowledge, you can set Advanced Cymatic Trader up to do almost anything based around your instructions.

How Can I Use Advanced Cymatic Trader?

The number of ways that you can use Advanced Cymatic Trader are really almost limitless. It can be used simply as a quicker and more efficient method of betting on Betfair’s exchange. It can also be programmed to be an advanced trading bot that will place bets for you around a system of your own devising. There are also several features that allow you to gain a clear edge over the competition with things like the football odds predictor included.

How Much Does It Cost?

Cymatic used to be free to all, and came with no cost. This has now changed.

There are three different ways of paying for Advanced Cymatic Trader, all of which are recurring payments. Before you pay out anything for Advanced Cymatic Trader however, there is an option to trial the service for 14 days entirely for free.

This doesn’t involve handing over any credit card details and it gives you full access to all of the features that Advanced Cymatic Trader comes with.

Once the free trial period has elapsed (or if you simply choose not to sign up for it), you can sign up a monthly subscription at a cost of £6.69 per billing cycle.

There is then a 6 monthly billing cycle which cost £35.99 (representing a 10% saving on the monthly costs). Finally, you can sign up to an annual billing cycle at a cost of £59.99 (meaning that you save 25% compared to the monthly costs).

Payment is handled via Paypal, although you don’t need an account in order to make payment.

It is important to point out that there is no money back guarantee when you purchase a license for Advanced Cymatic Trader, although you can cancel your subscription at any point (simply by cancelling the recurring payment on Paypal). There is no partial refund available if you choose to do this however.

Conclusion on Advanced Cymatic Trader

There are a lot of different bits of software available for improving your trading and betting through Betfair and trying to rank Advanced Cymatic Trader compared to the competition is a difficult thing to do. In many respects, a lot of betting software does the same thing and so the advantages and disadvantages are to be found in the little details.

In the case of Advanced Cymatic Trader I have to refer back to my point about it being a jack of all trades. The software does lots of things, and it does them well.

It is definitely a huge upgrade over using Betfair’s online betting exchange and I genuinely feel like the edge that Advanced Cymatic Trader gives you is more than worth the costs involved, so long as you take your betting seriously.

In terms of the additional features that Advanced Cymatic Trader comes with, there are some fantastic things on offer that can really help you to not just improve your ability to bet, but to improve your betting knowledge in general. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the football odds predictor. Whilst it is far from a complete product in and of itself, I know that there are some websites that would charge you an additional fee for what it does.

Whilst there isn’t a lot about Advanced Cymatic Trader that I would say is really worthy of criticism, there are a few things worth highlighting. One of the main things is that if you want to use Advanced Cymatic Trader to its fullest potential then you definitely need to know what you are doing with excel.

Whilst you can use some of the automated features to implement a system to a small degree, it is only when you start to configure Advanced Cymatic Trader with your own systems that you can really get your money’s worth.

Really, the real value that comes with Advanced Cymatic Trader for me is the various methods of automation that you can employ. The dream of a second income is for it to be entirely passive and Advanced Cymatic Trader can definitely help to achieve this.

Yes it can be complicated, and getting things up and running fully will take work but it should be considered an investment. Of course, of you are the type of person who takes their betting and trading, this isn’t going to be a problem at all.

So is Advanced Cymatic Trader worth buying?

I definitely think so. There are a lot of different advantages to using Advanced Cymatic Trader rather than nothing and honestly, no negatives that immediately spring to mind.

This only leaves the personal decision as to whether or not that the amount of money that Advanced Cymatic Trader costs is going to be less than the edge that the software gives you would allow you to earn. If it’s even close, then I would strongly recommend Advanced Cymatic Trader over nothing.

Cymatic is not as pleasing on the eye as some of it’s competitors, Betangel for example, which I discussed here, but it does the job, and does it well.

When it is put next to other betting bots, Advanced Cymatic Trader is one of the more affordable and more complete examples. Whilst I wouldn’t necessarily say it is the best (a very subjective thing), and a long way from the  worst, it is definitely one of the better ones available.

The post Advanced Cymatic Trader Review appeared first on Money Makers Reviewed.

I have always admired this website, and as a reviewer of products myself, always admired the way that Ben, and his reviewers dug deep into the core of products being reviewed.

Ben has now gone onto pastures new, and there is a new virtual reviewer in town.

When the chance recently came to take over I jumped at the chance, so please allow me to tell you a little bit about myself.

My name is Dan (Daniel to my mum and dad), and I have worked freelance for many of the websites you have probably already heard of, compiling reviews on products and services on a wide range of subjects. I know the legalities of such inside out.

Product and service reviews have always a passion of mine as I always wanted to make sure that consumers are getting the best “bang for their buck”, so although I have owned a few websites in unrelated sectors, creating online income is where my heart is.

A little bit about me, Dan.

My name is Daniel, and a freelancer reviewer, as well other bits and bobs that pay my mortgage.

I graduated from University with a psychology degree at Nottingham Trent University a good few years ago now, and have held various positions along the way, some to do with my degree and some to do with my passions and interests.  My parents suggested that I work for the social services in some form to use my education, and although that was a possibility, it was not really my cup of tea.

You may then ask why I studied psychology in the first place, which although that would be a valid question, my answer would be that I have always been fascinated in the way human minds work, and initially I thought my port of call would be to work for the police in some capacity, but I also changed my mind on that also.

But don’t worry, even though I have the education and background, I won’t be placing  BSc (Hons) after everything I type, as much as my parents always wanted me to on various business cards over the years.

I am an avid swimmer who represented my county on multiple occasions, and also had trials for the British National championships way back when I was a little fitter. These days, although I am still very active, and like to think still fit, my hopes of representing my country for the sport is a no go, although I still like to think I could have done it, had I pushed myself enough.

I currently reside in Merseyside with my fiance, whom I met at University and after much, much persuasion she finally convinced me to move to the City of Culture, which is a fantastic place to live I must say.

My main interest now is in online businesses, and financial leverage from using online resources that can be transferred to a home based business, of which I have operated many.

Like many, I have tried most “money making” products online, some I failed at and some I did exceedingly well at, and still do.

I have a few “stable” mates that will be researching products and services, so feel free to throw me an email if there are any products you feel worthy of a review, and time permitting we will do our very best to accommodate.

There are still a couple of reviews pending which I will cast my eager, and critical eye over, and these will be released over the coming days. I will of course be keeping the website, and the reviews on topic.

I look forward to discussing many future products and services with you on the review pages, and I will ensure that my reviews are as equally informational as Ben’s were, and that of his researchers. Ben still holds an account and may still participate from time to time.

Best Wishes,

Dan

The post About Dan New MMReviewed Reviewer appeared first on Money Makers Reviewed.

Many people do matched betting. During a recent and very in depth look at the various examples of Betfair trading software, something came up that has been on my radar for some time. Whilst I had followed the rumours, I was somewhat surprised to see that Betfair had finally merged with bookmakers Paddy Power to form Paddy Power Betfair PLC.

Combine this with the news that Ladbrokes and Gala Coral may finally be merging and the landscape of bookmakers and betting exchanges and it demonstrates some massive changes.

Given how it is a proven method of income for a lot of users, my thoughts soon began to turn towards matched betting and how these changes will affect the community. Aside from what the future holds, even now bookmakers are battling desperately to try and curb matched betting and the losses that they incur from it.

It is estimated that the betting industry may be losing as much as £20 million per month through matched betting. Given the fact that in 2014 showed that the betting industry had revenues worth in excess of £7 billion, this may seem like a drop in the ocean but a business is a business and any source of lost revenue will be investigated.

There are multitude of different ways that bookies are already trying to fight back against matched betting (which I will explore below). Some of these are more successful than others but it seems to me that right now is very much a do or die time for matched betting.

As time has passed, this method of making money has moved from the mind of Mike Cruickshank (the marketer behind the first major matched betting product) all the way to articles in serious newspapers such as The Guardian and The Times.

I have also watched news spread of matched betting on forums for students and stay at home mums, appearing on money saving websites and recommended by some financial gurus. On top of this, the number of companies that are dedicated to matched betting has increased exponentially, particularly over the last few years.

Obviously something somewhere is going to have to give. Whether this is matched betting slowly being closed down or bookmakers accepting it as an assessed risk of their business and allowing the practice remains to be seen. There is a lot to talk about on the subject and I intend to try and cover all of it with this article.

What Is Matched Betting?

If you have landed here and read to this point, I presume that you have some knowledge of what matched betting involves, however I will provide some details for those who are perhaps researching the topic before committing to a long term subscription.

Matched betting allows people to take advantage of bookmakers special offers in order to get bets that they can place for free.

Once you have free bet/money in your betting account, you use a strategic betting approach to find games where it is possible to profit no matter the outcome. This typically involves placing a bet with a bookmaker using a free bet and then laying the same bet on a betting exchange.

This way, whichever outcome occurs, you end up profiting. We did a full review on Matched Betting Basics Here.

This is only a very vague description of what matched betting entails though. The full thing is actually slightly more complicated however I have highlighted the part that is important to me. Betfan involves betting one way with a bookies and another on the exchange. Given the overlap that is starting to appear between the two and I feel that it is apparent where my concerns are coming from.

What Are Bookmakers Currently Doing to Stop Matched Betting?

Now more than ever, bookmakers are closing accounts left right and centre. There doesn’t need to be any real need for an infraction in order to allow them to do this either. In fact, a lot of bookmakers have it written into their terms and conditions that they can simply close your account without giving you any prior notice of this.

For example, Ladbrokes say that “We reserve the right to close your account at any time for any reason”. Betfair say that “Either we or you may suspend or terminate you account at any time, either with or without cause”. Bet 365 say “bet365 reserves the right to close or suspend your account at any time and for any reason”. This goes on and on and it is something that a lot of bookmakers are using to stop those that they suspect of matched betting.

Keeping Matched Betting Accounts Open is Like Roulette:

Anybody who has been involved in matched betting will be able to tell you that there is a pretty clear trail that you leave. For example, all of your bets will happen to coincide with the offers that the bookies put out, closely followed by a bet on a seemingly unrelated event. Not to mention that almost all of your bets happen to be with free bets.

I could go on, but the fact is that bookmakers are employing increasingly high tech options to monitor what punters are doing.

Enter IEsnare. This is a little tool that has caused a lot of division amongst the betting community and frankly, with very good reason. It is a piece of software that is often downloaded without consent in the background when you access a bookmakers website. This is undeniably an unethical process, however the legality of it is something that is still being considered (unfortunately, I don’t believe that this is an argument that punters will win however).

We did a complete review and more detail on IEsnare Here

What IEsnare does however is the real devil. It is software that monitors what websites you are accessing and sending this data back to the bookies. Naturally, you can see why this has upset a lot of people. One of the reasons that it is suspected that this software is now being used however is in order to catch out matched betting accounts.

By looking for certain patterns in your browsing habits (for example going from a bookmakers website to a matched betting site to a betting exchange and then back to the bookies), bookmakers can identify those who are taking money out of their pockets and simply close them down.

In this kind of position, it doesn’t matter whether or not a punter is winning or losing their bets because they are still taking money out of the gambling industry.

The Future of Matched Betting?

This all brings me in a very roundabout way to my initial line of though.

Of the big bookmakers in the UK, there are (arguably) 6 that really matter. Coral, Ladbrokes, William Hill, Betfair, Bet365 and Paddy Power. Once upon a time, betting exchanges were very much independent from their bookmaking counterparts. In fact, when betting exchanges first started to take off, a number of bookmakers lobbied to have the practice made illegal.

Now however, you have Betfair and Paddy Power operating as one. This means that two of the largest bookmakers have access to the same data from the largest betting exchange in the world. Ladbrokes bought out Betdaq, a betting exchange that many see to be the closest to a serious rival that Betfair’s exchange has some time ago.

With the potential merging of Ladbrokes and Gala Coral, this will mean that 4 of the 6 biggest bookmakers in the UK will hold the reigns over betting exchanges.

If for any reason you don’t see how this can lead to a potential abuse of power, then you are a much more optimistic man than I. The truth is that you don’t have to look far at all in order to see examples of bookmakers screwing people out of winnings, closing accounts etc. and that is with the relatively primitive tools that they have at their disposal right now.

The people behind matched betting are a resourceful bunch and I don’t doubt that they will be able to continue to take the proverbial fight to bookmakers for a few years yet. Longer term however, I wouldn’t hold my breath at all. Historically, anybody who has been too successful in betting has had to pay one way or another.

Whether it is punters being banned from all the bookies in their area (way back when) to Betfair introducing additional charges for their top earners. I see no reason why matched betting will be any different in the long term.

So is this the End of Matched Betting?

I am currently writing this in early March and I genuinely think that matched betting does have a bit of wind in its sails yet. It will take time for bookies to really be able to lock things down in the way that they appear to want to.

I also feel that there is something to be said for the number of betting accounts that will suddenly end up inactive as a result of a “ban” on matched betting (I put ban in quotation marks there because I don’t think the practice will ever formally banned, it will simply be squashed in such a way that it becomes impossible to carry out).

Really, I think that what you are currently looking at with the matched betting scene is the beginning of the end. The way that bookies are currently merging and the steps that they are taking to combat matched bettors in these relatively early days suggests that their approach is going to be one of singlemindedness.

What are the Alternatives to Matched Betting?

In terms of “direct” alternatives to matched betting, there simply aren’t that many options available. The fact is that there has been very unique climate which has allowed people to make money through this method and it seems unlikely that it will ever exist again. That doesn’t mean that it is the be all and end all however and there are a number of ways of making money both through betting with bookies or on betting exchanges.

The one that you will see mostly often are tipster services but I have to say that this is a very expensive option. Furthermore, these are often expensive and there is no evidence to suggest that any tipster is able to consistently generate a profit. The same applies to a lot of old fashioned mechanical betting systems. These usually involve “patterns” like a horse that hasn’t lost in its last 3 races but where it isn’t favourite or some such ideology.

There are a number of more advanced trading systems however and these arguably have the most merit in my book.

The first example that I believe is worth serious consideration is dutching. This involves betting in such a way that you reduce the possible losing outcomes. Ideally, and when you have honed this method, you can even bet in such a way as to guarantee a profit no matter what. This isn’t however the quick fix that matched betting is and it can take substantially more work and funding in order to be able to make a decent profit consistently.

One of the big advantages to learning how to Dutch is that you can use it “on demand”.

One of the more impressive methods that I have seen recently however is scalping. This is a method of trading on a betting exchange that has been lifted from the trading floors of major stock exchanges. The method allows you to lock in profits before an event even begins which means that there is no having to focus on events and bet in play (something that can be required when dutching).

With the right training, it is not inconceivable to see around 20 opportunities to “scalp” in a single day. It probably won’t come as a surprise to regular readers that I am espousing Betfair scalping as I recently recommended BF Scalper, a fantastic training course that shows you everything that you need to know to start making money with this method. This is reviewed elsewhere on this site.

Conclusion on Matched Betting Going Forward

Matched betting has more than ran its course and it has done a very good job of making a lot of people rather substantially wealthier. Unfortunately, every bubble has to burst and I think that the matched betting one may be due. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that everybody cancel their matched betting subscriptions tomorrow, there is still money to be made.

When you take into consideration how effective matched betting can be as well, I would be inclined to flog that proverbial horse until it is well and truly dead.

That having been said, I think that now is probably the time to start exploring some of the other options that are available to you. There are plenty out there and they show much stronger traits of sustainability. I don’t think that they are flawless. To suggest otherwise would be naïve, however there are some clear positives. One of the main ones in my opinion is that you are learning a skill and as such, you can apply Dutching and even more appropriately scalping to any given situation.

The truth is that bookies hate losing. I have always said that they will do almost anything to ensure that they remain profitable and the existence of IESsnare alone backs this up. The software is highly unethical, legally dubious and will more likely than not be defended on the grounds that it will help to stop money laundering.

As more bookies begin to come together, the shared interest in closing down losing revenue streams is going to become more prominent. Matched betting is going to end up on the receiving end of this at some point or other and when it does, there are going to be a lot of people left wanting.

The only thing that is going to keep matched betting moving forward in the future in my eyes is the will of the people behind the services.

There is no denying that these are some of the brightest minds in betting and as I have touched upon, I also don’t doubt that they have some tricks left up their sleeves, but against the combined might of bookies I simply don’t see what can be done in the long term.

I set out to consider whether or not matched betting is still a worthwhile endeavour and the short answer to this is yes, but possibly not for long. Personally, I would be looking at other methods now rather than later, especially if you are strongly reliant on the income from matched betting.

The post Is Matched Betting Still Working and WorthWhile in 2017? appeared first on Money Makers Reviewed.

BetTrader software by Racing Traders. I recently began to undertake a rather substantial look at what Betfair trading software is “the best”. The short answer to this is that there isn’t one, however this behemoth of a topic did lead me to some rather interesting examples of software that I ultimately felt deserved a more detailed and thorough look. At the top of this list is BetTrader.

There are a lot of different examples of Betfair trading software out there, but mostly I feel like you can apply the Henry Ford principle. You can have it in any colour you want, so long as it’s black.

What I mean by this is that almost all of it looks and handles the same. You get a piece of downloadable software that mimics the Betfair exchange, but faster.

Of course, there is more to it than this. I am grossly over simplifying things but sometimes you have to paint things as black and white to undersand just how much contrast there is. So what exactly makes BetTrader so special given the fact that there are so many different examples of trading software available?

Let’s Start The Review…

Product: BetTrader Trading Software

What You Get: Access To The Product/Software

Price: £9.95 Per Month

Guarantee: No Money Back Guarantee

Support Offered: Yes

BetTrader Software, an In Depth Look

In order to look at BetTrader, you first have to look at their parent company, Racing Traders. The company was started by trader Adam Todd.

Having moved to London from Manchester, he began working as a trader in the pits of the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange.

After quitting and travelling, he returned to the UK to discover the Betfair betting exchange. Starting with £200, he was able to make £100,000 in 3 years.

Whilst this was ongoing, he also started Racing Traders and began work on BetTrader.

Because the software has been built by a trader for traders and also developed over a period of time, it is a very complete offering that knows what people are looking for.

This experience really shows through when you take the time to look at BetTrader. It is a remarkably lightweight and easy to use example of Betfair trading software. A big part of this is down to the way that the software works.

I have touched upon the idea that almost all other examples of trading software works in almost the same way and there is something of an unfortunate truth to this.

One of the key similarities is that all of the programmers behind these applications have chose to develop their own framework. BetTrader however is built upon opening in your internet browser, a rather neat approach that I have never seen before now.

There does however appear to be something to it as I genuinely believe that BetTrader is amongst the fastest pieces of Betfair software currently on the market.

As you would expect, BetTrader is able to trade on all markets that are currently available on the Betfair exchange. Whilst this may sound like something that doesn’t need to be said, I have looked at software before now that comes with a number of restrictions in terms of what you can and cannot bet on.

Unlike a lot of Betfair trading software, BetTrader is fully compatible with both windows and Apple Mac.

What are the Main Selling Points of BetTrader?

The idea of there being a fastest piece of trading software on the market is a difficult one to quantify as there are various definitions of fastest and they can be applied to various metrics. For my money however, the speed of a piece of software is how quickly it is able to do what you would expect it to.

In the case of a piece of trading software, I would expect it to update prices quickly. I would also expect it to be able to match my bets in the shortest possible timeframe.

Not surprisingly, BetTrader delivers. The actual refresh rate on prices is set at 5 times per second. This is a number that initially seems intimidating however I found that after spending some time with the software, it was a very good number.

Data flashes before your eyes at first however you soon settle down into a rhythm and block out some of the “white noise” of data.

Once you achieve this, you are able to use these changes as a very good barometer for where the market is ultimately going. In updating prices as quickly as BetTrader does, for example, you can see odds moving prolifically in one direction or another.

Compare this to some slower software and you can easily miss a big price surge.

To further enhance the speed at which it operates, BetTrader is supplemented by the ladder interface that Racing Traders are famous for introducing. This shows a wide variety of different odds that are available for a given horse in a vertical “ladder” format.

This means that at a glance, you can see what kind of odds are available as well where money is being wagered. This is essential if you are a trader.

These two things are the main selling point of BetTrader however despite the focus on them so far, it would be remiss of me to ignore the many other features that are on offer.

Not all of these features are unique to BetTrader however and are available on other versions of similar software, however they do exponentially improve the end user experience when it comes to actual trading and betting.

What Are the Additional Features of BetTrader?

The features behind BetTrader are numerous and as such, I don’t wish to go into them in too much detail however I will talk about them here. What I have attempted to do however is to loosely group together the features.

Sticking with the theme of speed and ease of trading from the two core selling points of BetTrader, the software comes with a number of “one-click” solutions.

First of all there is One-Click trading. This is standard with a lot of Betfair software and allows you to configure BetTrader so that simply clicking will place a trade or bet at a pre assigned stake. These stakes can quickly be set by using a net stake button which simply makes a chosen value your next bet.

Keeping on the one click theme, BetTrader has a rather impressive tool which allows you to hedge bets with just a single click of a button. The One-Click Hedge Button is able to divide any potential profit or loss by available back and laying prices.

In doing this, BetTrader can ensure that you win or lose the same no matter who wins a race.

One of the first things that one should be considering after the speed of a piece of trading software is how you are able to display data. This is something that is often overlooked with some examples of software that I have looked at, however it goes without saying that a trader needs to have access to data in order to make an informed decision.

There are numerous ways of customising BetTrader, starting with the already mentioned ladder mode. You can also view a variety of different Betfair graphs to gain a visual representation of what markets are doing.

Given the fact that BetTrader provides full and real time data on offered prices, last traded prices, and the volume figures it can be much easier to have this visual representation.

Perhaps not surprisingly given the fact that BetTrader is ultimately a piece of software for trading on the Betfair exchange, there are a number of different tools that help with this.

Some of these do a relatively straight forward job such as automatically placing a bet at a certain price and time to automatically cancelling bets if they are unmatched for a certain period of time.

There are also some slightly more complex things that BetTrader can do such as allowing the software to automatically trade for you once you have made a certain number of ticks profit to breaking bets up into smaller amounts to get a larger bet matched.

BetTrader also comes with some advanced features that you would likely expect such as a stop loss tool which allows you to set up BetTrader to trade when the  markets are going a certain way.

Ladder View Features:

• Price literally moves up and down

• Visualise up and down price movements much easier

• Submit bets instantly (one click) at any price

• See gaps in the prices instantly

• One-click movement of unmatched bets up and down

• One-click hedge

• Right-click stop loss

• See Traded Volume, Traded Amounts & Matched amounts

More BetTrader Features

The post BetTrader Review, Sports Trading Software for Betfair appeared first on Money Makers Reviewed.

How to Make Money Online Series – Affiliate Marketing

There are supposedly a lot of different ways to make money online. Some work very well and some don’t. This is a fact of life. There are however a lot of ways of making money online that people will tell you are crap and don’t work, but actually have bags of potential in terms of how much you can earn.

There is however a rather substantial grey area when it comes to products of this nature which may not come as a surprise to anybody. The method that I want to look at for my inaugural article is one that most people who have ever seriously researched how to make money online will have come across and that is affiliate marketing.

Without trying to bombard you with details on the subject here (that is what the rest of this article is for), I will say that affiliate marketing is arguably one of the biggest markets for making money online and it is a truly digital and truly global phenomenon.

So with that in mind, I want to jump straight into this article.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a delightfully simple principle and this is a big part of why it has proven successful. Essentially, you act as a reseller of sorts for another person’s product.

You market their product, introduce buyers and in return, you receive a commission for your sale. In theory, it is as easy as that and this ease is a big part of the appeal. The truth however can be rather different.

So now that we have a rough understanding of what affiliate marketing is, why are so many people drawn to this method? The beauty of affiliate marketing is that once you are established it can become a very good passive business. You don’t really have to do a lot once you are well established and if I am honest, the whole process can be very “by the numbers” meaning that once you have established one revenue stream, it can easily be scaled and reproduced.

The most difficult part of affiliate marketing is getting started when you have nothing. Whilst there are various methods of promoting products (which I will look at in more detail below), all of them require hard work and effort in order to get started.

In many ways, affiliate marketing can be like pushing a very large round stone. It is intimidating to look at and it takes a momentous amount of effort to get the ball rolling, but once you do it is pretty easy to keep momentum going.

With this in mind, let’s get a little more in depth and explore some of the different methods and ways that one can get involved in affiliate marketing.

How Do I Find Products That I Can Sell as An Affiliate Marketer?

When you are an affiliate marketer, you need to start out by finding something that you want to market to others. This is a massively important step as it will ultimately dictate the tone of everything else that you do.You need to find the right products.

When it comes to products to sell, there are literally thousands however to be successful, you should look for products that have a proven track record of selling, especially if you want to build a sustainable income.

If you are looking for a quicker fix as it were, there are plenty of fad products available as well. Both approaches carry different challenges.

In order to find products to sell, there are several platforms available for numerous different types of products.

These can be information products or physical products. Generally speaking, I feel that the focus for most people is on information products. These can vary massively in terms of what they are, but generally speaking their main goal is to provide information (as the name suggests).

These can be made up in a variety of different ways depending on the niche, but generally speaking you can expect to see training manuals, video series and in some cases, one to one training.

There is a lot of versatility available in information products which means that no matter you want to sell, chances are that you can find something that fits in with your interests, and most importantly, your customer base’s interests.

When it comes to information products, there are two main companies that are out there, both of which come with their own advantages and disadvantages.

ClickBank Affiliates

Arguably the largest platform for information product affiliate marketing is Clickbank. They are a huge company that have been operational since 1998 and have continued to grow steadily since then.

Clickbank offers a huge variety of products in a variety of different niches (which is how affiliate marketers refer to the area they have chosen to promote products from). These include things like home business opportunities, health and fitness, gambling and even dating advice.

The other main competitor to Clickbank is called JVZoo. JVZoo tends to have more products in the way of software and it is almost exclusively aimed at other internet marketers. This is a very profitable and productive niche to be in but it is also one of the most difficult.

I have personally always felt that JVZoo is the kind of place that content creators would go to if they were looking for products to sell on an affiliate basis.

This isn’t to knock the products as some of the most impressive techniques and methods that I have seen in recent times have come about through the JVZoo platform. There is just a tendency to have a little less variety which means that in turn, it can be harder to gather an audience.

There are other differences between the platforms too, for example Clickbank offers a 60 day refund window on all products that are sold through it. JVZoo on the other hand don’t force sellers to offer any money back guarantee.

It is worth pointing out however that many of them do offer at least 30 days.

I will be compiling a full review on ClickBank in a later review, which will be more detailed, but basically ClickBank has a wide range of digital products that you can promote using your own website as the vehicle to generate the traffic needed for the sales.

More on the ClickBank Affiliate Network can be found here: http://www.clickbank.com/affiliate-network/

Amazon Affiliates

Possibly the biggest and most varied affiliate partnership online is Amazon. They allow users to sign up as an affiliate and sell products on behalf of other sellers. This has a huge advantage over trying to sell information products for a number of reasons, key of which is that you are selling tangible products that people want.

Another advantage of selling as an Amazon affiliate is that you can generally expect to be selling brands that people recognise and are actively selling.

Furthermore, there is an almost unlimited number of products to sell. As is the case with affiliate marketing of information products, there are a variety of different niches that you can take advantage of.

Naturally, the best way of selling is to sell as much as possible and there is a lot of synergy between the niches that you will identify on a platform such as Clickbank and Amazon. There are a lot of people who promote Amazon’s products, and there is a reason for that:

• Amazon is trusted world-wide.

• Amazon is the world’s largest online market place

• Millions of people use Amazon habitually

• Amazon’s service is fantastic

Here is basically how it works:

You can look further into this here: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/welcome/getstarted

How Do I Sell Products as An Affiliate Marketer?

As I have mentioned, depending on your chosen niche you then have to decide how you want to market your products. The “traditional” way of affiliate marketing is to build a website (this doesn’t have to be anything fancy), create some content for a product and generate traffic this way.

This is however a long and arduous process and it can take some time before your website starts to make money.

WordPress For Affiliates:

One of the main tools that affiliate markets use is WordPress, mainly because it is free if you host the website with WordPress, or you the price of a few £/$ you can purchase a domain name and host the free WordPress software on a standalone website, which is a very cost effective way of starting your affiliate business.

There is a very good reason why 99% of affiliate markets use WordPress, and that is because although it is free, it is fantastically capable, can be modified, and there are endless programs/templates for it that you can use.

As I have stated you can use WordPress and their free services here: https://wordpress.com/

SEO For Affiliates

If you are going to take this approach it is necessary to have some understanding of search engine optimisation (SEO) as well as knowledge of how to build a website.

Many marketers do just fine with a WordPress website, but then you actually have to get your website ranked in Google and the best way to do this is with great content, that is valid and serves the purpose of explaining exactly what your potential customers are looking for.

I suggest you Google the SEO aspect of affiliate marketing because the size of the subject will warrant a page and review all on it’s own, and is far too deep a subject to go into on this review.

This is a free platform that allows you to make good looking sites with no real understanding required of web design. The beauty of building a website however is that you can make it do whatever you want it to.

This kind of measured approach is best suited for people who are aiming to build a longer term business and want to have an audience that they can interact with properly. One of the biggest advantages with building a website as well is that it allows you to build an email list.

An email list is exactly what it says it is and it can be a powerful tool for internet marketers who have a genuine audience. With an email list, you can simply email your readers when there is a new product out that you think may be of interest to them.

If they buy from you, then you make a profit. If not, it has cost you nothing extra really to send out.

The other approach is to use social media and this is a method that is becoming increasingly popular. By using fan pages on Facebook, Instagram accounts and Twitter, you can still interact with your audience without having to create a website and provide content for it.

This makes things much easier and costs less however there are much fewer long term gains to be had from this approach.

Social Marketing

One advantage that I do feel that social media has over a traditional website is that you can sometimes better target your audience.

Through the use of hashtags and interests etc. you can quickly and easily reach out to your target audience (for example, if you were selling a fitness programme on an affiliate basis, you might want to hashtag your posts on Instagram #fitness).

The downside to using social media for affiliate marketing is that it can be much more difficult to get a social media page or account ranked on Google. This can have a substantial negative effect on your marketing abilities as people who are looking for the product you are selling in an organic fashion (that is to say, through a search engine) may not find you.

Unfortunately, these are generally the customers who are most eager to purchase the products that you are selling.

Naturally, the best course of action is a combination of the two methods but this can be rather time consuming and the differences between them isn’t always complementary.

A good example of this is a fitness based Instagram that targets younger users may not necessarily benefit from a full website, just as something aimed at boosting sales leads for a business isn’t really going to benefit from an Instagram account.

YouTube For Affiliate Marketing

A lot of marketers now in the affiliate niche have started to use YouTube as their only source of traffic, and it is probably one of the quickest ways to start generating clicks to your websites.

A lot of these type of markets will generally just place a direct link to their affiliate offers at the end of the video, or in the description but that is not something I would personally advise.

You see with marketing you really want to start building a rapport with your visitors, and it is far better to do this using a website where you can actually communicate.

The following videos is of someone explaining how his business is based around video marketing, and actually has a business and website helping others to do so, but although the video is valid, I do not recommending just jumping on the first offer you see, you need to do your research!

So Is Affiliate Marketing Really Viable?

If you want to know if Affiliate Marketing is really a viable method of making money then I would simply refer you back to the multitudes of people who continue to make money through the method.

Furthermore, I would also point out that the industry is one of the oldest and most proven methods of making money online. Whether or not it is the best is a very different question.

In order to be able to get the most out of affiliate marketing then you should ideally be an outgoing person with a lot to say on a subject. This is why picking a niche that you know and are passionate about can make the job a lot easier.

People are naturally drawn to content whether this is a 2,500 word essay on Affiliate Marketing or a picture of a fitness model with a quote about determination over it.

As well as the fact that you need to be able to produce content, you also want to make your audience trust your recommendations. This means that when possible you should be engaging with your user base in such a fashion that they see you as an expert on a topic (something that indirectly, also helps with SEO).

This way, when you tell somebody that a product has positively influenced your life or business, they see you as a success story that they want to emulate.

If this sounds fun, then congratulations, Affiliate Marketing is something that you can probably make work for you. It is important however to stress once again the hard work that is involved in Affiliate Marketing.

Picking a niche, a marketing method and making the money are the easy parts. The hard part of Affiliate Marketing is in getting yourself established and set up. This is a long road that can feel a lot like talking to yourself for extensive periods of time.

You do also have to keep content coming which means that whilst I have described Affiliate Marketing as a passive form of income, it does still require some effort on your behalf.

Ultimately, this doesn’t have to be overly substantial however and as long as it is on topic and of a reasonable quality, it will keep people engaged and allow you to keep making money.

The beauty of Affiliate Marketing as far as I am concerned, is that anybody can do it with a computer and an internet connection. It isn’t easy to get to the goal line however when you do, you are left with a truly capable and scalable business.

There are a lot of people who have used affililate marketing not just to make a little extra “on the side” as it were, but have made it a career.

What are the Pros and Cons of Affiliate Marketing?

There are rather clear pros and cons to affiliate marketing in my opinion and this polarising aspect makes it a very difficult method to moderate. The truth is that the pros and cons for affiliate marketing are polar opposites.

The things that make it enjoyable for one person can be a reason not to pursue the method to antoher. None the less, I shall record my opinions here so that you can gain a quick summary and make up your mind.

Pros

• Affiliate Marketing can be an evergreen method of making money online. This means that you can use the method forever without the revenue streams drying up.

• Affiliate Marketing can be a fun way of building a business with very little start up costs.

• When you are established, Affiliate Marketing becomes a passive stream of income that requires very little work on a day to day basis.

• There are a huge number of products available to affiliate marketers to sell depending on your interests and what the current commercial trends are.

Cons

• The start up period for Affiliate Marketing is long and can be draining as it will likely be some time before you start to make sales.

• You are selling other people’s products and so are ultimately relying on a third party to keep your business up and running.

• Some people will not like the fact that running your business for Affiliate Marketing does require some input, whether that is creating content or interacting with users.

So How Does Affiliate Marketing Stack Up Compared to Other Methods of Making Money Online?

Affiliate Marketing is a good place for this series to start as in many ways, it represents perfectly what the journey to make money online can entail. It can make you a millionaire or you can sit spinning your wheels for days before anything comes along.

This makes it difficult to recommend over a lot of other ways of making money online.

The truth is that running an affiliate marketing website is one of the hardest was to make money online, and yet it is the one that I would recommend over any other to people.

Whilst there are plenty of easier methods available, there aren’t any that involve the potential to make real money. Affiliate Marketing on the other hand is all about building something sustainable and long term.

All of this does make it substantially more difficult than some of the easier and faster routes available to  boosting your income online. Affiliate marketing is one way that I think will pay off for most people in the long term though.

Conclusion on Affiliate Marketing

As far as ways of making money online goes, you can do a lot worse than considering an affiliate marketing business. Really, the best way that you can think of it is to start out writing about things that you love and monetise your content when the time is right.

This isn’t something that a lot of people are capable of doing however as they are looking for a quick turn around.

If this is you, then please forget about affiliate marketing entirely and go elsewhere. If you want to make a quick buck then this definitely isn’t for you.

A lot of the methods of making money online that I will be looking at are much smaller in scope than affiliate marketing (and resultantly, these articles may not be as long) and this is important to remember and to compare with what your end goal is.

For me, affiliate marketing is a good example of something that those who want to build a genuine long term passive income can start out with. I will hold my hands up and admit that the end results may vary (something that can arguably be said about any method of making money online) and this is something that I know will put some people off.

As I have touched upon, I think that you need to be a very certain kind of person to make affiliate marketing work for you. If you are keen on social interaction and have a lot to say, then this method of making money online can feel like a natural extension of your life and as such, it is a very easy thing to do.

Those who are perhaps less active on the internet will likely struggle to find their niche and carve out a space for themselves.

On the topic of niches, this is probably the single most important decision that you will make when you start out as an affiliate marketer.

Given that you will be providing content based around a certain topic, it is definitely for the best that you choose something that is of interest to you, otherwise you run the risk of getting bored and disillusioned further down the line.

Honestly, if you can make affiliate marketing work for you, then I think that you are onto one of the best and easiest methods of making money online. Just take with a pinch of salt all of the people out there who claim to make a fortune without lifting a finger.

It doesn’t really work like that and there is definitely a lot of hard work that goes into it. The rewards are there for the taking however and if you get enough of a following, making money can eventually be as simple as sending out a simple email.

With this in mind, I give affiliate marketing a thumbs up as a method of making money online. This is one approach however that does require serious management of your expectations, especially in the short to medium term.

The post How to Make Money Online From Affiliate Marketing – The Reality appeared first on Money Makers Reviewed.

Being heavily promoted by Agora Lifestyles at the moment is an automated system called DataKings created by Peter Higson which I will be looking at, which claims to have an automated way of making money from horse racing.

Now I do have a fair bit of experience with trading and gambling, so this one caught my eye, but mainly because of the word ‘automation’ which I usually see as fools gold, and checking the results from another review website who promoted this product to me, I am not sure DataKings is as straight forward as it first seems.

Starting The DataKings Review

Product Title: DataKings Using BetPlans staking by Peter Higson

Price:

• £50 per month (£600 per year) to access DataKaings Membership.

• Plus and possibly a VPS if required  – The VPS is around £25 per month.

• The Betex software required is £42 per month, or £99 per year.

Guarantee: Guarantee for the first 21 days, if you decide to cancel.

What You Get: Access to the Betplans staking.

• Access to the Betplans staking.
  

• Daily new and updated Betplans.

• Support.

Where To Purchase: Offered by Agora through / Betting Rant (we did a review on Betting Rant recently)

What is DataKings?

From what we can see, what you are purchasing is access to various betting plans that are then compiled into spreadsheets that can be uploaded into Betfair trading software called: Betex Trading software.

(I am sure we will so a review on Betex Trading software at some stage).

Now personally I do not like automation, and have never heard of it making money for anybody, which is why I am a little surprised that Agora are promoting this as a ‘set and forget’, which in the gambling industry is always seen with a side-ways smile usually.

Such automation is usually the dream of many, but the reality of the few – and even fewer long term. In other words it is usually a load of nonsense that gamblers buy into thinking it is some kind of holygrail.

So basically, the idea is that you upload Peter Higson’s ‘rules’ into the Betex software and that is it, the automation does the work for you, and you make profits.

DataKings / Agora Marketing?

Now I really do have to pick up on the way this is advertised by Agora Lifestyles, via their various satellite websites. The way DataKings is advertised is a little typical of Agora, including:

• Ficticious limitations on memberships.

• Countdown clocks on the order page which insult the intelligence of potential buyers.

• Claims of ‘One of the most respected reviewers in the UK’ has tested it (Peter Philipson).

All of which is obviously constructed to build up the product and anticipation of what to expect.

The fact is that the DataKings membership will not be limited, and there is no time limit on how long you have to purchase, so such things put me off immediately.

15 Minutes to Order DataKings?

This is what you see on the order page, a countdown clock showing that you have only 15 minutes to order DataKings:

I left the page to run in another browser, and let the clock run down, which it duly did, and then stated the following:

And yup, you guessed it, I was still able to follow the ordering procedure. In fact refreshing the page starting the 15 minute clock all over again.

Also, only 100 members allowed to join?

This is what the ordering page claims:

“Only 100 Places Available – Reserve yours now
RISK-FREE”

Really? they send a massive email to their tens of thousands of subscribers and only allow 100 members to join? I don’t think so, and I feel that you don’t think so either. I count at least 4 emails from them over the last 24 hours advertising and pushing this product for sale. Not something you would do with ‘only 100 memberships’ available to sell.

I feel such advertising, especially the countdown clocks, belong back in 1990, when marketers used to use such gimmicks to try and rush a sale along, but it is false advertising really, and they should not be doing it.

Dubious Advertising?

You may think I am being finicky over the advertising, but when you consider that The Betting Rant, More Money Review & Agora Lifestyles in general have for years claimed to be the self-styled ‘protectors of the people’ regarding betting systems, and work at home products, I feel sure that you can see the irony, and the rather large contradiction in their own advertising styles when trying to extract money from the public using rather dubious advertising practices themselves.

Regarding ‘One of the most respected reviewers in the UK’ – Peter Philipson

The sales page claims that one of the most respected reviewers in the UK has tested the product.

They are talking about Peter Philipson who works as a reviewer for Betting Rant, and previously More Money Review.

‘One of the most respected in the UK’? Who says so? Just because their own (Betting Rant) website claims this, simply does not make it so. More importantly, Peter Philipson, the reviewer works (paid or unpaid) for the actual website offering the product and who collects your payments via their parent company.

I am sure Peter is a pleasant enough chap, but such testing can never be impartial, not when the related company he works for is making profits from the sale of the product. This is one of the issues this very website (MoneyMakersReviewed) discussed with Matt Houghton a while ago.

……again, this is slippery advertising at it’s best, similar to what Streetwise Publications have done for years.

And considering Agora Lifestyles have berated advertisers for many years on such tactics, it is very surprising that they still promote this way.

Does DataKings Work?

Now I have dealt with the spurious advertising tactics we can look at the product. DataKings has only just been launched to the public, so we will obviously be looking at this in more detail over the coming weeks, and months.

Here is the headline:

So this is obviously being advertised as ‘set and forget’ system; total automation, although looking on the spreadsheet that Peter Philipson has publically offered to proof his own results, there have been periods almost within 21 days (the guarantee period) where a profit has not been made, and the betting bank has not made any notable profits.

In fact, the DataKings results also show that there was a losing run of 14 at one stage over the last few months, so we shall see what users say about this software, the betting plans behind it, and if there is a profit to be made.

And just to give an idea that the advertising is not always showing the reality of results, here is a section of the results that show the losing runs:

The above snapshot of results show that out of 27 races, there were 5 wins, and 22 losses with the losing run of 14, which on first glance does not inspire confidence that the rules are finding any patterns that could be exploited, and I can imagine that if you had joined at the time the above results were formulated then you would be slightly concerned by the last race.

In fairness to the review though, there was also an instance of 7 wins on the bounce, but what I am trying to show is that none of these betting systems are as glossy in their stats as the advertising states.

That is not to say that it does not work, it may very well work long term (and such information should always be tested on a much longer basis), but reviews are also there to point out that it is never always plain sailing.

On a similar subject, and in the same vein as testing over longer periods, we recently compiled another review on a service that had been profitable for very many months until we tested it, and then there were 2 losing months out of three, this was the Great Bets Service that was doing fantastically well, and all the backdated results looked promising, but during our three month test we did, a loss was reported.

This means that previous results are never a true indicator of future results.

The advertising webpage also states:

Please remember that the reference to ‘independently audited’, and the results achieved were carried out by the very same website trying to get you to buy it, so that could be discounted as a single person carrying out a review, and again, I would read the Betting Rant review this website did for more details on who is offering this product.

Who is Peter Higson from DataKings?

I cannot find a great amount of detail on Peter Higson other than he is a ‘respected MD from Devon’ (as stated on the advertising page) who has spent years putting this together and testing it after coming from an accountancy background. And a search does not bring anything up on this individual.

There was a cricketer called ‘Peter Higson’ but it seems that is somebody totally different.

Something else that is to be considered, is that if Peter is using this himself, and if there is genuinely a concern over the amount of members who join that could reduce liquidity in the markets for those who use it, then why would he even offer it to the public in the first place?

What Are BetPlans?

The BetPlans are simply automated filters that a creator of a betting bot will create and then save to a spreadsheet ( or alternative file, depending on which software is being used Betangel for example, uses Excel spreadsheets for this, or a .BAF file).

In basic terms, the spreadsheets will instruct the software, in this case Betextrader to trigger actions depending on the individual instructions that have been ‘penned’ as filters.

For example,  if the favourite of a race has a history of being an early leader, then one trigger could be to back it at SP (starting price) with a view to laying the horse when it’s odds have dropped by 10%; this can all be achieved with filters placed into the spreadsheet and then uploaded back to the Betfair trading software.

The software then triggers your instructions.

Conclusion on DataKings?

Early days, and as I say we will be looking at this in more detail and offering reports, but I have never read about anybody making long term profits using betting automation, so maybe this could be a first, we shall see, but my advice would be to hang back for now, and see what results come in.

I will adjust the star rating on this review accordingly, as results and feedback comes in, but initially the star rating will be based on poor advertising, and the fact that automation has not worked previously over a long term basis.

Updates to follow.

In the meantime, if you have already purchased DataKings and would like to furnish us with your own results, then please get in touch, or leave a comment below.

Incoming search terms:

• betex trader reviews
• peter higson datakings

The post DataKings Review Using BetPlans, Does Automation Really Work? appeared first on Money Makers Reviewed.

As many of you know, I recently took over the website from Ben, and have found a fair few files, and interviews that were not published.

One of the audio interviews was from a Betfair trader, who created the Betfair Scalper course (click link to the left for details) which Ben tested, and also left me his spreadsheets of his results. I also plan to purchase a copy of this course myself soon as there are a lot of emails coming in about it.

Ok, as I say one of the files that were not published was an audio interview that took place between Ben and the creator of the scalping course (link above), so I think I will set it live on this page, as an interview with an expert. The interview was dated November 2016.

Betfair Trading Course Interview:

I will place the audio below, and then manually type out the wording as I know not everyone can always listen to audio recordings:

Ben: So just getting into how, how much money does someone need to get going with this system?

Answer: Hi Ben, Its not really so much as the betting bank, people can start with a very small betting bank, because what we are not doing, is placing £50 bets on a horse to win, or a horse to lose. We are actually trading the pre race markets, and at any one time there is only a tony portion of your betting bank at risk. So yes, you can start with maybe a £100 or even less.

It all depends on the odds the participant, or the member decides to use, and then they can scale up and make more profits, but there is only ever a tiny portion of your betting bank at risk, and that’s what I would say straight away. So this can be started with a 3100 or so, there is not a great deal of money needed to learn this.

Ben: That leaves me onto the next question. How long does it take per day to action?

Answer: I would say that it depends on the time most people have available. We know that most people have a 9-5, which is not a problem, because as we reach the summer months, then horse racing goes right into the evenings, maybe 9-10pm, so then there is plenty of opportunities around.

Then you have got the weekends as well, so you have got the daytime, the evenings and weekends, so it really depends on when sombody has the time available to scalp, and to trade, it’s not really a problem, because as I said once we reach the summer months the nights are lighter.

Ben: I’ve bought the product, I’ve looked at it, I’ve used it myself, but I’ve also seen these systems, they always seem to good to be true, so I’m pretty sure that I’m not the only person who thought that, so what would you say to people who are thinking of giving it a go?

Answer:  You see this is the problem, Ben. Online people are becoming conditioned into reading into all the weird and wonderful advertisements for instant riches and all that nonsense, and scalping is not a system, it’s an actual skill, so as long as you are prepared to sit down, and listen to what is being advised, and absorb the information then you can make a profit this way, but it is definitely not a system.

So please don’t expect to follow a,b,c,d, and get e, because you need to practice and I stress this on the course that you need to practice for as long as it takes. Sit down, take your time because the markets are not going anywhere, and really learn how to do this, because it is a skill, and once you have learned the skill then some good money can be made, but it’s definitely not any kind of get rich quick nonsense like what you see on the internet.

So once something geuine comes along, then you know, they can kind of dismiss it, it hard works needed, they are looking for that instant gratification which is not always wise, so all I will say, is that if you follow and adhere to the principles then good profits can be made, but you need to, and we stress this, practice, and practice, and practice. And as long as you are prepared to do that, and have a work ethic, and are prepared to put the time in, then some good profits can be made, there’s no doubt about it.

It’s like anything. It’s like riding a bike, learning to drive, a skill needs to be learned. As long as you are prepared to out the effort in to do that then profits can be made for sure.

Ben: Excellent, onto the last question now. Is there a place that people can go to ask any questions before they get started?

Answer:  Well on our website we have got our email address at the bottom, but what I would say is on the website itself most of the pre course questions should be answered, we go into quite a bit of detail regarding what is required, what we expect from the member, what’s needed and what the course entails.

Ben: OK, thanks for that.

BFScalper Creator: So I don’t think there is any problems there, but if anybody has got any questions, then of course our email address is at the bottom, and we have a customer service and we are well known to respond fairly quickly.

Ben: I will put a link on my website as well so that people can get through to you through there. Excellent. It’s been a pleasaure to talk to you, thanks for your time today, I know you are busy, so I appreciate your time, and hopefully I’ll be speaking to you again in the future.

Answer: That’s great Ben, nice to speak to you. And hopefully I’ve managed to put across some of the answers to questions that are usually asked, and I think a lot of people will be pleasantly surprised with what they see on the course. Some of the testimonials that are coming in have been fantastic, and I’m sure that will continue. OK, thank you, and take care.

Ben: Bye.

For those interested in taking a more detailed look at the original testing that Ben did, then you can do so here: Betfair Trading Course

The post Betfair Trading Course Creator – Betfair Trader Interview appeared first on Money Makers Reviewed.

Today in the post I received a mailshot from Quorn (140 St. Vincent Road, Gosport, Hampshire, PO12 4RF) with a product offering called ‘Patent Cracker‘, with what appears to be a tipster offer.

Now a little bit of research on them confirms my early doubts, and it is quite easily the quickest decision to avoid them I have ever written about.

Bascially the letter headline goes like this:

• “8 Saturdays Free Trial”

• “Massive Profits From Small Stakes”

• “Latest – Last Month £3,960 Profit to £5 Stakes”

What is Patent Cracker by Quorn?

Well the sales letter looks like it was written by a 12 year old (honestly, even a 12 year old would probably be able to produce something of a higher quality with basic word processing skills), and that is no exaggeration. There are words missing, punctuation errors and more; which immediately caught my attention.

When I first read it, I was immediately catapulted back 10 years when such sales letters used to land through the post without a lot of thought on persuation placed into them.

You know the type, with insulting statements about “get rich, never work again” type of rubbish, and this is the same.

What is strange is that I can imagine that quite a bit of money has been spent on mailing lists, printing and postage, so why they wouldn’t even think about putting some professional copywriting together is a mystery, as surely the additional expense would be recovered by potential sales.

The letter by Quorn is written in a rather large typeface, which smacks of playing on the emotions in a rather assuming way,  the assumption I am guessing is that gamblers receiving this mailshot have all lost money in the past and are looking for saviours to point them in the right direction.

I think with matched betting and the likes, that assumption is not correct these days, because very many people are now making profits from bookmakers when in the past it was obviously more difficult to do so. Matched betting changed the way many now perceive making a profit, instead of just using, and testing what tipsters had to offer.

OK Let’s get right into what is being offered, and the review. This will be fairly quick and short unfortunately, because the research we have quickly done have found previous offers from the same outfit that did not produce successful results for their participants, although it was a very similar offer.

What is Quorn/Patent Cracker Offering?

The claims made on the Patent Cracker mailing states that the service is being put together by three betting professionals:

• ML Harrington

• Ryan Hartley

• KP Hawke

And it is also claimed that all three of them have had full page advertisements in the following publications over the last 30 years:

• The Racing Post

• Weekender

• Racing and Football Outlook

The mailing does not go into detail about what the advertisements offered, or the success rate of the products advertised, but the service for Patent Cracker is as follows:

Each Saturday, each of the ‘betting professionals’ will pick a horse each from their connections which will form part of this ‘patent’ service, and buyers will gain access to such information via a hotline telephone number, but only if you agree to test the ‘free incredible once only opportunity’ to join the UK’s top 3 professional team’

Yes, that is exactly how it is worded on the mailing.

The rest of the Quorn mailing is a series of ‘convincers’ to try and part you from your money, including statements like:

• “We really do believe that you have found the best racing team of all time”

• “Making money couldn’t be easier”

• “Give us the chance to restore your confidence in horse racing”

• “Massive Profits are being made week, after week”

The page also makes the point that the betting will only take place on a Saturday, and that you will be receiving the 3 tips on a Saturday morning which only take you minutes to put on, and then bank the profits.

Quorn state their 5 Good Reasons To Join Patent Cracker as Follows:

• Fantastic tax-free income

• No expensive phone calls

• No need for a large betting bank

• Free trial for 8 Saturdays

• High class information from professionals

The claimed results are £10,200 profit made so far in 2017, and £46,395 profit made in 2016 to £5 stakes, which sounds highly unlikely if I am being totally honest.

How Much is Quorn’s Patent Cracker?

The claim is that they will give you 8 Saturdays for free (8 days testing that is), but the standing order that comes with the mailing states that you can pay for the following, should you decide to do so:

• Get 8 free Saturdays plus 1 year for £695

• Get 8 free Saturdays plus 2 years £895

• Pay monthly for £188 per month

Expensive by any standards, and I think what is happening here, is that they are playing the numbers game with the mailshot.

The usual numbers game will go something like this. Let’s say they have sent 40,000 mailings, there will be a percentage who will take up the offer, and a percentage who decide to take up the paid options, some in advance for the year, and some monthly.

Those that take the trial, there will be a portion of those that make a profit initially, who will then receive follow up communications to pay for the year/monthly, and those that are not so successful will probably vanish anyway and avoid future comms from the outfit.

Peter Webb from Betangel compiled a video recently where he explained this type of offer in far more detail, and how such mailings are playing the numbers game mentioned, and it is a very interesting approach to making a profit from those sending the mailings in the first place.

Here is how Peter explained this type of offer:

Conclusion on Patent Cracker from Quorn

I would not touch this with a dirty stick. Seriously, that type of advertising is playing on the gullible in a big, big way, and the advertising on the mailing is shoddy at best, and put together very quickly in the hope of making a quick buck – for them.

By all means if you really want to, then try the free offer, but as with anything regarding gambling and tipsters, 8 days (8 free Saturdays) will never be a long enough period to judge the validity of any racing tipsters – especially when they are asking for such huge sums of money in advance based on such short testing.

I would seriously not advise you sending any money in the post for this Patent Cracker offer.

If you have tested any of Quorns offers in the past, then it would be great to hear from you in the comment section.

Incoming search terms:

• patent cracker racing tips

The post Patent Cracker Review, Quorn Gambling Offer – Save Your Money appeared first on Money Makers Reviewed.

I had Free Money Plus referred to me by a close associate and I was massively interested in what on the surface appears to be a very good opportunity. Truth be told, there is a lot going on here and it is only by really stripping away the layers that it is possible to understand exactly what you are getting into.

Even now sitting down to write this, I’m not entirely certain on where to begin. As a website, Free Money Plus advertises itself as a unique opportunity based around European Lotteries. There is a lot more to it than this but fundamentally, this is what you are supposed to be getting into.

I use the term supposed because whilst what the sales material for Free Money Plus makes this sound like a straight forward affair, there is a lot more happening in the background.

With this in mind, possibly the best place for me to start is by breaking down what everything is and what everything does.

So, What is Free Money Plus, and LottoSpring?

In order to understand what Free Money Plus is, I have to start with the man behind the site and that is one Paul Hardingham.

He is an internet marketer who has operated a company, AdNet Multimedia since 2001 who have supposedly generated “sales well in excess of $50,000,000 for a wide variety of businesses”.

He also claims to have links to Lotto Spring, the website that Free Money Plus promotes.

So what do you actually get with Free Money Plus? It is a website that anybody can join for free that provides you with tools in order to promote LottoSpring. I use the term tools lightly because most of what you get are videos explaining why LottoSpring is the best way for you to make easy and guaranteed money.

I should also point out that all of the links to LottoSpring happen to carry the AdNet Multimedia affiliate link.

This is important for reasons that I will explore.

Moving onto the videos in greater detail, there are actually 5 of these available and they are titled as follows:

• My LottoSpring Winnings
• What is LottoSpring 1.0 and 2.0
• How to check your genealogy
• Choosing your membership level
• How to send messages to your team in LottoSpring

What I think this makes obvious is that much of what you are getting access to with Free Money Plus are best described as tutorials for using the LottoSpring website.

Free Money Plus – Paul Hardingham

This fits the MO that Paul Hardingham has displayed so far which is mostly to get people to register for LottoSpring through Free Money Plus, therefore generating more revenue for him.

To further back this up, one of the few tools that is actually recommended through the Free Money Plus website is Clixsense. I will look at exactly what Clixsense is shortly as I feel the need to really dissect the purpose of Free Money Plus. Truth be told, I am not entirely convinced about what is on offer here and I want to ensure that this instinct is properly justified.

Needless to say, when you are sent to Clixsense to market your affiliate link for LottoSpring, you will earn Paul Hardingham a commission when you sign up.

Truthfully, aside from some more promotional literature for LottoSpring, Free Money Plus doesn’t contain much more content as a website. Presuming that you have followed through on everything that is offered however, you will have achieved several things for a shrewd internet marketer.

You will have given your email address to AdNet Multimedia so that they can target you with future offers. You have also signed up to LottoSpring as an affiliate for Paul Hardingham boosting his own revenue through the platform.

Finally, you have signed up to Clixsense on yet another affiliate link generating yet another revenue stream.

This leaves two things left to look at and I will start with Clixsense. This isn’t a big part of this review however I hope that in looking at what Paul Hardingham gains, my position remains reasonably explained.

Clixsense

I have looked at things like Clixsense before although I don’t believe that I have ever looked at this particular programme itself. The company describe themselves as “an industry proven method that allows website publishers of every size or budget to direct targeted and unique traffic to their website”.

What this actually means is that you pay Clixsense to advertise your website, and they in turn pay people to look at it. This method of generating traffic doesn’t have a particularly strong audience retention rate.

What is of interest with Clixsense is that for each direct referral (which is what Paul Hardingham is doing when he links you to the service from Free Money Plus), a referrer can earn “at least $5 or $10” per recruit. It doesn’t take a genius to see that by trying to refer Free Money Plus visitors to Clixsense, the end goal is to maximise the profit of the website.

What is LottoSpring?

Whilst Free Money Plus as a website is questionable, I haven’t really taken any time to look at what LottoSpring is. This is important to consider as if it is actually any good, then it doesn’t really matter if Paul Hardingham makes money as an affiliate. Unfortunately, there seems to be a pretty big question mark over this service as well.

There are two key elements to LottoSpring as a service. These are a large scale lottery syndicate and a multi level marketing scheme. This last part is of particular concern as there are a worrying amount of questionable schemes online, many of which do a great job of sounding legitimate.

There is also a ProSpring service as well which is advertised as being for those who want to start a business using this multi level approach to lotteries.

I will start by looking at the syndicate aspect of LottoSpring. Essentially, the company operate a massive number of 97 user syndicates.

This number is chosen because it supposedly allows all possible combinations of Lucky Star Numbers to be covered by each syndicate This in turn means that a syndicate only needs to get the 5 winning numbers to get the jackpot instead of what would effectively be 7 numbers.

Joining a syndicate is a free affair so long as you introduce 3 paying friends (or alternatively, they could also sign 3 people up as well) and this is where the free part of Free Money Plus comes from.

If you aren’t able to get people to sign up then LottoSpring could cost you as much as €99 per month depending on the level that you subscribe to.

Naturally, all users are incentivised to sign up for the more premium opportunities.

It is worth pointing out that whilst you are offered a free subscription to LottoSpring, this is highly conditional. Firstly, you have to pay your monthly fee when you sign up. Once your three referees have signed up and each paid their monthly fees, then yours is automatically refunded.

Not surprisingly, this amount is none refundable should you be unable to find 3 paying members. Whilst it also isn’t explicitly stated anywhere, it would appear that you need to get 3 sign ups per month in order to keep LottoSpring free.

If somebody in your syndicate scores a win, then you are guaranteed a percentage of whatever they win through LottoSpring. If you are the winner, then you receive a larger cut than the other 96 people that are in your syndicate.

This isn’t the end of it however. I have referred to LottoSpring as having a multi level marketing aspect and this now comes into play.

When you sign somebody up, they will then be entered into their own syndicate of 97. If somebody you have signed ups syndicate wins, then you also get a cut of their winnings. This can go multiple levels deep as well meaning that if you are successful in your recruitment, then there is some potential to have a reasonable amount of income.

In relation to the multi level marketing aspect of LottoSpring, the company themselves offer something called Blitz tickets.

These are drawn monthly and give you 1 ticket for each person that you have signed up. These give you a guaranteed prize of €1 if you haven’t matched any numbers, all the way up to €50,000 if you match 5 numbers. Think of it as a lottery within a lottery.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that LottoSpring comes with a number of tools that are designed to help you to market the service further.

These are however rather basic and whilst not as self serving as Paul Hardingham’s own attempts through the Free Money Plus website, are far from high quality.

Honestly, there may be a little more to LottoSpring, but this is enough to cover the basics. Whilst I understand that some people would want me to go into greater detail, I don’t believe that it is necessary at this time. As I will explore below, all you need is an idea of how the operation is set up so I can dissect it once again.

So is LottoSpring a Scam?

As is often the case with multi level marketing products, I feel that it would be very unfair and naïve of me to refer to LottoSpring as a scam. I don’t doubt that there are some people out there who make a lot of money through it.

I also don’t doubt that Paul Hardingham has done alright off the service. Especially if he is, as he claims, a founding member.

What I will say is that in order to try and establish some sense of legitimacy, the LottoSpring website makes the following statement:

“LottoSpring syndicate is backed by the official UK Euromillions lottery tickets”

This is answer to the question:

“How can I be sure I’ll receive my winnings?”

This is a nonsensical answer really and the closest interpretation that I can make (and which seems to be what was meant) is that the service works by purchasing tickets in the UK. I do however feel that I am giving LottoSpring a massive amount of leeway there.

Personally, it feels more to me like an attempt at placating a questioning audience.

In keeping with this, Paul Hardingham says that LottoSpring is a “UK Government licensed lottery operator” and that it has been “Operating global Lottery service since 2015”. Despite my rather intensive searching, I have been unable to fund anything that suggests that there is such a thing as a UK Government Licensed Lottery Operator.

Whilst there is extensive outlining of laws relating to lotteries available through the Gambling Commission, I cannot find anything that pertains to the circumstances in which LottoSpring operates.

What I can confirm is that LottoSpring has been operational in some form or another since 2015. When I have been talking about the service to date, I have actually been referring to LottoSpring 2.0.

In fact, what the Free Money Plus website doesn’t really make very clear is that this is a relaunch of a service with only one substantial change. That change is only a higher tier of play that costs €99 per month and allows access to two new lottery syndicates.

All of LottoSpring is operated by one Jamie Mather. He runs a number of online businesses, many of which pertain to internet marketing or multi level marketing on some level or another. These are all operated out of Malta.

So what about Free Money Plus?

It LottoSpring is questionable, I don’t think that there is any doubt about Free Money Plus. Whether or not Paul Hardingham is actually a founding member or not I wouldn’t like to speculate on. There are reasons that he may be and reasons he may not.

Either way, Free Money Plus isn’t something that is going to help you to make money. In fact, all that you are doing is putting yourself in Paul Hardingham’s down line and helping him to make more money for himself in the long run.

Once again, I don’t begrudge anybody the chance to make money of something. The business of internet marketing is just that, a business. To have free money in your URL, to have free money plastered all over your marketing material when you know that this isn’t technically a free service is plain misleading.

Free Money Plus Verdict

As a reviewer, I don’t like LottoSpring as a product. I think that it does a fantastic job of making money for a select few and whilst I understand this is the basis of any business, there should be a great product or service at the heart of it.

I don’t think that is the case with LottoSpring.

The fact that it has been launched, relaunched as ProSpring and is now being relaunched yet again as LottoSpring 2.0 speaks volumes.

For my final consideration on LottoSpring, I would like to quote the Acting Commissioner for Consumer Protection in Australia David Hillyard who said the following:

“Lotto Spring began in November 2015 and the website operator is offshore-based (British Virgin Islands and Curaçao). Importantly, subscribers are not entering a lottery. They are betting on the outcome of other lotteries, such as the EuroMillions draw.”

“However, Lotto Spring does not have the required Australian licence for this sort of gambling,” he said.

“The community needs to be aware that with Lotto Spring you aren’t offered the same protection or guarantees of payouts as you are when playing with lawful Australian lotteries and there may be issues in relation to taxation as payouts will be coming from overseas.”

“There is also a recruitment element. In exchange for referrals, participants can receive a reduction or refund of their monthly entry fees or free tickets and they are also promised a share in any winnings of a referred person if they can recruit four people or more.”

“This is what has resulted in the scheme being promoted in WA by a local participant.”

Whilst I accept that not all of this will apply to all users with a fair chunk relating to Australian Lottery laws, I feel that the fact this warranted such a statement is warning in and of itself.

Conclusion on LottoSpring and Free Money Plus

There are two things that we have looked at here in LottoSpring and Free Money Plus and they are both equally important to consider. I want to open by looking at LottoSpring however as I feel that really, it is the bigger fish to fry.

We run into a lot of things in our day to day life that we would like to call a scam. Sometimes, it is genuinely the case. Quite often however, we simply don’t take full stock of what it is that we are getting into and take things at face value. I would like to consider LottoSpring to fall into this latter category.

Honestly, I have seen things like this before and there are always some people who make good money off them.

In fact, I have seen some people do exceptionally well however there is always a limit to this. Any multi level marketing scheme that doesn’t really have a tangible product or value is doomed to cave in on itself at some point.

The way that LottoSpring is set up, I don’t think that it will be in the immediate future. Jamie Mather has been very clever in setting the service up.

What I do have to say is that whilst some people will do alright from this, there will be a hell of a lot who don’t. The sales material for LottoSpring makes it sound like winning is a sure thing and talks about how you are 10,000% more likely to win something with their syndicates than on your own.

Maybe, but you lose a large part of your winnings on smaller pay outs and even if you do take the 10,000% increase on the odds of winning, they remain very slim.

I cannot stress enough that the majority of users of LottoSpring are likely to come out worse off and whilst I wouldn’t like to say that it is definitely the case, I can imagine that there are a lot of users who quit after a month and would rather write off that initial $33 than stick with this service in the long run.

I did sign up to register just to see what it was all about for the research of this review, and received no less than 6 emails from Paul Hardingham in less than a week pushing me to join for real – 5 emails were received in the first 2 days.

Now I could put an affiliate link here for all those that will land on this page looking for the subject of Free Money Plus, and “How To Play The Lottery For Free” – But I will decline.

This could possibly be forgiven if Free Money Plus linked to a decent product but I don’t believe it does.

As far as I am concerned, Free Money Plus serves solely for Paul Hardingham to exploit others and make a quick buck and I would definitely recommend giving the whole experience a miss.

The post LottoSpring Review Free Money Plus, Play The Lottery For Free? appeared first on Money Makers Reviewed.

Sports trading is a particular passion of mine, so when I was recently presented with yet another Betfair trading product I just had to review it. This one is Sports Trading Exposed written by Tomas Paul, and ex professional volleyball player.

Many people try to make profits from Betfair, and obviously not many people achieve this, mainly due to the fact that there is not a great deal of information on how to trade successfully, but there have been a few products launched recently which are starting to change this.

Sports Trading Exposed is another one of them.

One thing I do want to say from the off, is that Tomas Paul is not from the UK, so although there is a slight language barrier, the PDF and content has been written by an native English person to ensure that there are no issues on that score.

OK, onto the review:

Product Title: Sports Betting Exposed, by Tomas Paul

Website: TBC

Price: £94.80 (incl VAT)

Guarantee: 60 day guarantee if not satisfied with the product.

What You Get:

• 234 page PDF document containing the full training course.
  
• 45 Real Time videos that are linked to on the course.
• Full support from Tomas himself.

What is Sports Betting Exposed?

The product is in PDF format, and is a download after purchase.  The PDF is also complimented by video training which is linked to from the book itself.

Tomas Paul claims to teach to how to follow in his footsteps and train you how to make a profit from Betfair just like he has done for the last 11 years.

Just to show you that I do have the product for this review, the following screenshot will show you the PDF:

The Sports Betting exposed product claims to teach readers how to trade on Betfair for maximum profit.

Included in the manual is a variety of different subjects all relating to the conclusion of teaching someone from the start how to trade the Betfair markets for a profit.

On early impressions the book is extremely well written, and Tomas Paul also shows a little of his own personality throughout the book.

I have not fully read the book (yet), as like I say it is 234 pages long with a fair amount of detail, but the downloadable book has obviously had a lot of thought and attention go into it.

I would say Sports Trading Exposed is very professionally written, of Amazon quality in fact, which is refreshing to see and is certainly not the usual poor quality found for similar products, so early impressions are very good on the whole.

Who is Tomas Paul, The Trader?

As I mentioned earlier there is a section regarding the history of Tomas, not a great deal but he explains that he was a professional volleyball player and started trading on Betfair back 2006, and has now been trading for 11 years after making over £250,000 profit from the Betfair exchanges.

Paul does mention early on in the book that he is now slightly bored with trading Betfair, and that is the reason for him putting pen to paper and writing Sports Trading Exposed. He also mentions that he has a strong dislike of Betfair since the introduction of the premium taxes (a stealth tax by Betfair placed on those who do well!)

What Does Sports Betting Exposed Contain?

The book as already mentioned is extremely detailed, infact the ‘table of contents’ for the book is one of the longest I have ever seen, and I have read a lot of books and never seen anything as long as this index –  over 7 pages of ‘tabled contents’  and this is the first page, which I am not sure is required to be brutally honest:

As I say, there is 7 pages of contents, which is a little over the top, and could be seen as padding the book out, but with such a long book, maybe it is needed, I don’t know yet until I really get into the ‘meat’ of what is being explained.

Just going through the book, it is obvious that the very basics are covered; not in any great detail but I would say enough to cover most angles.

Is Sports Trading Exposed Explained for Newbies?

I am not sure yet, the product explains how to open a Betfair Account, and has the links to downloading trading software, etc. The book is divided into three main sections:

 Sports Trading Exposed Videos

What Software Does Sports Trading Exposed Use?

The software that Tomas uses, and recommends is Geekstoy (I have done a recent review on Geekstoy which I will be publishing soon), and Tomas also uses Geekstoy in all his video demonstrations, so if you use different software already, you will have to learn and purchase Geekstoy to follow Tomas’s examples, and training.

Early Conclusion on Sports Trading Exposed.

I am still going through the content, and therefore this review will be updated in due course.

The product is obviously detailed, and Sports Trading Exposed is very professionally presented, but as we know the crux of the information, and the training will be if the information is adequate enough to generate users a profit.

Betfair trading is never, and never will be an overnight income creator for anybody new to trading the exchanges, so this will also need to be taken into account when apply the final rating, but early impressions are good on the professionalism of the product.

I just need to complete the book, and test the actual product, and this Sports Trading Review will be updated accordingly.

Updates and testing to follow.

The post Sports Trading Exposed Review Offered by Tomas Paul Betfair Trader appeared first on Money Makers Reviewed.

Matched Bets is a relatively new matched betting website to come onto our radar. I recently wrote an article asking if matched betting was still working and still worthwhile and not surprisingly, companies continue to emerge that are specialists in this niche.

I am not surprised however as those who read my opinions will know that despite a ‘potentially’ bleak future (at some future point), there is still money to be made in the here and now.

You will need to avoid bookmaker restrictions though, which we compiled another review about. It can definitely be done, and if you wish to prolong the income you can make from matched betting (and some people make a LOT, sometimes 20/30/40K a year from it), then I advise you read the content on the link above.

In spite of the fact that there is still money to be made through matched betting, it has been some time since I have seen anything new in this department.

Recently however I was invited to take a look at a new entry into the market (MatchedBets.com), an invitation that I have taken to with gusto, namely because there is a new feature with this product that I haven’t seen before.

So what will I be looking at today? The product is Matched Bets and it is still relatively new. In spite of this, there has been a lot of positive feedback and interest in the service. So with all of this in mind, let’s start to take the time to look at Matched Bets.

Product Title: Matched Bets Matched Betting Service

Price: £14 Per Month, or £99 per year

Where to Buy: Matchedbets.com  (please read the review first for benefits of membership!)

Guarantee: You can cancel at any time.

What You Get:

• Access to the MatchedBets.com website.

• Access to standard match betting tools.

• Access to the matchedbets Facebook group.

• Full Support and user guides.

• Access over 180 welcome and reload offers

• Reload and MoneyBack Offers Updated Every Day by 11am

• Advanced Odds Matcher with 32 Bookmakers and 4 exchanges

• In-depth training on a range of matched betting strategies

• Save time with our advanced Odds Matcher with real-time updates

• Forget spreadsheets, the bet tracker does it all for you in just a few clicks

• Customer support from 8 till late every day

• No Contract required, cancel anytime

As I am going through this particular review, I will randonly quote Key Points, and images of what customers can expect from their MatchedBets membership.

What is Matched Betting?

I always like to provide a refresher on matched betting because it is something that a lot of people are looking for online yet aren’t necessarily familiar with the concept.

This is of course due in a large part down to the media coverage that this form of making money online has recently enjoyed.

MatchedBets also have their very own section that will teach you ALL about matched betting, how it works, and exactly what to do. I have taken a look at these guides, and they excellent:

In fact, you could say that over the last 12 months or so there has been something of a renaissance as far as matched betting goes with media outlets as large as the Guardian advocating the method as well as websites like Save the Student and Money Saver Expert all offering endorsements.

Matched betting is a very special way of betting that can fundamentally eliminate the risk that comes with betting.

This is done by taking advantage of offers from bookmakers and using them in such a way that you are essentially betting with the bookies money. In fact, the term matched betting comes from the fact that you are matching a free bet in order to guarantee your profit. In doing this, you put yourself in a position whereby no matter the outcome of a given event, you can still bank a profit from your bets.

Whilst it sounds too good to be true, matched betting has proven to be a consistently profitable approach to making money online for a lot of different people. I have personally seen people making tens of thousands of pounds in a single month (albeit rarely) although most users of matched betting are simply looking to supplement their income with a low risk and low effort method.

So What About Matched Bets?

As I have already mentioned, Matched Bets is a relative newcomer into the matched betting arena however this doesn’t always have to be a bad thing. In fact, as Matched Bets demonstrates, sometimes taking the time to look at the competition can lead to a very good offering.

In many ways, I don’t think that this is a service that necessarily does anything different (with one massive exception which I will look at in much greater detail below) however it does it very well.

Generally speaking, there are two core things that any matched betting service should do well and that is list offers and match odds. Matched Bets handles both of these very deftly.

You are probably best watching the first video on the welcome screen as soon as you have logged in:

The above is an image, not a video by the way, I couldn’t obviously just pull a video from their members area

The second thing to look at is the offers screen. This is where any budding matched bettor should head as it will allow you to see not just what potential guaranteed profit is available (writing this late in the day, there are offers going all the way up to £160 of guaranteed profit).

Matched Bets Done For You Links

One of the things that I really like about Matched Bets is that there is an “Info, or show instructions” button next to each offer.

This breaks down what you need to do to claim a bet as well as listing what the best bets to place are. Possibly more importantly, this screen also tells you some of the terms and conditions of an offer, for example, the £160 guaranteed profit tells you about how much you will need to wager, odds restrictions and time restrictions. There are also links to loopholes etc.

What this means is that at a glance you can tell whether or not an offer is right for you. Sticking with the example above, a quick look at the info screen tells me that this is not a bet for beginners.

As such, I would be able to skip over this and come back at a later date rather than finding myself with £1,200 in a Bet365 account and terrified that I’m going to bankrupt myself.

Key Point: After logging in, you are presented with the MatchedBets Dashboard:

The other thing that is really important when you are looking at a service which deals with matched betting is how many matched odds chances it can identify.

This is something else that Matched Bets does particularly well with their odds matcher page offering almost 2,000 matches at any given time. Naturally, some of these are better than others however there are a number of filters that you can apply in order to identify the best.

Listing all of the filters would be a rather lengthy task so I will focus on some of the more important ones. The main one is what Matched Bets refer to as the match %. This expresses the percentage you’d keep on a qualifier or of a bonus. Essentially, the higher this number is the better.

Matched Bets Odds Matcher

As well as this, you can also filter based on odds and ratings, markets or competitions and perhaps most importantly for any long term bettor, bookmakers and exchanges. Here is an example of the MatcheBets Odds Matcher:

As you can see from the above image, at the time of writing there were well over 18,000+ variations of matches to look at.

This is of particular importance as some users of matched betting can find their accounts with certain bookmakers restricted or in some cases closed. Furthermore, you may have free bets waiting with some bookies and not others. If this is the case, Matched Bets allows you to skip time wasting by trying to find events that will suit you and having them all in one place.

The same thing very much applies with the betting exchanges too.

With some matched betting services that I have looked at before now, restricting anything at all can cause a massive dip in availability of betting opportunities but this doesn’t seem to be the case with Matched Bets. With 36 bookies and exchanges considered for the odds matcher, this does allow a lot of freedom to find the best possible chances.

There are also other aspects to Matched Bets, some of which are very much “industry standard” whilst some are new and rather exciting. There is a matched betting calculator and a solid customer service offering (which has email support and live chat 8am till late and an information centre which is online 24/7).

One of the things that I haven’t really seen before now is a forum which appears to be relatively active and seems to have enough people posting to be worth a look (truthfully, I didn’t spend too much time here).

What really jumped out at me however is something that I don’t recall having ever seen before at another service. Acca Backers is still in its beta phase meaning that Matched Bets is still very much testing this, however it is undoubtedly one of the more interesting developments I have seen in matched betting for a considerable length of time.

So How Does Matched Bets Acca Backers Work?

Given that Matched Bets is running with a totally new concept with Acca Backers, I only feel that it is fair that it gets a considerable look. After all, it is not an everyday thing when there are new developments in the sports betting world. The methods that Matched Bets use for the accumulators in question are a good way of creating scenarios where you can gain additional funds for betting.

I feel that it would be remiss of me not to point out that the methods that Acca Backers employs are rather advanced. Whilst it is interesting and can boost the bank, the Matched Bets team do acknowledge this fact and say that backing and laying accumulators is for their more advanced members.

When you look at the Acca Backers page of Matched Bets, there will be a list of accumulator bets. These are predominantly based around football however there may occasionally be events from other sports too. As you would expect, the accumulators that you will be backing tend to be five folds and higher, something that is likely necessary to get the best possible odds.

It is important to take the time at this point to say that not all of the Acca Backers that are available through Matched Bets have a matched element. Some of them are simply straight forward accumulator tips. Even the examples that require laying Matched Bets lists as being higher or low risk.

This is important as even though this new development in matched betting has a solid underpinning, it is really only something that at present supplements current methods.

Once you have selected an accumulator bet that you wish to place (which comes complete with details of which bookmaker to use and the relevant odds), you then have to look at the laying strategy that Matched Bets recommends.

This is of particular importance as laying the bets that make up the accumulator is crucial to getting the best out of this new method. I won’t go into these different methods in detail as truth be told, the whole process is actually rather complex and the Matched Bets team have done a great job of explaining things themselves.

So How Much Will I Pay for Matched Bets?

There are 3 different ways that you can sign up for Matched Bets, all of which come at costs that I think it is fair to say are reasonable. Payment for all options is handled directly via Paypal and it is important to keep in mind that there is no money back guarantee offered with Matched Bets. For a number of reasons which I will explore, I do however feel that this is more than reasonable.

Before you pay for Matched Bets, you have an option to sign up for the service entirely for free. This is limited however so that once you have made £50 of profit, you then have to pay. This means that whilst there is no money back guarantee in place, if you choose to reinvest the money you make from your trial period then you will essentially have received 3 months of the service for free.

This leads me to the monthly costs involved with Matched Bets. The service is priced at just £14 per month which is slightly cheaper than some of the other examples of matched betting products that I have looked at before. There is also an option to sign up for Matched Bets for a full 12 months period which is a one time cost of £99 (a limited time offer).

How Much Can I Expect to Earn?

Quite how much you can make with Matched Bets will ultimately vary depending on how many of the offers you want to take advantage of. Those who invest a lot of time and effort into matched betting have reported making a few thousand pounds each month. I personally feel that this is a rather lofty number to aim for however (at least after the first month or so).

Realistically, I think that making around £300-£500 per month is a reasonable enough figure.

Key Point: MatchedBets states that you will get the very first £50 profit for free:

So Is Matched Bets Better Than the Competition?

I find it rather difficult to compare and contrast the matched betting market in a lot of ways and this is in a large part down to the fact that there is very little that changes from one service to another. What I can categorically say is that I don’t think that Matched Bets does anything any worse than its competition and this is something that is rather important to consider.

There is also a rather useful forum built right into the Matched Bets website, where you can converse with like-minded members on the exact best way to turn a profit, and any other offers that members find are usually posted as well, creating a community feel that is very useful:

What really stands out for me is the potential of the Matched Bets Acca Backers service which as I mentioned is very much in its beta phase. Whilst I wouldn’t like to go out of my way to say that it is going to be a game changer, it is certainly something that I Haven’t seen any other services offering and this is a big step in the right direction.

Here and now, I don’t see it as being a game changer however in the future, anything that adds opportunities to improve the profit to an already successful method of making money online will likely be welcome.

Conclusion on Matched Bets

Matched Bets has inadvertently reminded me that whilst matched betting may not necessarily be the money making juggernaut that it is today forever, there is still a decent amount of money to be made now. In terms of how Matched Bets stacks up, this is a difficult thing to consider and that is largely down to the fact that there is generally very little difference from one matched betting product to another.

Here is an official Matched Bets Video Explaining:

With Matched Bets however this has been broken with the Acca Backers service. I cannot stress enough that if you are looking for a matched betting service, you shouldn’t be buying Matched Bets solely on the grounds of this new feature.

For example, if you are already using a service and were considering taking advantage of Matched Bets to increase your betting potential, you will be sorely disappointed.

Given the fact that Matched Bets does what it does, I don’t see why you wouldn’t at least give some thought to changing from your existing service. For my money, Matched Bets is massively flexible for users with a lot of bookmaker offers and decent and numerous matched betting opportunities  on offer. Whether or not this is enough to consider it to be “the best” is a very subjective concept.

What really matters to me is that in using Matched Bets, you will ultimately profit. If you put your free £50 towards an annual subscription to the service, I can easily see anybody who actually follows the instructions making 10 times their investment in a year although truthfully, this is me choosing a bare minimum figure to work with.

The presentation of Matched Bets is top notch and browsing everything never feels difficult or leaves you in anyway confused and if you are, there is a fantastic support network in place. With all of this in mind, I don’t really see why you wouldn’t consider Matched Bets, even in a competitive market and I have no qualms in saying that it is a decent product.

This MatchedBets service has our recommendation – A lot of quality work has gone into the service.

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Emails and our email addresses are becoming more, and more important, and the spam merchants are getting wiser. As somebody who looks at hundreds of products per year, I am more than familiar with having an email inbox flooded with rubbish promotions and products that I have no interest in.

As a result of this, I have an email account that I solely use for working. This email address currently has 39,029 unread emails (now it’s 30,030. I’ve just had another land whilst writing this) and a further 2,000 in a spam inbox.

It was whilst pondering this that I decided to see what would happen if I were to browse in the same fashion as normal, but with an entirely new email address.

How Many Spam Emails?

I should start by saying that almost every internet marketer out there is interested in having your email. It is an opportunity to notify you of new products and opportunities that may be of interest to you.

It is also pretty well known that one of the main ways that internet marketers will try to get your email address is by offering you free stuff.

For the purposes of this experiment of mine, I decided that I was only going to put in my email address when prompted and when there was something free on offer.

By the end of all this I hope to be able to examine the content that I have received and compare it with how much time I would have to spend managing my inbox. My quest is to ultimately explore just what the real value of these free products are.

I will approach my inbox as though it is also a personal one with correspondence coming through from friends and family to really get a feel for this. With that in mind, let’s jump in and look at things.

Is Free Stuff Worth It?

OK, let’s start this and see just how many emails arrive in my account just by looking at the offers we are interested in on the subject of making a few extra quid. A few technical details for those who are interested in such things, I have been running the email account through Microsoft Outlook’s free service.

Day One

Day one was relatively straightforward for me. I looked at a product from a chap named Paul O’Keefe who claimed to offer a free product in exchange for my email address. This was a perfect starting point and I happily inputted my experimental email account details. Within seconds my first email landed however it wasn’t from Paul O’Keefe, it was instead from somebody called Chris Jenkins telling me that focus is the key to achieving all my goals.

I was also linked to a free WordPress plugin for creating polls on a website. There was also another call to action that involved downloading a piece of software in exchange for allowing the marketer to post notifications through my browser.

Disappointed that literally the first email that I received was as a result of my details being assigned to multiple product lists, I pressed on and waited for the marketer who’s list I had actually signed up for to message me.

This came through shortly afterwards and took me to the free product that I had actually signed up for. This was called Software Mastery Course. Unfortunately, there was very little mastery going on as this free product appeared to serve as a slightly different sales pitch for a rather lacklustre product.

The day closed with yet another email off Chris Jenkins, the internet marketer who sent the first email to my account. Given that I hadn’t signed up for a product from this particular marketer, I opted to ignore it and take no further action.

Day Two

Day Two was an interesting one as my online travels took me to the Betfan group. I have written about them as a company extensively including a rather detailed article. This was of particular interest to me as Betfan and their various subsidiaries actually send out free tips to their subscriber lists so I figured that this might represent a good chance to make my new email address pay so to speak.

Signing up with Betfan actually involved 6 emails landing, one each from their various services including Bet Kudos, Tipster TV and Winning Information Network. These were mostly introductory an whilst I was anticipating this kind of thing as a result of being very aware of the wider Betfan Group and their approach, had I been Joe Average, I would be very frustrated to receive 6 emails for signing up with one tipster company.

I also received yet another 2 emails from Betfan over the course of the day meaning 8 in total.

Day Three

Just three days after starting my experiment, I received 10 emails in a single day and this was before I looked at my spam inbox. This actually brought the total emails up to 14 for the day. Even more worryingly is whilst I could identify most of the email sources (although Chris Jenkins is still sending me unrequited emails).

There have been numerous emails from the Betfan group, some of which have offered me free tips. Had I followed their advice, I would have made a profit of 5.88 points (including a 6/1 winner) which would mean for the first time, that my free emails have actually demonstrated any real value.

Day Four

By Day Four, Outlook had started to filter out most of the emails that I received as spam, automatically putting them into my junk box (however this did still involve 9 new emails today). This is fortunate in many respects as I received yet another email from somebody that I had not subscribed with. Interestingly (or perhaps worryingly), the email that I did not recognise was advertising a product from the Betfan group.

The other emails that I received were further invites from people I have already subscribed to. They were all inviting me to sign up for yet more “free” services. The free tips that were issued to me lost 0.37 points, a relatively small amount compared to the big win yesterday.

Day Five

Day Five saw a few new emails land in my inbox from the usual suspects as well as the emails that I receive from Betfan appearing in my junk email. This still amounts to over 12 emails today across my various email accounts. Where I had previously drawn some solace from the betting side of things with Betfan’s free tips proving profitable, today saw a loss of 3 points across their services meaning that my profit stands at just over 1.5 points.

Day Six

Today was a Sunday and as such, I wasn’t expecting anywhere near the usual level of correspondence from internet marketers. Betfan were quick to issue a number of emails including 2 free tips. Unfortunately, these simply made for a loss of 2 points meaning that I would now be in the red with them as well.

Day Seven

It has been almost a week since I started monitoring what kind of thing I get through in my free emails as well as what to engage with. I was rather astounded to find that there were over 18 emails to look at today with only one new email address popping up. This was however expected as it was for a new service I had signed up for that day. In terms of the selections, I have incurred a net profit of 1 point today.

This means that I am now 0.5 points better off, but my confidence in these free tips has definitely been knocked.

Day Eight

Today saw just 9 emails that I had to go through. Half of the amount received on the Monday, although still a lot in an afternoon, especially if you take the time to read them. There were no emails from new products which I expected as there hadn’t been anything new that I had registered an interest in. What I did find interesting however is that in just over a week, the services I had signed up with were already starting to offer me new products and affiliate products.

This is a long way from the content that I signed up for. In terms of the free tips, there was just a 1 point profit meaning that over the course of this experiment, I would be 1.5 points up.

Day Nine

Wednesday marks the first day for some time where my email has seemingly been forwarded to somebody else. The product that was on offer was entirely unrelated to the stuff that I have looked at before now or expressed an interest in. It also brings the number of emails per day up to 10 which means that the number is slowly creeping up, exactly what I was worried about.

In terms of the free tips that I have been receiving from Betfan, there was an astounding 7/1 winner which even losing on the two other bets leaves me in a position of 6.5 points of profit. At £10 per bet, I would currently be £65 up which isn’t bad for a week and a half of reading my emails.

Day Ten

Today marked another 9 emails landing, most of which are no longer relevant to what I was interested in. Betfan continue to be the biggest hounds with 6 emails from them although the free selections that they issued were profitable once again. A 3 point winner and a 1 point loss means that I would currently stand at 8.5 points of profit. Still not substantial, but a very good figure none the less.

Day Eleven

At this point, the emails that I am receiving are hardly worth my attention as they have almost nothing to do with the products I originally expressed an interest in. For the sake of posterity I have decide to visit a few of the free products that I am being offered. These are mostly WordPress plugins that already do what my existing website host does or add very little in the way of value.

I have to hold my hands up and say that there was an interesting piece on Facebook Live, a new platform that I have been aware of but not necessarily followed. Whilst I was less than impressed with what this particular marketer was suggesting, it did serve as a reminder that this new piece of tech is there and the possibilities for it.

Going back to the horse racing tips which are without a doubt my favourite part of the day, there was a 2 point winner which ultimately was offset by 2 points of loss.

Day Twelve

I am nearing the end of this two week experiment and honestly, I will be glad to see the back of this kind of email monitoring.

Honestly, reading and scouring every last email you receive and keeping track of what you have subscribed to and what you haven’t can be overwhelming. I would say that I am now entering double digits in terms of my daily emails which, if you were to put side by side with your everyday emails that you actually want to read, would be a hell of a lot. As an aside, Betfan’s free tips delivered once again with a clean sweep generating an outstanding 10.25 points of profit.

Day Thirteen

By this point in the experiment I have given up trying to keep on top of things because I simply don’t see it as being viable. I will explore all of this in my conclusion, but today has produced double digits in terms of the emails with new names appearing and increasingly aggressive marketing from those services I have signed up for. I have in fact received 3 different emails from just one marketer trying to draw me into his sales funnel.

The free horse racing selections I have been receiving produced a none runner and a 1 point loss today.

Day Fourteen

I have given up looking at the emails from the marketers and have pretty much written off the email account in question. There were 2 free bets that I received, both of which lost. This does however mean that over 2 weeks I have ended with a profit of 15.75 points.

Conclusion on Protecting Your main Email Address

Honestly, it has been a surprisingly exhausting two weeks researching this project. In my own line of work I filter through hundreds of emails per day, however I barely glance at most of these simply aiming to see if it is something that is worth looking at. Taking the approach of somebody who is looking to get started in making money online however makes the whole experience dramatically different. It has been very eye opening being forced to look at internet marketing from the other side of the fence.

When I started out with this I wanted to see whether or not there was value to be had in signing up for free products and at the end, I feel that this is a very mixed thing. Purely based on the 14 days I have ran this experiment for, I would be forced to conclude that there is hardly any value to be had in terms of the products I have looked at.

I do however know from personal experience that there are plenty of good quality free products out there that can massively enhance the tools that you have at your disposal.

By far and away the biggest surprise has been the free tips that I have had. In 2 weeks I could have made over £150 using £10 stakes which isn’t a bad profit in anybody’s book, especially considering there is very little work involved.

That having been said, these numbers have been based on some very generous odds, however even losing 5 points would still mean £100 to £10 stakes. Of course this could have just as easily gone the other way so as with anything gambling related online, only bet what you can afford to lose.

By the time I have finished writing this up, I have had over 200 emails land in the inbox that I created and this is in just over 2 weeks. Honestly, this is more than I could manage actually taking the time to look at what marketers are offering me. That having been said, if one were to unsubscribe to those emails that weren’t going to add value to my inbox, this would be much more manageable.

So is it really worth signing up for free products? I would conclude that it is a bit of a reluctant yes from me. There is no denying that a lot of what is on offer is crap that serves as part of a rubbish sales funnel. You can always tell this kind of thing because it constant refers back to selling you another product.

The fact is however that there is plenty of content that is there because a marketer wants to show you that they can add value and these are the ones that I would find myself considering products that I would pay for.

If I may put on my business hat for a moment instead of looking at this from a consumer point of view, this is something that is massively important for marketers to take away.

There is no denying that a free product is a great way of keeping people in your sales funnel, but you have to give them something that is of genuine value. Putting together a 45 minute advert for your product and labelling it a guide to affiliate marketing is only going to turn people off. If on the other hand you deliver exactly what you promise, they are more likely to buy your actual product with very little prompting.

One of the things that did jump out at me as a customer is just how many lists you can end up on just subscribing to one product or service. This was really noticeable with Betfan who instantly bombarded me with emails from their various subsidiaries. As somebody involved in the industry and who knows their marketing tactics well, this was expected but if I was a casual punter I would think that my details have been sold on.

I have tentatively titled this article “How To Protect Your Email From Spam”, when looking for freebies, and free ‘stuff, and this value changes depending on who you ask. To a genuine marketer, the value of your email address is priceless. To a scam artist, it is worth as much as somebody will pay for it. This is something that you need to keep in mind when handing this information out.

Whether you perceive it to be or not, your email address does have value and you should keep this in mind when you trade it for a “free” product. My final piece of advice would be that the unsubscribe button is your friend and if somebody is abusing your email, then it can be better to get off their lists rather than hanging on in the hope of getting something for nothing.

You must control what arrives in your inbox, because if you don’t then any useful information will definitely get hidden amongst most of the rubbish. Also, be aware who you give your email address to, because in this day and age, so very many websites sell such information to a third party in the pursuit of profit, and then the spam emails will arrive thick and fast.

And the definite final piece of advice is to get a ‘throwaway’ email address for all the offers you are interested in, which you can easily switch off if required, and keep your main email address as ‘clean’ as you possibly can.

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Heard of ClickBank? Following on from my initial look at affiliate marketing I have had some absolutely inspiring feedback. There has however been one prevalent question which hasn’t really gone away and that is people asking how to get involved with affiliate marketing.

More specifically, people have asked me about Clickbank and Amazon. They have also asked me about setting a website up.

Now I could easily lump this into a single article, rehash what I have talked about and get on with my life but that isn’t how I am as a person or a writer. So with that in mind I have decided to break down affiliate marketing even more and look at each topic individually.

In keeping with this series’ aims, I don’t want to let this descend into a step by step tutorial. If you are reading this, then you are smart enough to know how to sign up with a website and follow their own tutorials. What I do want to do however is to look at each aspect of affiliate marketing in more depth.

For the purposes of this particular article, I will be looking at Clickbank as this is a website that I feel most people are (perhaps inadvertently) familiar with. Furthermore, it is much easier to get started with Clickbank as an affiliate as it is much easier to get accepted and link up with people whose products you wish to market.

What Is Clickbank?

You probably haven’t ever heard of Clickbank and yet they are one of the top 100 online retailers in the world servicing 200 million customers. On their website, they say that they sell “lifestyle products”, created by “passionate entrepreneurs”.

These however have a number of different names within the affiliate marketing world. The one that I have encountered most often and that I use is information product.

Truthfully, there are a massive number of different examples of information products however I feel that they all have one thing in common. They are a product that provide information (hence my choice of name). These information products can cover a vast number of topics and as I will explore over the course of this article, they are available in every niche.

Moving back to Clickbank, it is probably the biggest marketplace in the world for this type of product and it is without a shadow of a doubt amongst the most diverse.

The company was started in 1998 and has grown exponentially in the following years to a company with over $3 billion in sales across 190 countries. This is not a small company and for many, they are considered the premiere destination for affiliate marketers.

Who Uses Clickbank?

There are three types of users of Clickbank and it is important to understand the relationship that exists between them if you want to start making money as an affiliate marketer.

The first group of people that you need to know about are product creators. These are hugely important and truth be told, without them, Clickbank wouldn’t really exist as it does. As the title suggests, content creators do just that. They create the content that you will be selling. These are usually people who have a very specific knowledge of something and wish to make money from this knowledge.

Product creators will create things like ebooks, audio books and even instructional videos based around their interests. Truthfully, this can be on anything from a cookbook to a workout regime to a spiritual guidance book. Content on Clickbank can be in almost any niche (something that I will explore in full below) and I am rather of the opinion that you can find information on almost anything.

With a reported 6 million content creators in place, it is pretty easy to see how there is an almost unlimited well from which to draw products to market.

This leads me onto the next group of people who use Clickbank and they are customers. There isn’t a lot to say about customers on Clickbank. They are like customers anywhere in the world who are looking for a service or product. Mostly with Clickbank, these are people who are looking for information on how to do something and are ultimately, the people that are most important to you as an affiliate marketer.

Finally, there are marketers. These are people that like you, wish to make an income through putting other people’s products in front of the correct eyes. As an affiliate marketer selling Clickbank products, there are a number of different things for you to consider however. The biggest of these however (in my opinion) is understanding which products it is that you should be selling.

Finding the right kind of product can range from simple common sense thinking (people are more likely to want to learn how to improve their sporting prowess or improve their bodies in summer) to using some of the multitude of tools that Clickbank themselves provide to help you find products that are selling well. This brings me neatly onto my next topic which is in many ways the heart of Clickbank.

The Clickbank Marketplace and How to Use It

In many ways, I feel like the marketplace is both the heart and mind of Clickbank when you are an affiliate marketer. It is here that you will come to look at what is selling well and what the newest products on the market. If I hold my hands up, actually getting to grips with the marketplace can be one of the more difficult aspects of using Clickbank as your main source of content to market on an affiliate basis.

Once you have learned to navigate these rather treacherous oceans however, you will find that you are able to tell quickly and easily what will and won’t be profitable. There are two main ways that you can look at which products are available which are to search for a term or to browse based on category. The method that you use will more likely than not be determined by where you are as an affiliate.

If you are starting out, I would recommend browsing based on a category or niche that you are interested in. This way, you can look at products that are available and start to build your marketing campaign around this. Whilst this may sound difficult, the truth is that it is actually a pretty straightforward process.

For example, you choose a product that is a recipe book for a vegan diet. The website that you build could be based around the health benefits of a vegan diet. You could also write about losing weight through a vegan diet and of course, tasty vegan recipes. You would possibly want to run an Instagram marketing campaign alongside this in which you post pictures of vegan food, inspirational quotes on health and eating etc.

In this circumstance you have started with a product and built your marketing around it. From here, it is easy to look at the marketplace from the other side of the tracks. You have an existing marketing network which is based around vegan recipes, so you would search for things related to vegan eating.

Really, whether you are browsing or searching, you are still looking to get to the same destination. The only difference is that you set off from slightly different starting points.

What Niches are Available in the Clickbank Marketplace?

To say that the Clickbank marketplace is a diverse place is something of an understatement. There are 22 different categories available on the marketplace, each of which is broken down into multiple different sub categories. Most of my experience with affiliate marketing has been in the category of making money online as it is what I know best, however this broad niche is composed of several Clickbank categories.

When you are deciding on what niche you want to be involved with, it is best to try and think broadly initially. This means that you can cover a large number of products through your marketing network (I will explore the concept of this in a different article).

For example, you want to be involved in health and fitness. More specifically, you want to promote a product that is based around body building. There is a whole section dedicated to strength training on Clickbank (admittedly with just a few products), however there are products in other categories that relate to this.

Furthermore, people who you are selling products on muscle building to may also be interested in a paleo diet which is high in protein and encourages eating natural foods. This can then lead to low fat diet books for those who are looking to lose body fat once they have built up muscle. All of these are in different categories on Clickbank however there is a synergy to their promotion.

In terms of making money online, there are a massive number of products. They can be gambling products, online trading, selling products on eBay, affiliate marketing, home businesses. All of these are very different things however they all really fall under the same niche.

I think that the thing to really take away from this is that your niche should be as wide as possible, however your marketing for a particular product needs to be very specific. This can be a little bit confusing at first however once you understand the principle, you will find that it is a very easy premise.

What Are the Clickbank Stats and What Do They Mean?

Irrespective of how you look for products, you will have to get to grips with the various metrics that Clickbank use when they rank and report on how a product has performed. Initially, this looks complicated and confusing and it is easy to feel overwhelmed when you are first looking at products. What I want to do here is break down what the different stats mean and how you can use them to make the best decisions on what to sell.

Under the stats, there are 5 figures that you will need to pay attention to in order to determine whether or not there is profit to be made in marketing a given product. These are Initial $/sale, Avg %/sale, Avg Rebill Total Avg %/rebill and arguably most importantly, Grav (which I will explore in its own section).

• The Initial $/sale – This is the average amount that you will earn as an affiliate when you make a sale of a product. This is definitely an important figure as it ultimately defines how much money you can expect to make for each sale that you generate. It is worth keeping in mind that this figure takes into account things like refunds and chargebacks etc. It is important to keep in mind that this number is only an average and there may be some variance.
• The Avg %/Sale – This is a much simpler number than the above and shows the average commission rate that is earned for sales of a vendors products. As with the Initial $/sale, this is an average figure and so there may be some variation.
• The Avg Rebill Total – This number is only shown on products where the vendor offers a recurring billing cycle. It shows you what the average amount that an affiliate makes on all rebilled sales, not simply the initial sale.
• This kind of subscription based product can produce a better long term product for you as an affiliate, however you should consider how long it takes for the average rebill total to come in (for example, a $10 per month product with an average rebill of total of $100 may not prove as lucrative as pursuing something that makes $75 in 3 months).
• The Avg %/Rebill – This is the equivalent of the Avg %/Sale however it shows the average commission rate on all rebills. Again, this is an average so your numbers may differ slightly from those published.

The final statistic that Clickbank use is Grav, short for Gravity. This is something that I was initially going to summarise but truth be told it is so easy to overlook despite the importance that I want to dedicate a full section to it. For those who are skimming through this article however, the higher the gravity, the more in demand a product is (i.e. it is recording more sales.

What is Gravity in Clickbank?

Gravity on Clickbank is a very important and often oversimplified concept. Many people presume that the highest number is the best to go for however this isn’t always the case. This is mostly down to the very unique way that Clickbank calculate this figure. Essentially, the gravity for a product shows how the affiliates selling a product are doing with values assigned to sales based on how recent they are.

The more recent the sale, the higher the value of said sale when calculating the gravity.

For example, if you look at the two products above, if you were to compare them both for potential resale, then circled in red are obvious reasons why the second product would be far more advantageous, and profitable – because the stats show that good sales are already being made by other affiliates, plus the fact that there is a generous ‘rebill’ included, which is always a very nice bonus.

There is in fact a very precise formula that Clickbank use however this hasn’t been released to the public for obvious reasons. There are however some people who have attempted to reverse engineer the process and from my extensive research, there is one widely agreed upon pattern.

Each affiliate (A) is assigned a value of 1 for each sale they made yesterday. For each subsequent day that a sale isn’t made, this value of 1 drops. The formula for this is 0.96^(n-1) where n is the number of days since the last sale.

Using this formula, we can calculate that if the last sale from an affiliate was 30 days ago, they would add gravity of just 0.3 to a products overall score.

So what does all of this mean in the real world for you when you are searching for a product?

If a product has a very high gravity, then there are plenty of affiliates selling it. In fact, the “whole” number demonstrates that there is a minimum of that many affiliates marketing a product (for example a gravity of 70.85 would mean there are at least 70 affiliates marketing a product). This allows you to get a pretty good sense of whether or not a market is over saturated.

The general rule is that the higher the gravity, the more people selling a product, and the more people selling a product, the harder it is to sell.

The problem with gravity as a number is that it doesn’t tell you a lot. It can provide some insight however using a gravity of 70.85 again as an example. This could mean that 500 affiliates haven’t made a sale for 30 days, or it could mean 70 affiliates are selling it every day. The answer is inevitably somewhere between the two, but which one could mean you making no money or a small fortune.

Using Gravity for Research Purposes

So you’ve decided on a niche, looked at the gravity for products in said niche and you are now as confused as ever (I certainly would be). There are two options open to you really. The first is to join a site that charts Clickbank products and their gravity movements etc. This is undoubtedly the easy way to do things however these websites generally charge a subscription fee.

For this however you get up to date information and graphs which allow you to see the sales pattern in a much better light.

Truthfully, this is the method that I would explore, especially if I were aiming to make a proper go of affiliate marketing. The information is much more accurate than anything that you can research yourself and frankly, if you value your time, you can save yourself hours of work.

As you can see from above, you can filter the stats based on your preferences.

If however you are budget conscious (which I know that a lot of people starting out can be), then you can always carry out research the old fashioned way. This involves a lot of searching and trying to identify where the product is being marketed.

This can however lead to some false results however as people will be marketing in a number of ways that aren’t reliant on having a website (for example I can receive 30 emails per day about a newly launched tipster service).

What are the Pros and Cons of Using Clickbank as a Platform For Affiliate Marketing?

Clickbank is something of a divisive topic when it comes to affiliate marketers. I think that the majority seem them for what they are which is probably the largest affiliate network in the world. The truth is that it is difficult to avoid Clickbank if you are an affiliate marketer as at some point or another, there will be something on their marketplace that you can sell.

Truthfully, there aren’t too many criticisms of Clickbank from affiliate marketers. In my experience they are prompt with payments and make good on what they promise. This is probably the most important thing to your new business. It is certainly easier than some stories that I have heard about verbal agreements made with content creators who down the line don’t like to pay up for your hard work.

One of the biggest problems that you can face as an affiliate with Clickbank however stems from something that I am personally very supportive of when looking at products. This is their money back guarantee policy.

Clickbank offer a blanket 60 day money back guarantee on any product that is sold through their network. This has led to some unscrupulous users signing up for a service, downloading the content and claiming a refund. As an affiliate this is massively frustrating however it is part and parcel of the industry.

My feelings are that having that 60 day money back guarantee in place generates more sales than it leads to in refunds. The thing with any online retailer is that they are only as good as consumer confidence. This is why Amazon are such a big company, because their refund policy and customer service is second to none. People have much less of a problem taking a risk when they know that they can always claim a refund if something isn’t as advertised.

Please note though, that if you are a successful vendor, then you can instruct Clickbank to use your own refund terms, and stipulate your own rules, so not always will you gain a refund from every vendor, just make sure to actually read each vendors rules on refunds.

One of the biggest downsides of Clickbank doesn’t even come from the company themselves. It instead comes from content creators who are putting out less than stellar products. You can find something that you think is a fantastic product only to find that it is absolute crap and you have wasted a lot of time and money.

I’ve looked at enough Clickbank products in my time to know that it happens all too often and whilst a lot of sites will encourage you to check out a sales page, I would be inclined to go one step farther.

If you have any doubts about a product that you are marketing, it can be well worth making the purchase for yourself. That 60 day money back guarantee can work for you as a customer as well as an affiliate (although you should avoid doing this too often as it can lead to account closures). Generally speaking, if you are vigilant and avoid what is obviously crap, you will be OK. Especially if you use Gravity as one of your metrics.

My Own Results and Profits

Some fantastic money can be made using Clickbank, and just to show you that I know what I am talking about…

I don’t use Clickbank as much as I used to, but just take a look at some of the commissions I have personally generated in the past promoting a variety of different products using the market place, on an array of specific websites I used to promote from:

Last year I made over $90,000+ using Clickbank:

The last screenshot above was taken at the end of May when I was planning this review. I am sure you would agree, that is some pretty decent money coming in on a weekly basis. The $’s get converted to £’s when it hits your bank account, and Clickbank pay weekly without fail, providing you have hit the threshold that you set.

As you can see, on one of my Clickbank accounts I made well over $90,000+ in 2016, and I have scaled back this year due to other commitments I have, but it definitely highlights that some very good money can be made when you are committed.

Downsides to Clickbank

It isn’t all roses however. Truth be told, Clickbank can have some major downsides as well. A prime example of this is the competition that exists on products that are selling a large number of units. We have looked at gravity extensively and if you consider the fact that there are some products which have gravity into the hundreds, you can start to get an idea of just how many people use Clickbank.

One of the other issues that I have is that you can struggle to sell products simply because people expect information products to be a “scam”. Whilst the truth is that many products created for Clickbank are genuine and written by people who understand their chosen subject well, there are the occasional efforts from fraudsters who are also looking to make a quick buck. I know that I have certainly had more than my fair share of crap in my time.

People have an inherent distrust of products of the nature Clickbank deal with and when you throw in the fact that the authors are rarely household names, you can have a melting pot for customer resistance. Of course as a marketer and sales person, you should be able to bypass these objections however I think that it would be naïve of me to ignore that they ca be a problem.

Conclusion on Using ClickBank as an Affiliate

The biggest challenge for any new business starting out is getting a decent revenue stream up and running. In fact, if you believe the old oft quoted statistic, it can take a business 3 years before it starts making a profit. This is rarely the case with online money making simply because your overheads are much lower, however that doesn’t mean that you can ignore the importance of having a steady cash stream.

Clickbank is probably the quickest and easiest way to start trying to monetise your marketing network. There is something for everybody and truthfully, the company don’t make you jump through hoops to get involved. This is unlike some affiliate networks that I have looked at before now where your whole marketing set up has to be approved by a product vendor before you can sell their products.

As I said in my original article about affiliate marketing, it isn’t easy and when I write in length about how to set a marketing network, you should be able to understand how much work can be involved. That doesn’t however mean that it isn’t worthwhile.

Clickbank also have a YouTube Channel

Returning my focus to Clickbank, one of the main reasons that I feel that it is so worthwhile to pursue as an option for affiliates starting out is how easy it is to use. From a logistical standpoint, all that you need to start making money through Clickbank is a link and this can be used anywhere.

I have talked a lot about a marketing network and if you want to build a sustainable business, then this is something that you will want to do. If however you are simply trying to earn a quick buck, then the structure of Clickbank and its simplicity allows you to try your hand at that. As a prime example, the best selling video game products on the Marketplace are World of Warcraft guides.

A simple and easy way of trying to sell this would be to look on relevant forums for people looking for advice and trying to sell them the product directly.

Likewise, you could choose any niche and begin discussing a product in a Facebook group that is related to the topic. Clickbank as a network are really as flexible as you are and that is one of the reasons that they have grown so exponentially.

All things considered, I am a fan of Clickbank, especially as an affiliate. It is a place that can provide anybody with a foot in the door of affiliate marketing and there is nothing trying to hold you back. The company are always prompt with the important things like payment and if you are new to Clickbank and affiliate marketing, they have a whole training section on the website that shows you what you need to do in order to trade successfully.

One of the things that I really appreciate about Clickbank is that the whole operation is set up in such a way that it allows you to grow with your own marketing brand. There are plenty of cross selling opportunities as your business and customer base increases and this of course means more money.

Whilst there are other (and in some ways, better) affiliate networks out there I hold with the fact that Clickbank is one of the easiest to get involved with. This is something that when you are starting out is a godsend. I also like that Clickbank operates in such a way that you can build a multi-million pound business from your bedroom or alternatively, you can make a little bit of going out money for next month. This flexibility is key to the appeal in my eyes, and as such I have no problem in recommending Clickbank for new affiliates and experienced alike.

Related Content and Resources:

How to Make Money Online From Affiliate Marketing – The Reality

What is an Amazon Associate, and Starting as an online Affiliate

The post How To Make Money Using ClickBank, A Detailed Affiliates Review appeared first on Money Makers Reviewed.

Many send emails asking about becoming an Amazon affiliate / or an Amazon Associate, and not too long ago I wrote extensively about affiliate marketing as a way of creating an online revenue stream and a way of making money online.

The response to this was fantastic and so I followed this up with a more in depth look at one of the topics that I covered in the initial article which was using Clickbank as a platform for affiliate marketing (which so far has also had a positive response).

I have also been asked about another affiliate programme that I recommended which is Amazon’s affiliate program, Amazon Associates. With Clickbank out of the way, it is now time to turn my attention to what is arguably one of the most lucrative and best ways that you can make money through your own affiliate marketing network.

As I have said from day one, this isn’t intended to be read as a template or a step by step tutorial. Instead, this article on Amazon Associates is designed to give you some ideas and insight into what to expect.

Truth be told, there are plenty of step by step guides out there but if you need somebody to hold your hand whilst you register with a website, affiliate marketing may not be for you.

I should also point out that for the purposes of this article, I will be looking exclusively at the Amazon Associates. Whilst I may well drift into other topics a little, what I want to explore is how much time and effort you need to put into using the Amazon affiliate programme as well as a few bits of advice.

With that in mind, let’s get started with the big question.

What is Amazon Associates?

If you haven’t heard of Amazon by now then chances are you have been living under a rock.

The company that started out with humble beginnings as an online book store is now one of the top online retailers in the world selling everything from A-Z (something that is demonstrated rather cleverly in their logo with an arrow forming a smiling face). Since then the brand has grown exponentially and year on year.

As a company, Amazon serve over 300 million users and that is only through their “.com” domain. This number grows rather substantially as you factor in localised sites.

With net sales over $136 billion recorded for 2016 and 80% of Amazon customers in the US making purchases at least once a month, the company is a genuine retail juggernaut.

What is interesting however is that research into online sales through Amazon show that just 44% of online shoppers go directly to the site. This means that there are still a massive number of people who are looking to make purchases that need a push in the right direction.

By offering the right advice, you can be that push and make a little bit of extra money for yourself.

Enter Amazon Associates. If you have read my article on affiliate marketing or Clickbank then you will almost instantly get the picture. For those who don’t, you can get paid for referring people to products on Amazon.

If they ultimately make a purchase, then you receive a percentage of the sale price of the item as a commission. It is a straight forward thing that can make a substantial income if you are skilled as an affiliate marketer.

How is Amazon’s Affiliate Programme Different to Clickbank?

To say that Amazon are a trusted brand is something of an understatement. They are prolific in their marketing, in their approach to online retailing, and that reflects in how people trust them.

Even their customer service is legendary with numerous tales of people getting free stuff etc. that has been delivered accidentally. By contrast, one of my biggest criticisms when it comes to Clickbank is that to those who aren’t in the know, the whole thing can feel a little bit “scammy”.

The problem that it has is because anybody can create content on any subject and charge up to 6 times the cost of a hard back book for a PDF, there will always be an element of mistrust. With Amazon Associates however, you don’t just have the advantage of having the Amazon brand behind you, but the brands of products that you are selling.

If you want to sell mobile phones on an affiliate basis through Amazon then you get to talk about Apple, Samsung, Sony, LG etc. All of these are brands that people know and trust.

Sure, you can also sell Cubot NOTE S:3G Chinese knock off, but that isn’t your only option. As such, you can generate an air of credibility about what you do that isn’t really there in the same capacity with Clickbank.

The other major difference is that you are dealing in physical items. This can make a huge difference in terms of how people feel about the purchases that they make.

Truth be told, there are some great products on Clickbank that offer a wealth of knowledge, however it can feel like you’ve not necessarily got what you paid for when you simply get a login to a member’s area on a website.

So How Does Amazon Associates Work?

As with any other affiliate programme, the core premise of Amazon’s entry is that you get paid when you generate a sale. The approach that is taken however is (perhaps not surprisingly) rather unique to the company.

One of the first things that should be noted is that Amazon are much pickier about who they choose to partner with. Whilst some other affiliate programs will accept almost anybody, Amazon Associates will review your site before agreeing to work with you.

There are other differences too. Amazon do not simply provide you with a text link for spamming to your customers, they provide a number of tailored solutions ranging from images to banners and even widgets that you can use on your website.

A big part of this increased awareness of the visual element of marketing comes from the fact that with Amazon Associates, you are selling physical products and people like to see what they are getting.

Much of the way that you set up your affiliate network for Amazon Associates is the same as any other programme. There are however a few methods that have proven more successful than others that may not immediately spring to mind. The main way that I have seen people use the affiliate programme is to create a website that reviews products.

This means finding the products that you wish to sell as an Amazon affiliate and writing reviews of them for people to look at. You have probably seen websites that employ this before now without even noticing. For example, I ended up on one such site this morning whilst researching drones.

There is a distinctive pattern of grouping products by price and usually having a top 10 format. This allows you to market a decent variety of products without overwhelming people (something that is often overlooked and massively important as I will get to).

As you can see, fundamentally Amazon Associates is about as straightforward as it comes. Even if you do find that you are struggling, there is more help available from the team than I really know what to do with.

So What Kind of Things Should I Be Selling?

If you want to be involved as an Amazon Associate it is 100% necessary that you understand your niche. Whatever you choose to market is ultimately up to you as so long as it is legal, Amazon will have likely something for sale.

This shouldn’t be a problem but too much choice is sometimes more difficult to cope with than having no choice. For example, if you go to Amazon’s UK store and search for “speakers”, there are over 350,000 results. Search for PC speakers and this number drops down to 132,00 results. Portable PC speakers then becomes 22,000 results.

There is also a complete list of products you can sell and promote on Amazon’s site:

Even knowing your niche well, which of those 22,000 results do you opt for? It is a very difficult maze to navigate and truth be told, even trying to find a way to express the scale and work involved with finding items to sell was difficult. Now that you do have some idea however, I can start to look at what things you can do to find the best items to sell.

Whatever niche you are involved in you have to understand that Amazon will have items of wildly differing prices and quality and it is up to you to decide what is and isn’t worth selling.

A good rule of thumb is that if an item has over 100 reviews and are mostly positive, then it is something that is worth considering.

The fact of the matter is that reviews are king when it comes to products on Amazon and people will often overlook the same item for less if a listing has no reviews whilst another has hundreds. Another good point of reference is to identify your niche on Amazon and then find their best selling products.

This allows you to instantly get an idea of what people are looking for.

Because Amazon pay out different commissions depending on what you are selling, this may also influence your decision (I cover this in greater detail below). There are also special events where commission may be increased on certain categories of item which again, may influence the types of items that you want to sell.

Amazon Associate’s Operating Agreement

At the centre of the Amazon affiliate programme is their operating agreement which is a contract that you have to agree to in order to become an Amazon Associate.

This may seem straight forward at a glance however there are some very important and key things that are raised that you may overlook, especially if you are new to making money online.

What I have discussed so far provides a broad overview of what you can expect but truth be told, once you start getting into the nitty gritty of the operating agreement there is rather a lot to consider. For example, your marketing approach must fall into one of 8 categories. These are as follows:

• A website who’s primary purpose is to display special offers, coupon codes, vouchers or other promotions.
• A blog which may be any website that is formatted as an online journal on which entries appear in chronological order.
• A website site which addresses specific content or a niche. These should be areas of interest and look at specific topics. An example of this could be a fan site for a movie.
• A comparison shopping engine which will allow users to enter product related search terms for the purpose of viewing a list of products and comparing prices.
• A website that you operate as a manufacturer or creator of content that is sold on Amazon, for example an author or publisher.
• A none profit or charitable organisation
• A portal or directory
• Any other type of marketing

Amazon Affiliate / Associate Commissions

The operating agreement also sets out the commission that you can earn. This ultimately depends on the item that you are selling. At the time of writing, it looks like this:

• Home Entertainment, Smartphones and Mobile Phones earn a 1% commission.
• Computer, Electronics, Video Games, Camera, Major Appliances, Digital Software, Gift Cards, Kindle and Fire Accessories, Kindle (all devices) earn a 3% commission.
• Home, Books, Kindle eBooks, Music, Musical Instruments, Kitchen, Toys, Home improvement, DVD & Blu-Ray, Software, Beer Wine & Spirits, Digital Video Games, Business Industrial and Scientific Products, Handmade earn a 5% commission.
• Sports & Outdoor, Personal Care Appliances, Health & Personal Care, Stationary & Office Supplies, Baby, Grocery, Pet Products, Car and Motorbike, Lawn and Garden, Beauty, Pantry earn a 7% commission
• Shoes, Jewellery, Apparel, Watches, Luggage earn a 10% commission.
• All other products earn a 3% commission.

Amazon Promotions Hub

This is where Amazon really comes into it’s own as a publisher and friend to the affiliate world, because they have a whole section on their website which is dedicated to helping their affiliates generate a profit:

This is the area that if you need to know anything, then Amazon has the answer. After all, they were one of the pioneers in the affiliate marketing world and probably have more affiliates than any other business on the planet, bar none, so please do not underestimate the tools they can provide to help grow your business.

Amazon Associates Banners:

Obviously if you are going to be promoting their products, then ideally you will need images to go onto your website/blog/Facebook, etc, and Amazon have a whole range of advertising tools for this job, and a section dedicated to banners, as you can see from the above image.

Amazon Link Builder:

The amazon link builder allows you to promote via links to any product you wish to make commissions from, and this is a downloadable piece of software that allows you to connect to your website, ideally WordPress, which I will go into shortly:

Amazon Associates and WordPress – Promoting!

And this leads me perfectly onto marketing, and how you are going to promote the products and then hopefully make commissions.

The majority of Amazon affiliates will be using WordPress to promote the products.

This will allow you to actually build web pages that are specifically designed to attract traffic from the search engines, because by doing this you will be in effect creating standalone pages dedicated to these exact products, and then you can create any persuasive content you require, and the search engines LOVE WordPress for that very reason – it has the tools, and creativity for any promotions you wish to undertake.

In fact, Amazon know that the majority of their users will be promoting using WordPress, and so have dedicated a whole detailed section to this area, including tutorials, and ‘how to’ manuals that you can read at your leisure, and be under no illusions – Amazon know exactly how to get the best out of your website, so I would advise that you read as much as you can on this section:

Read the manuals if you wish to know how to promote the products for maximum benefit (and commissions), it has been written by professionals, and nobody could deny that Amazon know how to build a business.

The content is detailed and leaves no stone unturned, and even advises on how to use SEO to gain search engine rankings, by providing quality conten that Google know will benefit it’s readers. Here is an example of the SEO section:

Of course when you are up and running, and have starting building your new mini Amazon Associates empire, you will want to keep track of all the loverly sales that start pouring in each day (obviously it will take time to get to this stage, but you get my meaning…)

So Amazon have a fantastic portial where you can see exactly how much money you are making, and you can filter down into these statistics as much as you need to using their reports section:

What Are the Pros and Cons of being an Amazon Associate

The biggest advantage to using Amazon Associates is definitely that you are partnering with one of the biggest online brands in the world. Whatever it is that you are selling, when somebody clicks your link and is sent to Amazon, you can almost guarantee that they aren’t going to click off it because they think that something is suspect.

There is also the fact that you can sell practically anything. Truth be told, I have avoided scratching the surface of niches too much when looking at Amazon Associates because there is simply too much availability.

The sky is literally the limit and this is a big advantage over something like Clickbank where certain niches perform much better than others.

In fact, these two things combine to become the main reason for signing up Amazon as an affiliate. You can sell almost anything and because it is through Amazon, people want to buy it. This isn’t the be all and end all however. There are a number of downsides to Amazon Associates as well and these are often overlooked.

The commission per sale that you earn as an Amazon affiliate is significantly less than it can be with Clickbank. Where you can typically expect between 50% commission and 75% commission selling information products, Amazon offer much less than this.

Furthermore, most of the products that you will be selling through Amazon Associates aren’t necessarily high value items. For example, 10% on Jewellery sounds great however of the top 20 best sellers, just 3 are priced at more than £10 and none are valued higher than £30.

I also feel that the products that you are selling as an Amazon Associate, whilst infinitely more varied, inherently come with more competition.

This means that getting your marketing platform ranked and gaining traffic can be a very difficult thing to do. Especially considering you are working with much broader search terms than a lot of Clickbank products.

Conclusion on Becoming an Amazon Associate

Truthfully, Amazon Associates is a funny old thing. It is almost impossible to say that it is bad. After all, you are getting access to one of the largest inventories online and one of the most respected companies.

All that you have to do is get people’s eyes on your website and you can start making money, but this is sort of where the problem lies.

Because Amazon is as broad as it is, it can be very difficult to get yourself noticed. Sure, some niches are much easier than others to get going with, but even then, there are big questions over the economical viability of marketing some of their products. Truth be told, I don’t think that Amazon Associates is really a very good affiliate marketing platform.

This is a controversial statement and I can hear some people crying out at me that I am wrong already but hear me out. In my opinion, Amazon Associates is fantastic for monetising a website.

This is very different to affiliate marketing though. Affiliate marketing is a business in its own rights. There are thousands of people who every day create websites specifically to sell a product.

There are however likely millions of websites that aren’t created to sell a product that aren’t making any money and these are where Amazon Associates can come into its own.

Blogs written by stay at home Mums, websites ran by people who keep pigeons or even something as completely random as a fan site for a Reliant Robin. These are websites that might get a few hundred visitors per week.

When you compare Amazon Associates to something like Clickbank, there is a clear difference in supply and demand of resources. What I mean by this is that for Clickbank to succeed, it needs affiliate marketers.

Without them, content creators would not utilise the platform and the whole business would fall apart. You are so much more than a middleman there and this is reflected in the commissions and how simple it is to get involved.

When it comes to Amazon, the fact of the matter is that they could do away with their affiliate programme entirely and I don’t think that it would really make a dent in their sales. This means that they don’t have to dedicate as much time, effort and resources to their affiliates.

Don’t misunderstand me, you are far from alone. There is a whole team in place and they have plenty of information and training available if you want to get involved. I also feel that I should point out that there is still a lot of money to be made for the right person.

In fact, my research has shown that there are over 100,000 people making more than £100,000 per year as an Amazon affiliate. These are big numbers.

So what are my final thoughts? Amazon Associates isn’t bad. In fact, I think that Amazon are quite generous to have the programme open at all. I simply don’t think that it is a great affiliate marketing platform in terms of making a business.

As I have said before now, if you have a website and you already have visitors, then it is perfect. In fact, I think that it is probably preferable to what I suspect the real rival to Amazon Associates is, Google Adsense.

Just as an interlude to this, I thought it would be interesting to see how Amazon’s delivery service works, should you decide to become an Associate, and you can see the process from order to delivery:

For my money, I would have it over Adsense almost any day of the week. Being able to select which products you are advertising and keeping them properly relevant to your niche will only result in more sales.

When it is put next to Clickbank however, I do feel like Amazon Associates looks a bit like an afterthought. This is somewhat ironic as it has been operational for over 21 years now.

So Amazon Associates definitely has its place. I just don’t think that it is at the top of the current available affiliate marketing platforms – commissions are fairly low compared to other affiliate platforms

More details can be found here: https://affiliate-program.amazon.co.uk/

Related Content and Resources:

How To Make Money Using ClickBank, A Detailed Affiliates Review

How to Make Money Online From Affiliate Marketing – The Reality

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A few of our readers have asked us about Racing Wins, a tipster service that promotes impressive profits on the surface of things.

When you look at products and services as much as I do, especially during the research for a review, it is very easy to become cynical and jaded. I have written before about the kind of things to look out for when considering whether or not a product is legitimate and unfortunately, it has been a while since I have seen something that isn’t littered with these red flags.

There has been a recent launch however which has been generating a lot of interest for Pete Thomson online and to my surprise, actually seems to be well put together and a genuine service.

Naturally there is plenty of marketing hype, but if you have read any of my reviews before, you will know that I discount ‘hype’ during the review stage.

Here is the Racing Wins Headline – Which does it’s job, as it makes you look:

This is inevitable and I see no reason why Racing Wins (the name of this new service) should be any different, but there is something more to it and this is ultimately what is interesting to me.

Product Title: Racing Wins Tipster Service

Price: £14.99 Per Month, or £67 per year

What You Get:

• Access to the daily tips by email
• No contract required, cancel anytime

Where to Buy: Racingwins.co.uk  (please read the review first for benefits of membership!)

Guarantee: 60 Day Money Back Guarantee.

What is Racing Wins?

With that in mind, let’s take a look at Racing Wins and what, at least in my opinion, has the potential to make it stand out from the crows.

One of the first things that stands out for me is actually the copy on the sales page. The creator of Racing Wins, Pete Thomson, takes a very decided swipe at a number of different tipsters.

This is typically something that I would consider to be a bit of a red flag, however he backs up his argument with evidence. This shouldn’t be impressive. Unfortunately, as somebody who has looked at hundreds of horse racing services I can confirm that it is definitely not common practice.

What Pete Thomson points out was actually a bit of a revelation to me. For example, until reading the sales material for Racing Wins, I didn’t realise that of all the horse racing tipsters in major UK newspapers only 17% are profitable.

It isn’t necessarily relevant, but this has clearly been researched by Pete Thomson and in the long run, bodes well for Racing Wins as a service.

This is What Pete Thomson declares:

What to Expect from Racing Wins?

So what do you actually get from Racing Wins as a service? The short answer is a lot and a little at the same time. I know that this is rather contradictory but stick with me because I will explain this over the course of this article.

The long answer is that you appear to be getting access to a well rounded tipster service that offers something for everybody.

Now in some ways, Racing Wins doesn’t immediately stand out from the crowd. It is a rather typical affair as far as tipster services go if I am honest. Selections are emailed out on the day they are available. The emails are sent in the morning usually between 9-10 am and there are 4 selections per day.

So far, I could be describing any given tipster service, but I will now explain where Pete Thomson makes Racing Wins a little different.

The astute and observant amongst you will have noticed that I haven’t made reference to Racing Wins being a daily tipster service. This is because it isn’t. Pete Thomson says that he prefers to focus his betting on the most profitable days which means betting Tuesday through Saturday.

The reasoning for this is two fold. Firstly, it allows both Pete Thomson and Racing Wins subscribers a few days off. Secondly (and most importantly in my book), Pete Thomson says that racing on the Sunday and Monday is rarely worthwhile following, so he doesn’t.

This might sound like a missed opportunity to some but I have lost count of the number of tipsters that I have looked at that fail because they refuse to trim the fat from their services.

Knowing your market well is massively important in generating anything resembling consistent profits and with Racing Wins, Pete Thomson seems to really be on top of this.

The Four Racing Wins Types of Bets

As I have already touched upon, Racing Wins does provide just four selections each day however there is actually some rhyme and reason behind this rather than simply selecting four horses per day.

One of the key aspects to Racing Wins is the four bet system that Pete Thomson implements which works thusly.

There are 4 different types of selections which are issued. These are ranked based on how likely they are to win and range from Nap to Outsider.

The Nap bet is your traditional tip, that is to say, it is the horse that Pete Thomson feels is most likely to win a race.

The odds that Racing Wins identifies are rarely great on this type of bet, however I do feel like there is still a decent amount of value to be had. This differs from some services which focus so much on winning that they can forget to make sure that it ends up being profitable.

This type of Nap bet has attained an incredible strike rate of 49.8% which if maintained, makes it far and away one of the lowest risk services that I Have looked at.

The second type of bet is Second Best. This type o bet is very much in the name. It is the second best bet that Pete Thomson recommends to Racing Wins subscribers. The odds with your Second Best bet do creep up a little and there is definitely some better value to be had here however the win rate does drop rather significantly.

In fact, over the 4 months that Racing Wins has shown proof for, the Second Best bets have averaged just 36.3% which is still respectable, however it does represent a drop of around 13% which is rather significant.

The Third Best bets are again a step towards longer odds and this does once again mean a drop in some numbers although not as much as you may think. In fact, Racing Wins maintains a strike rate of 35% over its Third Best bets, a result that Pete Thomson should be proud of given the increases that are to be had here.

Then there is the outsider bet – which should be self explanitory – a horse with only an outside chace of winning, but still has a chance, because it is in the race after all.

At this point I should talk about the types of bets that you are placing. Pete Thomson recommends that those who are following Racing Wins back all of the above bets as straight win bets with 1 point stakes (he talks in pounds and pence however for the sake of this review I will be converting into points).

All of the above bet types are straight forward win bets which makes Racing Wins pretty simple to follow.

Keeping with the mood of simplicity, Pete Thomson also recommends that the majority of bets are placed with Bet365. The reasons for this are twofold.

Firstly, they supposedly offer the best odds on most of the selections that are issued via Racing Wins. Secondly, should those odds drift out Bet365 offer best odds guaranteed. If there are any bets that are advised through other bookmakers, Pete Thomson will typically notify subscribers in the email.

Having covered that, the final tips that Pete Thomson sends out are his Outsider bets. These are horses that have a long shot of winning and as you would expect, this does mean that the strike rate takes a massive hit.

In fact, for this type of bet, just 13.8% win. That having been said, when you are dealing with odds of 20/1 plus, you do not need to win often in order to be profitable. Racing Wins demonstrates this nicely as I will look at when it comes to the results.

How Much Will Racing Wins Cost Me?

One of the things that I like most of all about Racing Wins are the options when it comes to receiving selections. First things first, there is a free trial available. This doesn’t require any down payment however you do only receive Pete Thomson’s selections for the Saturday.

I admit that this isn’t necessarily enough to provide a robust test of the service, but I don’t think that it is a bad offering either.

From here you have the option to pay for Racing Wins on a monthly basis. This costs just £14.95 per month and can be cancelled at any time. Because Racing Wins is sold through Clickbank, this does mean that there is also a full 60 day money back guarantee in place (something that Pete Thomson freely advertises on the sales page for his service).

The other alternative with Racing Wins is to sign up for a full year. As with the monthly option this comes with a full money back guarantee. In the long run, it does work out substantially cheaper however.

At the time of writing you can actually sign up for the 12 month subscription for just £67. This is being advertised as a limited time offer to tie in with Ascot though.

On top of this you will of course need a betting bank to run Racing Wins.

Pete Thomson recommends starting with small stakes. Quite what this means in terms of pounds and pence will ultimately vary from person to person however I feel that £500 as a 100 point bank (£5 per bet) is a reasonable place to start.

You can still build your bank with this amount without having to risk too much.

What is the Income Potential for Racing Wins?

The question that really matters is how much you can make with Racing Wins and this is arguably one of the most exciting parts. First and foremost, I don’t buy into the figures quoted by Pete Thomson on the sales page.

Whilst you could well have made £16,490 in 4 months with Racing Wins, this would be betting to £100 stakes. To create some context, this means betting £2,000 per month which is a hell of a lot money.

In real terms, this means a profit of just shy of 165 points in 4 months which is still a very respectable figure.

Obviously that is a static image from their sales page, and the results will change daily, and monthly so here is a snapshot from their up to date results:

One of the things that I like about Racing Wins is the fact that you can choose which of the four bets to put on and this is something that can be quite important when calculating profits.

For example, whilst the NAP bets win almost 50% of the time, the ROI is just 27.2%. At the other end of the spectrum, Racing Wins’s Outsider bets have a strike rate of less than a third of the NAP bets but almost twice the ROI.

This is really positive for subscribers as it allows you to make a genuinely well informed decision about how to bet. It also means that Racing Wins can be used by almost anybody.

Those who want frequent wins can follow the NAP bets whilst those who like big pay days can opt for Outsider bets or something in the middle. It isn’t very often that I say this but there is something in Racing Wins for almost anybody.

So is Racing Wins Any Good?

Naturally this is subjective, however there are a few issues that I have with Racing Wins which I wish to address here. The first is the lack of information on the selection process. Whilst the betting set up and the fact that full proofing is provided allows us to get an idea of what we are getting into, it doesn’t paint  a complete picture.

Whilst I have never expected any tipster to unveil their systems in full (if that is even possible), I do think that it is only reasonable to provide some insight. Are selections based on recent form or matching horses to races that suit them? Does the tipster look at Jockey and Trainer combinations or speed ratings?

These are simple details which give away nothing, but allow you to know what to expect.  The fact that Racing Wins doesn’t provide this is a bit of a disappointment for me.

The other thing that I wish to point out is that whilst Racing Wins has been fully proofed, this has only been carried out for 4 months. Now some cynics will say that 12 months of proofing is the only thing that will convince them but I am not that militant.

I do however believe that 6 months of proofing is a reasonable figure.

This means that a service can demonstrate that it can maintain a profit over the busier and more difficult summer months. Unfortunately, Racing Wins doesn’t do this.

As I have mentioned, there is still a lot of potential on offer here. The fact that Pete Thomson is willing to give his selections away on the free trial basis is definitely a boon.

There is also the 60 day money back guarantee which means that even if Racing Wins doesn’t perform over the next few months, it hasn’t (at least in theory) cost you anything.

Conclusion on Racing Wins

There is no such things as a perfect tipster and unfortunately, I don’t think that Racing Wins really comes close to this either. There are a number of problems that I have with the service however some of these are simply based around the way Racing Wins is marketed rather than the service itself.

None the less, I think that they need to be considered. If I hold my hands up, my biggest genuine concern is the amount of time that Racing Wins has been proofed for. I simply don’t see 4 months as being long enough.

As a service, I like the structure of Racing Wins and the four bets system. It really does open things up and provide something or everybody. The cost is also a bonus with £15 per month being one of the cheapest tipster services I have looked at in the last few years.

Finally, there is the profitability. It is clear to me that Racing Wins can make money and from what I have seen, Pete Thomson should be able to replicate this.  This does however loop back to my concerns about the period during which the service has been proofed.

Honestly, I think that Racing Wins is worth a go.

There is risk inherent with any tipster service and to dismiss something because of this seems like a pointless endeavour.

I talk a lot about Pete Thomson proving himself over the busier summer months but if he is able to continue in the same vein as he has started the year, there could very well be a decent haul to be made.

If you are prudent, bet on paper for a month or so (there is always the money back guarantee in place) or try out the free trial if that seems too much.

Click Here To Try The Racing Wins Service

I will start this review with 4 stars, and then I can change this based on future performance, but this is certainly an interesting service based on advertised results, and if they are similar going forward, some very good profits could be made here!

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