Category Archives: Money

How Much Do Golfers Earn?

Entertainment, Finance & Insurance, Fun Stuff, Money, Recreation, Sports, ,

It is no secret that top sports people, including golfers, can earn a lot of money. Not only do they earn money from taking part in (and hopefully winning) tournaments, but they also earn a lot of money from sponsorship deals, in fact these days they often earn more money from that than their actual sports earnings!

tiger-woodsBut regardless of sponsorship deals it can be interesting to look at money that golfers can earn from tournaments. In order to check on the top level of earnings that a golfer might be able to achieve, we have looked back on the earnings of Tiger Woods from when he turned professional.

Obviously looking at someone who was so successful will give a good idea of the maximum earnings a golfer can strive for not including sponsorships. But also in Woods’ case, you can see the effect of the bad years that he has had due to his personal situation and injuries.

Most tournaments that you take part in as a golfer offer prize money to all levels of participants – the bigger the tournament the higher the prize money of course.

Dropping just one extra shot in a tournament can lose you a large chuck of money so it is no wonder golfers need to be concentrating at all times and don’t like to have any distractions when playing.

So here are the annual tournament earnings of Tiger Woods from when he turned professional in 1996:

2015 – $448,598
2014 – $108,275
2013 – $8,553,439
2012 – $ 6,133,159
2011 – $ 660,238.00
2010 – $ 2,090,477.00
2009 – $ 9,434,813.00
2008 – $ 5,875,000.00
2007 – $ 12,217,052.00
2006 – $ 11,291,563.00
2005 – $ 10,870,522.00
2004 – $ 6,925,471.00
2003 – $ 7,373,413.00
2002 – $ 8,789,225.00
2001 – $ 6,846,108.00
2000 – $ 10,318,321.00
1999 – $ 6,816,584.00
1998 – $ 2,241,116.00
1997 – $ 2,376,831.00
1996 – $ 906,170.00

Looking at the annual earnings for other golfers it seems that the top golfer of the year earns around $8-12m depending on how many events they play and how dominant they are in those events.

For example in 2015 Jordan Speith was dominant with earnings of over $12 million, up with Tiger’s top earnings.

However, in 2014 Rory McIlroy was the top earning golfer but he actually ‘only’ earned over $8 million.

 

What Are the Chances of Winning the Lottery?

Entertainment, Finance & Insurance, Fun Stuff, Games, General, Lifestyles, Money, Recreation, Society

What are the chances of winning the lottery with 59 balls?

In October 2015 the national lottery in the UK increased the number of balls in the draw from 49 to 59, thus making it much harder to actually win the jackpot.

Previously, choosing 6 numbers from 49 would give you a 1 in 14 million chance of winning the lottery but now with the extra 10 numbers to pick your 6 numbers from, the chances have massively decreased to 1 in 45 million.

This increase in the number of balls and decrease in the chance of winning have been proven with the fact that the jackpot has continued to be an elusive prize that has not been won since the changes were made, contributing to a massive jackpot of £50 million + which could go on for a couple of weeks.

Tonight’s draw (6th January 2016) will be the 14th rollover jackpot – continuous rollovers since the new rules were introduced. This could trigger more people to buy tickets just because of the size of the jackpot which could then mean that more of the number combinations are covered.

The national lottery website says the following about the limit on the size of any rollover jackpot:

The jackpot can only stand at £50 million for two draws. If no one wins in the second draw, the full amount rolls down and is shared between the players in the next winning prize tier.

So it might be worth waiting to see if anyone wins the jackpot this time and if they don’t then there might be a great chance of winning more money with lower odds in the draw where the jackpot will be filtered down if no-one wins. This would be next Saturday 9th January 2016.

If no-one wins the jackpot on Saturday then the chances of winning with 5 numbers and the bonus ball are around 1 in 7.5 million which is almost twice the odds as winning the jackpot before the numbers were expanded to 59!

So if you want to know what are the chances of winning the lottery with 59 balls then I would say much better if you wait until the jackpot has to filter down!

Earning Money From Surveys – Is It a Scam?

Money,

So, a little while back, I decided that I would look into this business of earning money from surveys that is touted by various websites as being a way of earning some money from home. I had always been a bit wary of the ‘Making money from Surveys’ thing but decided that I would just investigate it myself and see what it was all about.

When you google ‘making money from surveys’ you get a heck of a lot of results and there are a few key players. But also there are companies that get you signed up to quite a few different survey providers. It can all get rather confusing and even now I can’t remember which website I went to originally because they all seem to be linked in to one another!

Anyway,  I signed up for a number of them which include Panelweb, Valued Opinions, Inbox Pounds, Global Test market and Opinion Outpost. There may even be more but those are the ones that appeared in my inbox most often. A lot of these companies invite you to other panels as well but I figure this is quite enough for now and I probably can’t even keep up with this lot!

How Does It Work?

So, pretty much every day, if not more than once a day I was getting an email from all of these companies inviting me to take part in a survey. In return for completing the survey I could get points or even in some cases actual money. Some of the sums are quite large (up to £8 so far) but these kinds of sums are not available by just filling in some questions but by actually taking out a trial subscription for something. Most of the emails that come through with this kind of offer I just delete.

The surveys that offer points for completion do enable you, once you have built up enough points, to exchange then for things like Amazon vouchers which would also be just as useful as money as I often spend money on Amazon anyway. But I was more inclined to try and complete the surveys that offered real money more often.

Every morning when I got up there were a bunch of surveys waiting in my inbox as they come in all times of the day and night. If you are going to do this then you really need to keep a good handle on your inbox so that your email does not get bogged down with surveys. Even with what seems to be a small number of companies that I signed up for I was already feeling that my email could get overwhelmed.

The best method of dealing with them seems to be to set aside some times in the day when you will go through the surveys that you have received and try and complete as many as possible.

Can You Really Earn Money From Surveys?

My Inbox was inundated with survey emails
My Inbox was inundated with survey emails

Ok, so here is the rub, each survey you complete you have to go through some questions to see if you are actually eligible to complete the survey. In some cases I have found that these questions in themselves can take a good amount of time to complete and all you get in the end is ‘I’m sorry but you do not qualify’ so you have wasted your time. In fact, for the surveys that I have completed so far I would go as far as saying that I have been ineligible for around 80% of them!

For example I got a survey one morning asking if I had had a fungal nail infection in the last year! But first it asks personal details and information about which TV region you are in etc.

So I tried to complete at least a few surveys a day (a lot of them take about 20 minutes to complete) but after 10 days of doing this I had earned less than £2 due to being ineligible for most of them. Not exactly a great rate of return.

Perhaps I was not the right demographic for doing this and other people might have more success and be able to earn more money!

Is It a Scam?

surveys2Well this is the key question and I have to say that I think in a way it is. The reason I say this is the you can tell by the way some of the questions are phrased that the survey is not there to get your opinions about things but it is there to see if you are likely to be interested in a certain product. No doubt the product of the person who is conducting the survey. I will give you a couple of examples of this:

1. I took part in a survey which asked which charities you were most likely to give money to (this was just one of the many questions) – I think there were a list of only a few specific charities. I ticked the box for Great Ormond Street Children’s hospital. A few days later I got a phone call from their office asking if I wanted to give just 75p a week to the charity. So really this wasn’t a survey about opinions as it was made out to be, at least one factor of it was to try and get people to give money to charity.

2. I remember completing a survey where one of the questions was about pre-paid funeral plans. I must have ticked that this would be a good idea as I had a relative who died recently who had one and it made life so much easier for us. However, it’s not something I would do now but maybe in about 10 years time. Anyway, just this morning I got a call from a company asking if I would be interested in taking out a plan.

So, to me, the majority of the surveys are more than likely just companies trying to find people to flog stuff to. I’m a bit annoyed as I don’t generally give out my home phone number so I don’t want now to have a whole rush of cold calls coming in. Perhaps I just won’t answer the phone unless it is a number I recognise!

The other point that I think makes it a scam is the fact that you can fill in a whole lot of surveys without being eligible for any of the rewards, thus completely wasting your time.

If you are eligible for a survey then you can earn really small amounts – but then this is your decision. If you have spare time and it is the only way you might earn some money then you may just do it anyway.

Does Niche Affect CPC?

Business, Internet, Money, ,

The question does niche affect CPC was one that I asked myself after some comments I got from potential buyers on a site I was selling on Flippa.

To summarise, CPC is cost per click from advertising like Google adwords which is the amount you get each time an end user clicks one of your ads.

A couple of potential buyers of my site had said to me that they had analysed the CPC for the niche that my site related to, and that the CPC was very low – about $0.02.

So I got a bit despondent and thought that may be why, although the site had tons of traffic, maybe that was why I was not earning as much ad revenue as I thought I should. So I went to the site and had a look around and came to a different conclusion. All of the ads that I saw referred to stuff that I personally was interested in or had searched for recently. None of the ads related to the topic of the website.

I also went back over the time I had had the site (nearly 4 years) and checked out the CPC. It was way higher than the $0.02 that the buyers had told me was the going rate for that niche.

One question I don’t know the answer for is – do the advertisers bid a particular rate for their ad showing in a particular niche? – and if that is the case then the niche might well be relevant to the CPC. But if the answer is No then surely the niche does not have much effect on the CPC at all.

The key to the CPC rate therefore must surely be the type of ads that are shown to the viewers of the website and what kind of things they are interested in. So to that extent the niche may have a bit of influence on the CPC because let’s say your website is about high end finance, then your end users may well be interested in stuff that would generate a high CPC. But if your website could appeal to anyone (which mine would, albeit mostly women) then the ads could surely be from any niche?

I went in search of info about how to increase CPC and to be honest I got a lot of rubbish. Some of the advice firstly was to select a high end niche to base your blog/website on – well that’s not much good for those who already have a website to start with. But I wasn’t impressed with much of the rest of the stuff I read. More useful were some posts saying not to worry too much about CPC, but to instead concentrate on ad look and placement to increase CTR. This seemed like good advice to me, especially after I went back and checked the CTR and I found it to be pretty low. I made some changes to the site style and ad location, as well as the colour scheme of the ads and hey presto, an increase in CTR almost immediately!

So, does niche affect CPC? I would say only to a limited extent, depending on who you are targeting with your niche, but it is not eh be all and end all of increasing ad revenue on your website.

Hostgator Discount Coupon

Internet, Money, Technology, ,

So if you are looking for some web hosting and you want a reliable and great value host then I can vouch for the great hosting from Hostgator. In fact if you came here searching for a Hostgator discount coupon then you probably already know that Hostgator has really great hosting plans where you can create as many sites as you want all for one price. Personally I host all of my websites with Hostgator and of course you get economy of scale if you host them all in one place, so even when I create new websites I don’t have to pay any extra money for them.

Hostgator have lots of options on their hosting plans too. I create all of my sites in WordPress so you can get an unlimited number of WordPress websites with your hosting package but there are plenty of other options that you can choose form to create your websites.

So I have a couple of Hostgator discount coupons. All you need to do is to use the following codes as the checkout and you can get one of the following discounts on Hostgator web hosting:

AZURE25OFF This will give you 25% off whatever hosting you chose and however much you pay for up front.

AZURE994OFF This will give you $9.94 discount from your web hosting.