Saving is the best way to start.  Determine an acceptable percentage of each paycheck that you want to set aside in a savings account.  If you have direct deposit at your job, practically every bank offers you the ability to denote a percentage of each check automatically to your savings.  That way you’re saving money without really even consciously trying.  Remember, start small.  You don’t have to go crazy to save a lot of money.  This is a long term strategy, so a little now will add up over the long run.

When you’ve started building up a decent amount of money in your savings account, think about making that money work for you.  If you’re money is sitting in savings, it isn’t really doing anything.  Consider putting some of that into long term stock or bond investments.  Something practically guaranteed to make your money grow.  There’s always some risk involved, so don’t over invest, but definitely take a few steps to build on what you have.

Finally, try not to frivolously spend your money.  That doesn’t mean being frugal your whole life so you can finally spend in your 50s.  But rather, don’t make purchases you can’t afford, and don’t use credit to live beyond your means.  Both catch up with you faster than you’d think, and will hurt your retirement in the long run.  Be intelligent with your money.  If you have to wait a few weeks for something you want to fit in the budget, be patient.  You’ll be better off in the long run.

The honest answer is, not as effective as you would hope considering the price you’re paying for the privilege of running these programs.  All of the aforementioned programs really only have a 30-50% detection rate when it comes to malware, viruses, and Trojans.  That means despite having dedicated security updates, the program’s scanning ability, a chief draw when we’re talking antivirus software, is pretty much lackluster at best.  Severely disappointing when you consider the amount of money you’ve probably shelled out on these programs over the years.

But probably the biggest factor that bothers me, and that should bother everyone, is the massive amount of freeware virus removal tools that seem to perform more effectively than any pay service.  Take Ad-Aware, and Spyware Doctor for example.  Both of these programs are completely free, and yet they tend to find more malware, viruses, worms, and Trojans than any of the pay services, and that completely bugs me.

What is it that the free programs do, that the pay services can’t achieve with their virus scanning?

Sure Norton is going to be better for you than a free antivirus program in the sense that it offers a fairly ironclad firewall, email scanning, and auto-protect against known viruses and malware as you surf the internet, all features that the free stuff doesn’t have.  But how useful are the preventative measures if Norton can’t detect the bad stuff that seeps through it’s protection?

I guess it’s pretty annoying, but you sort of have to take the free with the pay services, because the costly antivirus programs are fantastic at preventing virus intrusions, but you need programs like Ad-Aware and Spyware Doctor to detect all the stuff AVG, Norton or McAfee are going to miss.

Some of the things you need to watch for are e-books that claim to have the answers to all your internet riches, hopes and dreams, as most of them are just scams to get you to pay for something you don’t really need.  There isn’t any secret to using Adsense that isn’t either already available on the internet for free, or provided by Google themselves to inform you more about how to use the program.  Be wary of anyone that wants payment for helping you learn to make money on the internet, nine times out of ten the only way that person has learned to make money is by duping people into buying a useless book.

Don’t be lured by people that want you to pay for keyword lists that are reportedly able to increase your revenue and traffic greatly.  First off because Google offers their keyword information, and secondly because there’s no such thing as a magic keyword list that will net more traffic to your site.  Sure formatting your page to involve common keywords more effectively is going to drive your traffic, but there’s no such thing as a ‘magic’ list of keywords that are ‘guaranteed’ to make you successful.

And especially don’t be lured by anyone claiming to have the one secret to Adsense wealth, because if there was one little secret that could make you an Adsense millionaire, I sincerely doubt you’d scream it from the hilltops letting everyone know.

I am sure you’ve heard of de.li.cio.us. It redirects to delicious.com, but as a .us domain and social bookmarking site, I can’t help thinking that their creativity was first sparked from the lack of interesting domain names available. If you can take something short and to the point from your search on word navigator, your next step would be to check it’s availability. The following guidelines can speed up the process:

• Since there are 3,563 words that end in -us at the time of this posting, the easiest thing to do would be to copy and paste each list (by length) into a text document, which took me about 7 minutes. You probably won’t take as long, if you copy and paste only half of all the words.
• In the document, click Edit and Select All. Proceed to toggle the bullets off. Then use Ctrl+F and type us into the search box. Click on Find All. You will notice that the -us ending has been selected for all of the words. Now click on Replace All. Your document should no longer have any of the -us endings.
• If your document is 75 pages long, perhaps it would be best to weed out words before continuing. Or you can copy and paste the words in only chunks (maybe 30 words) at a time into this domain name regristration search (clicking on the us extension, while unselecting the com extension), so that your internet browser doesn’t freeze up during the process.

Of the first thirty words I submitted, 14 were available. Here is my example chunk with unavailable .us domain names crossed out:

fagaceo.us                          furacio.us
felonio.us                          furfuro.us
feracio.us                          garrulo.us
ferocio.us                          gingero.us
fervoro.us                          glaireo.us
filaceo.us                          glamoro.us
flavoro.us                          globulo.us
fractio.us                          gluteno.us
frivolo.us                          glutino.us
froufro.us                          granulo.us
fugacio.us                          gummato.us
fulgoro.us                          gumptio.us
fulguro.us                          hazardo.us
fulmino.us                          hilario.us

Honestly, if I were a business looking for an attractive and modern domain name, gumptio.us would be my first pick! If you don’t know, gumptious is an adjective that means enterprising (synonym to energetic, industrious, up-and-coming). Or how about furacio.us? Hurry up, domain names like these will soon fill up the Web 2.0 (or is it 3.0) scene! If you really don’t care what the domain name is and just want to set something up quickly, your best bet would be to submit one or two words into a domain name suggestion tool.