How to Find Salvage and Recycling Material

Recently a member emailed me asking for any tips for finding salvage and recycling material. He said that in his area all of the accounts were taken. My reply was that early on I had a couple of accounts with metal fabricators, but I found that having accounts just didn't work out. I found myself driving by opportunities and having to pass them up because I had a load and/or a schedule to keep. I realized that I was passing up things that would I could get for free or pennies on the dollar for material from accounts that, at best, I was doubling my money. So it wasn't long before I gave up the accounts.

I understand the desire to get accounts and have a regular dependable income, but, I wasn't ready to settle for a limited income in that way. If I was a different sort of person I could have hired people to do the accounts and build the business that way. But I'm not the managerial type and I knew that wouldn't work out. Once I took account of who I was and the way I operated I did much better.

I see opportunities almost every day in my travels around my home area. I live in a very rural area - a town of less than 500 people. Other towns are spaced out about 20-30 miles apart and none are more than a few thousand, but I see and find things all the time. Here's an example from the other day. A house was being torn down. If I had seen it a few days earlier, I most likely could have torn it down myself and made good money off of the used lumber and material. When I did get there all that was left was large timbers. Most were 4x12 and a couple of 6x14. I knew I could sell them easily for good money. But I also knew that they would save me a lot of money as the main timbers for a new shop I was building.

I went into town and checked at the barber shop and sure enough, the barber knew who owned it and put me in touch. I checked with the owner and he was more than happy to give me the timber if I would also haul off a boat (with 2 motors and trailer) and an old tractor. I jumped at it.

As I was hauling the old tractor down to a heavy equipment dealer. I saw a vacant old metal warehouse. It was about 30 feet by 60 feet long. I put my business card under the door with a note asking about the building. I continued on to the heavy equipment dealer and was happy to accept his offer of $800 for the tractor. On my way back to get the boat I got a call from the owner of the building and he said he wanted to remove the building.

The next day I hired a couple of guys for a week to take the building down. So in an afternoon I had found timbers for my new shop, a boat that with a little work I could use on our local lakes, a tractor that I sold that would cover all my expense of transportation and taking down the building, and a metal shop building to put atop my timbers. A very good day! I could have sold the timbers and building for a couple of thousand at least, but in this instance, I could use them myself.

So... keep your eyes open and get known in the towns in your area. Barbers and small shopkeepers often know what it going on. Leave cards and flyers anywhere and everywhere and you'll be amazed at your success down the road.

Good hunting,

Mike

Recycling Secrets

How to Estimate Gold Plating Thickness and Content

Here's an excerpt from a very good article:

The board is made over-sized, in order to provide electrical connections to the areas of the board that require plating. When the plating has been done, the "picture frame" is trimmed off with a die.

We used to hire cheap labour to cut off the gold plated areas of the picture frames with tin snips - the good offset type - you can buy them left or right handed. This will reduce the volume and weight considerably and will make the pile much less bulky. I, myself, have filled many barrels with just the gold portions, using this method - it's not so bad - wear leather work gloves. We then stripped the gold in a cement mixer with cyanide/peroxide.

Even if you don't process this yourself, by trimming it, you are putting it into a state that can be sampled and assayed, before having it refined. This is much harder to do with the picture frames, since many of them are different. You might also have a separate barrel for pale looking gold pieces.

If it is true immersion gold, it's worth about $.04 to $.05/square inch, max. Immersion...

Download and Read the Entire Article

Mike
Home Based Salvage and Recycling Business Manual

Revisions to Gold Plate Removal Report

A very helpful member asked a good question. I found that I skipped through the process a bit too fast. So, if you downloaded the report before about 1:30 AM PST, download it again and you'll get the revised version. Thanks.

Download Free Report: Recovering Gold from Plated Copper or Brass Substrate

You can now download the free report: Recovering Gold from Plated Copper or Brass Substrate HERE

If you are a member, go to the member website

If you would like to become a member go HERE

Thanks and Best,

Mike

Learn How to Recover Gold from Electronic, Computer and Other Plated Objects

Hi - Just a note about an upcoming update to the members area. In a day or two you will be able to download information about how I reverse the plating process and remove gold from plated objects. It makes use of only one readily available chemical (NO cyanide or aqua regia) that can be used over and over again. I still highly recommend that you have a refiner do this for you, but I've had a lot of requests for this.

If you are not a member, you can become one by purchasing the Home Based Salvage and Recycling Business Manual.

Best regards,

Mike

Home Based Salvage & Recycling Business Manual Feedback

Hi - I've received excellent feedback from folks who have purchased the eBook. I just want to remind all the purchasers that the eBook is just the beginning. Your purchase entitles you to a free one year membership to the members-only website. Over time I'll be publishing updates, news and resources there. Also, i'm always available to answer questions by email. If you haven't already done so, be sure to sign up for updates.

If you haven't purchased the eBook yet, Check it out.

Thanks to all

Mike

Update: AVG Antivirus 2011 No Longer Blocking Adsense

Hi - I checked my webpages with the AVG 2011 link scanner turned on today and all seemed well - adsense ads were showing. Later I received and email from AVG saying that they had performed a remote workaround and would fix it permanently in the next update. My hat is off to the folks at AVG engineering. They jumped on this quickly and provided a fix within hours.

How to Sidestep Bogus Internet Marketing Schemes and Create Real Value With Your Home Based Business

By

Mike Meuser
RecyclingSecrets.com

Given the present economy more and more people are turning to home-based businesses hoping to earn a fulltime income. The internet is full of marketing scams, schemes and ripoffs and folks often jump from one dissapointing opportunity to the next hoping it will be the one. In my home-based businesses I've found that rather than focus on opportunities where the primary focus is on making money, it works best to develop a strategy based on my skills, education, interests and, most important, my passion.

The internet is just full of online business scams, schemes and rip-offs. Just signup on one of the many home based business forums and you'll see what I mean when you get friends, emails, and replies to your posts. Many are there to take advantage of your desperation. The majority seem to be a bunch of amateurs who pose as professionals and try to sell you products and services guaranteeing that you will get rich like them yet they have never sold anything online except more online marketing schemes. Where does it end? Similar to the dotcom bomb and housing bomb, no real value is created. Very few will profit at the expense of the great majority. If you are lucky enough to actually make a living with one of these schemes, is this the way you want to do it? - At the expense of others? That's not the way I do business and I doubt if it is the way you really want to do it either.

How many people who have NO claim to internet fame except to sell internet marketing schemes to others will there be before the bubble bursts? I could see the dotcom bomb coming. I read reports saying that most of the top companies were only shuffling money amongst themselves - no real money was coming in. It was doomed to fail yet I would hear people say, "all I have to do is work at suchandsuch.com for a few years, take my stock options, cash in and retire." NOT! Some I know even cashed in their kids' college savings to buy dotcom stock! If it were only so easy! It wasn't, of course, and most lost a great deal while a few prospered.

Then along comes the real estate boom. Just like dotcom, everyone wanted a piece of the action before it was too late. As the percentage of people who could actually afford to buy a home dropped from 50%+ to less than 10% in some places, few connected the dots. I saw it coming but very few realized that when only a few can buy the inflated value homes, the bubble just has to burst - there's no one left to buy them. And, of course, as we all know, the bubble did burst. While a few got rich, the great majority suffered and will continue to suffer for a long time.

But, don't get me wrong, not all internet marketers are bad. If you step away from the bunch who sell internet marketing strategies to newbies who then in turn sell more internet marketing strategies to newbies and on and on, you find that there are some folks out there who sell amazing products and services. Before I elaborate on this let's talk about creating real value instead of furthering the get rich online marketing schemes that very few will actually benefit from. Here are two examples.

My website MapCruzin.com is devoted to helping people learn GIS mapping. I provide free software, map shapefiles, maps and resources. I also sell a few GIS map shapefiles that I have created. MapCruzin.com was online from 1996 through 2008 before I even thought about making money with the website. My passion drove me to create unique helpful content. In 2008 I began implementing adsense. Since then MapCruzin's revenue has risen from a few hundred dollars per month to several thousand. The ads are extremely well targeted to my audience. I have both a high click through rate on the ads and a high number of pageviews per visitor. This tells me that both my content and the ads are of real value.

I'm now writing an ebook about MapCruzin.com and how I earn a living from it NOT by selling "how to make big money selling online" products, but by providing unique content and real value to people making a living in the real world. It's easy to get drawn into the online-marketing-bubble, but if you do, in time your bubble will burst.

My other website, RecyclingSecrets.com is devoted to helping people bootstrap (as in little or no startup cash) their way into the home based salvage and recycling business. I began in this business in the early 1980s doing deconstruction, metal recycling, electronic and telecommunication salvage and reuse. I've done quite well at this business and I now sell an ebook that chronicles my experience, the Home Based Salvage and Recycling Business Manual. The manual is full of real stories about how I bootstrapped my way into the business, provided real value to my community, while earning a very good living. This business is not for everyone - it is not passive income or some scheme that "guarantees" that all you have to do is work a couple of hours a day and sit back and watch the money come in - it takes hard work at times - but it can provide a good and growing income. You can check it out at RecyclingSecrets.com,

It was only after years in the real business of home-based salvage and recycling that I became qualified to write and sell an online product that adds real value to the lives of the purchasers. Similarly, when I do write the ebook about my success monetizing MapCruzin.com, I am qualified to do it because I've spent years writing content, placing ads, blogging, tweeting and doing related things to increase the traffic to and revenue from the website while increasing its value to visitors. Both ebooks provide the purchaser with real value because they are both based on the real world experience of making a living with home-based businesses.

Earlier I mentioned that there are some really good and helpful folks online who can help you to create really excellent information products and market them earning a good living. One I have found that is particularly good is Dr.Mani Sivasubramanian. His excellent ebook, Think, Write and Retire is full of helpful information about developing your niche, writing and marketing your online informational product. More great folk who have inspired and helped me are listed here.

You too have experiences, knowledge, interests and passions that provide you with unique insights. We all tend to think, "well everybody knows that" when we think about what we know, but the truth is that most of the time, most other folks DON'T know what we know or how to do what we can do easily. Your unique insight is valuable and can be of great interest and help to others.

Avoid jumping from opportunity to opportunity. You will be better off if you stay away from things that only attract you because of the claims about money and focus on the real tools and information out there that will help you to capitalize on your unique skills, experience, education, passions and interests to develop a winning strategy.

The bottom line is to not spin your wheels and waste precious days, weeks, months and years of your life doing things that someone tells you will "make you rich." Spend your valuable time creating real value for others, creating real things that people in this world really need. If you do this, you will succeed in business.




You are free to share this article in any manner that you like with the following exceptions. You can email it, use it in presentations, print it, place it on blogs and websites, and otherwise use it only IF (1) you do not alter it in any manner and (2) you give credit to the author by linking back to MapCruzin.com and RecyclingSecrets.com. Thank you.

How I Write eBooks and Earn a Fulltime Income with Adsense

Frequently I get emails from folks asking me how I get my ideas and write my ebooks. Others write to ask how I make money with adsense. I'm writing an ebook right now that covers both topics and more. In this new ebook I talk about how I developed my first ebook, Home Based Salvage and Recycling Business Manual and the website, Recycling Secrets, and blog, Recycling Secrets Blog that goes along with it.

I also talk about my other website, MapCruzin.com. MapCruzin.com pays me a fulltime income that is totally provided by adsense income. I tell how I let my passion build the content and the traffic and about the various strategies I used to grow it from making a few hundred dollars per month a few years ago to several thousand dollars per month now. If you signup for updates I'll let you know when this new ebook is completed. Or just keep checking back. It shouldn't be long now.

In the meantime I thought I should share a few of the resources that I have used to grow my online home based business.
I hope they are as helpful to you as they have been to me.

Adsense is Back - I've bought quite a few adsense books and they've helped me grow my adsense income from a few hundred a month to several thousand per month in a few short years. Tony's book goes at the top of the stack. He is no "guru" - no guarantees, no hype - just good plain uncommonsense strategies that work to increase adsense revenues...More

How to Write your eBook in 7 Days - This is the information you need to make that breakthrough and finally finish your ebook. I had been thinking about mine and intending to write my first one for 20 years! (of course it wasn't originally going to be an ebook). This ebook was one of the few that really helped me get started and FINISH. Give it a try...More

Think, Write & RETIRE! - It took me quite awhile to get past writer's block and really dig into creating my ebooks. Mani offers a very straightforward approach to organizing, writing and marketing your ebooks. He is really good at helping you to develop your own unique ebooks based on your interests and passion...More

Blog Mastermind - Dont' let the title make you skip this one. Yaro is the real deal. He has learned the hard way how to create and grow blogs. He'll walk you through the same system that he has developed for himself - a system that earns him a substantial fulltime income...More

P.S. Yes, I do earn a commission from the sales of these. Thank you for looking and helping to support my work.

AVG Antivirus May Be Blocking Adsense Ads

Hi - Since many of you come to Recycling Secrets looking for information about home based businesses. Some of you may be using adsense on your websites so I thought I'd pass this along.

The other day I upgraded my AVG Antivirus program to the latest 2011 version. Today I was looking at my other website, MapCruzin.com and to my dismay my adsense ads were not appearing. This was very serious as my income from ads on the website allows me to continue to add valuable content to the website.

Fortunately I had only upgraded 2 of my computers. The third still had the older version of AVG Antivirus so I checked it. To my surprise my ads and ads on other websites were appearing just fine.

I went back to my original computer and checked other websites that I knew had adsense ads and they weren't appearing there either.

So, I looked through AVG 2011 to see if I can find the trouble. After a lot of time testing I finally discovered that turning off the AVG link scan solved the problem.

My big worry is that this is a new release of AVG and as people upgrade most will have the link scan enabled meaning that lots of webmasters like me will lose needed revenue until this is fixed.

So... check your websites and if you have the same problem I encourage you to contact Google Adsense and AVG Antivirus and encourage them to fix this quickly.

Thanks

Mike
RecyclingSecrets.com
Home Based Salvage and Recycling Business Manual

MapCruzin.com
Free GIS Software, Maps, Shapefiles, Tutorials and Resources for Geographers and Cartographers

Home Based Salvage and Recycling Business Manual is available

Thanks for your patience. The Home Based Salvage and Recycling Business Manual is now available for immediate download.

Check it out here