http://www.prosper.com/public/lend/listing...listingID=43342

This is my third try on this loan... hopefully the third time is the charm?

Any tips?

thanks

Eric

Get vetted!

HOw does one do that?

Ask your group leader. They need to verify your information before most will bid.

Ask your group leader. He / She usually does it

What information do they usually as for for verification?

I've offered and strongly suggested that borrower needed to be vetted, have not heard back until today, borrower said that he wants to get vetted, so i emailed back and told him what kind of docs i can use. As soon as i will recieve it i will let you guys know.

Check the Pinned thread in this RML forum. 2nd post there cover vetting pretty well. The rest of that thread is worth reading too.

------- Note: I removed the links to hide personal info... can someone verify that they saw that this was an accurate representation? ---------

I am posting the response here so that all may see the info:

I have uploaded 5 files to the internet. I apologize in advance for any large file sizes.

1. My latest paystub.


2. Rent Receipt (Other than my $50 per month cell phone bill, this is truly my only bill. I do make minimum payments (at least) on my two credit cards for a total of $30 per month) I also pay $24.95 for my web hosting accounts. All my utilities are included in my rent. The from date is the date I moved into the hotel.

3. Last paycheck from previous employer: I still work in the same hotel, we just had a change of management and we were fired and rehired on the same day. I include this because it shows continued employment, as well as the total earned this year.


4. The letter hiring me into the new management company (sort of double proof of number 3 above) This also could be considered proof of my rental rate ($452 per month which is phenomenal in San Francisco)


5. The letter firing me from the old management company (also double proof of number 3 above)

So, my monthly budget:

Net (after taxes) $1400
Rent $452
Cell Phone $50
Credit Cards $30
Food $300-400
Web Hosting $24.95

This leaves total expenses at $856-$956 Leaving me about $500 per month to be able to repay my Prosper loan.

I am actively cleaning up my credit score as well. I (just today) received a letter from Equifax notifiying me that they had removed one of the delinquencies from my credit report. This was a collection account. 3 of my other collection accounts are for less than $50 each. I am currently working to contact these companies to find out what it will take to clear these (I found one collection account for $13.... seems it would cost them more to keep it on my report than that... LOL)

Anyway... I hope this helps anyone who needs access to this information.

Eric

yikes, you may want to edit all that personal info on those.

Yep, Identity scrub these ASAP! While I'd like to think many of the folks on here are honest and trustworthy, having your indentity out their for anyone pick up is to much of risk, You don't want someone deciding to your burden by running up credit on your behalf. Other than that Good luck I hope your listing is successful!

Ray

My GL has asked me to address the delinquencies I have on my credit report. I'm using a copy of my Equifax report for this, so the information may be a little different than Experian, but here goes:

#1 California Service Bureau: This appears to be from an NSF check (3-05) $69 (paid... investigating with Equifax)
#2 Check Control Golde: This appears to be from an NSF check (10-03) $83 (paid... investigating with Equifax)
#3 Check Control Golde: This appears to be from an NSF check (10-03) $121 (paid... investigating with Equifax)
#4 Awa Collections: Auto Club: I never received a bill for this one. (12-02) $70 (investigating with company)
#5 Calvary Portfolio Services: ATT: This appears to be from an old phone bill. (2-03) $177 (investigating with company)
#6 Lindy's Collection Service: Time Warner Cable: Didn't return cable box (10-05) $487 (don't know what to do with this one)
#7 Security Check: This appears to be from an NSF Check (4-00) $13 (Just sent off payment on this one)
#8 Applied Bank Card: Old Credit Card (4-03) $969 (Investigating with company)
#10 Arrow Financial Services: unknown (6-02) $1132 (investigating with company)
#11 Certegy unknown (3-03) $453 (investigating with company)
#12 First Premier old credit card (8-02) $707 (investigating with company)
#13 Palisades: unknown (2-00) $98 (investigating with company)
#14 Portfolio Recovery Associates: unknown (1-00) $491 (investigating with company)

2006 Delinquencies: 0
2005 Delinquencies: 2
2004 Delinquencies: 0
2003 Delinquencies: 5
2002 Delinquencies: 4
2001 Delinquencies: 0
2000 Delinquencies: 3

I'm including a copy of my credit report. I'm not including the (about 10) pages of information on my rights, etc.

------- Note: I removed the links to hide personal info... can someone verify that they saw that this was an accurate representation? ---------

As you can see, most of these are in the distant past. I am working hard to clean all of this up.

Thanks again

Eric[B]

I'll be working on that... I didn't think there was much that could be done with that little bit of information, most of it could be found in a phone book...

You NEED to remove the personal information. Please.

Working on removing personal info within another window....

Thanks to your help, I'm at $490 within the first 12 hours... thanks so much!

Eric

Quick question- and I know I'm not that bright, so please bear with me.

Why is your information hosted on the server of an autosurf site?

For other lenders, a bit of detail on autosurf can be found towards the bottom of This thread from yesterday with inquiries for another borrower.

Please let us know if you are in an autosurf group. Many lenders would be interested in this information I believe.

All personal info removed

I hate to be rude, but again, the documents were hosted on www.forestsurf.com. Are you the proprietor of this site?

I want to let everybody know that i did check his pay stubs and other documents, everything checked out clear, I asked borrower to fax or email it to me, but sometimes it gets compicated for new people here and he thought he needs to place it here on forums for other lenders to see it, but again his name, income and address was verified and it seems like he should be ok making the payments on this loan. I would bid but i ran out of money last week.

Good Question... and a quick aside.

More information can be found on autosurf sites at http://www.sec.gov/investor/pubs/autosurf.htm

OK... so the answer to your question.

I own several websites:

BaobabNetwork.com: OutGayLife.com: ExitOurSite.com : AutoHits48.com: GoJewelry.info : Traffic-Swirl.com : Fresh-Traffic.com : ForestSurf.com : CreateABetter.com : Auto-Traffic-Builder.com

My business plan involves working with brand new webmasters. I know several ways to find them, and one of the places is an autosurf site.

It's important to note that there are two types of autosurfs: Free and Paid. It's the paid autosurfs that are the issue legally. I have 4 of them, all free. Members sign up for free and use the site for free. Any purchases on the site (and there are a few things that people can buy) and treated as purchases, not investments.

That's the important difference between the free and paid services. With the paid service, you pay a fee to join (say $10) and recieve a percentage of your "investment" (the fee paid) back every day that you surf. (Say 12% for 12 days) This (in theory) gives you 144% of your money back after 12 days. Sounds great, but in practice, totally illegal. These are run like pyramid or ponzi schemes.

With a free service like my own, it's treated more as a traffic exchange. You visit me and I visit you. More technically, for every 100 websites that I visit, I get 70 visitors in return. (note the 30 visitor discrepancy)

As the site owner, I have access to the 30 visitors (in the above example) and can direct them to the sites of my choice. One of the sites that comes up quite often in the rotation is the above mentioned SEC site. I want people to know that most paid autosurfs are illegal and they should not be participating in them. It's these 30 sites that I make my money on. I send to partner websites, which in turn pay me for the traffic I send them. Of couse, the more users I have, the more traffic I send my partners, the more they pay me.

As far as products purchased on these (my) sites, they are purely are purely advertisement based. A user can purchase some banner ad exposures, or perhaps some visitors to their websites. In no way is this an investment (except in the visitors=sales concept) and I make sure that everyone knows this. Unlike a paid autosurf, if you pay me, I will not be paying you back more money in a few days. That's called a loan, which is what Prosper is all about.

The entire purpose behind finding beginning webmasters, is that no other site caters as specifically to them as mine do. It's a network for a reason, each site within my network is designed to get people to move higher up the internet food chain.

So, I get a lot of people who are looking for get rich quick schemes (trust me, they don't exist) and I work to convince, say 10% of them that what they really need to do to make money on the internet is to have their own website.

So, I lead them through the steps, selling them a domain name, a web hosting account (that's what part of this prosper loan is allocated for is a web hosting business) and all the various tools that go with it. Need a site designed? I've got a team of them. Need advertising? Gee... I can set you up with lots of it through other sites in the network, etc, etc, etc.

So, The short version of the answer to the question above... Why is my info hosted on an autosurf site? Because this is where the beginning webmasters are that I can take and lead them step by step and help them succeed online. It's how I made my money last time I succeeded online, and it's how I intend to do it again.

Great question, and I hope I didn't get too long winded on the response.

Eric

Does this mean I'm vetted?

How does that affect my loan now that it's already posted?

Thanks

anyone care to answer my previous question?

In a rather informal sense.

That means that you have been verified on your employer,income, name, but it does not take away your delinquencies, that's what is hurting you the most.

And I don't really suppose that there is anything I can do about that?

Eric

Well, you can use some of your loan to pay your deliqs off, or the extra money that you have left over from every paycheck. It would help your credit rate also.

I'll have to make sure to do that, as mentioned above, many of these delinquencies are small amounts, and I'm actually having many of them verified.

I've even managed to get one of them removed, although it doen't show it on Prosper, I'm assuming they only pull the credit report one time.

Many of my past bidders (from past attempts) have suggested that I fix a couple of typos in my listing. Is there anyway to edit the listing once it is up?

once its up and running you can not edit.

thanks... From the looks of things, I might have to make an attempt number 4, but I'll be sure to post a link to this thread and catch all the typos. That way, People can have many of the answers to their questions already answered.

Thanks for all the help that everyone has been, it's actually been a quite pleasant experience.

Just had a Prosper Member ask me the following question, which I thought I'd answer in the forum, as it's an excellent question:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Can you tell me more about the type of web business you ran before? Why it was able to generate income, what that income tends to look like (lots of small payments every month or large payments that are spike)? You said you would need to hire a programmer. What would you say are your skills and strong points for this sort of business? Thanks in advance
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I first started my web buiness about 8 years ago (yes, that was in the days when you could easially get a domain name, AOL was the primary browser, and the internet (as we know is) was still relatively new. Seems like such a long time ago, yet it was only 8 years... my how time flies on the internet.

I had many friends at the time who were education majors in college, and I spent a lot of time surfing the web. They asked me to help them find some resources online to help them with their studies, and I found a free site (similar to geocities) and created a web directory of education resources. The site looked horrible, as I had no experience, but for a first site, it was actually pretty good. Eventually the site generated a lot of visitors (was getting about 500 per day, purely through search engine traffic) and I decided that, being the consumate entrepreneur, I could make a few dollars off the site.

I upgraded it to a "real" website, complete with domain name and the whole works. I learned HTML the old fashioned way and my online business was born.

Overtime, I added more and more websites (I think the top number was 5 at a time) and through (lots) of trial and error, found advertisers, and learned the ropes of Internet Marketing.

Overtime, some of the sites faded away, but the knowledge remained. I watched, learned, and found a niche.

The most sucessful niche I found online was "webmaster services" It's a niche that many people attempt to address, but I have yet to find a site that handles it successfully. In essence, I created a site that was sort of a "Starting Your Online Business Roadmap"

The site became an instant success, generating about 6000 visitors per day. I listened to all the "gurus" at the time and started my own online newsletter. Within a year, that newsletter had generated over 25,000 subscribers, and I was selling advertising within it for about $300 per issue. This went out on a weekly basis. Due to the quality of the newsletter, and highly targetted adverting list, I had many repeat advertisers, as well as a waiting list for advertising in the newsletter.

As "side" income, I worked with about 2000 different advertisers, reselling their products through various reseller programs. I made about $2-300 per month through this type of arrangement.

So, the short answer to the first question, where did the money come from, would be 80% large advertisers / 20% small advertisers.

Question number 2, involving skills and talents.

I can do most of the basic type stuff pretty well as far as site design. I know how to write HTML (although, I tend to use software for this now, due to speed issues) and primarily use my knowledge of HTML for debugging when I can't get things to work quite right with the software.

I'm in the process of learning PHP and CGI, although I would not consider myself to even have a working knowledge of these issues.

My real knowledge is internet marketing and promotion. I used to work with an online personals company as their marketing director, and was personally responsible for about 20% of their revenue (even though it was a company of 100 people)

I can generate traffic. http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=s25baobab is a link to my online web counter. My current traffic level puts my in the top 1-2% (traffic wise) of all sites on the internet.

I can convert advertising into sales. In an advertising world where a 2% click through rate on an advertisement is considered good, I can regularly achieve 50-60% click though ratios.

All the marketing stuff, and basic web design, all strengths.

Weaknesses: Advanced Programming. This is the reason for the programmer mentioned in my loan request. A note: I do plan to outsource this task to Lithuania, where a friend of mine has a lot of college programming students willing to work on projects for a fraction of the price I can get here in the US. This will help to keep the cost down. (If nothing else, I'm a very frugal person... It only cost me about $2000 over a period of 3 years to build my last online business)

One of the problems when dealing with any business, is trying to do everything oneself. I can be bookkeeper, designer, marketer, order taker, sales person, janitor, and order fulfiller, but I can't do all those things at the same time well. Part of my trouble last time was trying to do it all, this time I wish to spread the projects around a little bit and (hopefully) be able to concentrate on my strengths.

I will be posting a copy of my business plan in my next post to keep this post short (a little late for that, but I wanted to give a complete answer)

As mentioned in my loan request, I will require a new computer for many of the things I need to do. I can get a $500 Dell computer as a basic starter model.

I fully consider all of my web sites a work in process, and I've had to set priorities. Yes, I could put out a loan request for the $10,000 I'll probably need to get everything up and running in the long run, but first of all, it would probably never fund, and secondly, I can borrow $3000 now, get the tools I absolutely need to get things going in the next 6 months, and return later for another $3000 after probing myself, and generating a payment history.

Per my GL's advisce, I'll be using a portion of this loan (approximately $500) to clear up past delinquencies.

BaobabNetwork.com Business Plan

Elevator Pitch: The Baobab Network will operate as a sort of "web portal" with each site in the network wholely owned by a parent company. It will utilize a variety of marketing methods, including email, banner advertising, RSS Feeds, and affiliate marketing plans. Income will come from a variety of sources, including, but not limited to subscription sales, product sales, advertising, and reseller programs. The initial traffic goal is to serve up 1,000,000 page views per month across the entire network within one years time (By August 1, 2007).

Implementation: The Baobab Network will operate a number of main sites, each on a general topic (such as website business, gay life, or travel) along with a number of feeder sites that will each "feed into" the main site. This will allow each main topic to have a network of its own, allowing for many different doorways into each site.

A specific example of this type of implementation will be the main B2B (Business to Business) website located at CreateABetter.com. CreateABetter.com will in essence be 7 different sites, each with a similar look and feel. Each site will handle a different aspect of owning, managing, operating, and promoting an online business.(Affiliate Marketing, Web Design, Advertising, etc).

The main site (CreateABetter.com in this case) will be the "glue" which holds each site together.

Category One: Business to Business:

The first major category of implementation for the Baobab Network will be the Business to Business Web Portal at CreateABetter.com. There are 6 sections planned for this site.
Affiliate Program Management
Web Hosting
Web Design
Traffic Building
Advertising
Ezine Marketing

Each of these sections in detail

Affiliate Program Management: An affiliate program is a web promotion scheme which utilizes a number of other websites as partners or affiliates and pays them based upon their performance. The most common utilization of this type of program is to pay a partner website a percentage of a sale, yet some programs choose also to pay a bounty per visitor (Pay per click) or a fee for a sign up. The primary audience for this section will be medium and large businesses which seek to increase their sales through affiliate marketing.

This section will cover in detail how to successfully recruit affiliates, including how to maintain relationships with individual affiliates and resellers of the products. It will seek to work with established affiliate program managers, as well as with many high level "super affiliates" and seek to open a level of communication among affiliates and affiliate program managers, helping each group to help the other.

Other topics of discussion in this section will include choosing an affiliate solutions provider (a company that operates as a back end solution handling many of the day to day operations such as writing checks and tracking sales), and other issues of concern to affiliates and affiliate managers.

This section will include a forum for affiliates and managers to communicate, along with 2 newsletters (one for affiliates, another for managers)

Income for this section will come from many different sources, including Google Adwords, affiliate revenue from product sales (such as bulk mailers, etc) which will be of assistance to program managers, and referral fees, both from two tier affiliate programs (a program which pays a bounty for finding resellers for their programs) and from affiliate solutions providers which often pay a referral fee for finding a merchant to utilize their services. There will also be an advertising fee for advertising in the newsletters.

Web Hosting: This section will primarily serve as a giant FAQ page for how to best utilize a web host. Topics will include choosing a web host, as well as how to handle many of the technical issues of web hosting such as setting permissions on a cgi script etc.

This section will also include a forum to make the site interactive and allow the web community to post questions and answers to common problems on the internet.

Income will come primarily from reselling web hosting services of other companies, however, there are plans in the future to start an in house web hosting company to be able to host the websites of the visitors to the sites in the business section.

Web Design: Much like the Web Hosting section above, this site will offer a forum, as well as many answers to the "How do I do ________" type questions. Income will come from the sales of existing products on the internet such as Coffee Cup (an HTML writing program) and other products such as graphic design programs, etc.

Future plans (6 month time frame) include working with programmers and designers all around the world and reselling their services on a contract basis.

In the future, there are also plans to sell a number of services such as web templates, clip art collections, and other tools that would be of use to those looking to build and improve their websites. These services and products would be developed in-house.

Traffic Building / Advertising / Ezine Marketing: These sections will focus on how to build traffic to websites. Each will be integrally integrated within the other. Topics discussed in these sections will include such hopics as how to develop a successful banner advertising campaign or how to effectively optimize a website for each engines.

There are currently several other sites in the network such as AutoHits48.com (a traffic exchange), ExitOurSite.com (a traffic exchange) and CoolBannerAds.com (a banner exchange) which will be heavily promoted in these sections. Each of those sites offers a chance to sell traffic to websites, as well as offer a chance for webmasters to promote their own sites through the exchanges.

Income from this section will come from advertising in each of the newsletters, as well as from traffic sales for those who wish to get traffic to their sites without taking the time to actually build up credits in the traffic exchanges. There is the opportunity (as an example) to serve up banner ads for a fee on other sites in the network.

Goals for the Business To Business section
By December 31, 2006

Daily Visitors to CreateABetter.com Network: 4500

Active Users of AutoHits48.com: 2000
Active Users of CoolBannerAds.com: 2000
Active Users of ExitOurSite.com: 2000

Subscription Goals for Newsletters:
Affiliate Program Management: 1000
Affiliate Program Affiliates Newsletter : 2000
Traffic Building Newsletter: 25000
Advertising Newsletter:10000




Category Two: Gay Life

The second major category for the Baobab Network will be centered around OutGayLife.com a web portal for the gay community. There are several major sections in this portal:

Community Guides
Gay and Lesbian News
Health
Sports
Parenting
Travel
Personals

Each of these sections in detail:

Community Guides: Every major city in the US will be covered by a gay city guide (each guide will be a seperate site, for example San Francisco will be covered by SFGayLife.com) Each section will include local news and events, as well as "information pages" on local businesses. These information pages will include a semi interactive experience for the end users where each local business will be able to present special events, discounts, and other information about their business to the local community. One example of this would be a night club, where the local club owner would be able to promote their own business, as well as to offer a coupon for discounted cover charge, or provide a calendar listing of upcoming performances or DJ appearances. Success of this section will rely heavily upon the cooperation of local buisinesses and in order to keep prices low for those businesses, a highly intuitive control panel is being developed so that most changes to the site and maintenace of calendar entries, etc will be able to be handled by the individual business owners.

Gay and Lesbian News: This will operate as a sort of nation wide Gay and Lesbian Newspaper (note... this type of service is not currently known to exist on a nationwide basis, although many companies offer a local version) Plans are to offer this as a free service, primarily as a way to divert traffic into the community guides described above.

Health: Similar to the Gay and Lesbian News section above, but focusing on health issues

Sports: Similar to the Gay and Lesbian News section above, but focusing on sports.

Parenting: Similar to the Gay and Lesbian News section above, but focusing on parenting.

Travel: This section will work as a major reseller of gay friendly trips and travel. It will work with many different companies providing these services, as well as being a major traffic contributor to the Community Guides section listed above for those visitors who plan to be tourists in other citiies. It will be a major way for an out of town guest to find Gay and Lesbian friendly businesses in cities that they plan to visit in the future.

Personals: Currently the only major option for Gays and Lesbians who are looking for an online personals experience is Gay.com. This site will seek to offer the gay community a better alternative to that site. Income from this site will come from subscription sales for enhanced functionality on the site.


Other Categories: Many other categories are planned for the future, including General Travel, a General News and Information Site, and many more. Details on these sections will come in the future, however, the above structure is to be expected for each of these general topic sections.

I'm now at over 50% funded... Thanks all for your help!

Eric

60% funded.
Thank you lenders.

~~BUMP~~

65% thanks all!

Any advice on the business plan listed above? I'd love to hear from someone who has a little more experience than I do.

Thanks in advance.

Eric

B U M P

81% funded.... I just might pull this off... thanks everyone for all your help!

Eric

85% Feeling good

I'm now fully funded... thanks all for your help

Eric

bump

Why are you bumping your old thread for your old loan?

Just trying to keep it from timing out, as I reference this forum in another thread.