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[tbarefield]

Thanks Ken....this is valuable information. GREAT JOB!

Originally Posted by ksarner

As far as I can tell, this is the most basic tutorial in the entire forum. If you've come here from other freebie-trading sites, or if you've done extensive reading on this forum, there won't be much here for you.

There are a lot of tutorials here to help people run their business more effectively. But while I was reading through a few of them the other day, it occurred to me that there aren't any for someone who just wandered in with no background in the field at all, who doesn't know anything at all about this opportunity. This tutorial is designed for them.


What is this business about?

The opportunity presented in this forum is called "freebie trading". Freebie trading uses hundreds of websites called "Incentivized Freebie Websites" (IFWs). Each IFW will present advertisements from between 50 and 600 different companies (Jargon alert--these advertisements are collectively referred to as "offers" in the industry shorthand). The companies that provide the offers pay commissions to the IFW to advertise their products and services.

An important concept to grasp is that the IFWs are not allowed to pay people directly for completing the offers, but they ARE allowed to pay people to advertise their site. The types of prizes and cash amounts vary depending on the particular IFW site. The term 'freebie trading' refers to the process of two people reaching an agreement in which one person agrees to try some of the offers in return for a share of the second person's commission.


How does it work?

The IFWs get paid when someone signs up and completes an offer on their site. Let's use a real-life example. FreeCreditReport.com uses many different IFWs to promote their business. They offer a free 7-day trial of their service through the IFW. If you like the service, after 7 days you get billed each month at the regular price. If you don't like the service, you can cancel before the trial period has expired, and that ends your obligations to the company forever.

Always remember that all you have to do is to give the products a fair trial, but you do have to do that. If it's a trial period, keep them for most of it. If it's a product, use it for the trial period. If its an e-book, download and read it. Website? Register and look around to see what they offer. One of the ways that many offers determine whether you're a valid customer is whether you actually use the product. If you don't, you won't get the credit. After giving it its fair trial, if you decide the product isn't for you, you're under no obligation to keep it.

Not all offers are for a free trial period for their products or services. Some will require a small amount for shipping and handling, others charge a small fee. In most cases, though, this fee is much less than the money you will make by completing the offer. Since you get to choose the offers you're going to do, it's quite easy to make a good profit on your very first site.


How do I make money by completing offers?

Your trading partners will pay you directly to complete offers. (Jargon alert: completing a site's offer requirements to gain a credit is known in the freebie trading world as 'going green', or 'greening'. If you use your trading partner's referral link to sign up for an IFW site, complete that site's offer requirements, and get your credit, you 'went green' or 'greened' for them)

You'll be credited for the offers you do on the IFW to which your trading partner sends you. Again, no IFW is allowed to pay people directly for completing the offers. What they CAN do is pay OTHER people to refer people to them to complete offers. In this example, they will pay your trading partner, who will then give you part of that money. This works out well for both of you. You may need to pay a small fee for the offers you choose out of your half, but your partner will need to pay taxes out of his half. Everyone wins.


Can I really make a career out of signing up for stuff?

Probably not. You can make a couple of hundred bucks just by doing offers. But you don't have to try to make a career out of trying offers. If you've been listening closely, you might have noticed that there are two distinct methods of making money online through freebie-trading. Method 1 involves completing offers for someone else and having them pay you. Method 2 is what your trading partner will be doing. It involves finding other people and paying them to complete offers for you. Here's how it works:

Once you complete the required number of offers (go green) on an IFW, the site is "yours", and it gives you a referral link that you can use to refer other people. At this point, all you have to do is get enough referrals to sign up on the site (just like you did) and go green (just like you did), and you can collect the prize which that IFW offers.

Most people will start you on an easy site which pays THEM $40 per referral. As soon as you've signed up for the site using their referral link and completed the offer requirements, they'll pay you your share. Within about 24 hours, that site will verify that you've completed the offers and pay them $40. At that point, the SAME site you just completed will give you a referral link of your very own. All you need to do is find someone else to click on YOUR referral link, pay him some money to go green for YOU and you'll get to pocket however much money is left over after you pay him.. Best of all, after you've collected the $40, you can get ANOTHER referral and collect another $40 over and over again, without ever having to complete another offer on that site yourself.

Since there are literally hundreds of IFWs to work with, you can complete enough offers on different ones to build yourself a nice portfolio of easy sites that pay you $40 per referral. Or, if you prefer, you can collect a number of very difficult jackpot sites that will pay you $200 or more per referral. In my opinion, the best strategy is to get a nice mix of different sites. That way, you'll have a good selection to offer the people you find to work with. Once your portfolio is complete, you can walk away from Method 1 and all the offers forever, and start working on Method 2.


What's in it for the IFWs?

Money doesn't come from nowhere, and it might seem to you that the offers are paying out a lot more in commissions than they're getting in from the people who try them. Either that, or the IFW is giving out more in commissions than they're making in commissions from the offers. It wasn't until I got a little bit more deeply involved in the business that I began to understand where the extra money came from.

First, a lot of people end up deciding that they like the offer and continue using the product or service (or forget to cancel). Personally, my wife made me keep the incredibly expensive exercise product we got from Slendertone. I decided that I liked the herbal supplements from Alpha-Calm enough to keep them, and we both liked the $90 Miracle Knives enough to keep THEM, too. I was in no-way obligated to keep any of those products, of course, but once I tried them, I liked them. So the offers, collectively, made a reasonable amount of money from me. But I still made SOME money, and my family got to try a lot of products we otherwise wouldn't have known about. And the ones we kept were genuine bargains, which I got even more affordably, because someone paid me to try them.

Secondly, the more people who use a product, the more word of mouth advertising that product gets, and the company providing the offer doesn't have to pay a dime for that.

Lastly, the sad fact is that some people will sign up for an IFW site, start the process of completing offers, but then quit before finishing. When that happens, the IFW site still gets its commission on the products or services the person signed up for before he quit, but never has to pay me my commission. This makes me very unhappy and occasionally causes me to pound my head against the wall, and the fact that it helps the whole system to work doesn't seem like sufficient compensation. But it happens, and the IFWs make money when it does.


What you need before starting:

The needs are minimal, but they're not flexible. If you're missing any of the following, you'll need to get them before you start trading freebies. If you're unable to get any of these things, it's just not going to work for you, and it's best that you know that now before spending any more time on this.

1. You need to be at least 18 years of age.

2. If you're going to trade freebies for long-term income, you need to be a resident of the United States or Canada. You don't need to be a citizen of either country, but you do need to have a valid residence in either the United States or Canada.

You can make a few hundred bucks if you live in the United Kingdom, and maybe a hundred or so if you're from Australia, but there's no long-term plan. The good news is that if you're from the UK or Australia, you can get your money in a week or so, and then be done.

There are also urban legend type stories of someone's friend of a friend making a few dollars trading freebies from South Africa, but I don't think that they're true. At least I don't know how they could be. If you're from South Africa and you're interested, contact your trading partner and let him do some research. If he finds IFWs that will accept South Africans, make sure he tells someone.

3. A PayPal account. Getting a PayPal account is free and takes about fifteen minutes. If you don't have a PayPal account, you can get one here. You'll eventually need to get the account verified, which takes 3-5 business days, but that's NOT necessary to begin. For details on how to get your PayPal account verified, log into your PayPal account and click on the link that says "Status: Unverified"

4. A valid credit or debit card. (NOT a gift card or a pre-paid credit card. Canadian-based credit cards are fine, but Canadian debit cards are hit or miss. Many will work, but some won't. There doesn't seem to be a pattern. As near as anyone can tell, it depends on the specific Canadian bank with whom you do business.)

5. A valid home phone number. Neither Vonage nor Skype will work for freebie-trading.

That's it. If you meet all five of those qualifications, you can be making money online by trading freebies within the next hour.


What should I do now?

If you need to convince yourself that this is a truly legitimate opportunity, you can go here:
People who are making money!

After you've convinced yourself, if you want to just dive right in, you can either hook up with someone who's making money or read the advertisements for all the people who would like trade with you here:
Advertisements for trading partners

That's not necessarily the way to go, though. Being able to write a convincing advertisement doesn’t make you a good teacher/mentor. If you do a bit of enjoyable research, you can do better. I’d recommend you start by learning the rules here:
FreeLunchRoom RULES - Free Lunch Room

You can then have your basic questions answered here:
Member Tutorials - Free Lunch Room

and your more advanced questions here:
Freebie Help - Free Lunch Room
and here:
FLR Forum Support - Free Lunch Room

(There’s a lot of overlap between these last two forums.)

It’s better to start this way, because no-one gets paid to answer questions, so the people that do aren’t writing advertisements, they’re genuinely interested in helping. Read carefully and critically--people say a lot about themselves when they post. Find someone who seems to know what they're talking about--or someone who you'll be comfortable working with.

Once you've narrowed your choice down to a few traders, there are a few ways to learn more about them:

1. You can see how many trades they've completed just by looking to the left of any post they they've written. Underneath their name (and avatar, if they have one) is a bunch of information about them. At the bottom of that information, you'll see something like this:

iTrader: ###/100%

The numbers there are the number of trades a person has successfully completed. Naturally, the bigger the number, the better. You'll want someone with a proven track record and a history of success to work with. Unless you're in a huge hurry to begin, though, don't end your research there.

2. Click on the number I just showed you how to find. That will take you to his trading history, which is a page which lists what his trading partners have said about him, among other things.

2a. Near the top, in the center, you'll find his "Recent Ratings". That will how how many trades he's completed in the past month. Again, the higher the number the better. That's a good measurement of how active he has been on the forum recently, and a good way to guess how often he'll be here to help you if you need it.

2b. Down a bit from that and over to the right, you'll see a list under "From". It will include all the people he's traded with. This is a VERY important list. Click on a name or two from that list, and see how often that person traded with him. If they traded with him just once or twice and then moved on to someone else, he probably wasn't meeting their needs.

2c. Just to the right of their username is a number in brackets. That's a CRUCIALLY important number. It shows how many trades their partner has CURRENTLY completed. That's the best measurement there is of how good a teacher that person is. If many of his trading partners have gone on to successfully complete many trades of their own, it's a good bet that that person has trained them well for success.

To get the most accurate assessment of a person's trading history, you might want to scroll down near the bottom of this page, and look to the right. You'll see:

"Page 1 of X 1 2 3 4 5 6 Last »"

The further back you go in those pages, the older the trades are. His most recent trading partners might have only two or three trades completed because they're very new. They might also have only traded with him one or two times for the same reason. If you go back a month or two and find that his trading partners from a while ago only traded with him once or twice, then either moved on to someone else or quit, or if they didn't learn enough to have a reasonable number of successful trades themselves by now, then it's a sign of weakness somewhere in his system.

That should enable you to narrow the field of potential trading partners considerably. Once you've done that, you can learn more about the traders who are still on your "short list" by clicking on the “signature” at the bottom of his post. When you decide that you’ve found the right person to work with, send them a PM.

--Ken

[markt]

Excellent!!! Way ta go Ken!!! Very simplified and informative for new folks!!!

[6string]

Great tutorial Ken!
Good Info to give to anyone who is not familiar to Freebie Trading!

[Chicago]

This is an interesting read, especially if you actually read the whole thing which I'm sure a lot of people didn't do before they replied to it. If you pay attention toward the end of the original post you will notice that a lot of the advice given will direct a new referral to avoid working with those who are newer to method 2 or only doing it part time. That's probably good for the new referral in question and good for the experienced "vets" we have here who do this full time, but to be honest a lot of the people replying in this thread are the very people who will have referrals directed away from them by the content they're applauding.

My recommendation to those individuals would be to re-read the first post and then work very hard to bring your game up to the level of those who this tutorial pushes new referrals toward. Use it as fuel so that you're one of the people who would benefit if all new referrals went by this particular system when deciding on their mentors, instead of one of the people who would be left behind in the dust.

All in all this was a very clever tutorial that serves many more purposes than may be apparent to the average naked eye. I recognize that, Ken, and I can also appreciate the talent required to formulate such a tutorial in a positive light. Keep up the good work. ;)

[green4phoenix]

I too appreciate the wisdom in Ken's post and I also have had the priviledge of acquiring some of that wisdom from him personally. I agree with you also Joey, that the content that is described in the end of the post is of great value. I would like to point out though that there are many factors that go into some of the statistics that Ken described and I have been quite taken with his thought process for choosing a mentor. Being in the market research business for over 20 years... has allowed me the opportunity to understand statistics and the various factors that influence cause and effect. I just want to say that there is another perspective on this whole mentor issue and I am hoping to post a new topic on this very subject fairly soon.
Blessings to all and remember...there are also good mentors out there who may not have the high TR's that are so highly sought after, but these traders can bring something unique to the plate that is also of great value. Look for the upcoming post - and I will elaborate.
Donna

Originally Posted by Chicago

This is an interesting read, especially if you actually read the whole thing which I'm sure a lot of people didn't do before they replied to it. If you pay attention toward the end of the original post you will notice that a lot of the advice given will direct a new referral to avoid working with those who are newer to method 2 or only doing it part time. That's probably good for the new referral in question and good for the experienced "vets" we have here who do this full time, but to be honest a lot of the people replying in this thread are the very people who will have referrals directed away from them by the content they're applauding.

My recommendation to those individuals would be to re-read the first post and then work very hard to bring your game up to the level of those who this tutorial pushes new referrals toward. Use it as fuel so that you're one of the people who would benefit if all new referrals went by this particular system when deciding on their mentors, instead of one of the people who would be left behind in the dust.

All in all this was a very clever tutorial that serves many more purposes than may be apparent to the average naked eye. I recognize that, Ken, and I can also appreciate the talent required to formulate such a tutorial in a positive light. Keep up the good work. ;)

[Chicago]

Originally Posted by green4phoenix

I too appreciate the wisdom in Ken's post and I also have had the priviledge of acquiring some of that wisdom from him personally. I agree with you also Joey, that the content that is described in the end of the post is of great value. I would like to point out though that there are many factors that go into some of the statistics that Ken described and I have been quite taken with his thought process for choosing a mentor. Being in the market research business for over 20 years... has allowed me the opportunity to understand statistics and the various factors that influence cause and effect. I just want to say that there is another perspective on this whole mentor issue and I am hoping to post a new topic on this very subject fairly soon.

Yes there are definitely numerous factors that need to be recognized for what they are and they certainly influence everything that goes on around here. My hope is that members start to pay closer attention to those details before they reply. I'm just surprised that I was the first to point out what I did, as well as pointed out how to use it as an even greater positive than what most probably saw if they simply skimmed through the tutorial. Brand new members are not the only ones who can benefit from the content within, even though the title currently directs it toward them solely.

As for me personally - I really wish that some of the instructions in this tutorial could be shown to brand new members before they contact anyone because as I said in my previous post it IS in their best interest to choose people who have proven track records and are readily available at almost all hours. I've seen countless n00bs come in and fail because they weren't made aware of that in time, so all they did when they arrived was start setting up various trades with the first random people they saw which ultimately led to their "freebie demise" because by the time a week passes and they realize they should have been doing homework on who they work with first, it's already too late and they're in the hole big time.

Blessings to all and remember...there are also good mentors out there who may not have the high TR's that are so highly sought after, but these traders can bring something unique to the plate that is also of great value. Look for the upcoming post - and I will elaborate.
Donna

I am sure that will be an interesting read as well. I'll keep my eye out for that one.

[sylvery]

Originally Posted by ksarner

As far as I can tell, this is the most basic tutorial in the entire forum. If you've come here from other freebie-trading sites, or if you've done extensive reading on this forum, there won't be much here for you.

There are a lot of tutorials here to help people run their business more effectively. But while I was reading through a few of them the other day, it occurred to me that there aren't any for someone who just wandered in with no background in the field at all, who doesn't know anything at all about this opportunity. This tutorial is designed for them.


What is this business about?

The opportunity presented in this forum is called "freebie trading". Freebie trading uses hundreds of websites called "Incentivized Freebie Websites" (IFWs). Each IFW will present advertisements from between 50 and 600 different companies (Jargon alert--these advertisements are collectively referred to as "offers" in the industry shorthand). The companies that provide the offers pay commissions to the IFW to advertise their products and services.

An important concept to grasp is that the IFWs are not allowed to pay people directly for completing the offers, but they ARE allowed to pay people to advertise their site. The types of prizes and cash amounts vary depending on the particular IFW site. The term 'freebie trading' refers to the process of two people reaching an agreement in which one person agrees to try some of the offers in return for a share of the second person's commission.


How does it work?

The IFWs get paid when someone signs up and completes an offer on their site. Let's use a real-life example. FreeCreditReport.com uses many different IFWs to promote their business. They offer a free 7-day trial of their service through the IFW. If you like the service, after 7 days you get billed each month at the regular price. If you don't like the service, you can cancel before the trial period has expired, and that ends your obligations to the company forever.

Always remember that all you have to do is to give the products a fair trial, but you do have to do that. If it's a trial period, keep them for most of it. If it's a product, use it for the trial period. If its an e-book, download and read it. Website? Register and look around to see what they offer. One of the ways that many offers determine whether you're a valid customer is whether you actually use the product. If you don't, you won't get the credit. After giving it its fair trial, if you decide the product isn't for you, you're under no obligation to keep it.

Not all offers are for a free trial period for their products or services. Some will require a small amount for shipping and handling, others charge a small fee. In most cases, though, this fee is much less than the money you will make by completing the offer. Since you get to choose the offers you're going to do, it's quite easy to make a good profit on your very first site.


How do I make money by completing offers?

Your trading partners will pay you directly to complete offers. (Jargon alert: completing a site's offer requirements to gain a credit is known in the freebie trading world as 'going green', or 'greening'. If you use your trading partner's referral link to sign up for an IFW site, complete that site's offer requirements, and get your credit, you 'went green' or 'greened' for them)

You'll be credited for the offers you do on the IFW to which your trading partner sends you. Again, no IFW is allowed to pay people directly for completing the offers. What they CAN do is pay OTHER people to refer people to them to complete offers. In this example, they will pay your trading partner, who will then give you part of that money. This works out well for both of you. You may need to pay a small fee for the offers you choose out of your half, but your partner will need to pay taxes out of his half. Everyone wins.


Can I really make a career out of signing up for stuff?

Probably not. You can make a couple of hundred bucks just by doing offers. But you don't have to try to make a career out of trying offers. If you've been listening closely, you might have noticed that there are two distinct methods of making money online through freebie-trading. Method 1 involves completing offers for someone else and having them pay you. Method 2 is what your trading partner will be doing. It involves finding other people and paying them to complete offers for you. Here's how it works:

Once you complete the required number of offers (go green) on an IFW, the site is "yours", and it gives you a referral link that you can use to refer other people. At this point, all you have to do is get enough referrals to sign up on the site (just like you did) and go green (just like you did), and you can collect the prize which that IFW offers.

Most people will start you on an easy site which pays THEM $40 per referral. As soon as you've signed up for the site using their referral link and completed the offer requirements, they'll pay you your share. Within about 24 hours, that site will verify that you've completed the offers and pay them $40. At that point, the SAME site you just completed will give you a referral link of your very own. All you need to do is find someone else to click on YOUR referral link, pay him some money to go green for YOU and you'll get to pocket however much money is left over after you pay him.. Best of all, after you've collected the $40, you can get ANOTHER referral and collect another $40 over and over again, without ever having to complete another offer on that site yourself.

Since there are literally hundreds of IFWs to work with, you can complete enough offers on different ones to build yourself a nice portfolio of easy sites that pay you $40 per referral. Or, if you prefer, you can collect a number of very difficult jackpot sites that will pay you $200 or more per referral. In my opinion, the best strategy is to get a nice mix of different sites. That way, you'll have a good selection to offer the people you find to work with. Once your portfolio is complete, you can walk away from Method 1 and all the offers forever, and start working on Method 2.


What's in it for the IFWs?

Money doesn't come from nowhere, and it might seem to you that the offers are paying out a lot more in commissions than they're getting in from the people who try them. Either that, or the IFW is giving out more in commissions than they're making in commissions from the offers. It wasn't until I got a little bit more deeply involved in the business that I began to understand where the extra money came from.

First, a lot of people end up deciding that they like the offer and continue using the product or service (or forget to cancel). Personally, my wife made me keep the incredibly expensive exercise product we got from Slendertone. I decided that I liked the herbal supplements from Alpha-Calm enough to keep them, and we both liked the $90 Miracle Knives enough to keep THEM, too. I was in no-way obligated to keep any of those products, of course, but once I tried them, I liked them. So the offers, collectively, made a reasonable amount of money from me. But I still made SOME money, and my family got to try a lot of products we otherwise wouldn't have known about. And the ones we kept were genuine bargains, which I got even more affordably, because someone paid me to try them.

Secondly, the more people who use a product, the more word of mouth advertising that product gets, and the company providing the offer doesn't have to pay a dime for that.

Lastly, the sad fact is that some people will sign up for an IFW site, start the process of completing offers, but then quit before finishing. When that happens, the IFW site still gets its commission on the products or services the person signed up for before he quit, but never has to pay me my commission. This makes me very unhappy and occasionally causes me to pound my head against the wall, and the fact that it helps the whole system to work doesn't seem like sufficient compensation. But it happens, and the IFWs make money when it does.


What you need before starting:

The needs are minimal, but they're not flexible. You need to meet these qualifications before you start trading freebies. If you're unable to meet them, it's just not going to work for you, and it's best that you know that now before spending any more time on this.

1. You need to be at least 18 years of age.

2. If you're going to trade freebies for long-term income, you need to be a resident of the United States or Canada. You don't need to be a citizen of either country, but you do need to have a valid residence in either the United States or Canada.

You can make a few hundred bucks if you live in the United Kingdom, and maybe a hundred or so if you're from Australia, but there's no long-term plan. The good news is that if you're from the UK or Australia, you can get your money in a week or so, and then be done.

There are also urban legend type stories of someone's friend of a friend making a few dollars trading freebies from South Africa, but I don't think that they're true. At least I don't know how they could be. If you're from South Africa and you're interested, contact your trading partner and let him do some research. If he finds IFWs that will accept South Africans, make sure he tells someone.

3. A PayPal account. Getting a PayPal account is free and takes about fifteen minutes. If you don't have a PayPal account, you can get one here. You'll eventually need to get the account verified, which takes 3-5 business days, but that's NOT necessary to begin. For details on how to get your PayPal account verified, log into your PayPal account and click on the link that says "Status: Unverified"

4. A valid credit or debit card. (NOT a gift card or a pre-paid credit card. Canadian-based credit cards are fine, but Canadian debit cards are hit or miss. Many will work, but some won't. There doesn't seem to be a pattern. As near as anyone can tell, it depends on the specific Canadian bank with whom you do business.)

5. A valid home phone number. Neither Vonage nor Skype will work for freebie-trading.

That's it. If you meet all five of those qualifications, you can be making money online by trading freebies within the next hour.


What should I do now?

If you need to convince yourself that this is a truly legitimate opportunity, you can go here:
People who are making money!

After you've convinced yourself, if you want to just dive right in, you can either hook up with someone who's making money or read the advertisements for all the people who would like trade with you here:
Advertisements

That's not necessarily the way to go, though. Being able to write a convincing advertisement doesn’t make you a good teacher/mentor. If you do a bit of enjoyable research, you can do better. I’d recommend you start by learning the rules here:
FreeLunchRoom RULES - Free Lunch Room

You can then have your basic questions answered here:
Member Tutorials - Free Lunch Room

and your more advanced questions here:
Freebie Help - Free Lunch Room
and here:
FLR Forum Support - Free Lunch Room

(There’s a lot of overlap between these last two forums.)

It’s better to start this way, because no-one gets paid to answer questions, so the people that do aren’t writing advertisements, they’re genuinely interested in helping. Read carefully and critically--people say a lot about themselves when they post. Find someone who seems to know what they're talking about--or someone who you'll be comfortable working with.

Once you've narrowed your choice down to a few traders, there are a few ways to learn more about them:

1. You can see how many trades they've completed just by looking to the left of any post they they've written. Underneath their name (and avatar, if they have one) is a bunch of information about them. At the bottom of that information, you'll see something like this:

iTrader: ###/100%

The numbers there are the number of trades a person has successfully completed. Naturally, the bigger the number, the better. You'll want someone with a proven track record and a history of success to work with. Unless you're in a huge hurry to begin, though, don't end your research there.

2. Click on the number I just showed you how to find. That will take you to his trading history, which is a page which lists what his trading partners have said about him, among other things.

2a. Near the top, in the center, you'll find his "Recent Ratings". That will how how many trades he's completed in the past month. Again, the higher the number the better. That's a good measurement of how active he has been on the forum recently, and a good way to guess how often he'll be here to help you if you need it.

2b. Down a bit from that and over to the right, you'll see a list under "From". It will include all the people he's traded with. This is a VERY important list. Click on a name or two from that list, and see how often that person traded with him. If they traded with him just once or twice and then moved on to someone else, he probably wasn't meeting their needs.

2c. Just to the right of their username is a number in brackets. That's a CRUCIALLY important number. It shows how many trades their partner has CURRENTLY completed. That's the best measurement there is of how good a teacher that person is. If many of his trading partners have gone on to successfully complete many trades of their own, it's a good bet that that person has trained them well for success.

To get the most accurate assessment of a person's trading history, you might want to scroll down near the bottom of this page, and look to the right. You'll see:

"Page 1 of X 1 2 3 4 5 6 Last »"

The further back you go in those pages, the older the trades are. His most recent trading partners might have only two or three trades completed because they're very new. They might also have only traded with him one or two times for the same reason. If you go back a month or two and find that his trading partners from a while ago only traded with him once or twice, then either moved on to someone else or quit, or if they didn't learn enough to have a reasonable number of successful trades themselves by now, then it's a sign of weakness somewhere in his system.

That should enable you to narrow the field of potential trading partners considerably. Once you've done that, you can learn more about the traders who are still on your "short list" by clicking on the “signature” at the bottom of his post. When you decide that you’ve found the right person to work with, send them a PM.

--Ken

Thank you for this excellent post. I'll have to add it to my list of posts that I send to my referrals. :-)

[monksmom]

Title of this caught my attention just now...the FIRST reads anyone should be doing here on the forum are the rules, whether it's the ones posted around the forum or the shortened versions in tutorials...no matter what one knows about freebie trading or even how good or bad they are, without an understanding of the rules going in, well...just figure you're going to have issues...you will get frustrated and it will NOT be a very positive experience:)

Just a lil head's up...it IS what YOU make of it yet it really is a great opportunity...if you start off right:)

[tammyjk]

This is a wonderful post and full of information. A must read for all newcomers. Some of the tutorials in the forum are hard to understand. This is very straightforward and to the point. And, yes you should look at the traders statistics and his rating, but some newbies should be looked at too. We have had to go through the same thing, even though we may not be experienced as the older traders, we can still input suggestions and help them make it work. If the newbies have been taught well by their mentor, they should have not problem being a mentor themselves.

[chipawa]

Just because a person has a low iTR don't mean they can't help people. Maybe the person hasn't been active in the forum or they might have came from another forum.