Monday, December 31, 2007

Google Ads

Ok, So, I guess this Google stuff is setup. Once the system goes through the blog, and picks up keywords, it will start generating ads. Now, it's part of the legalese that I can't ask you to click on anything. So, i won't do that. But, I'm sure we would all like to see what kind of money this thing will pay, and there is only one way to find that out.

In theory, what we need to do, is come up with some nice keywords that will generate ads that will bring in some ads that pay out the big bucks. As I have mentioned previously (I think) it cost me .75 cents for a top slot in "Board Games" but a top slot for "Buy Chess" was more like $3.00- $4.00, so was "Gifts for Him". How about stuff like XBox 360, Playstation 3 and Nintendo Wii.

yeah, Yeah, OK, that's enough of that crap. I just checked in on my .11 cent bids, and they are doing abysmally. I upped the bid to .12 cents and we will see how that does. I already know that .15 cents was too high, believe it or not. So, I'll find the happy medium in there somewhere.

Oh yeah, porn, boobs, pussy, vagina, and naked women. (Well, if we are going to be getting ads around here, we can at least make them interesting, right?)

Game Store

This game store is proving to be a thorn in my side.

I setup Yahoo Ads to be limited to $10 per day, and .11 cents per click.

The problem seems to go back to these damn vendors I need to deal with. My first day of the new ad, I get an order for $155. Sounds good right? I was pretty excited. Then after about 15 minutes of digging around, I find out that two of his products are discontinued. Another product came from a second vendor which would be additional shipping and additional drop ship fee. The fourth product was actually without issue. Since he ordered over $100, I could not charge him shipping, because I am competing with other companies that offer the free shipping also.

Long story short, I waste 1/2 hour gathering information, make about $17 on the sale (then minus the yahoo costs), and in the end, he just canceled the order anyway, and I don't blame him.

I keep telling myself Christmas was a shitty time to try and start this, and also that starting any business will have it's difficulties.

The other issue is that I am breaking a drop ship rule. The rule is to only sell products from one distributor. this way there is only shipping and fees from one company. Since I have some 5 companies listed so far, my profit is tough if they order from too many places. That's my call though, because I am trying to have more available than my competition. For example, I seem to be the only one who sells a product from a particular vendor, and that gives me a leg up on everyone else.

I think I also started with the hardest one, the games. the next one I will do is Women's Lingerie, in hopes for sales during Valentines. Tis would be easier because it's less products (By far) and only one distributor. Nice stuff too, cross between Victorias and Fredricks. Nice, but slutty.

Blog Advertising

When I finished my last post, I noticed an ad that says "Earn money from your blog
Let your blogging pay off with relevant ads from Google AdSense." and I had a thought. What if I stab myself in both eyes with a steak knife, and sell my soul for a few dollars.

Up front, I would say that I hate, Hate, HATE internet advertising, especially clogging up blogs. Garbage on the page where all I want to do is read something useful.

I would additionally ask who the hell clicks on those damn things anyways? It will make a mess of my page, and not bring in any money anyway.

Then I think of another blog I go to. He recently mentioned that his blog makes him about $5,000 per month in advertising revenue. He is making plans to quit his job, and blog full time.

What? No way! I'll tell you, those Yahoo ads that are placed on random internet pages certainly work to drive traffic to my store, so somebody is clicking on them.

After all, I figured no one bothers to read this blog at all, but I know of two readers that are out there, cheering me on. Besides, if every other post of mine mentions the words Chess, Backgammon, Gifts for Him and Gifts for Her, then I **edited out because of AdSense Rules** to click on all the "Buy Chess" ads, I could make some money. Serious money. Or not... I won't really know. It said that they won't tell me how much money THEY made on the click, so how do I know if I got a fair share? It said "Although we don't disclose the exact revenue share, our goal is to enable publishers to make as much or more than they could with other advertising networks."

So, I decided what the hell, I'd give it a shot. After all, it says "There's no cost, no obligation, and getting started is quick and easy." Of course, that's followed by legalese of what I can, and can not do. What I can post about, and what I can't. I would love to tell you about it all, but it said I would be in violation, if I mentioned any of it to you. HA! Google Adsense system is really obnoxious. They are going to "Review" this blog to make sure it's real, and what kind of content it has on it. I better not mention the words Casino, Gambling, or Tobacco. The Google World Police will then veto my ability to become part of their collective.

So, it says I will get paid 30 days after I reach $100 in clicks. Yeah, OK, I'll hold my breath.

Oh, another odd thing. When I went to sign up, it said that I did NOT have an account. Which i find odd, since I DID have an account. For that Game Store stuff. I guess when I complained about the system last time, they booted me out. Ha, that's funny.

Since I can't have Yahoo Ads with these Google Ads, maybe I should make a clone of this website on some Yahoo system and sign up for their system too. hmm... I guess no one ever said I couldn't have two identical websites run on two different systems.

iPods Everywhere

What can I say? This has to be the best idea I ever followed through with. I can sell those damn things all day, every day. It wasn't just christmas, either. My sales haven't even slowed down, really. Doing this won't work for every product, nor will it work for everyone, but it seems perfect for me.

Sure, it has it's hassles because of suck-ass customers, but overall it seems to be easy money. If I had larger pockets, I could possibly do it full time, seriously. However, it takes a large sum of money to keep it going, at least to start. My first batch of 40 4gb ipods cost $2140, second batch of 40 4gb ipods cost $2140, third batch of 30 1gb generics cost $775, and my newest batch of 30 30gb ipods cost $2520.

Technically, as long as I keep one batch at a time, it's the same $2000 capital being reused over and over. Then the added sales pay for all the paypal/ebay/postal fees. This is more of a long-term plan, rather than a get-in get-out thing. After 1 month, I have made a cash profit of only $300. However, my real profit is still inventory sitting on my floor. I'll make my money as long as I keep plugging away at it.

The big money stopper was those generic ipods. Sure, they sell, so it's not like it was a bad idea, it's just that it takes a while. Apple ipods can sell 5 in 1 hour. the generics only do about 1 per day. I could lower the cost, but that seems to be counter intuitive. So it takes an extra week or two to sell off, whatever. It's tough to stand firm when I look at that measly $300 for all this work, but I keep telling myself I am building a long-term business. In another month or two, my 'company' should be self-funding and will continue to bring in an actual paycheck every week. This is not only the IPods, but includes my Game Store, and whatever other e-store I setup in the coming months.

I have been toying with the idea to go asking around for Private Funding for my project. If I can borrow $2000 from someone, pay them like 10% or $7 per iPod sold or something, then that could be it's own funding source that doesn't have to come out my own pocket. This would allow me to buy twice as much inventory. Not only that, but that would be inventory that someone else would NOT be able to buy. Slowly, I would able to corner the market. Yeah, i know, big ideas.

Friday, December 28, 2007

Auction Tricks

Here is a little trick I learned about Liquidation Auctions. I should not be telling you this. You are my competition. However, I figure, very few people will read this, and of those, few will try buying iPods, and of those that do, I will unlikely be bidding on the same exact auction away.

Lets say you have a product you want to buy from www.liquidation.com, my case is obviously iPods. I started by seeing what was available to buy. This week (being christmas, it was slow) there some 512k shuffles and 1gb and 2gb nanos. All of which were overpriced at auction, so I let them all pass. I focused on 3 batches of 30gb iPods, all of which were ending today. Morning, noon, and afternoon.

Now, how many people do you think are out there bidding on $2,000+ worth of broken iPods? Not too many. In fact, there was only three of us, and three auctions. The morning one bid up to $2,700 because all three of us bid on it. The noon one bid up to $2,700 because two of us bid on it. With the last auction of the day, I was the only person left standing willing to spend that kind of money. I won the auction for $2,400 because there wasn't any competition left. Do you know who drove the price up that high in the first place? Yes, the same three people... we were the only ones interested for the day. I have done the same thing on each of my other auction purchases, creating hundreds more in my profit margin.

The moral of the story, is that you should not get emotionally attached. Set your top price, and stick to it. If someone else is willing to pay more, let him. There are always more auctions to buy from. Pace yourself, and at some point you will win the auction. The same goes for Ebay. There is a reason I can sell a 4gb nano for $115, and another one won't even make my reserve price. It's called timing. They drove up the price on themselves.

The other moral, and true trick, is to focus on the auctions that are at the end of the day. Let everyone else fight it out, when they leave for the day, you can get the real deal. the same goes for EBay auctions. There is a reason I will only sell in the morning, and that i called competition. by 8pm at night, people are watching TV, doing homework, or even bought their product for the day. Morning sales bring in more than 20% over comparable evening sales, in my experience.

In a nutshell, Sell in the morning, Buy at night.

Thursday, December 27, 2007

eCommerce

So, if you want to check it out, my store is at www.the-game-store.com and I think it came out quite well. Opening day was a rush to try and snag a few last christmas sales. While I did manage to get a few orders, I saw where there was some serious flaws. I was not going to find them until I went live. They are now a thing of the past, but I thought I would mention them.

I signed up with Google's AdWords. To this day, weeks later, it still isn't working. Stay away from this system, it really sucked. Nothing would get done unless I emailed customer service asking them what the fuck was going on. I've gone into detail about this before, so I won't rehash it.

I then signed with Yahoo's Adword system, and I was more than pleased with the system, and the results. Minutes after setting things up it was driving traffic to my store by the truckload. This, is obviously good. I can only assume that my problem was christmas time. Since I was peddling board games, I was competing with some serious bidders for top slots. I would guess my average per-click price was about .75 cents each. 30 visitors was costing over $30, and that did not take long to get that many hits. Other really good keywords was going to cost WAY too much for my blood. For example, both "Buy Backgammon" and "Buy Chess" were going for $7 - $11 EACH visitor. It was insane. The reason, was that they were shooting into a barrel trying to get someone to buy a $1000 Alabaster Chess Board and $750 Chessmen. But realistically, all I found was under $50 sales.

In the end of the weekend, I made 3 sales, $20 profit, and spent $250 in advertising. Now, obviously there is a better way of going about it. I think if I could get results from .10 cent hits, that would be affordable. Also, Amazon.com looked like a real deal at only $40/mo so i will look further into this at a later date.

Anyway, other issues I had with the store was that shipping was right on my site, but when it went over to paypal, it only charged about 50% of the shipping. Turned out to be some hidden "feature" I needed to disable. I also noticed that I was wholly undercharging for one companies products. Both these issues ended up costing me $4 to make my first sale.

I also had many Out of Stock issues pop up. One customer is going to wait for it to come back in stock next month, so I can make another $20 off that.

In general, I am putting the whole store thing on a shelf for now while I add more products to the database I am creating for the website. If you missed that part, none of these companies have valid databases of products they carry, so I am creating it all by hand from their website, one page/product at a time. It's a huge time waster. I would never do this if it wasn't for the fact that I do nothing at all at my day job. Seriously, for the past 14 months, I go in late, and run my side business from my desk. Everyone knows, and no one really cares. I do actual work for about 1 hour a day, if that much. I have no clue why they employ me. I have no idea why they pay me top dollar to do it, either. I used to worry about it, thinking if they caught on, they would fire me, but they never did care. Of course, now I'm just gloating.

Ticket Sales

Toni asked a question. I don't know who Toni is, but thanks for reading. He asked if I wait in line or go to ticketmaster. The answer, is neither. I had been using www.livenation.com. When I purchased those TSO Tickets (Awesome seats BTW, I could see right up the girls skirts! er.... sorry) they started sending me weekly updates of what they have coming up for pre-sales and regular sale dates. I'll skim through and see if there is anything of interest.

Here's the thing though, TSO tickets were only $60 each, and at the time, I didn't have any other real uses for the money other than leaving it in a 5% savings account. So, the fact that I had $1000 tied up in tickets for 2 months was easy money. These Van Halen tickets were $210 each, $421 for the pair. If I add on (my new rule of thumb) profit margin of 25%, then tack on StubHub fee of 15% on top of THAT, now your talking $615/pair and who the hell wants to pay that?!?

Right now, to stay competitive, I've dropped below 20% otherwise I'll never move the damn things. While it IS easy money, now it's tying up over $800 that now I would rather spend on the iPods because that is faster money with a much greater profit margin.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not going back on what I said about tickets being a bad idea. After all, in 6 weeks I made $550 on TSO tickets, about a 50% profit. What I AM saying, is that I can make that in under two hours on ebay. It's more work dealing with "customers", but it pays much better, and much faster.

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Google AdWords

AdWords have MANY policies that they enforce with dictatorship accuracy. While I agree with some of them, like no ads about Prostitution, Hacking, Phishing, Freaking, etc... I honestly fail to see why using a keyword of Casino or Cigarettes would be banned. Go ahead, try a google search and you won't find anything listed at all.

Who made Google the World Police for Ethics? My Board Game Website sells Casino products like Poker Chips and Dice, but I can't say that, otherwise my ad gets disapproved.

I also can't have page forwarding either, which is silly. Which means www.abc.com gets sent to www.xyz.com because, again, who cares. While I can aplaud Google for keeping the system clean and keeping out bogus bullshit, but it takes DAYS before these ads get approved or disapproved, which leaves me without revenue until they get around to fixing the problem. In this case, I loose out of Christmas Traffic while they bother to tear my ad apart.

Saturday, December 8, 2007

DropShip Warehouses

What the hell are these people thinking anyway? I have dozens of warehouses I am jugging here, and not ONE of them has a usable database speadsheet that I can use to import into my website. The images are either ginormously large or low resolution garbage. I am spending hours and hours of my life building usable data for my e-store. And these forst 3 were the easy ones! The next one I have to scan in a price list, OCR the text, scan in the paper catalog, extract the images, OCR the text there too and put it all back together as something my website will import. I have complained to them all, and the just shrug at me.

I swear, If I was building a long lasting website that will generate lots of money for me, I would never bother with all this junk. My wife is SO pissed off at the amount of time I've wasted in my office. Whenever she complains, i have to point out that since she isn't working anymore, she has to stay out of my way and let me do whatever I have to do to bring in a steady flow of money. I'll be damned if I'll be out working part time at Burger King, I tell you that.

It's a shame the real estate market is doing so badly. I was good at flipping houses, damn good. But now, the house across the street from my rental has gone on the market at less than what I have invested in it already. So, it looks like I have little chance at selling it anytime soon.

Small Blog World

I was reading a Blog that I go to regularly and the guy starts talking about this blog I am writing here. I was quite surprised because what are the odds of finding anything on the internet anymore. i mean, I doubt I would be able to find him again even if I tried.

He had mentioned that Selling broken IPods on Ebay wasn't his "Thing". Well, shit, it wasn't my "thing" either until I calculated $1000 in two weeks.

If I failed to mention before, the reason I picked IPods is because, like cell phones, everyone needs one. The other reason is that they are generally easy to fix, taking less than 10 minutes each. Out of Batch #1, I threw away 3 that were just beyond saving, Selling 5 "as-is" broken for parts, and 32 were sold between $71-$129 each. I estimate my walk away number is about $900 for two weeks in my spare time.

The 30 New Ipod Knock Offs are expected to bring in about $1300-$1500 in ONE week. And that's without actually doing anything to them but shipping them out.

The comment was made about "Dealing with the Public" and yeah, I've had my share of morons this past week. One person never replied again after winning, another said his 9 year old bid by mistake, and yet another complained that a new one could be had for $20 more. So, sure, there is a general hassle factor, but I feel the profits are enough for me to suck up and deal with it.

It was also mentioned about buying things other than IPods on liquidation websites. And that I can almost agree with. Almost. For example, I could buy Xboxes and PSP's and resell those for profit. the catch is, if they really are broken, what the hell do I do then? Same for toasters and blenders. At least with the IPods I have a chance to fix.

More Tickets

Since the TSO concert tickets did pretty well for me, I decided to up the ante a bit and I picked up 4 Van Halen tickets. They cost $210 each and I currently have them listed on StubHub for $370 each. This price puts me just below the bulk of the pack. There are always low ballers that resell the tickets at just above cost, which I think is just a waste of time. Since I spent an hour of my time to buy and list the tickets, then put up $850 that will sit for weeks into months before I sell them all, I simply need to make more than $25 per ticket. I was hoping for a much faster sell out since this area is small, but sadly good seats are still available. Oh well, I suppose they will be sold out soon enough.

I still get emails about those TSO tickets (the show is tomorrow) and I have been sold out for weeks. I just checked StubHub and all the tickets on there were sold out now too. So either they got tickets by now,or they simply are not going.

Thursday, December 6, 2007

IPod Christmas Sales

Wow... I tore through my IPod inventory in 5 days. I literally could not list them faster than I was selling them. What a wonderful problem to have! I seem to currently have 6 good ones to sell off tomorrow, all for profit, between $90-$120 each. This tail end is where I can finally make my money. I also have 2 more I need to fix using a Macintosh (some problems seem to fix better on a Mac) and I have 9 busted ones that need actual attention from me. While I could EBay them off as broken for $30 each, I would rather take a few minutes and swap out the parts and fix them. Like, I can use one to swap the LCD, another a Battery, etc... it's pretty easy, if your so inclined, like I am.

I Won't have time though, because I took all the money I plan on making, and I ordered 40 more Ipods as well as 30 Brand New Generic IPod Rip-Offs. These other ones sell for less, but they cost me so little, the mark-up is awesome. In this case, I got them for about $23.00 each with an expected sale of $60-$80 each. Yeah, seriously, do the math. Since I make a few more bucks off shipping to cover costs, it's like $50.00 each times 30 means a profit of about $1500. Thats more money than I'll make from monkeying around with the scratched up IPods. That revelation came to me AFTER I spent another $2000 on the next batch. Oh well, whatever, They will sell, no problem.

My wife thinks this is because it's christmas, that's why I can sell them so fast for so much. Maybe she is right. That's why I picked up 2 more batches I can get out the door before christmas rush is over. Personally, I think when they don't get what they actually wanted, they will just go out afterwards and buy more IPods, giving me anoither month of great sales. But, if I can keep this going, that would be amazing.

Just as a followup, while I am here, I am also working on the Board Game Website. Really tough work since these dumb assed distro places don't have any usable databases. This means I have to go through every item myself. This lag means I will likely miss any real christmas sales since a bulk of my time is spent keeping up on the IPods.
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