Well I’ve been on holiday for the last week or so, and today as I was trudging through my neglected emails I came across a class action lawsuit that involves people who have been involved with CJ either as an advertiser or a publisher, since 2003. That’s me. So I read it. (If that’s you, click here to find out more). Seems like twice a year lately I get one of these class action emails about some network or other I’ve been part of.
So anyways, I guess it involves CJ’s use or non-use of some sort of software that should have been industry compliant, but wasn’t. So what’s in it for us, the publishers? Not a lot, as it turns out. One million dollars has been allocated (if approved) for the settlement. First you take off the lawyers fees and everyone’s expenses related to anything remotely close to the case, and whatever is left over, you split between the advertisers and the publishers (us) 70 / 30.
Ok, so what is the best case scenario here? Well, first off, as a publisher, it looks like I get my share of the 30 percent left over. Ok, so what is that share? Well, first, that depends on how much CJ actually paid out in commissions between 2003 and July 2008. My guess is it is quite a big number. I have no actual facts about this (I did do about 2 minutes worth of Google research but couldn’t find much other than 2001 figures of 997 Million in sales for the first three quarters) so I’m purely speaking off the top of my head, making this up as I go. But let’s just say, for argument’s sake, that they pay out $10 million per month in commissions. Ok, make it only $1 million, just for fun. Where does that leave me? Well, we’re talking about roughly 5 years here. So that would be roughly 60 million in commissions. Do the math and I figure I get about $112, assuming that the full 300,000 remains for paying the publishers. My guess is that becomes more like 200,000. My guess is, they’ve paid out a LOT more than a million a month as well.
So I guess I’m in line for a free dinner, courtesy of CJ. It might be McDonald’s, or it might be a bit nicer, but I’ll probably still get something out of it. I’m not holding my breath though. My last payout from Google came to $8.37.
I’ve been getting Dan Kennedy’s newsletter for several months now. Each month it is packed full of unique sales and business advice, with great testimonials and case studies. Anyways, I recently went over to Amazon and picked up enough of Dan’s books to get free shipping. Today I received my package, so I dug right into “No B.S. Sales Success. The Ultimate No Holds Barred Kick Butt Take No Prisoners & Make Tons of Money Guide.”
That’s a bit of a mouthful right there, but once you get into it he really does have a lot of insight into sales. In my previous job, I worked closely with our sales force. I wasn’t selling myself, but I worked with those who did. This book is therefore very interesting to me. I often wondered how I would do in sales, but ultimately chose to work for myself rather than pursue sales. I think the experience would have been beneficial, but I can make as much or more money from home doing far less work, so I guess laziness won that round.
Anyways, here’s a tidbit from the book.
Keep It Simple, Salesman (or Stupid, if you’re down on yourself)
Dan talks about “complexity creep” and how that tends to sneak up on us unawares. I know I love having systems in place for different things, and that can actually be a detriment to the sales process. I’m not selling directly, but I am selling on the internet. So how does this relate? Well, we need to make sure that the website is geared towards the sale. Everything on the site needs to be pointing the customer towards handing over their credit card. Articles can be extolling the benefits of your product, helping the prospect to imagine what life will be like once they have it. Testimonials should be there, telling people what a great experience it was dealing with you. Basically, don’t miss anything you can have in the mix to point people towards that sale - but don’t let those very things get in the way of the sale! Make sure that the sale is always easy to get to, technically easy to complete, and overall as efficient a process as possible.
P.T. Barnum once said “No man ever went broke overestimating the intelligence of the American people.”
Even if you think your prospect is highly trained, intelligent, and attentive, don’t take that for granted! Boil everything down to the simplest common denominator. Dan mentions that salespeople often overestimate how smart and sophisticated their customers are, because it feeds their own egos. People like to think they serve the best out there. That may be true, but there are a lot more people that aren’t the smartest of the smartest out there, and their dollars are just as green as the next person. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to put down the customer, I’m just saying you need to present things in a way that everyone is going to understand intuitively.
Well I just realized it is halfway through July and I still haven’t written my little traffic charting post. I’ve been somewhat neglecting this blog lately, (this is the first time I’ve used that time-honored phrase on this blog) so I’m not sure what we’re going to learn from this post. Nevertheless, here goes.
Popularity Indicators
Alexa: 780,780 (up from 1,291,056)
Google PR: unranked (I heard somewhere PR gets updated quarterly????)
Technorati Authority: 8 (up from 6)
RSS Subscribers: 6 (down from
The Golden Rule
April 2008 Absolute Unique Visitors: 876 (last month I had 353)
Inbound Link I’m now using the tool found at MarketLeap.com which seems to give fairly reliable results.
Google: 6
Yahoo: 372 (spread across jonathanboettcher.com and www.jonathanboettcher.com)
In a different post I talked about my difficulties with having some links coming in on www. and some without. I think I’ve straightened that one out, but it is taking a while for the search engines to correct. I also had about a million absolutely useless links showing in Yahoo, hundreds of them coming from the same two blogs, and I couldn’t even find my link on their page! Some wierd bug in their template I suspect.
Conclusions Anyways, as you can see, my traffic is generally improving. However, if you look at the webmaster tools and search results, you see a more full picture. Fact is, probably 90% of my traffic is coming for and leaving on a certain post I did about my Dell XPS 1530 laptop a while back. I had no idea it would be so popular, but it has been drawing a steady 20-30 visitors per day for a few months now. If only some of them would click on an ad or two then we’d be getting somewhere.
So where does that leave us? Well, I’m still going to keep on plugging away here. I think the trick to getting some good traffic is to get a few posts out there that are really hot. Once you start getting some traffic flowing you get a better opportunity to attract those regular readers.
The other day when I logged into my Adwords account I noticed one of those fun alert boxes at the top, advising me that Adwords had a new feature.
Upon further inspection, it appears that Google has finally decided to let people see what sort of search volumes each keyword is getting. This is a great new source of data for internet marketers, who have previously been relying on all sorts of other sources which are then extrapolated to guesstimate total search volume.
For instance, to carry on from my last keyword research post, I’ll use “affiliate marketing” as the keyword again. Previously, if I wanted to research this term I would have gone to the free tool at WordTracker, and punched it in. They give a result of 546 people per day, which is something like 16,000 a month. Now this is only a small percentage of the real searches, so you always need to do some sort of rough extrapolation to figure out where the market was at. I read it was 1% somewhere, so if you multiply by 100 you get 1.6 million searches.
Well, what does Google data say? Google says that approximately 1 million people search for that term every month. So if you throw in Yahoo and Live/MSN the 1.6 million figure is probably in the ball park. Still, isn’t it nice of the big G to give us a sort of semi-firm approximately averaged number for our research?
A few weeks ago many Canadians were happy to hear that the iPhone was finally coming to Canada. I even wrote a post about the fact that I was thinking of getting one. Getting an iPhone would require me to drop my current carrier, Bell, and go to Rogers.
Well, since this blog is about marketing, I thought the recent updates were blog-worthy. First, some background, courtesy of BCTV and YouTube:
The essence of the above clip is that Rogers is overcharging for the iPhone plan, and people are TICKED OFF!
Now, I realize that the purpose of every business is to make money. But there is more than one way to do that, in every business. In fact, there are three ways to do that.
1. You sell to more people.
2. You sell more products to the same people.
3. You sell more expensive products to the same people.
Clearly, Rogers is subscribing to #3. Now, in many businesses it makes a lot of sense to raise the price of your product. I’ve heard a lot of good internet marketers saying that by and large people should be charging more for the info products they sell online, and I think they’re right. There is a degree to which the market is elastic enough to accept the increase, and still respond positively.
However, in the case of Rogers, they are clearly going about this the wrong way. They have over judged the elasticity of the market, and they’re squeezing it for every bleeding red cent they can get.
Now, consider what we know:
1. Rogers knows that they have a monopoly on the iPhone. They happen to be the only carrier in Canada that is technologically capable of running it on their network, so for the foreseeable future, nobody can compete.
2. The iPhone is being hailed (whether you agree or not) as the phone that is revolutionizing the marketplace. It is changing the way people interact with their phones, their computers, yadda yadda yadda. Basically it is tremendously anticipated.
3. Did I mention no one can compete?
Okay, so Rogers can go about their marketing strategy a couple of ways. They can jack the price up really high, banking on the fact that a ton of people REALLY REALLY REALLY want this phone and they’ll pay anything to have it. Assuming people didn’t mind the prices, they would hopefully gain new customers coming over for the iPhone.
Unfortunately, some marketing bonehead totally over estimated the market’s price elasticity on this one, and they’ve crossed the line. Way crossed it. So much to the point that you saw in the video clip, where long time customers are now talking of buying out of their contracts just to get away from Rogers!!! WOW! Party foul!
So instead of gaining new customers, Rogers is LOSING customers! On top of that, they’re losing them by the thousands. If you checkout www.ruinediphone.com you will see that the petition is up to 43,910 (July 6 9pm) and growing steadily. That is 10,000 more than yesterday. So even if they had calculated on losing some customers by hiking the price, I don’t think anyone considered the incredible bad press they’re attracting right now!
Now, consider a second way they could have gone about this. Knowing they had an upcoming monopoly on an incredibly highly anticipated product, they could have come out with some killer rate plan, geared towards JUST the iPhone, and released this with a huge media splash. The media would have been overwhelmingly in favour of it, and they likely would have picked up thousands of NEW customers. We’re talking a lot of three year contracts here. Out of every thousand, I’m sure at least some would hang around beyond their contracts for round two.
Back when I originally read the 4 Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss I thought outsourcing was the coolest thing. Pay someone to do those things that you don’t really want to do - especially when you can get them done cheap! Well, that was months ago, and I never really did much with it, or really got a handle on how it could help me in my business.
I should mention that I keep a spreadsheet that tracks my affiliate activities, and I’ve updated it every day for the last few years. I’ve always wanted a program that would basically do that for me. So I thought, why not outsource the creation of such a thing, at least to see how much it would cost?
If you’ve followed this blog at all you’ll know I’ve dabbled in Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. That was my first experience with outsourcing, and it went fairly well. It was also extremely cheap. So I thought I would take a step up, and try out another site, Scriptlance.com. Last week I posted this project on Scriptlance, to see what the cost would be. I’m currently a member of an online service which does something similar to what I wanted, and I’m paying $100 a month there. So I figured if I could get it done for a few hundred bucks, I’d be ahead, right? Well I ended up selecting a bid for $325. The guy has lots of great reviews, and many people have even paid him bonuses, so I figured he would be a good choice to build my software.
Anyways, we’re just now getting into the process of starting this, so I’ll keep you updated as we go along. However, the whole concept of outsourcing has seriously made a come back into my brain. Now I’m thinking of all kinds of things that I can outsource.
Link building, for instance. My web store needs some serious, dedicated link building and SEO work to attain a top position, and I’m no longer certain I want to be the one doing it. As I’ve written in previous posts, I want to learn how to do SEO, but that doesn’t mean I want to do it! I mean, link building is seriously boring work! Try it for a few hours and tell me otherwise!
So I came across this other site, called AgentsOfValue.com, and I’m considering now whether or not to hire a person through them. The idea goes beyond project based outsourcing; you’re actually hiring a full time employee! In the flimsy business development timeline I had in my head, I had never really considered hiring a full time employee, especially not so early in the game. I had an idea that hiring an employee would likely mean having someone working for me, possibly out of the basement in my house. It seemed like it represented a huge step in the evolution of my business… one that would likely take a few years to achieve.
And yet here I am, seriously considering taking on a full time employee, from the Philippines. I can get a full time (yes, we’re talking 40 hours a week) link builder for about $675 a month. Do the math. That is $5.63 an hour, for skilled labour. And for them, that’s higher than average pay, locally.
I sat back for a few minutes, thinking to myself: “Can I realistically keep such a person occupied on a full time basis?” ie - is it worth it?
So we get to the core of the question - what is YOUR time worth? In other words, presumably this work you’re thinking of outsourcing is worth doing, right? Well, how long would it take you to do it?
In my case, I probably can’t do the work a whole lot faster than someone else can, who is skilled and trained in link building and other SEO work. So you’re basically looking a the bulk of my time being used on this. And that is only for one web store, and I’ve got several other projects that I really want to start spending time on! So how much is my time worth? Well I won’t tell you what I’m making right now but let’s just use $20/hr as a nice round number. I think you can see where this is going…
If my time is worth $20 an hour, and their time is worth $5.63 an hour, then the choice is easy; pay them to do the work. This frees me up to start other projects and hopefully generate some new income streams.
You see, the whole question is about opportunity cost. Yes, I CAN do the work. But if I do, then I can’t do anything else while I’m doing it. What is the cost of that lost opportunity? Now, I’ll quit freely admit that I’m somewhat lazy and don’t exactly work like a mule at my business, but there again is a lifestyle choice that I value. I don’t want to be overworked, in fact I don’t even want to be working 40 hours a week, necessarily! So if I can outsource that work, why not?
As I’ve been writing this, more ideas have popped into my head. I might go so far as to outsource the entire creation of a new webstore, then the SEO after that. The part that I really don’t like - researching dropshippers… why not outsource the research? Pay someone by the hour to sit there and find every possible option, compile a list and essentially do the dirty work for me?
Product creation, customer support, graphic design, web design, writing, link building, programming; the list goes on and on as to what you can successfully outsource these days. The question is, are you ready for it? Can you make efficient use of someone else’s time?
The more I think about it, the more I like the idea. As my time is freed up, I will start new projects, which I have no doubt will create new tasks to throw at my personal link builder / SEO expert. I’m starting to think that it will be a leap of faith, but I can see it turning out to be an incredible step in my business development.
Do you use pay-per-click? Are you into search engine optimization? Either of these marketing disciplines hinge on proper keyword selection. You want to be in front of your customer when they’re in a buying mood, not a browsing mood, right?
I’ve always found that keyword research is one of the hardest things to when creating an ad campaign. How do you find out which keywords make money, and which ones burn money? Anyone can add all the suggestions from a keyword tool into their campaign - but I guarantee they will lose money unless they take that a step further. So how do we find profitable keywords? Here are three steps to help this process.
Step 1
The first thing to do is have a little brainstorm session. For whatever product you’re promoting, try to get inside your customer’s minds:
What is causing them to be looking for your product?
What pain (problem) are they feeling or dealing with?
What questions do they have?
What solution are they trying to find?
Once you’ve answered these things jot down the different phrases you think they would use to find you.
Step 2
The second step is to use a keyword tool such as the free keyword suggestion tool at wordtracker.com. See if the terms you thought of are showing up on their lists, and find out how many searches are done daily for each keyword. The higher the better, obviously, though the highest keywords might not be the most profitable.
Step 3
Up until now, the information here is probably old hat for most of you. Here’s the golden third step. Head over to MSN’s AdLabs Online Commericial Intention Detector. Click on query, and punch in one of the keywords you think has potential. The web form will then spew out a number between zero and one. Here’s the readout for “affiliate marketing”
Result: NonCommercial (Query)
Probability for Commercial Query:
0.33748
As you can see, MSN thinks this phrase is by and large, non-commercial in intent. Having less than a 0.50 indicates non-commercial; anything over .5 (50%) is commercial in intent. The stronger or higher the co-efficient, the more profitable this keyword is likely to be!
Go to the tool, and compare the output for “personal loan” and “personal loans” - you’d perhaps be surprised to see that the singular is scored at 0.67969, while the plural is scored at 0.89554. So although both look to be quite profitable, “personal loans” is the keyword with the highest commercial intent, of those two.
So now you run your list of keywords from steps one and two through this tool, to make sure that they are all above 50%. If you’ve got keywords that you think would be good, but they’re under 50%, ask yourself why, and see if there isn’t a small variation that can be made to boost the score. If you can improve on it, use the new keyword instead.
Now, I should clarify that although I’ve talked about this as being a way to find profitable keywords, I guess really it is just a method to find the keywords that people are using to buy stuff. This is great, if you are doing SEO. If however you are paying per click, profit takes on a new meaning, as you need to consider what your costs are for each keyword. Chances are strong that the highest rated keywords are also those with strong competition.
However, in all markets, the presence of sharks indicates there is prey in the waters; competition isn’t a bad thing, you just need to find a way to best them, and you’ll be laughing!
A few weeks ago I wrote a post on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (mturk.com) and some of the potential I saw in it to get stuff done on the cheap. Well, since that day I’ve been running multiple HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) on the Turk and I’ve been getting some great results.
If you’ve got a blog or any kind of website, chances are you’d like for people to be looking at it, right? Well, one great way to do that currently is to promote it on social media websites like Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Facebook; the list is seemingly endless. You could spend entire days creating accounts at each of these sites, write a small review of your site and post the link, and in the end you would probably see a small gain in traffic. However, what if you could accomplish all that for 50 cents? Without spending any time on it yourself? Would you do it? I sure would. In fact, I did.
As I’ve previously mentioned, I’m currently in the process of launching a new webstore selling digital picture frames and as such I’ve been trying my best to find ways to promote it. So I created a HIT on Amazon’s web services (Mechanical Turk) asking people to bookmark my site on their favorite social network. My HIT looked something like the following:
Bookmark the URL http://www.digitalframeguy.com
Using one of the following sites:
http://del.icio.us/
http://www.stumbleupon.com/
http://www.propeller.com/
http://spurl.net/
http://diigo.com/
http://myjeeves.ask.com/
http://www.connectedy.com/index.php
http://www.myvmarks.com/
http://www.bookmarktracker.com/bt/home
http://www.oyax.com/
http://www.jumptags.com/
http://www.mylinkvault.com/
http://buddymarks.com/
http://linkagogo.com/
http://bibsonomy.org/
http://backflip.com/
http://www.mister-wong.com/
http://blinklist.com/
http://furl.net/
Include in the title or description one of the following terms:
digital picture frame(s)
digital photo frame(s)
digital frame(s)
wireless photo frame(s)
You may use either the singular or plural version of the keyword.
Please provide the URL of the bookmark in comments to receive payment for the HIT.
You can complete this HIT up to 5 times if you use a different bookmarking site each time.
So you can see I tried to make things as easy as possible for the turker to complete. Most of these people already have accounts at one or another of the social networks, so all they have to do is login and link to you. I offered 10 cents for these, only because I wanted a bunch in a hurry. 10 cents is actually a decent price for a HIT such as this. For another site, where I was more patient, I only offered 1 cent per bookmark, and I still got good results, though slower. As such, it is important to decide on your budget. It is worth taking the time to figure out if you only want to spend 25 cents promoting your site, or if you can actually afford a full $2.00. The choice is yours.
So I’ve basically given you a blueprint here for one way to get as many hiqh quality backlinks to your site as you want from the social media sites. If you want, you can specify only Digg links, or whatever you value. The great thing about this is the search engines love social media right now, most of the sites have high PR, and you get a link to your site that typically includes the keyword phrase of your choice. All for a few cents.
What’s not to love about that?
EDIT: I just got some article HITs back from Mechanical Turk and two of them were so good that I wanted to award a bonus to the authors. FYI - here’s how to do it. In the Manage HIT interface, where you see their unique ID number, beside the HIT results, click on that number (it is a hyperlink) and a pop down menu will appear. You can then award a bonus of any amount you wish through that link. I just felt bad paying 50 cents for these two great articles, so I doubled it for them.
A few weeks ago I wrote a post on using Google’s Website Optimizer (found inside your Adwords account). At that time I mentioned I was running a split test on a couple different background colors for a landing page I wanted to test. After only a day or two I was getting some pretty interesting results:
“As a side note, I’m currently split testing a different version of the page which at least in preliminary results, the splits are outperforming the original by 26% and 55%. The implications of a successful outcome from a split test can really make a big difference on the bottom line!”
I wanted to follow up on this to see if we can learn anything from this exercise. The first few days seemed spectacular; I thought for sure I had stumbled upon the ultimate background color. Then as more results steadily streamed in, things gradually started to equalize. In fact, the two tested colors suddenly reversed their leads! Anyways, I continued to run the test, from May 7th to June 16th. You can see the results here.
I should mention that the Original in this instance was color code #333366. Google doesn’t give you an option to edit that title. So you can see that color #0099CC came out on top, which is strange, because to my eye it seems the ugliest of the three. However, I guess that is neither here nor there. FYI, the original is kind of a dark navy blue, combo 1 is a light sky blue, and combo 2 is a light gray.
I don’t know if you can draw anything too substantial from these results, because I am sure different background colors work better with different page content as well. However, on the page that I’m using, apparently combination 1 turned out better. It is important to note that Google still didn’t come up with a conclusive answer, only that there was an observed improvement over the original of 5.86%, and that there was a margin of error of plus or minus 2%. Having run this for five weeks now, the numbers have not really been changing a whole lot, so I’ve decided this is as far as it goes. If I wanted to confirm these numbers I might try re-testing with only the original and one alternative.
You can see that there were a total of 2443 conversions during this period (I only used traffic from Yahoo PPC for this test). That gives me an overall conversion rate of about 50.3% - from there I still need to get them to apply for the offer after clicking through.
You can get some insight into how this tool works by looking at the conversions/visitors column. I think that the way they’ve built this, Google takes the assumed favorite combination and tests the heck out of it, while giving an equal share to the original. You can see that combination 2 got less visitors than the first two, but that the first two got exactly the same number of visitors. I think this is Google’s way of testing a hypothesis. First give everything equal traffic, then as soon as things start to gel a bit, pick the original and the favorite and push them farther.
Anyways, for the time being, I’m happy having found something that offers me a 5.86% improvement over what I had, for no cost. As I laid out in the previous post, anything I can do to increase this conversion ratio will net me more profit at the end of the day. I’ve already spent the money to get the visitors to come; from here on the more that click through the better.
For example, if I spend $100 on PPC to get 100 visitors, and previously got 49 to go through to my offer, and if I know that each time someone views my offer it is worth about $3.00 to me, then before I was netting ($100 - (49 x $3.00)) = $47 profit.
Now, with the new numbers, it would work out to ($100 - (52 x $3.00)) = $56 profit. That’s a $9 improvement, per day. That’s nearly $300 a month. Not bad. Of course, assuming I was actually paying a buck a click, and actually getting $3 per viewed offer - these are just made up numbers for the sake of illustration. However, it is close to reality, and the principle still stands.
I don’t recommend you all go out converting your landing page backgrounds to 0099CC because of this - but I do recommend you think of something that might improve your offer and test the heck out of it!
Lately I’ve seen a couple different product launches, all geared towards taking advantage of eBay. It’s like a whole bunch of people suddenly found a jar of eBay pixie dust and started throwing it around the marketplace. The two I’ve come across are the Four Tier Annihilation method and the eBay Code. Four Tier is your standard $77 ebook with a video upsell. The eBay Code is more like $1497, not sure if there’s an upsell (I didn’t get this one, my pockets aren’t that deep!).
So anyways, being the eternal sucker that I am for a good sales letter, I picked up a copy of Four Tier Annihilation, and read through most of it today. Here’s the basic plot. Guy is broke, living in a friend’s basement, etc. Buys every internet marketing product out there and fails miserably until he stumbles upon eBay by accident one day. One thing leads to another until now he makes tens of thousands per month, and has trained many others to do the same, not to mention you! Strange how many of these stories all sound so familiar… yet I digress.
So cut to the chase, right? Ok, so he advocates a few different ways of selling on eBay. The first that is dealt with is dropshipping. Probably most people have heard about that. Dropshipping is this sweet setup (which I’m trying to get going with my digital frame store) whereby you secure a supplier to ship small quantities of product on demand, directly to your customer. So you make the sale, then the dropshipper fills the order. You never carry inventory. It really is a terrific setup, allowing the seller to automate his business as much as possible. Anyways, probably the best part of the dropshipping segment is where he talks about how he goes about doing his research into which eBay niches to enter. Using the advanced search feature in eBay you can checkout all the closed sales in each category. Find an item that looks decent, and has closed for a good price consistently, then lookup the seller in a tool such as Goofbay. From here you can see how much they’re selling, and judge whether there is profit potential in the niche. Quite fun to find sellers that are doing $10,000 a month in eBay sales. Then he goes into finding suppliers who will dropship for you. This is the part that I’ve personally had the least success with so far. Mind you, at the time the product I was looking for was a bit harder to find. I’m quite interested in taking another stab at it with a more common product.
So moving on from dropshipping to info products. You’ve probably seen the $1 ebook craze on eBay. Well apparently that is going to be changing, as eBay has brought in new terms and conditions disallowing download-able products. Of course this means you just have to outsource CD creation to a company like Kunaki.com and charge more for your product. Still, it will keep a lot of people out. So he talks about how to get ebooks you can legitimately sell as your own, without spending a whole lot, and how to find the good niches. There’s a lot of good information there.
One little nugget mentioned is worth gold, in my opinion. He talked about how after successfully selling a bunch of cellphones like crazy on eBay he created a short ebook on how to sell phones like crazy on eBay, including the contact info of some of his suppliers (note: withhold your best supplier for yourself!). Then he would advertise this ebook right beside his cellphone listings, and sell it for $47 or so. Basically, look at me - I’ve got a successful cellphone store on eBay, and I’ll tell you exactly how to do it to! Cool concept. Of course, only 3% of people who buy info products actually act on the information that they contain (according to him - not sure where the stat comes from or the validity of it). So because only 3% will act on it, you’re not even really exposing yourself to much increased competition, plus you’re already established in the marketplace. Sounds like he ended up making more cash off the ebook sales than off the cellphones!
He goes on to talk about flipping websites on eBay, outsourcing the creation of simple turn-key web businesses, etc. Basically there is lots of good content in ebook. I’m not really concerned about giving away all the Four Tier Annihilation secrets in this short post, as the ebook is 175 pages or so. Nothing terribly mind-breaking in there, but definitely more than enough information to make a healthy living on.
then we’d be getting somewhere.
but let’s just use $20/hr as a nice round number. I think you can see where this is going…
