5 Bucks a Day

There’s been a bit of buzz going around in some circles about the relatively new eBay listing format, the classified ad format.

It’s only available for a limited subset of categories, but the purpose is to allow sellers to generate leads for their “items, services, or properties”.

With classified ads, there is no bidding, there can be multiple buyers, and the fee is generally $9.95 for each 30 day duration.

What’s unclear, even among eBay employees, is whether or not it is allowable to include a link to a web site in a classified ad.  It appears you can, but some sellers have been shut down for doing so.  Some who were shut down were allowed to resume the ad with the link intact.

What is exciting, if in fact links are allowed, is that it could be used to market products as an affiliate.  If you have a product that gets a good amount of keyword searches, and it fits into the categories that allow classified ads, you could make a killing.

One of the categories allowed is “Everything Else”, and in that category, the sub category “information products”.  So if you are an affiliate for something that shows up on eBay Pulse as a hot item, you could do very well by only spending $9.95.

There are no final value fees.  The sales are all done off auction.

Once this shakes out, it could be a booming opportunity.  Or it could be snatched out from under us if eBay decides they’ve given up too much advertising space.

Stay tuned.

Share This

If you’re involved in Bum Marketing, or article marketing of any kind, wouldn’t it be nice to know that your articles will earn you at least something?

Isn’t it an empty feeling researching, writing, submitting, spending 10, 20, 30 hours a week, with no immediate gratification?

Sure, there may come a day, after you’ve submitted hundreds of articles, and waited weeks, months, or more that your article empire starts to give you a significant income. But often that can take a lot of time.

In the meantime, you have no clue what people think of your articles. Are you wasting your time?

Did you know that you have the ability to get some immediate gratification, and at the same time, some immediate payment for your efforts.

If you haven’t heard of Associated Content, check them out. You can submit articles to them for payment directly to your PayPal account. Amounts earned will vary. Bum Marketers will most likely be interested in the option where an article is submitted on a “non-exclusive” basis, meaning you can submit it to Associated Content at the same time as other article directories.

I don’t have a lot of experience with them yet, but just to check them out I took an article I wrote a couple years ago and submitted to many article directories, didn’t change a thing, submitted it to Associated Content, and a week or so later had an offer in my inbox. Once I accepted it, I had money in my PayPal account about a week later.

As far as I can determine you can’t put affiliate links or links of any kind in your articles, but that’s not the point here, is it? The point is to get some income flowing in.

Of course, it’s always a good idea to spin your articles slightly so that different directories get at least slightly different versions. Different headlines, slightly different text.

Your article will be reviewed by a human editor. If acceptable, an offer will be made to you, it could be as little as $3 or $4, but wouldn’t it be nice to know your article isn’t worthless? And if it isn’t acceptable to AC, that feedback is valuable also, so that you can work on doing a better job next time. Why submit articles that are unacceptable to AC to article directories to begin with?

If you’re outsourcing your article writing on eLance or elsewhere, it’s also a way to get some of your investment back, as well as to get an idea about the quality of the person working for you. If you’re paying someone $6 to write an article, and getting $4 back for it right away, that’s significantly reducing your costs.

Articles submitted on an exclusive basis will earn you more. You might experiment. It might be possible to profit from your ideas. Outsource the article writing, pay $5 to $8 per article, maybe you can earn more from those articles than you paid. It would all depend on the topic, length of article, quality of the writing.

And if you’re writing your own articles, going this route will make you not only a better writer, but also a paid writer, in other words a professional writer.
Not a bad deal in either case. Check them out.

Share This

Many affiliates realize how easy it is for their affiliate links to be hijacked by unscrupulous customers, yet fewer affiliates realize how easy it is to protect themselves to a certain extent (no method is foolproof, but at least you are making it less obvious).

My favorite method is by using PHP code to redirect to the merchant page, masking my real code.

Especially now, with the proliferation of reports using the $7 Secrets coding technique of putting your PayPal email address in the URL, you certainly don’t want that address to be showing to the public.

Rather than make this a long post, I’ve set up a web page showing you exactly what you have to do, called “How To Redirect with PHP“.

Protection is the best policy, don’t make your affiliate links too tempting.

Share This

After releasing 5 Bucks a Day in October, 2006, I wasn’t prepared for the success it achieved as far as sales.  The large number of sales, the questions, and comments, all convinced me that I need to start up our membership site and forum.

That came with a cost, as far as the money I was spending to put new reports in there regularly, and the time spent to oversee the forum itself.  The cost required me to increase the price on the book, since the membership site came free to readers.

The problem became that many who could most benefit from reading the book were put off by the new higher price.  Today I’m publicly announcing a new policy.

5 Bucks a Day is now available either with or without membership privileges.  Without, it can be purchased an the unbelievable price of just $7.77 at our new site, 5BucksADayJr.com

Those that purchase the book can upgrade later if they see fit (most will, I’m sure), but in the meantime they can start increasing their income by following the action steps inside the book.  Then, after seeing the results, they can ramp up their efforts by taking advantage of what’s inside the members area.
Additionally, as an added bonus, 5 Bucks a Day, Jr. can be sold by readers, for a 100% commission, this could be the first 5BaD project for many, getting them off to a fast start, and paying for their purchase many times over.

So far, sales have been fairly brisk.  I’m not surprised.

Share This

I don’t know how I missed it until today, maybe just a little too focused on a big project I’ll announce here tomorrow or the next day, but there’s a great change for Google AdWords people.

In your account, you’ll see a new feature, if you look at any of your adgroups, called “Customize Columns”. Click on that, and then use the drop down menu to show your keyword quality score. You can also hide any columns you don’t particularly care about.

This will show you what Google’s current algorithm thinks about your keywords. For each one, it will show poor, OK, or great, and the minimum bid you need to make for each keyword.

Yes, I had some poors, and now it gives me some input as to how I can better structure my landing pages. For example, if I have a green widgets page, and my keyword “used green widget” shows as poor, where “green widget” shows as great, why is that? Maybe I don’t have the word “used” on my page anywhere. Now we have a tool we can use to improve our pages, and at the same time, Google’s searchers experience, which is what Google is after, right?

You can read more about the recent update here in the Google AdWords blog.

Share This

I had a tremendously frustrating day yesterday.  I wasted at least 8 hours trying to figure out something that was so simple it was silly.

So I had no time to even think about writing a post here.

What happened is, I’m working on a new report that will most likely be announced tomorrow (Friday, February 16th).  I needed to do something inside the report, and I found the software that would do it.

Unfortunately, while testing, it just didn’t work, and in a really zany sort of way.  I suspected it must be something I was doing wrong, and I went to the vendor’s website and downloaded the manual they provided, and read it.  Twice.

Still no luck.  I suspected it might be something incompatible with the software and the report I had prepared with MS Word and a PDF making utility.  So, instead of using the utility I was currently using, and had never had a problem with, I downloaded Open Office, which is a free replacement for Word, and can make PDF’s.

After going through that (big download, lengthy installation, and doing the conversion), still no luck.  I tried several different ways.

Then I put in a support request to the vendor.  Frustrated, I went home and ate dinner, hoping he would get back to me so I could finish up this part of my project.

With no response, I decided maybe it was that I needed to use the real Adobe PDF software, so I got onto my home computer, and downloaded a trial version (268 megabytes of download, which took a while), and tried to install it.  Unfortunately I got a famous Adobe message (program has caused errors and will be shut down) during the install process.

So, I figured I didn’t have enough memory on my home computer.  Not to worry.  I logged onto GoToMyPC to connect to my office computer which is more powerful, downloaded the software again (another 268 megabytes, which took a while), and tried to install it.  Again, install program caused errors and shut down.  I couldn’t even install the thing!  I tried rebooting.  No luck.
One last try.  I logged onto my laptop which runs Windows XP (the other computers run Windows 2000), downloaded Adobe again (another 268 megabytes which took a while), and installed it, which took a while but actually worked this time. Then I took my document, ran it through Adobe to make a PDF to see if the software I had purchased would like this document better.

Nope.

By then it was after 11 p.m. and I was so frustrated and annoyed I had trouble sleeping all night.
This morning I downloaded my morning emails, and had received a response from the vendor.  He was acting like I was an idiot because the problems were documented in the user guide and I should have read about it.

OK, my fault.  Except there was no user guide downloaded to my desktop.  The program icons were, but the user guide was quietly tucked away in the program files section, not a peep about them, but it was actually there.  And yes, it did mention what I was trying to do, and the workaround.

To answer my own question, good customer support is anticipating what the customer is going to need, and making sure he or she has it readily available.  Writing something down and hiding it isn’t good customer support.

I can understand vendors can be in far different time zones, I have to live with that, so when I had no response between 2 p.m. and 11 p.m., the man might have been asleep.  But the problem was so zany, and the solution so equally zany, that you have to wonder why the user manuals can’t just be downloaded to the desktop in a folder with the programs.

Or am I wrong?

Anyway, end of rant.  Big news coming tomorrow, I think.  Be here!

Share This

I was just looking at my MyYahoo page, and saw this news article, titled “4 ways to double your money in 5 years“.

It occurred to me just how lucky Internet Marketers are to live in the current day and age.

Investors would love to be able to double their money in 5 years, and we have opportunities to double our money overnight, or sooner in many cases.

There are many techniques to do so. None are guaranteed, of course, nor are the techniques in the news article guaranteed. However, it is very routine for marketers to, just as an example, buy AdWords advertising and double their money. In a month. In a week. In a day! And continue to buy ads to double their money over and over again.

No, you can’t double, then double, then double again, so doing would enable you to accumulate the wealth of the world in short order. But if you start with $100 or $1000, there is no reason why, once you have the skills, that you can’t make that $100 into $200, or that $1000 into $2000. You do have to work for your profits, but so do landlords or business owners, or stock investors.

Plus, the cost of getting into the game is much less, you can start with $100, where you would need a large down payment to purchase some real estate, most likely.

There are other ways to double your money overnight. For example the $7 reports that I’ve mentioned before. I spent $7, and have gotten commissions for dozens of those reports.

By the way, there’s a new report available now, called Zero to Fifty in 30 Days, which discusses how to take your income from $0 a day to $50 a day in a month.

Sort of reminds me of 5 bucks a day. The techniques are a little more rigid, but they would work. There might be a limit to your earning potential, but again here’s a way to double some money you have lying around.

Both the $7 Secrets report and the Zero to Fifty report allow you to resell them for 100% commission, so if you have a list of subscribers, it’s almost inevitable that you’ll turn your $7 investment into a profit of more than 100% very quickly.

Double your money in 5 years? That doesn’t impress me one bit!

Share This