5 Bucks a Day

In the U.S. at least, this was the beginning of the holiday shopping season. From the reports in the newspapers, there were record crowds and sales in the area because of the mild weather and killer sales.

I only know what I read in the paper, because honestly I can’t stand shopping in the malls anymore, even though I’ve also read in the paper that our local Paramus NJ is shopping mall capital of the U.S. based on whatever criteria they use.

The last few years I’ve been able to do almost all of my shopping online. I love amazon.com personally. Here’s an example. My son saw a digital camera he was interested in, and it was on “sale” at Staples for $199.97.

So I went online, accessed the Staples sales circular, got the model number, and searched for it at amazon.

At amazon they reported the suggested retail price was $199.98 (quite a sale you’re having there, Staples ) and amazon has it for $179.95. With free shipping.

Now why would anyone want to drive to the malls in horrendous traffic, paying $3 or more for each gallon of gasoline, circle the parking lots waiting for someone to leave, or get there hours early to be in line early, then line up to pay more money? And then drive home and be dead tired and cranky? Not me.

I’m sure there are legitimate deals to be had at the stores, but the lack of stress by shopping online is a good deal for me.

With the time I can save by staying at home, I can spend those hours building another web site as an affiliate merchant, and likely more than pay for my purchases with the money I earn in the time I don’t spend shopping. That’s what I mean by “virtually free” in the headline.

Ah, Internet marketing, you can’t beat it.

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Unless your ISP melted under the blitz, you had more than a few emails today about Google Assassin. In fact, I received at least half a dozen emails from a couple different people. Each. All told, I probably was told 50 or more times to go, go, go, GA is live.

I was given free access in advance so that I could review the product, since I had made a few sales of Day Job Killer a while back, I guess. I also got to review the sales copy in advance, but what was particularly interesting was the video that was put up a day or two ago.

If you fast forwarded past the proof of income shots (note to Chris: boring to all but you and your wife ), it got into the meat of what was to be included in the membership area.

I have to say, for $67 a month, it sure beats the competition all to heck. In fact the competition is promoting this site, I guess if you can’t beat em, join em.

But as of Sunday I hadn’t had a chance to take the tools for a test drive, so I asked the members of Earn1KaDay if they wanted me to spend the time to review it for them. They’d seen the pre=launch hype also, and it was a collective yawn, don’t bother.

So I’m sorry, I have no honest review from a test drive. I do have an opinion from watching the video though. I personally can’t see how giving all these powerful tools to all these people that are breaking out their wallets will enable any of them to have an advantage on any of the others.

Aren’t all the people getting the same information? What am I missing here? Why should I be spending my time (and money) seeing what products GA tells us all to promote if several hundred (thousand?) people are getting the same information?

Wouldn’t my time be better spent thinking outside the box, finding my own secret niches, writing my own unique ads or articles, doing my own thing?

Or am I missing something?

I do have to give credit where credit is due. Chris McNeeney and his people sure write convincing sales letters, and they sure are prolific in pumping out product after product. I’m sure there are a lot of JV partners making a bundle on these launches.

But I’m wondering if these JV partners have noticed a trend of massive unsubscribe rates whenever they feel the need to send out 15 emails in 3 days about the same thing. Personally I think I’d prefer to keep people on my list so that I can tell them about something that I found that nobody else is telling them about.

But maybe that’s just me.

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I read an eBook this week that I wish would have been available oh, about 9 years ago.  I’d be a millionaire by now many times over if I had it then.

Back when I was heavier into eBay (I still sell every day, but mostly the same things that I’ve been selling for years, which I keep relisting, that I get from trusty suppliers), I used to always look for the magic wholesale list that would enable me to find stuff that could be sold for a profit.

The trouble with the wholesale lists is that they’re available to anyone willing to spend the few dollars.  Then you start competing not by who has the best product line, because you all all have the same, but by who’s willing to sell closest to cost.

Whap go the profits.  That’s no fun.

Dennis Hester has written a great guide called “The Product Hunter” that should enable you to find merchandise nobody, or very few others are selling, right in your neighborhood.  He lists over 20 sources that he’s found over the years to get sellable merchandise for great prices.

If you’re into eBay heavily, you really shouldn’t be without this guide for finding wholesale merchandise for eBay sellers.

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I’m happy to see an announcement in the Google AdWords blog about how the clickable area on an ad shown on sites displaying AdSense is managed.

In the past, if someone clicked anywhere in the general area of an ad, it registered and off it went, whoosh. In fact I remember my first scare, when I was attempting to copy and paste a section of an article on my own page, and without knowing what would happen, I put the cursor over the text, meaning to copy a few paragraphs, and when my mouse clicked it went to an advertiser.

I found out quickly the reason. Beside my text was a large rectangle ad, and my cursor must have wandered over into that area by a pixel or two, and it registered. Even though it was nowhere near the text of the ad, evidently it was into the large rectangular area.

I was horrified. Would Google notice me clicking on my own ad? Would my account be suspended or investigated for click fraud? I shot off an email to support, telling them the problem and my IP address, and no harm was done, but I lived in fear from that point on about copying text from my pages.

Now according to the article I linked to above, a click will only register if you click on the title or on the URL of text ads. I guess by reading between the lines, if there’s an image or video ad though, the entire area is still hot, so watch out.

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I have a programming background (way in the background, to be honest), and sometimes I like to fool around with challenges like one I’m currently banging my head against the wall with.

I want to start up a Wiki, so that I can make individual spaces available for members of my Earn1KaDay.com membership site.  What I want to accomplish is allowing members to reserve specific sections.  For the sake of the discussion, let’s say each one gets to reserve a keyword phrase.  So one member might get auto insurance, one might get mortgage loans, one might get acne treatment.

I want to restrict each Wiki page so that only the owner can edit it.  I think I’ve figured out how to do that using TikiWiki.

But I also want to make the url’s to the pages be search engine friendly, in other words, instead of:
http://www.domainname.com/tiki-index.php?page=auto+insurance

I want it to be:
http://www.domainname.com/auto_insurance

I think I’ve figured out how to do that with WikiMedia.

I haven’t figured out how to do both requirements with either software, though.  I’m sure it’s possible.  I’m sure there are a thousand people out there who can tell me how to do that off the top of their head.

If one of those people is a reader, please contact me and tell me what you’ll charge me to help me out.

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It occurs to me that there may be many readers that get confused about some of the things that I regularly babble on about.

For example, IM.  IM can be either of two things, actually, it can be Internet marketing, or it can be information marketing.  Or both at the same time.

Normally most of my discussions are about Internet marketing, which actually is a business model where you sell something by using the Internet.  That might be even something very familiar as selling on eBay, actually, or it may be selling an eBook, a video, (these are examples of information marketing as well), it could be promoting a product on a blog, through emails, etc.

In the future I want to get more into the types of information that you could market, but today I just want to set the stage.  Yes, the Internet is a vast warehouse of information.  Yes, most of the information that IM’ers market is freely available, though there are those who do come up with unique and valuable ideas, which you don’t want to miss out on by assuming you can find their ideas for free elsewhere.

Personally, I purchase thousands of dollars worth of eBooks, video series, and other information products annually.  I’m happy to get one good idea for every $100 I spend.  A good idea is golden.  You won’t find one in every product, but when you do, cherish it, write it down so you don’t forget it, and most of all act on it.

A good idea is worthless if action isn’t taken on it.

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Most Internet marketers think of joint ventures as the act of a product owner finding partners willing to promote their product to the partner’s list of email addresses. As an incentive for doing that the product owner may sometimes offer additional commissions or other incentives.

More and more though, at Earn1KaDay.com, I’m seeing true joint ventures take place, and I’m thrilled at the trend. In these cases, people are getting together to jointly produce a product. For example, one person might have programming skills, and the other have writing skills. Together they can produce a better product than either could produce independently.

In fact, together they can produce a product, where independently they couldn’t do anything at all.  That’s what I consider the real power in a true joint venture.

How do you find partners? Join a true Internet marketing forum. Get to know people, learn their skills and needs. Figure out what you can bring to the table. And listen when you hear people tell what their problems are, such as “I wish there was something that could help me …”. Can you design something that will fill that need, but don’t have all the skills necessary? Find someone that has the skills you lack, and approach him or her. It could be a match made in heaven.

Yes, Internet marketers tend to work alone, but that doesn’t need to be the case.

And yes, the traditional IM JV can still happen as well, where you get multiple people to promote your product after it’s ready.

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