Can’t Get Rich

I just haven’t had much luck with digital goods lately. While other affiliate marketers have made their fortunes from ebooks, dating services, and ringtones, it’s just not working out for me. That’s why I’ve decided to try a different approach, one mainly focusing on eBay.

As I mentioned the other day, I’m going to try to get into the affiliate niche store business. I’m testing one right now, and if I can find a good method of driving traffic, I’ll probably build 10-25 stores a month (and many more if I really start making money).

While affiliate stores are all well and good, I’m thinking of taking it a step further and actually starting an eBay store. I’ve been thinking if over for awhile, and I’ve decided to do a few trial auctions for imported items from Japan. If things work out well, I’ll start doing lots and lots of them. I have a friend over in Japan who is going to sea-mail me a big box of stuff, stuff that our research shows we can get a 300% ROI. Isn’t legitimate business fun?

Ebay has always been fascinating to me. You can sell the most mundane crap on there. Just as an example, I have an uncle who lives by a pier in New York. He used to go out to that pier at low tide, pick up snails, and sell them on eBay. Now he makes a pretty decent living selling aquarium stuff. I find it amazing that you can just pick up crap you’ve found lying around and sell it on eBay.

How can you apply this to your situation? What if you don’t live near an ocean? Well, for starters, pay attention to what’s on sale in your area. If you find a store that’s overstocked and having a 90% off sale, buy up whatever it is they’re selling and resell it. A long time ago, a store in my hometown was overstocked on Gameboy Advance games and was selling them for $5 a piece. I bought 20 of them and resold them for an average for $30 each.  Huge profit.

Of course, managing an eBay store takes a lot of work when you factor in order tracking and shipping, so it’s not for everyone. Still, if you think you can find a niche and crack it, you stand to make a lot of money.

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I have nothing against Macs, but I can’t stand their fan club.

You know what I’m talking about. The snobbish elitism. The contemptuous glares. That smug, self righteous attitude. For some reason, Mac users seem to think that they’re part of some secret club of elite super users. What’s worse is that they don’t seem to actually know much about their favorite OS. 90% of them never use the CLI, much less realize that OSX is just BSD with a shiny wrapper. They love to boast about how their ’superior’ operating system doesn’t need virus/spyware protection, but they really don’t seem to understand why. Here, I’ll help:

Short version: Nobody cares.

Long version: Why would anybody take the time to find an exploit in the Mac OS, and then write a virus for it? Mac users comprise such a tiny percentage of the desktop market share that there’s really no point in wasting your time.

You guys know why most viruses are created, right? Server infiltration. Backdoors, botnets, etc. Windows Server OSs are such nice targets because they’re so easy to setup that very few people actually take the time to secure them properly. Speaking of servers, let me tell you a joke that we have at my workplace. It’s just two words: “Mac Server”. Don’t understand? It’s funny because nobody uses the Mac OS for web servers, or nearly any kind of server for that matter (although Apple makes decent RAID arrays). Are you starting to understand? Mac is secure because it’s just not important. *cue the fanboys*

Here, let me explain the three primary OSs, and which one is right for you.

*nix

Unix, Linux, Ubuntu, Red Hat, Fedora, Debian, Solaris, there are hundreds of distros. Linux is great for servers because it’s open source, meaning that bugs are quickly caught and corrected. The downside is that some people find it difficult to setup and manage, and the command line interface takes some getting used to.

We don’t care about servers though, right? Let’s talk about Linux as a desktop OS. Ubuntu is the most popular, due to it’s ease of installation and PR campaign. If all you need a computer for is Internet, email, and word processing, Ubuntu is the right OS for you. It’s easy to setup, and as long as you stay out of the shell, hard to break. It’s free to use, and it comes pre-loaded with pretty much everything your basic computer user needs.

What about power users though? Linux is great for programmers and developers. If you know what you’re doing, you can make Linux do nearly anything you want.

I only recommend Linux for absolute beginners and pros. If you’re somewhere in the middle, chances are you’ll break something.

Mac

Mac OSX is fine if you don’t mind paying $2,000 for a computer. I recommend it to rich people and morons. Why morons? Because it’s hard to break. As I mentioned earlier, it doesn’t get infected with Windows viruses and spyware. You know what though? Those viruses and spyware are usually brought into the system by the user (moron) opening email attachments, downloading toolbars, and pretty much sucking at the Internet. If you like expensive shiny things and don’t have a shred of common sense, go with Mac.

(I will admit that Macs are great for graphic design, but that’s a very small percentage of overall users)

Windows

I bought a new computer last summer. I was torn between a Dell Inspiron desktop and an iMac. On one hand, the iMac would do practically everything I needed, but on the other hand, the Dell was half as expensive and had twice the hardware power. Looking back, I’m not sure why I had such a hard time deciding.

Windows is the middle ground between Mac and Linux. You have a lot more options in terms of hardware and software with Windows compared to Mac, at the cost of actually having to use your brain when deciding whether or not to click on a flashing banner online. Sure, IE sucks, but that’s what Firefox is for. Most importantly though, is that you can play games on Windows. Sure, Mac has a decent library, but Windows has 10x as many titles available. Hooray games.

Let me summarize that for you

Mac is for:

• Artists
• Rich people
• Morons

Linux is for:

• Coders
• Power users
• Poor people with old hardware

Windows is for:

• Gamers
• Businesses
• Average users

Feel free to make use of the ‘hate mail’ option on my contact form.

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It’s been brought to my attention that some of you don’t want to be exposed to my wit and charm on a daily basis, and would rather only subscribe to my weekend podcasts. I understand. It’s just like staring into the sun: You can only take so much sarcasm before your eyes melt. So, for those of you who only want to subscribe to my podcast, I’ve added a link on my Podcast Page (see that graphic I added to my sidebar?  The one that I can’t get to look good no matter where I put it? It leads there too). The link at the very top of the page will lead you to my podcast-only feed.

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Here’s a quick peek at what I’ve got lined up for this week’s podcast.

First of all, I managed to get things figured out with Paul, so he’ll be appearing on this week’s show. I’ve got plenty of questions for him, as he’s had a rough week in terms of shock and outrage. You’ll see what I mean

For my second interview, I’ll be talking to Lord Brar. He’s pretty well-known on Wickedfire, and apparently he’s the go-to guy when it comes to domaining. I don’t really know anything about him or domaining, so it should be an informative interview.

Listener Questions

Just a quick heads up - If you guys leave a comment with a question for one of my guests, chances are I won’t receive it. I’ve been getting literally 200 spam comments per day for the past week, and Akismet is eating everything. I’m going through the filter a few times a day, but I still might miss something. If you really want your question to be asked, please use my contact form.

Next Week’s Episode

I’m not going to say much about it yet, as I still don’t have have all the details sorted out, but right now it looks like I’ll be talking to three of the big guys from Wickedfire: Jon (the owner), Eli (of BlueHatSEO), and one other guy (maybe? no confirmation yet).  It’s looking like I’ll be talking to all three simultaneously, so it should be interesting.

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It seems like everybody on the Internet has made eBay affiliate stores, so I figured I might as well join the party. Here’s what I plan on doing, and what I’ve done so far:

Sign up for an eBay affiliate account

I signed up with my primary email they day they switched to their new system. I never heard back from them, so today I signed up with one of my other emails. If you’re not familiar with it, the eBay affiliate system pays it’s affiliates 50%-75% of the revenue that eBay makes from auctions referred to them by the affiliate. You may be wondering why I bolded those four words. Well, put simply, a lot of people out there seem to think that they make 50%-75% of the item’s final price. This shows you that they’ve never made a single sale from their site. You only get a percentage of what eBay makes (that’s the listing fee, a very small percentage of the final item price, and any additional fees charged for special listing options). Still, that can add up.

Picking a plugin

Ah, the eternal struggle. PHPBay Pro or BANS? I say screw them both. I’m using PHPBay Lite. There’s no sense in paying for something if I’m not making any money yet.

If I do happen to start making money with this, I’ll just upgrade to PHPBay Pro. Nothing against BANS, but PHPBay Pro integrates directly with Wordpress, and Wordpress is great for SEO.

Pick a niche

There are literally thousands of niches. You can pick a product that’s in the news, popular on eBay, one that you saw at a pawn shop, whatever. It’s really not that hard. Just don’t pick something like XBox 360s or expensive cars, because everybody else is already doing that. Microniches are best, so instead of using a very broad category (Pokemon) pick something fairly specific (Mudkips).

Buy a domain

Nicheauctions.com. Replace ‘niche’ with whatever you’re promoting. If the .com is taken, see if it’s actually being used or if it’s just parked.

Get traffic

Like I said a few days ago, I’m getting out of PPC for awhile, which pretty much limits me to organic search and social traffic. Since I’m relying on organic search, I had to do a little extra research into keywords that are easy to rank for. Again, that’s pretty easy to do. If whatever ranks #1 for your primary keyword looks like this:

http://www.site.com/product/category/subcategory/niche.html

You’re in business.

I also plan on submitting my sites to free directories (myself, not hiring anybody). A few months ago I paid someone to do that for me, and now I have a list of 500 free directories. Time consuming? Sure, but I’m not doing anything else at work.

Keep building

Don’t just sit there and wait for the one site to work. Keep finding new niches and building more sites. Before you know it, you’ll have 100 auction sites each making you $50 a month. From there, you can sell the whole lot of them for $50,000-$75,000 and buy a whole lot of Jones Soda.

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