Neville's Financial Blog

My Affiliate Marketing Experiment - Part 7

2010-02-25T15:00:00.000-08:00

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7:

....so eventually I pulled the plug on this little experiment (it ran for roughly 5 weeks) even though I was still making some money.

One of the negative parts about affiliate marketing I mentioned was the price of Pay-Per-Click varies wildly, especially when people are bidding up keywords. This can be the difference between a profit and loss if you don't watch out. This happened several times and the cost I had to pay shot up too much to be as profitable.

Basically I got these campaigns running for the experiment, but when I stopped paying attention, most of the good keywords stopped running because they exceeded my set budget. Eventually most traffic died down, a sale was made here and there, but nothing big.

Ultimately I ended up bringing in $727 from the BluCigs campaign and $360 from the GreenSmoke campaign (about 90% of that money was from that first 5 weeks) and paid a total of $166 for Google Adsense.

I could have kept on going, but the amount of effort for a short-term profit wasn't worth it, especially when I already have profitable businesses of my own that offer a more long term payoff. I can already see some of you trying to signup and start your own experiments with these ;-)

...however...hopefully this experiment demonstrated the POTENTIAL this sort of business model has in a more legitimate form. I wish I knew about it a long time ago when I was an active "financial" blogger.

I learned a lot and made a net profit!
-Neville Medhora

My Affiliate Marketing Experiment - Part 6

2010-02-23T15:30:00.000-08:00

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6:

At this point in my little experiment I've made some money and learned a few pro's and con's about this affiliate marketing industry (at least the low-end type):

Pro's of simple affiliate marketing:

It's possible to start making money very quickly with relatively little work.
It's possible to scale up successful campaigns to large levels.
It's possible to "sell" a product without knowing anything about it.

It's not hard to see why so many get-rich-quick books teach this very method of making money...because it SEEMS like it could work for anyone. Some people might even have some nominal success trying something like this, but very quickly the con's start showing their head:

Con's of simple affiliate marketing:

It's possible to LOSE those quickly-gained profits very quickly also.
Most successful campaigns you create will start to garner much attention from other affiliate marketers who quickly start copying you.
You have to be hush about your work....you can't openly talk about what you're promoting or your methods. This is why many people I talked to about this were so secretive.

By and far the largest con I see with doing this simple type of affiliate marketing is there is no long term value being provided. With my business HouseOfRave for example, everything I do today pays off for months at a time, even years.

With these small affiliate promotions, there is very little value ultimately being imparted to the customer. Ultimately a beginner trying to simply "make money online" with these almost-scam-like promotions will probably end up disappointed.

But screw that, I was now up to $371 in profit with JUST BluCigs and I'd barely spent $70 to get there!

....and this experiment called for finding out how to make a landing and optimize it with Google Website Optimizer, so that was the next step.

Basically what I'm trying to do in this step is have several versions of the same page and measure the effectiveness of each. After X-amount of people cycle through each version, a clear winner is usually identified. This is called an A/B Split Test...and if you do this enough, you can identify which pages convert the most people.

For this I had to do several things:

Make a separate landing page to send traffic (I chose ecigaretterecs.com).
Make three different versions of the page.
Enter all this stuff into Google Website Optimizer.
Drive traffic to the site, wait for results.

I didn't say this experiment was going to be pretty, I just wanted to learn the underlying lessons in it, so here goes:

Step 1.) Buy the domain name.

I chose ecigaretterecs.com because all sorts of other combinations were taken. Ultimately it didn't matter what the domain was. Even I kept forgetting what name I had purchased. I setup the site on my server and was up and running.

Step 2.) Make three versions of the page.

I wanted a basic page that looked sort of like a reviews site, a site where you go to get reviews of a particular genre of product. I actually first purchased a Wordpress plugin that makes a fully-functional reviews site, but I wanted this experiment to be extremely quick and dirty so I did it the ghetto home-made way.

Since E-cigarettes are quite new, there are multiple brands people want to look through before choosing one. I would provide this review information for them on this (ghetto and poorly made) page (ecigaretterecs.com).

I decided I would make three very different versions: 1 stylish, 1 simple and plan, 1 supper-ghetto:

(This was the "stylish" one...shut up, don't make fun of my web design skilzz).

(This was "plain and simple").

(This was the bare-bones and ugly one).

...the point of this is to simply test out different versions and see if there was any statistical difference in how each of them converted into sales. Sometimes the data is very surprising. I find from many friends who do this on a large scale that ugly and simply is often better.

NOTE: An A/B Split Test doesn't need to have versions that are so dramatically different like this experiment, it can simply be a different picture or different headline text for each version.

Step 3.) Enter into Google Website Optimizer

I went through the Google Optimizer process and outfitted each version of the page with special snippets of code (keep in mind this is something almost ANYONE can do) and set all the links to go to the affiliate sites I earlier created with the custom headers.

Now when someone lands on the webpage ecigaretterecs.com, it randomly selects which version of that page to show the visitor. So if you look at that page from your computer and your friend views it from a different computer, there is a good chance you will see a completely different page.

Google Website Optimizer then collects information over time and tracks the conversion rates to see if there is a statistically "better" version. When I ended up pulling the plug on this experiment there were 190 page visits, but no statistical variance shown (you usually need around 50 conversions per variant before conclusions can be drawn).

I didn't get the final results before I pulled the plug on this experiment, but I didn't care. I had learned how to A/B Split Test which was the important thing....now I can use it to make already-profitable pages more profitable.

So far I've accomplished almost everything I set out to learn with this experiment, and I even made some money.

I was still making money, so why did I finally end up pulling the plug on this experiment?

Go to Part 7.

Working...or not

2010-02-21T16:03:00.000-08:00

At the beginning of this month one of my goals was to make a blog post every 2 days on this blog...well my last one was THREE days ago, so I need to make up (Carnaval in Austin definitely got in the way)!

I have 12 minutes to write/edit/publish this post before the security guard at the library kicks me out, so here goes:

I just read a post by Dave (brought my attention by Adam's Twitter stream) about his transition from having a job to owning a business. I always like it when people take that leap, even if it doesn't work out, I'm sure they will learn a massive amount.

It made me reflect on my own experience with this. I've never had a job except one in college where I did NOTHING but work on my own businesses then promptly quit when they made me do work.

After college I never got a job...I didn't (still don't) even have a resume. I simply continued running my businesses I had already started. It's really the only way of working I've ever known, and I must say...I like it. Judging by the way most people talk about their jobs, it seems I've made the correct choice.

One thing I really like about owning a business, aside from all the fun stuff like being able to label your own role or change what you do by starting a new business....all your success depends entirely on you.

In ten years if I'm homeless and living on the side of the road, you can point directly at the person whose fault that was. I like that responsibility because it puts you in charge of your destiny a little more than working for someone else. In a sense, they control your future. If they go out of business, you do too.

I know people who worked for Dell at the right time in history who made millions on stock options, and people who worked the same jobs a few years later who weren't quite as fortunate. That irks me. It's kind of a lottery you play. You COULD get successful, but your involvement doesn't dictate it.

Ok, the guard is giving me the stink-eye, time to jet!

My Affiliate Marketing Experiment - Part 5

2010-02-18T19:45:00.000-08:00

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5:

...so now I had a very simple yet profitable affiliate campaign running. The next step was to try out some of the other e-cigarette companies with affiliate programs. I found another seemingly good e-cig company called GreenSmoke and joined their affiliate program.

I already knew what to do (and not to do) thanks to my prior BluCigs experiment, so I quickly setup my GreenSmoke campaign:

I registered a domain called BuyGreenSmokes.com
PhotoShopped a custom frames header for it that made it seem like part of the GreenSmoke website.
I made the framed header like I BluCigsStore site and got the new site running.
Immediately posted some Google AdWords pointing towards it.

Since I already knew what to do, within about 1 hour I completed most of this work. When BuyGreenSmokes.com went live it looked like:

So just like the BluCigs page I made, anytime someone gets to this page through my link and buys something, I make money.

Speaking of the BluCigs experiment, whilst I was making the GreenSmoke page and signing up for other affiliate programs, this small little experiment of mine had been working. I had been making 1-2 sales per day from the Blu campaign, and within a few days here was my revenue:

At this time for every dollar I spent on AdWords, I was making $6 back. So a 6X Return on Investment. At this point I had never seen the product I sold or promoted, didn't know anything about them and wasn't particularly "helping" anyone. In fact the people who came through my links never knew who I was or that they were coming through an affiliate.

However in about a week I earned my first check:

This is a very simple affiliate experiment, and probably against the rules of most affiliate offers. You see, I'm not ACTUALLY adding any value to the companies whose products I'm promoting. They probably would've made these sales regardless if I was in the picture or not.

Now lets say I owned a large forum for smokers to talk about smoking....then I write an article about how great BluCigs or GreenSmoke electronic cigarettes are. If those articles contained affiliate links that people followed then purchased products, THAT would be of great value to the companies....they just made sales they probably wouldn't have without you.

REWIND BACK to the first post of this experiment, I was talking about why a lot of affiliate marketers seemed shady:

"I can tell them I own a rave store and sell light up stuff online. It's pretty straightforward, and they can even see the website for themselves. Why were these people acting so shady? They were obviously hiding something or lying about something."

From this little experiment the answer became pretty obvious: They don't want competition.

If I told someone "I'm doing this easy affiliate program for BluCigs and making 6X my money" ....what do you think would happen REALLY soon??

That's right, tons of people copying you. Cool...a little competition never hurt. But what's different now is since there are other people bidding for your same keywords on your ads, the PRICE GOES UP. Now instead of making 6X my money, I'm down to 2X all of a sudden....and if more people start bidding the price up, I might even start losing money soon.

So all of a sudden I'm making tons of cash, then one week later that same campaign is LOSING money. No wonder people keep their mouth shut.

So the first two questions of my original list of things to learn were mainly answered.

Now I wanted to learn about making a good landing page using Google Website Optimizer. This could be something I could use on my other businesses to make more money. All the while I was learning all these new things, I was still collecting about $100+ per week in commissions from this small-time experiment....

Go to Part 6

My Affiliate Marketing Experiment - Part 4

2010-02-16T18:14:00.000-08:00

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4:

So for the first part of this experiment I decided to try something really simple that could just be a proof of concept....just to if it could work. I wanted to do a simple campaign where I promote an affiliate link over Google Adwords. When someone clicks through to the ad and buys, I get a commission. So long as I spend less to buy the ads than my commissions ad up to, I make money. It works in theory, now to see if it works in action....

Step 1.) I had to find something to promote:

I could've either joined something like CJ.com or ClickBank.com to find affiliate offers to promote or find one myself. I decided to steer clear of the affiliate networks for this simple experiment solely to find something easy to promote without tons of competition doing the same thing.

I had seen some videos about this new thing called "electronic cigarettes" becoming popular in bars, and started Googling. I'm not a smoker, but this e-cig concept seemed like a brand new industry which has the potential to become big, but hasn't yet.

I did a little research on e-cigarettes and first joined the BluCigs.com affiliate program simply because they had the best looking marketing material and easiest-to-buy-from website (See that link for BluCigs in the previous sentence? THAT'S an affiliate link in action! If you buy after clicking that link, I make a commission).

So now they gave me an affiliate link to place on my advertisements:
http://affiliate.blucigs.com/idevaffiliate.php?id=3257_0_3_1

Whenever you click that link, it takes you directly to the BluCigs website and if you make a purchase after you click that link, I make a commission! Simple affiliate marketing in action. Understand?

I now have something to promote....e-cigarettes...and I don't even know a damn thing about them.

Step 2.) Get some people to click that link!

I could either make my own ecigarettes site and build up a readership over time, but this is supposed to be a quick experiment, so the best way to get traffic is to BUY IT.

Since e-cigarettes aren't such a massively popular keyword at this point, the traffic is was dirt cheap. I could pay $0.05 per click and still be in the top results (or only result) for many keywords.

I immediately made a couple of Google AdWords ads and posted them. Here was one of them:

Once again...Whenever you click that sponsored link, it takes you directly to the BluCigs website and if you make a purchase after you click that link, I make a commission! Simple affiliate marketing in action. Understand?

Step 3.) Make some moola

So now I just sit back and waste money on buying traffic to see if I make a sale. I thought this would take longer than it did, but sure enough in about 2 days (or maybe less, I didn't check) I made my first sale! The BluCigs program gives me 20% of each sale, and it was a $59.95 sale, netting me $11.99 in commission....so far I'd only spent about $0.50 in ads! Pretty good return on investment!

This 24X return on investment was on an extremely small scale, so I was excited to see if that pace would keep up. However if it does, you see how certain people can make lots of money with very little?

A day or two later, I made ANOTHER SALE for $104.95, netting me a total of $20.99 in commissions! Even though this isn't a whole lot of money, I was excited my dinky little experiment was giving a good ROI (return on investment). Using less than $5 I now made $32.98 back. At this point I still didn't even really know what an e-cigarette was, but I was making money off them.

Step 4.) Get caught

Google first slapped my hand in the beginning of this experiment and and pulled my ad since cigarette-related terms cannot be advertised. I changed the text so it never says "cigarette" or any closely-related term:

This worked for two days, then Google denied the ad again saying the link-to URL was different than what was advertised (I guess since I had the referral link in it) so they asked me to change it. Unfortunately I couldn't get Google to accept my ad anymore.....I've been doing an affiliate marketing experiment for only a few days and ALREADY I was caught for doing something shady! :-)

Well, Google has a fair policy to ensure quality, so I decided an alternate and perfectly OK way of doing this....

Step 5.) Make my own domain

I bought a domain called BluCigsStore.com (if you recall the actually website is called BluCigs.com, without the suffix "Store") and made an auto-direct script for the page to forward to my affiliate link. I immediately changed the banned ad to BluCigsStore.com and Google accepted the changes, I was back in business! This cost me about $19 to privately register the domain name (so my name is not immediately associated with it).

A problem I noticed earlier was if people browsed around the internet researching these BluCigs, they would invariably click on several affiliate links. Whoever was the LAST affiliate link gets the commission.

To help improve my odds of being that person, I made a simple frames page (just used a template in Microsoft FrontPage since I can't even write simple HTML). Nothing shady or illegal about this, and it actually added some value to the customer because it makes it easier for them to navigate. I used Photoshop to make the graphic for the frame header, and FrontPage to create the simple frames page and picture-link the graphic.

Now when you go to BluCigsStore.com you see the normal store with a static header on it that doesn't move. When you click around the site, that header stays up. If you want to navigate home, it has a button for that. It also has an EXIT button that is a link to my affiliate link:

Using the frame bar on my own browser made it easier to navigate the site for me, so I'm guessing other people probably found it helpful (and probably never expected it was an affiliate tactic...just part of the normal site).

So Google once again approved my ads and I started making more money....

Go to Part 5

My Affiliate Marketing Experiment - Part 3

2010-02-14T11:00:00.000-08:00

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3:

My favorite method of learning something is jumping into it. I'll usually start by reading all I can about a subject, then quickly try a real life version of something simple, then something more advanced....an "experiment" so to say.

So I wanted to try an affiliate marketing experiment in order to learn all about this industry. From what I understood, a lot of affiliate marketing had to do with creating effective landing pages and making people want to buy or take action. Basically that means out of 100 visitors to a web page, how many of them can you make buy/signup whatever. Since I run an e-commerce store, this appealed to me. Perhaps learning some of this affiliate marketing could help me increase the effectiveness of my own business.

For the month of October 2009 I decided to embark on this affiliate marketing experiment in my spare time. I first made a written list of things I wanted to learn from it:

Learn why most affiliate marketers don't go into much detail about their work.
Learn more about what all this affiliate marketing stuff is about.
Learn to make great and effective landing pages.
Learn how to A/B split test landing pages using Google Website Optimizer.
Further understand how to optimize paid keywords and conversion rates.

Even if my real life experiment lost money, this list contains some pretty valuable skills that could add much benefit to my own business. So it was decided, the month of October 2009 I would try an affiliate marketing experiment to see how this all works.

Now to start a real life experiment promoting something......

Go to Part 4

My Affiliate Marketing Experiment - Part 2

2010-02-12T18:00:00.000-08:00

Part 1
Part 2:

....so the first thing I did was research the term "Affiliate Marketing" and printed out all the articles I could find. I read them all and took notes on a plane ride somewhere.

I read the Wikipedia article and a bunch of other search results, and the most basic idea behind Affiliate Marketing is:

Someone is selling a product.
You help promote that product.
When someone buys a product through your recommendation, you get paid a percentage of the sale.

SIMPLE.

I thought about this for a second and realized there are many successful companies that heavily use affiliate marketing in a non-shady way. These include Amazon, eBay and so many others. Amway and other companies also use an affiliate structure. Even car dealerships to a small extent seemed like "affiliates" of their larger companies.

The easiest example I can give of a super-simple affiliate marketing experiment is my books reviews page. If you click one of those book links and buy from Amazon, I get a small portion of the sale. Amazon is willing to do this because I helped drive a sale to their site through my review. If it weren't for me, they probably wouldn't have made that sale.

So THAT was affiliate marketing?? Not completely.

A lot of people I met talked about buying ads to promote their affiliate products....this was part of the term "Pay-Per-Click Arbitrage" I heard so much about. Some of the more intelligent people in the internet marketing group I attend made a lot of their money this way. I found out what some of these people do is:

Signup for an affiliate program for a product.
Buy ads on Google, Yahoo, banner ads etc promoting these products.
Clicks get sent directly to the product page or their own webpage promoting the product.
Whenever a sale is made from that action, they get a percentage of the sale.

This is a frequently touted method of getting rich quick by many crappy eBooks out there. In essence it makes sense. For Example:

If you buy paid clicks from Google costing $0.10/click.....
You send all that traffic to a webpage that offers an affiliate product/service/signup...whatever.
That service pays you $2 per transaction that succeeds.
If 1 out of every ten people completes that offer, that costs you $1.00 at Google.
So for every dollar you spend, you make two dollars.
So long as your spending is less than your earnings, you're making money.

The math behind this actually works, and some people legitimately make a lot of money doing this....and that's why people buying get-rich-quick schemes believe in these methods.

I thought this affiliate marketing world was a good model at its essence, so why was everyone I met in this world always so shady? If these people were making money doing arbitrage, why didn't they share details?

Just like the bottled water idea or homeless experiment, I decided to find out by simply trying it out....

Go to Part 3

My Affiliate Marketing Experiment - Part 1

2010-02-10T18:20:00.000-08:00

Spending a lot of time online I run across the term "Affiliate Marketing" all the time. I even go to an "internet marketing" event once a month here in Austin to meet other entrepreneurs, but always found some of the people doing affiliate marketing a little perplexing (and sort of shady).

When prying into what they do, they never gave me CLEAR answers. They would always say things like, "I do lead generation" or "performance marketing" or "sell an online product" and other buzzwords I didn't fully understand. I'd ask, "Ok, give me an example of a product you generate leads for" and they'd state a general industry at most (such as insurance, health or real estate). Some of the people said they do "PPC arbitrage" and that they "promote products" but wouldn't go much further into detail about their business.

I was never satisfied with these responses and just presumed these people were really shady (which some of them are).

So here I am trying to find out what these people do and they keep skirting around the actual details...WHAT THE HELL?

I can tell them I own a rave store and sell light up stuff online. It's a pretty straightforward, and they can even see the website for themselves. Why were these people acting so shady? They were obviously hiding something or lying about something.

Many of the people I met in the affiliate marketing world seemed to sell herbal pills online or get rich quick schemes for the masses. Most of the products they were promoting seemed relatively useless once purchased, and most had "interesting" billing plans.

In my mind, I saw "affiliate marketing" as referring to a website that promises to get you rich quick...something like this kind of crap:

(You should be PUNCHED if you even TRY to click that image).

I've read many bloggers like John Chow and other guys who make their living from blogging and they frequently talk about affiliate marketing. I kept wondering what exactly it was, especially since they correlate so much of their income to it.....so I decided to do some research and find out.....

Go to Part 2

The Condenser Mic

2010-02-08T17:10:00.001-08:00

For Christmas my brother bought me a Samson C01U Studio Condenser Microphone. That's basically fancy talk for a high quality microphone I can hookup to my computer:

I always wanted a nice mic but never got around to buying one, and now I realize all the fun things I can do with it.

For example:

I can speak like I'm on NPR radio and talk like the Saturday morning classical music announcer. Today we'll be listening to Concierto Number 5 by Beethoven.
I can even talk like God.

Silly stuff aside, I can record written posts into audio, all in a high quality format. I have some expensive software such as Adobe Sound Booth, but the free and open source program Audacity is by far my favorite and easiest to use so far.

I wrote this post simply to have a script to read from. You can now hear the whole thing here:

(or if that doesn't work, download here).

iPhone Goals = Awesome

2010-02-06T08:41:00.000-08:00

I stopped making monthly goals a while ago because I rarely followed up on them. They always get stuck on a sheet of paper somewhere which I promptly forget about on day 2 of the month.

I wrote my goals for February recently and snapped a pic on my iPhone....then had a brilliant moment where I SET IT AS MY WALLPAPER:

Now every time I look at my phone, guess what I see? Monthly goals staring me in the face waiting to be completed!

2009 In Numbers

2010-02-04T20:47:00.000-08:00

IN 2009 THERE WERE....
-------------------------------
154,458 Unique visitors to NevBlog according to Google Analytics.

442,307 Unique visitors to NevBlog according to Plesk Stats on my server.

84 Number of posts on NevBlog

5 Days spent homeless.

11,453 Miles put on my car.

87 Gigs of bandwith transferred to HouseOfRave customers.

377,176 Unique visitors to House Of Rave according to Google Analytics.

722,329 Unique visitors to House Of Rave according to Plesk Stats on my server.

$35,244 Amount of money I spent to live.

54 Times I rode the Cal Train

$1,892 Money spent on iPhone service.

1 Time I almost bashed my face in doing back flips on videotape.

Blogger's Almost Dead (To Me)

2010-02-02T09:39:00.000-08:00

Google officially announced it will be cancelling FTP support for all of Blogger.

You can read about it here.

This blog was started roughly 5 years ago and Blogger seemed to be the easiest blog platform to use at the time (and still is for most users).

However I use a custom-domain version of Blogger where it publishes files on MY server, not Blogger's....this of course causes much engineering difficulty for them, so they're pulling the plug.

Kind of sucks, but I completely understand their logic. 0.5% of people on Blogger use FTP support, but it probably drains 25% or more of their engineering resources. That's just bad business.

Anyhow, this blog has to move somewhere. I could easily pop this whole blog onto Blogger (which offers a lot of very easy to use tools), I can even still use my own domain name...but Blogger isn't very customizable as open-source platforms.

I asked myself, "If I was going to start this blog TODAY, what platform would I use?"

...the obvious answer is Wordpress, so I will use that.

I already use Wordpress for all business related blogs because it's MUCH faster, extremely customizable and has a MASSIVE library of free templates and widgets. I can't program very well, so customizing templates myself is a wee bit harder than Blogger, but something I've in the past been able to do (or pay someone to do).

I've many times considered crossing this blog over to Wordpress but there wasn't a real need....so this is actually a fortunate nudge in the right direction!

So pretty soon this blog will cross the blogging platform see to the Wordpress side. What do you think Adam?

Paul Graham - Relentlessly Resourceful Audio Recording

2010-02-01T14:32:00.000-08:00

This is me reading a March 2009 article from Paul Graham called Relentlessly Resourceful.

Play using Google Reader:

MP3 Download Location:
http://www.nevblog.com/files/relentlessly-resourceful.mp3

Sincerely,
Neville Medhora with special thanks to Paul Graham.

Lousy Interest Rates = Spend

2010-01-28T15:31:00.000-08:00

When the economy sucks, the government will generally lower interest rates so it's more enticing for you to SPEND money rather than SAVE.

Well they've done that big time right now, and I did a little sleuthing around at some of my non-risk-bearing accounts.

Example:

About 5 years ago I set up an Emigrant Direct account because internet banks usually offer higher interest rates than most traditional banks...and I've pretty much forgotten about it.

I stashed away about $25,000 in that account and checked it recently to be greeted with:

1.2% annual return??? HAHAHAH!!

This means my roughly $25,000 will earn $300 for a whole year of sitting there. Meanwhile the inflation rate right now is "officially" between 3-4%....and in reality is probably much higher.

So while I earn $300, my money loses $750 in value (at least). The account is no longer a "No risk" account...it's now a money pit.

Well that's a losing proposition, so while I already have an investment account I use to throw into businesses that make me money, it looks like I'll be almost forced to put some of that money to good use.

However with all the current tax breaks encouraging businesses to spend right now, taking money out of permanent savings accounts and spending them on money-making endeavors seems a smart idea right now.

Shopping spree time :-D

My Very First Business

2010-01-26T08:00:00.001-08:00

I consider my first REAL business to be House Of Rave (link), but before that were a bunch of other hair brained ideas to make money.

Of one of the very first was selling custom CD's in 9th grade. I'm taking a guess this was around 1997 or 1998 that me and my dad outfitted the family computer (a 33Mhz CPU with around 600 MB's of storage) with a CD burner.

This was a relatively rare thing...at least not many of my friends had access to a CD burner back then.

Around the same time MP3's had come on the scene. Most people didn't know what they were, but Napster was starting to make headlines here and there as an "illegal" file sharing service. I was all over Napster, downloading as many songs as I could over my dial-up connection and making CD's for my personal use.

Well it didn't take long for friends to see I could get ANY song and make a CD with different songs on it. I had something they wanted and couldn't get elsewhere, so the natural laws of supply and demand kicked in and I started selling custom made CD's!

People would make me a list of 17-20 songs on a sheet of paper...usually I'd already have the popular songs downloaded or on a CD already. The songs I didn't have I'd download on Napster (keep in mind...I was still using a dial-up at the time).

I would sell the CD's for about $1 per song, but would charge a little more if I had to download a lot of the songs. Generally the CD would cost them about $20 or $25. Close friends got special deals.

Making a CD back then wasn't especially hard, but there were a lot of constraints I had on my old family computer:

It was slow, so everything was sluggish.
I only had 400MB of free space, so I couldn't make a full 720MB CD at once, I had to chop it up into sections.
I couldn't store all the songs on the computer, so I'd have to delete something to make space, insert a CD with the song, rip the song to the computer, then burn the ripped song to the custom CD, then delete that file again. Process varied depending on the song source.
MP3's were so new, so I had to manually convert the MP3's to huge .WAV files for the burning software.

Making a single CD with all these swaps, changes, deletes, downloads etc. could sometimes take almost 2 hours or boring work. Remember, this was an old computer and stalls were common place. However it normally took me 30 min to 1 hour per CD. I did this all after school.

The next day at school I'd show up with the CD, they'd show up with the money and I'd make a 100% profit since I had no expenses (my parents paid for the computer, burner and CD's...unknowing I was making money off it)!

Due to all the constraints my limit was about one custom CD per day....and $20 for a CD was a lot to me, so I was fine with it.

Then one day I got caught. I didn't even realize I COULD get "caught" for what I was doing. It just didn't seem wrong. I made a CD transaction in my English class, and the teacher saw it....no big deal, I traded all my CD's in class.

The teacher yanked the CD and questioned me. She got really furious and said, "I read an article about these "M...P........3's?" and they're ILLEGAL." It sounded like I was selling drugs in her classroom! I remember it pretty vividly because she was a teacher that never raised her voice, but all of a sudden SNAPPED when it came to MP3's!

She took me aside after class and sternly warned that she wasn't going to report me...but if I EVER brought an "M...P...3" in school again she would.

I remember thinking, "report me for WHAT?" Since the recording industry was so behind on moving into digital downloads, a whole generation of kids like me never thought twice that downloading a song might be punishable.

So my side hobby of selling CD's went on for a while (although not in the classrooms of course) until more and more people had access to CD burners, plus summer came and there was no school. Eventually everyone knew someone with a CD burner and the small technology advantage I had faded. I made my cash and I was happy to not have to sit in front of the computer watching a status bar!

Brain Food and Inspiration: Steve Wozniak

2010-01-24T09:49:00.000-08:00

Checkout this bio about Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

Part 5:

Part 6:

He's the technical brains behind many of the first Apple products.

Learning from being drunk

2010-01-22T12:00:00.000-08:00

In college I was first exposed to people who would get drunk when they go out. It was always fascinating because:

People would be normal
They'd drink this stuff
They start acting differently

After more and more drinks it was very easy to see people getting chattier, louder and generally less inhibited. It's clear that alcohol is pretty good at spicing up a party, but why do we need it?

It always bugged me that some people HAD to drink to have fun. Maybe they didn't have to, but it really enhanced their good time...but why?

Being slightly nerdy I would select random people at a party and analyze their behavior from sober to drunk and in between. I would also do it with the best test subject I could find: myself. Now THIS is fun science :-)

I would take mental notes of what I was doing differently when intoxicated. There are a lot of good traits about being slightly intoxicate like the willingness to chat up strangers, feeling less nervous and not worrying so much about things. You tend to become a slightly more "fun" person when you're a little tipsy.

There are also bad things such as not being able to comprehend things as well, loss of coordination (I can barely play the guitar if drunk), paying lots of money for alcohol, not remembering things as clearly, the whole driving issue and waking up feeling like crap.

So the novel of idea of NOT drinking, yet trying to emulate the GOOD qualities of being drunk popped into my head.

Over the years I've randomly decided to not drink on some days....no reason other than to just test pretending to be drunk. Not drinking is easy. It really isn't that hard to refuse rounds of drinks because you can ALWAYS pawn off a free drink on someone else. You can also easily get a cola or other non-alcoholic drink to keep up the illusion. Almost 80% of the time the bartender doesn't even charge me for a "plain Coca-Cola" or pineapple juice!

I'd try to mimic the "good" effects of alcohol when I did this, and to my surprise it actually works quite well with practice! It actually helps you have a lot more fun when you "pretend" to be drunk!

For example:

Let's say you're shy to dance, I know I used to be. I would always think "I wonder what people are thinking of me" or "I wonder if I look silly" over and over in my head. However if I was a little drunky munky I'd probably dance anyway, accept the fact I possibly look ridiculous, wouldn't care what people thought and just have a good time.

So if I were sober and dancing, I would think WWDND? What Would Drunk Neville Do....and just do that. It actually takes some mental effort and practice to not emulate some drunky qualities, but it's well worth it. It can also apply to many other situations in life.

This little technique has definitely helped me have a lot of fun over the years.

Now all this alcohol talk kind of makes me want a drink... :-)

Cheers!

-Neville

The Dubai Laser

2009-12-26T12:48:00.000-08:00

As I step out of the security line in one of the Dubai airports today, I get asked, "Do you have a pointer?" by the security guard. I told him yes and he asked me what color it was....I reluctantly said the magic word "Green" which I knew would be bad.

They asked me to show it to them, so I fished out the hand-held 15 milliwatt from my backpack and gave it to them. They shined it on the floor and flinched as they noticed how eye-hurtingly bright it was. I could easily tell they were going to confiscate it, but there was also a restrained curiousity about them wanting to play with it.

My passport was taken and I was lead to a room where I had to fill out some paper work and sign a document stating they were going to destroy my laser:

Is it wrong to carry a high-powered, quasi-legal laser pointer that-can-place-a-bright-dot-on-any-object-your-eye-can-see-no-matter-how-far-it-is around with you for fun? Apparently not in Dubai.

Handwriting Blogs

2009-12-17T18:11:00.000-08:00

Boring hyperlink to the post.

It took me three sheets of paper, a scanner and Photoshop to make this post, that might be one reason it isn't a popular format:

....However when tablets (with both multi-touch and pen inputs) become more popular, this style of blogging shouldn't be difficult at all....and with tags you can make the whole thing search engine friendly too

I like this style of blogging for many reasons...plus it's just fun!

Weird Holiday Products

2009-12-16T19:54:00.000-08:00

Over at House Of Rave it's been busy because of the Christmas holiday shopping season. Owning a store that sells light-up and relatively unique items, I'm always tickled by the surprise hit products that seem to sell like crazy during the holidays.

Every year I see odd products that previously didn't really sell, then all of a sudden see huge spikes in demand. Often it's products that are unexpected hits, the manufacturer runs out of stock, so it goes out of stock at most stores, so people flock to whatever store they can get it at.

By far, the most demanded item I saw on HoR this year was this Lava Plasma Lamp:

It's basically a Lava Lamp that has one of those electricity-looking plasma balls inside. It's a new product and actually looks like a slick little room decoration...which makes it prime gift-giving material.

Unfortunately the Lava company didn't anticipate such a high demand for it (likely because this tight economy doesn't permit companies to easily extend huge lines of credit for large manufacturing runs). Or maybe there was a fire at the warehouse and they all got burned up. Who the hell knows. The end result was EVERY store was sold out.

I opened my orders one day and found 20+ orders for JUST this item, all from new customers...it was a little odd. For a while I could send them out, but of course my supply dried up also. I of course immediately cancelled and refunded all the orders since I couldn't fulfill them....but kept the item up for a while in order to grab new customer info (so I can send them my email newsletter later). Kind of sneaky actually....

I eventually put the "out of stock" status on the item because so many people kept ordering it and the customer service required for canceling and refunding got a little tedious....plus it pisses people off when they order something so close to Christmas then get an email their order has been cancelled.

Another funny runaway product line this year was BACON stuff. Yes, bacon. These are some of the items that recently came out and started selling REALLY well this holiday season:

Bacon Bandages:
There's a whole lineup of these novelty bandages, and by far the bacon strips sell the best.

Bacon Gumballs:
Why bacon flavored gumballs sell so well is beyond my understanding.

Bacon Toothpicks:
I'm not even kidding...

Who would've thought the American public has such a fascination with BACON products?? Like the popular Lava Plasma Lamp a lot of these bacon-related products sold out quickly too.

Another weird item that really took off and I had to keep canceling orders for was this Gravy Fountain Gag Gift Box:

It's a fake gift box you put a real gift inside to fool your unsuspecting subject. I presume this gag box is great for White Elephant gift exchanges, hence the popularity. What's weird is there are other gift boxes like this, but by an exceedingly large margin the gravy fountain box was the most popular. Baffling and kind of hilarious.

Most of these small items don't have a huge margin, so even if you get lots of orders per day for them it's not a huge amount of profit. However you gain new customers, some of them buy a lot of other stuff, and it's always fun to see the weird products that hit a nerve with the buying public!

The Kramer Poster Shirt

2009-12-13T12:20:00.000-08:00

Kind of in the spirit of my self-made spray painted shoes, I went to a "T-shirt Deli" in Austin that serves up your very own custom created silk-screened shirts.

You can pick out one of their designs or make your own custom print on the computer or with paper and an Exacto knife.

If you make a shirt from a compute image, you can stick it in Photoshop, set the threshold option which will make it black/white then print it on a transparency. The guys at the shop then do their silk-screening magic from that.

I decided I wanted that famous portrait of Kramer from Seinfeld on my shirt, that thing always cracks me up!:

I know my way around Photoshop, so they let me loose on their computer and I erased out everything but his image. I set the threshold to 135 and printed out the transparency. The threshold filter gives the image a really cool/rugged look which makes Kramer's portrait even funnier:

The guys then gave the transparency some sort of chemical bath, then started the silk screening process:

I know there's tons of internet sites where you can upload your design and they send it to you completed in the mail, but watching the actual process before your eyes made it feel like you "made" the shirt rather than just uploaded an image. Plus it's just plain fun watching the behind the scenes process!

They can place the design anywhere, so instead of the standard "middle-shirt" I had it placed offset on the side. The end result:

....my one-of-a-kind Kramer shirt!

I'm sure this is a copyrighted image, so I doubt you could sell these without some licensing agreement...but on a small do-it-yourself scale I'm sure it can't be too illegal (Dear Sony Entertainment: please don't have me killed, thanks).

Speeding Tickets = City Donations

2009-12-07T11:59:00.000-08:00

I've long held a rather odd belief about speeding tickets, which might be why I don't particularly mind getting them.

First of all, any time I've got some sort of traffic ticket I've been actually doing something wrong, so there's really no reason to bitch about it.

When you get a drivers license you clearly consent to following all the pre-set rules, and if you don't follow them, you run the risk of getting a citation for it.

The other belief is that every time I get a traffic violation it's like a "donation to the city."

I like this point of view because 1.) It's true and 2.) It's a great way to not get frustrated about getting a ticket.

I've been to the Austin DPS many times to pay off tickets, and I must say it's an exceedingly simple, straightforward and very easy experience (although I've tried schemes to get out of tickets before). It's actually refreshing to see a government entity so on top of its game.

I've been to other DPS's where I've had to wait in excess of three hours to give them my money. I don't care about the money, but making me waste an ENTIRE day....That's just cruel....very effective in getting me to avoid tickets...but cruel.

In Austin I almost don't mind getting a ticket because I can easily take care of it over the phone, in person or internet. It's easy, quick and the revenue goes towards a great city.

It almost makes me WANT to get caught!

------------------------------------------

Now what I DON'T like getting caught by is those automated traffic ticketing systems. I wrote about my first one here that gave me a nice photo shoot. It's so impersonal....although highly effective.

Getting caught by an officer is kind of a fun cat & mouse game. I wasn't particularly mad about the last one because it clearly shows I blatantly ran a red. However I got another one of these recently, and after viewing the photos online I immediately cried "I DIDN'T RUN THE LIGHT!!" I was simply taking a right turn on a red light, I could clearly see my car turning right. I unfairly got a ticket!!

Turning right:

However unlike my last ticket, this ticket included a link to a VIDEO of my offense. Uh ohh! I immediately thought this would be pretty incriminating, but it really wasn't. I didn't speed through this light, I safely slowed down and took the right.

Video:

OK, I didn't stop 100%, but I slowed down to like 2mph which is damn near stopped. I think this is actually an unfair and undeserved ticket. Yes, I didn't COMPLETELY STOP AT THE WHITE LINE, but even if a cop was behind me, I seriously doubt he would've pulled me over for this.

A little pissed off, I did some research and came across sites like Camera Fraud and others who highlight all the negative and unfair things about these camera lights.

I decided to try semi-fighting this ticket, even though I knew I either pay $75 to get this over with, or drive to Houston, schedule a hearing, then work with a small chance of success to get this dismissed. I called the company in charge of the cameras and spoke to someone about it. I told her the call was being recorded for a news broadcast (just so she wouldn't start getting snippy or hang up on me) and started questioning the video. Surely enough she started on the "You clearly didn't fully stop at the first white line..." spiel and I quickly realized fighting this wasn't going anywhere.

SO while I'll go ahead and pay this $75, I don't feel as good about it. I didn't get the thrill of being pulled over or immediately told what I did wrong....plus I don't think I did anything wrong.

However it's easier to pay off the $75 than to actually fight this ticket.

...and like I said earlier in this post:

...any time I've got some sort of traffic ticket I've been actually doing something wrong, so there's really no reason to bitch about it.

...and in reality I didn't fully stop.

---------------------

On another note:
Despite me being slightly fumed about this latest ticket, I have to admit these traffic violation companies have an EXCELLENT business model!!

The cameras and infrastructure might be a little costly, but they constantly generate revenue for the company and the city. I imagine the biggest drawback to that business would be having to deal with government entities to get permission to post the cameras....and getting governments to give you long-term contracts so you can make your money back.

---------------------

On even another note:
I remember hearing about a couple of products that help distort your license plate from those cameras. I imagine as technology gets better it will make these methods obsolete, but for now I'm seriously considering buying this spray:

It seems like a great (and legal) way to say F*CK YOU to the speed cameras (although purposely running a red light one day with a middle finger out the window might be more fun)!

From now on I'd prefer my traffic tickets to come from an actual officer.

License and registration please.....

Spray Painting Shoes

2009-12-03T11:32:00.000-08:00

I like weird color shoes because they break up the seriousness of any outfit. I bought some white shoes a long time ago and they made everyone look, but then white shoes started to come into fashion (that's right, I alone started the whole trend) ;-)

After a few years some of these shoes still fit and feel great, but look quite worn. They are past the stage of a simple cleaning due to years of heavy use.

I still wear them from time to time, but they don't have the same "weird-looking shoes" effect they used to have. It's also hard to tell by the pictures, but they look pretty dirty in person. So in trying to incorporate them back into the wardrobe I tried some experimental shoe cosmetic surgery using plain old spray paint.

Patient 1 was a pair of very comfortable Aldo shoes I've had for years. I still wear them when I need to do a lot of walking, but don't want to wear tennis shoes. They've become pretty worn and dirty especially around the sides, backs and stitching seams. The brown spot top-right is a test-spray I did with the spray paint to see if it would bind correctly:

I bought some gold spray paint from Wal-Mart and gave them a quick spray paint coat. I covered the entire shoe, even the bottoms. They came out quite well!

They actually look like a new pair of shoes now! I was very satisfied with how well this pair turned out:

Patient 2 is also an old pair of Aldo shoes I've had for years, and are starting to look dirty although this picture doesn't show that too well. I've tried using "shoe touch-up paint" to clean them, but it's no longer cutting it. These shoes are made out of some hard leather-like material, and I wasn't sure how well the spray paint would bind to the shoes, especially in the crevasses and cracks of the shoes:

When I was buying spray paint at Wal-Mart I saw "Outdoor Reflective Spray Paint" that's used for marking trees or painting road stripes. I THOUGHT this would look pretty cool, but it didn't exactly turn out so well:

It's not captured by the picture very well, but they actually look like someone sprayed over the original shoe. You could kind of "see through" the paint, and I wasn't exactly crazy about how these turned out, you can still see all the scuff marks on the shoes:

This was kind of a fail in my opinion, so I bought some metallic blue spray paint and gave them a once over. A weird thing happened, the yellow and blue mixed to turn the shoes GREEN! I didn't expect that to happen as I thought the blue would paint OVER the yellow, but this mistake ended up looking pretty interesting (and shiny):

So far these shoes have held up with their spray painted outer coats. The hard leather shoes lose a small amount of paint in the crevasse areas when I wear them a lot, but it's so small an amount no one would notice. So now I have two "new" pairs of shoes for the cost of $2.99 cans of spray paint:

...and the "mistake" pair:

I like both of them, but the gold ones came out looking the best. The green ones are nice in my opinion, but I either get "those look awesome" or "those are the worst shoes I've ever seen" remarks about them. If everyone thinks it looks horrible, I generally like it more.

The coolest part is when someone asks me where I got them, I can say, "I made them!"

My 27th B-day!

2009-11-17T11:06:00.000-08:00

In celebration I'm taking friends out to watch the remainder of the Leonid Meteor Shower tonight!

On the mens room wall...

2009-11-13T22:56:00.001-08:00

I should've renamed my Homeless Experiment the "Residentially
Challenged" Experiment!