Legitimate Online Moneymaking Round 3

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Business, Finance, and Careers > Legitimate Online Moneymaking Round 3

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

If I ever became a Gonzo journalist my first article would be comparing how easy it is to obtain sex on craigslist versus getting a job from there.

# ¿ May 17, 2012 20:45

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# ¿ May 7, 2024 04:13

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

Sparta posted:

Is there any site/book you guys actually trust when it comes to taking up online marketing? Every. single. source. screams 'IM TRYING TO SELL YOU SOMETHING!!' which is obnoxious and hard to filter out. What is a real, step-by-step book on advertising stuff through fb/adwords/etc?

I've got money to do real A/B testing and stuff, I just don't know the first thing about it.

(As a side note, I'm also learning programming, and I'm planning on building a small autoredirect program to automate semi-bandit testing.)

Sorry for the late reply on this (this forum moves so slow I don't check it very often), but speaking personally I would avoid the marketing 'programs' which are basically mlm shill frontends. E.g. chris farrell and his ilk.

If you're serious what I suggest you do is check out SEOMoz, which is more geared toward organic marketing and site structure, but you've got to have that poo poo locked down tite dogg before getting anywhere with cpc/for pay advertising. Google will give your ad a 'quality score' that can help determine how expensive it is per click, and one of the criteria is the landing page the ad goes to. I've had clients that started out at $2/click on their keywords that get down to $0.50/click just by upping the quality score.

Here's a good roundup from SEOMoz:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-big-list-of-ppc-resources-articles

And a more beginner oriented article:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/17-most-common-ppc-mistakes-web-marketers-make

As an aside, there's actually a lot of opportunities there that might be relevant to this thread. If you can create a property that generates legitimate traffic you can skate by on adsense/affiliate revenue with relatively low effort.

I can't stress enough though to avoid 'turnkey' solutions that charge you for hosting, education, per sale, etc. Every category is different and has different requirements. Any 'MY MARKETING SOLUTION WILL MAKE YOU $5000!/mo!!!' solution is inherently self defeating, since selling the same set of tactics to multiple people will result in a 'lobsters in a pot' phenomenon as everyone applies the same tactics to the same categories, enriching only the person who sold them the 'system'.

# ¿ Jun 7, 2012 21:54

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

Just signed up for TextBroker, but as a client not an author. Do you guys have any advice on how to make compelling postings so I only get the bestest authors?

EDIT-Also, is it worth checking out the others? I got the impression that TextBroker was the biggest one. The field is engineering/science/industrial.

# ¿ Jun 20, 2012 19:28

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

Nighthand posted:

Be specific about what you want out of a writer. Revisions are good, rejections are bad -- work with us. Provide sources if you can. If you find an author whose work you really like, go to them for direct orders -- it may be more expensive but you don't risk having some random schmoe claim it and give you work you don't like. If you have multiple favored writers you can set up a team and invite them to it.

Be careful with your keyword requirements. Try to make sure your required keywords make sense to use as-is in english. You'd be surprised how often something virtually impossible to work in comes up.

As for checking out other sites in the role of someone paying for writing: that's up to you. If what you get from Textbroker is satisfactory in terms of speed, quality and price, stick with them. If you're not satisfied, check out a different site and see if it works better for you. E-Lance has pretty robust profiles you can check out, same with oDesk I believe.

Thanks for the info. Because this was the first posting a TextBroker guy actually called me up (at a phone number I didn't provide to them oddly enough) to confirm that I had set up the account, this was legit, etc. He said my first posting had good instructions and reasonable keyword requirements so we'll see. I'm not sure if he even cares as long as the money's already in their hot little hands.

# ¿ Jun 21, 2012 06:24

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

Nighthand posted:

They have been a bit more concerned with client instructions recently, one of their blog posts was encouraging writer feedback on the instructions and getting clients a better set of guidelines. Up until memorial day, there were upwards of several hundred assignments that had been sitting there untouched for weeks, if not months, because of how bad the instructions were.

I don't know how everything looks from the client side, only from the writer side, so I just gave you what I like out of clients. I also tend to cherry-pick my articles more than some people, but in general the easier it is for a writer to write what you want, the better it is for everyone involved.

Welp, got the first submission back; the article is surprisingly not terrible. There were a few singular/plural confusion problems (not related to the keywords) but the language was tight, not too passive a tone. Developed a thesis well and obviously had a plan for the overall piece. All in all I'm actually relatively pleased.

# ¿ Jun 22, 2012 05:49

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

Anyone got the 411 on TextMaster? It showed up in my techcrunch feed and from a functional standpoint it looks incredibly similar to textbroker.

# ¿ Jul 4, 2012 20:25

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

Sorry I should have been more clear; I'm more interested as a client but I signed up as a writer anyway just for giggles. They showed me a picture of a tree and asked me to write 150-250 words about it so I made up this post apocalyptic scenario about the Last Tree On Earth. Don't think that's the kind of sample they were going for...

# ¿ Jul 5, 2012 19:35

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

I've signed up as a client as well, but am not going to start anything for a while; I'm a bit leery of their 'credits' system. For those who don't know, to start a project you first have to buy 'credits', and then each project (writing, proofing, translating) costs x credit per word. It seems like an unnecessary abstraction; the only gain I can see is that the more credits you buy at one time the cheaper they are. The other worry is that they might be adjusting how many credits are needed per project, meaning the credits you buy now are worth more/less in the future depending on 'inflation' or the like.

# ¿ Jul 5, 2012 23:38

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

hayden. posted:

I'm doing some researching on dropshipping but it's hard to find legitimate advice, probably because BUSINESS SECRETS or whatever. Anyone have advice on how to look for niche areas that have high search traffic but low competition? It's pretty hard to get a feel for this starting out.

I posted this in an A/T thread about setting up an online store that never got a response:

quote:

Note: All this assumes you'll be going B2C since you said 'sell one at a time'

I've been working in ecommerce for the last 8 years, the last place I worked at had over 1 million items in the catalog and gross sales in the 9 digits. About half a year ago I left and started up something new with a friend. So I have a lot of 'deep' experience that might not be a match for what you're trying to do but I figure I'd weigh in.

eCommerce Software:
It might be because I'm a tech guy at heart, but I hate all the open source platforms. They all look the same, they are all a pain in the rear end to customize, they are prone to exploits, and they rarely scale well. Every major project I've been part of we ended up rolling our own CMS/checkout/inventory etc. I do think Magento is one of the better 'off the shelf' for pay solutions though; osCommerce makes me want to bite my arm off. Another thing to remember is that you rarely 'stick' with your first ecommerce software; you either outgrow it or learn to hate it and get another. That doesn't mean don't use these kinds of software, but it all depends on what you're trying to accomplish. This leads into,

What are you trying to accomplish:
This one becomes important because it determines your strategy in a lot of ways. There are thousands of guys out there doing the same thing, so you need to figure out how you're going to be different. Are you going to have the best looking site? The lowest price? The best customer service? Fastest shipping? It's entirely possible to 'mom and pop' this kind of business and make a few grand every month but I think you need a larger perspective if you want to do anything more than that.

Monthly Costs:
- Hosting
- Staffing (customer service, fulfillment, IT, product acquisition)
- Warehousing/storage

Per Sale Costs:
- Product cost
- Shipping cost
- Merchant processing fee
- Acquisition/marketing cost (e.g. cpc)

Merchant Account:
PayPal is a good place to start, easy to implement, okay-ish rate. One thing to watch out for is that they'll generally 'hold' 20% of your payments for up to 60 days I believe as chargeback insurance. This means that if you're going to be running close to the bone financially you'll have less flexibility going with PayPal. Basically PayPal is the best 'babby's first merchant account' since all the other players who would take you on at the beginning would charge you ruinous fees usually, and the bigs (e.g. Chase, Litle, etc.) won't touch you until you're doing at least $50k/mo.

Inventory Management:
This is incredibly important, especially if you are going to expand quickly. Try to eliminate as many manual and ad hoc processes as possible. If you're at all data/development savvy try to silo your inventory so it's not tied to one platform or system (e.g. your shopping cart software). If things take off, you are going to want to be able to 1)publish that data to other systems and 2)have other systems be able to modify that data. This also applies to logistics; you should be ordering at least a month ahead of time for new stock. You should also be aware of your outbound shipments, because customers get crabby. This means you'll also want programmatic integration with UPS, USPS, FedEx if you're the one making your own shipments, as you'll need to be able to print labels, generate tracking, etc.

Distributors:
There are three ways to get distributors in this day and age. 1)Search on alibaba and hope you luck out. 2)Learn Chinese and take a trip overseas. 3)Identify your competition and snipe their suppliers.

There's a very important step you left off as well: Marketing.

Dropship supplier protection is actually pretty important. I can think of three cases off hand in the last 8 months where I heard someone got ahold of someone else's upline supplier and immediately started an identical business. If company A is dropshipping something, and you have more money you can buy a container of product Company A is selling and basically price them out of the market because of economies of scale. This is the main reason dropshippers are wary of sharing information about this stuff.

Someone else asked about auto parts in this thread and I posted some similar information:
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3491659

# ¿ Jul 9, 2012 02:35

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

hayden. posted:

Thanks for the response. It's all good information. Is Google checkout okay for this? I like them a lot better than Paypal (I like eating dog poo poo better than Paypal).

It's really hard to tell if dropshipping is an area worth pursuing. It seems for the most part that you can try a bunch of product areas that fail and sometimes get lucky and strike it really well with one in particular. Like you said finding dropshippers that aren't terrible is apparently the key to all of this and isn't easy to do. I'm also not so jazzed about the idea that I could be spending thousands on PPC and never come close to breaking even.

For the most part it seems like drop shipping works because people will come to a site and buy and item without cross-shopping it somewhere else. This would work well for stuff like wall art where you can't just type "cute cat painting yard" into Amazon and find the same print, and is also why categories like electronics and clothing don't work at all.

The criteria I've come up with that's needed in products to choose are:
-Where quality doesn't matter much (knives are a good example of crappy quality items that people will be upset with)
-Don't appeal to people who to call and complain (fishing gear, bible covers, auto parts) and cause lots of customer support issues
-Have a 50%+ profit margin (cheap to manufacture)
-Won't have high returns (clothing)
-Small, inexpensive to ship
-Not easily cross shopped and looked up elsewhere
-Can be priced between $50 and $200
-Not immediately obvious where to buy said item online or in a retail store (an example is artsy stuff, there isn't exactly an "art store" with wall art everywhere or a website for art that's a house-hold name)

If you're handling the checkout yourself Google Checkout is... well it's something. I used to love it when they were introducing it, but then the intro offer went away and they jacked the rates. It's relatively easy to implement, but base PayPal is 0.05% lower when you're starting out at the basement rate. Bizarrely I also prefer PayPal's AVS setup and chargeback protection, though I only got my feet a little wet with Google and that was probably 3 years ago.

As for choosing your category in dropship, it's kind of tough. There's two ways:
1. Be a little fish in a big pond and work to your strengths. This is what we do. We're in a very large, very competitive category, but we keep our costs low through automation, clever database work, good customer service (yes, good customer service can actually save you work in the long run), etc. The auto parts example would be like this; the category exists, but there's no 'google' that currently owns it completely.
2. Lightning in a bottle/leverage China (and work to your strengths). Basically you identify something, something that's going to go big and you either invest in it to make it go big, or you're just psychic. I'm less a fan of this because it feels like you can't build up expertise in your category, and all you're doing is shifting cheap crap roughly equivalent to chia pet or the pet rock of this era. You're also constantly on the prowl for the next 'big' trend and generally spend more time sourcing in China than you do selling. Here's the prototypical example of lightning in a bottle dropship to me:
http://www.amazon.com/Direction-Single-Bracelet-Concert-Wristband/dp/B00796P8IM/

I've sourced these in 5000 unit increments; they cost about $0.10 in China, about $0.18 landed. Amazon takes a 20% cut in the jewelry category from his $12.85 ($8.88 + $3.97 'shipping') selling price so $12.85 - $3.53 - $0.12 - ~$2.50 shipping = $7.60. Let's be pessimistic and say $7 is his profit. The thing is and has been on the jewelry/sport bracelet bestseller list for at least 3 months, he was probably moving 30 a day at the height and is probably down to 10 a day now. So what you say? That's only $7 * 30 = $210/day or $6300/mo!

Search for 'jewelry one direction' in Amazon. He's got >15< of these products on the first page. Some are higher bestsellers, some are lower. Even if you jack it down to $3000/mo, and say only 10 of them are at that rate, that's now $30,000/mo. On lovely wristbands for a boy band no one likes. And that's just Amazon, who knows what Buy.com, Nextag, Shopzilla, and organic site sales are like. And that's not even counting his other stuff.

So yeah, lightning in a bottle. But how do you spark it? That's the big question. I was going to write more here but I've got real work to do unfortunately. I would like to see more discussion on this kind of stuff though since parts of it are fascinating to me.

# ¿ Jul 9, 2012 21:36

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

imabanana posted:

I buy content on Textbroker and have had a couple of articles come in way over what I asked for, which I thought was really strange. Maybe angling for direct orders?

Same here; asked for 300 got 500.

# ¿ Jul 12, 2012 01:54

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

Tesla Insanely Coil posted:

Re: headphones. When I decided I wanted a better pair I of course found the SA thread on headphones because there is a thread for anything. That's where I learned that people will drop $300 on headphones, which seems crazy to me but I also learned a lot about the technology.

Psssh, $300? Try these:
http://en-de.sennheiser.com/hd-800

$1499 on Amazon.

# ¿ Jul 12, 2012 20:27

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

That''s funny I just got approved by them, though at a '1 star' level. N'ot sure if that is a judgement of the quality of my writing or just some kind of newbie badge/experience level thing.

EDIT-I logged in to see what it's like, but there's no tasks available. Whether that's due to a dearth of work in their system, or that as a '1 star' writer I don't qualify for anything, I'm not sure.

Scaramouche fucked around with this message at 05:11 on Jul 13, 2012

# ¿ Jul 13, 2012 04:59

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

Has anyone gotten a task at all from TextMaster? I've been dutifully logging in and checking but there's never anything there.

# ¿ Jul 20, 2012 03:21

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# ¿ May 7, 2024 04:13

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

Textmaster update: They sent me an email saying 'there's a job available for your skillset! Log in now!'. I logged in about 30 seconds after that and there was... nothing. Does anyone know if they even have work? I'm not jonesing for the dollars because I have way too much on my plate as it is, I just wanted to see what it was like, but there's been bupkis for projects there.

# ¿ Aug 24, 2012 09:33

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Business, Finance, and Careers > Legitimate Online Moneymaking Round 3