- @ScottATaylor Thanks for following me. in reply to ScottATaylor #
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- RT: @BudgetsAreSexy: Be Proud of Your Emergency Fund! http://tinyurl.com/yhjo88l ($1,000 is better than $0.00) #
- [Read more…] about Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-12-12
Balance Your Borked Budget
You’ve got a budget worked out to the penny. You know every dollar that comes in and every dime that you spend. All of your bills are getting paid on time. Then, one day, it all comes crashing down. Your budget is no longer even a reasonable approximation of your cash flow. You’ve got no idea what’s coming in or going out. Bills are piling up and fees are digging you deeper in debt.
What happened? More importantly, how do you get back on track?
The first thing you need to do is identify the problem. What, exactly, went wrong? Did you lose your job or need a surprise botox injection? Your car died or your kid developed a hockey habit? Sports car or shoe sale? Whatever the cause, if you can’t identify it, you can’t deal with it. Some of the possible problems may be things that can get clubbed and buried in the backyard, while other things may be expenses that won’t be going away. If it’s a one-time expense, you can simply refocus your debt repayment to take it into account. If it’s an ongoing expense, you will need to adjust your other expenses, possibly in a drastic manner, to make ends meet. You can’t know which way to go without knowing what caused the problem.
Next, commit to to making it right. Don’t leave it at a mere commitment. Actually commit and actually do it right. Future-you is counting on you to fix the problem before he gets screwed. This is important. Without firm–and real–commitment, nothing else will matter. At best, you will be treading water. At worst, you will drown yourself in unanticipated bills.
Cut everything extra. Every expense–whether it’s your mortgage or your maid–is a rock in your pocket, one hundred miles from shore. How much can you carry and stay afloat? This isn’t the time to keep paying something because you enjoy it. If it isn’t absolutely necessary, it’s got to go. Cut your internet, cancel Netflix, learn to shut off the lights when you aren’t using them. Is the early termination fee less than 6 months of your cable bill, your satellite bill? Cancel it. You can always sign up again later. This is the time to be ruthless.
Is there a way to bring in some extra cash? Can you pick up a second job, or land a freelancing gig? If you’ve suddenly found yourself unemployed, can you spend some time on being a Mechanical Turk? Sell all of the things you don’t use anymore, or, more likely, never should have bought in the first place? Do you have a spare kidney?
Remember, this is a drastic situation calling for drastic measures. Your future is depending on you. Don’t make him come back and kick your butt.
Update: This post has been included in the Carnival of Personal Finance.
The Unfrugal Meal
I spend a lot of time talking about how to save money here. It’s kind of what I do.
Not today.
Today, I’m going to talk about the best way I’ve wasted money during my vacation this week.
First, so my feelings are completely understood: A vacation is about experiences and memories. I could spend all day at the park with my kids, or I could spend a memorable meal with them. Which will they remember longer?
It ain’t the park. They are there almost every day.
Of course, if the restaurant is McDonald’s they wouldn’t remember for long, either.
Tuesday, after a long day of hands-on, interactive museum-going, we took the kids to a Japanese steakhouse. Teppanyaki, where they cook the food at the table, complete with fire, spatula spinning, and airborne food.
I’m the only one in my family who has seen that before. Honestly, watching the art, the skill, the banter, and the giant fireball leaves me as wide-eyed as my kids.
They loved it.
Watching the chef throw a bowl full of rice across the table made my son’s jaw drop.
Seeing the chef carry fire from one side of the grill to the other on his fingers made my youngest squeal and beg for more fire tricks.
Getting squirted by the chef when he was putting out a flare-up made the middle brat giggle, possibly because the squirt gun was a little kid, dressed up as a fireman, with his pants down. She got “peed” on and loved it.
Aside from cooking-as-a-show, the service was fantastic. There was always a waiter nearby to keep our water glasses full or to provide “little kid” chopsticks, which are modified with rubber band to remove the need for skill to eat. They had the courses perfectly timed. The minute the salad was cleared, the soup was delivered. When that was done, the chef rolled up to start on the rice. My two-year-old was eating white rice without complaint for the first time.
Giggles and squeals. Three days later, they are still talking about it. My 11-year-old, who’s trying so hard to be an unimpressible teenager, says it was the coolest restaurant he’s ever seen.
Frugal, it wasn’t, but the memories were worth the money.
Make Extra Money Part 1: Introduction
Today, I’m re-launching a new series on how I make extra money online. This series fell off my radar for a while. I intend to finish it now.
Right now, I have 7 sites promoting specific products, or “niche” sites. When those products are bought through my sites, I get a commission, ranging from 40-75%. Of those sites, 5 make money, 1 is newly finished, and 1 is not quite complete. I’m not going to pretend I’m making retirement-level money on these sites, but I am making enough money to make it worthwhile.
Over the course of the series, I’m going to show you how to take advantage of multi-million dollar market research to choose a niche, at no cost to you. You’ll see how I choose a domain name, where to find products to sell, and how to promote your new site.
As I write the series, you’ll get to see exactly what is working, as it’s happening. I’ll be choosing the niche as I write the post on choosing a niche. As of this writing, I don’t know what niche I’ll be promoting, what product I’ll be using, or what keywords I’ll be targeting. This will be a live, totally transparent case study of how I make extra money.
Before we get started, I need you to understand a few things.
First, this is not overnight money. My first niche site took 6 months before it made me a penny. That was partially because my product selection research was faulty, but also because these things do take time. I’ll show you how to pick a niche and product that won’t take that long, but you can’t expect to quit your job tomorrow.
Second, this is work. Once everything is established and optimized, it won’t be a lot of work, but it will take time to do. There is no such thing as “set it and forget it” internet marketing. Anybody who tells you otherwise is selling you something you won’t be satisfied with.
Third, this isn’t free. I’m not going to charge you anything, but some parts of this will cost money to do effectively. I’m not a fan of throwing money away, so I won’t be suggesting anything outrageous. If I do recommend something that costs money, I will try to recommend a free or very cheap alternative, but that won’t always be possible. I started out slow and cheap, but now, when I launch a site, I spend some money to do it quickly and effectively. I am a fan of paying others to do the things I dislike doing.
That’s the plan. I’m going to tell you how I make extra money online, and I’m going to let you look over my shoulder while I set up my next site, start to finish.
Any questions?
Any comments on how you make extra money online?
Book Review: Delivering Happiness
In April, I was given an advanced reader copy of Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh on the condition that I give it an honest review. Delivering Happiness is being released today and here is my review.
Tony Hsieh was one of the founders of LinkExchange, which sold to Microsoft for $256 million in 1999. Shortly thereafter, he became affiliated with Zappos.com and ended up as CEO. Zappos.com was later sold to Amazon.com as a “wholly-owned subsidiary” in a stock-exchange transaction valued at $1.2 billion.
Delivering Happiness is his story and that of the creation and management of Zappos.com.
The book is divided into three sections: Profits, Passion, and Purpose.
Section 1 is largely autobiographical. It tells the story of Hsieh’s business ventures all through his life, from a failed worm farm to a failed newspaper to an abandoned greeting card business. Obviously the business of having children sell greeting cards had improved between his childhood and mine, because, when I did it, there were many more choices than just Christmas cards. I still have both the telescope and microscope I earned selling overpriced greeting cards. An important lesson imparted is that past success is not an indicator of future success. Different personalities, goals, and economics can change the result of two nearly identical activities.
Hsieh tells the story of the excitement of building LinkExchange and how he knew it was time to move on when the excitement faded, largely due to a surprising change to the corporate culture. After leaving, he spent some time just living and reviewing his past activities. He came to the conclusion that the happiest times of his life didn’t involve money. Doing things right beats strictly maximizing profits. Taking business lessons from the poker table, he reminds his readers that the Right Decision may lose sometimes, but it is still Right.
When he gets into building his business on a foundation of relationships, he is reminiscent of Keith Ferrazzi. Don’t network. Build your relationships based on friendship and let the friendship be it’s own reward. The rest will follow.
Section 2–while denying it was intended–reads heavily like marketing copy. It is almost entirely about how wonderful Zappos.com is to work for and with. I think it is fascinating to read about how successful businesses are built and how the corporate culture comes with that, but it’s not for everyone. The important points from this section include being open to necessary change without being reckless and their insistence on transparency. I don’t believe in hoarding information and it’s wonderful to hear others feel the same way. They go as far as giving all of the profitability and sales numbers to the vendors, live, which makes the vendors feel respected and gives the vendors an opportunity to suggest future orders based on past trends. That saves time and effort for the buyers at Zappos.com.
Section 3 attempts to tie the business lessons to life lessons and almost–but not quite–succeeds. After discussing differences in vision and alignment between the Zappos executives and the board, he talks about his growing speaking arrangements. When he started, he nervously memorized his presentations, resulting in mediocre speeches. When he discovered his “flow”, it all improved. His method of writing and speaking involves being passionate about his topic, telling personal stories, and being real. When he adopted that plan, his speaking became natural and popular.
In the final chapter, Hsieh actually discusses happiness. His equation is Perceived Control + Perceived Progress + Connectedness + Vision & Meaning = Happiness. He works to apply all of this as a part of the corporate culture at Zappos, giving the employees a measure of control over their advancement, duties, and culture. The employees help write the Corporate Culture book, which is given to all new hires and vendors. I intend to get a hold of a copy in the near future. It sounds like a fascinating read.
He also addresses the three types of happiness: Pleasure, Passion, and Higher Purpose, also described as Rockstar, In The Zone, and Being a Part of Something Bigger. The first is fleeting, and the last is long-lasting.
Would I recommend the book?
Yes. I found Delivering Happiness to be incredibly interesting, but, if you have no interest in how a successful-but-not-traditional company is built and run, or if you are bored by successful people, this book is not for you. The book is largely autobiographical and a case study in the success of Zappos.com. If that sounds remotely interesting, you will not regret reading this book.
Now, the fun part. I was given two copies of the book. The first one is becoming a permanent part of library. The second is being given away.
Giveaway
There are three ways to enter:
1. Twitter. Follow me and post the following: @LiveRealNow is giving away a copy of Delivering Happiness(@dhbook). Follow and RT to enter. http://bit.ly/czd31X
2. Become a fan on Facebook and post about the giveaway.
3. Post about the giveaway on your blog and link back to this post.
That’s 3 possible entries.
Next Sunday, I will throw all the entries in a hat and draw a name.
Future Reviews
If you have a book you’d like me to review, please contact me.
Make Extra Money Part 4: Keyword Research
In this installment of the Make Extra Money series, I’m going to show you how I do keyword research.
Properly done–unless you get lucky–this is the single most time-consuming part of making a niche site. If you aren’t targeting search terms that people use, you are wasting your time. If you are targeting terms that everybody else is targeting, it will take forever to get to the top of the search results.
Spend the extra time now to do proper keyword research. It will save you a ton of time and hassle later. This is time well-spent.
If you remember from the last installment, when we researched products to promote, we narrowed our choices down to a few products.
What I’ve done is create a spreadsheet to score the products. You can see the spreadsheet here. I’ll explain the columns as we populate them.
The first column contains the name of the product. Easy. We’ve got 10 products. I’m going to walk through scoring 1 product, then, through the magic of the internet, I’ll populate the rest, and you’ll get to see the results instantly. Wow.
The second column is the global search volume for the exact search term. I base my product niche sites primarily on the demand for a given product. Everything else is a secondary consideration.
To find the demand for a product, go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. In the “word or phrase” box, enter your product name, exactly. In this case, it’s “X-Pain Method”. When the search results come up, change the match type to “Exact”. You should have something like this:
Enter the global search volume in column 2. In this case, it’s 73. Keep this window open, because we’ll be coming back to it.
Column 3 is the search competition. Go to google and enter your product name, in quotes. In this case, “X-Pain Method”. Put the total number of search results in column 3: 223000.
Column 4 is the search competition, but only what appears in a page’s title. Your search query is intitle:”X-Pain Method”, which yields 4400 results.
The next column is for the average PageRank of the first page of search results. For this, I use Traffic Travis. I use the 4th edition, which is paid software, but you can get the free version of version 3, instead. I’ll use version 3 for this example. Open the software and click on “SEO Analysis” on the bottom left of the screen. Put your search term (“X-Pain Method”) in the “phrase to analyze” and set the “Analyze Top” to 10, then hit “Analyze”. When it’s done running, just add up all of the PRs and divide by 10. Ignore Travis’s difficulty rating.
Now, for the rest of the columns, we’re going to look at the keyword tool again. We’re going to pick 3 alternate search terms. Here are the criteria:
- At least 1000 global monthly searches. We want terms that people are searching for.
- Competition bar at medium or less. This bar is just a rough guess on competition, so it’s really an arbitrary exclusion factor, but it helps narrow down the choices.
- A “buying” keyword is preferred, but not necessary. This is a term that indicates people are looking to spend money. “Back pain doctor” is a buying keyword, but it’s not an indicator that someone wants to buy a product, so we’ll skip it. A buying keyword isn’t absolutely necessary, because these will also be the terms we’ll use to generate content later.
- It has to be related to our product.
Once we pick the keywords, we’ll throw them into google to get the competition, just like we did to populate column 2.
“Exercises for back pain” has medium competition and 1900 monthly searches. It also has an estimated cost-per-click of $3.02, which means people are paying for this.
“Lower back pain exercises” has 6600 searches and medium competition. It’s actually on the lower end of medium, so it looks really promising.
“Lower back” has 4400 searches and low competition, with a CPC of $6.24. This should be a good one. Scratch that. It has 40 million search results, but only 4400 searches. That’s a lot of competition for a small market.
Instead, I’m going to search for “cure back pain” in the keyword tool and see what I get. “Upper back pain” is better. Low competition, 18000 searches each month, and only 2000000 competing search results. Now, I’ll score it.
You really want at least 500 searches per month for the product name. More than 2500 is better. I’m going to assign 1 point per 500 monthly searches.
You also want a lower number of search results. Less than 10,000 is ideal. Less than 100,000 is still decent. More than 250,000, I’d walk. So, under 10,000 gets 5 points. Under 50,001 gets 4. Under 100,001 gets 3. Under 200,001 gets 2. Under 250,001 gets 1. Any higher gets 0.
The ideal intitle search will have less than 2000 results. More than 100,000 is too time-consuming to deal with. 0-2000: 5 points; 2001-10,000: 4 points; 10001-25000: 3 points; 25001-50000: 2 points; 50001 to 100000: 1 point.
The perfect product will have the first page of search result all with a PageRank of 0. That’s a 5 point product. I’ll knock off half a point for every point of average PR.
The related terms are more relaxed. They are what’s known as “Latent Semantic Indexing” (LSI) terms. We will be creating articles to match those search terms, mostly to make our niche site look as natural and real as possible. Any actual traffic those pages drive is just gravy. Points for the related searches start at 10 and get 1 point knocked off for each 3 million results. We’ll be treating the 3 terms as one for this score.
That gives us a perfect score of about 25. There’s no actual upper limit, since the score for the search volume has no upper limit. X-Pain Method scored 18.22.
Now, excuse me a moment while I score the rest.
I’m back. Did you miss me?
I’ve finished scoring each of the products and sorted the results by score. The clear winner is the back pain product, but the lack of searches bothers me. The wedding guide looks much nicer, especially if I target the phrase “wedding planning guide” during the SEO phase of the project. That change alone brings the score almost to first place.
Frankly, I’d take either 2nd or 3rd place over the back pain product. The bare numbers don’t support it, but my judgement tells me they are better products to promote.
There is one final step before deciding on the product. I have to buy it. I can’t review the product without seeing it and I can’t promote it without approving of it.
That’s the secret to ethical niche marketing, you know. Only promote good products that you’ve personally read, watched, or used.
