English: Jalopy car in Joshua Tree National Park in Hidden Valley Campground (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
When it’s time to replace your car, most people focus on the new car, instead of the old, but that is ignoring real money. Your old car–unless it has disintegrated–still has value. Sometimes, it’s just time to ask yourself, “When should I sell my car?”
When you’re looking to sell your car (like with We Will Buy Your Car), you generally have several options:
Tow & crush. If your car has been wrecked, doesn’t run, or is just old and beat up, you may be stuck with calling a junkyard and accepting $50 for them to pick up your car and crush it for scrap.
Trade it in. This is probably the least hassle, but–other than #1–doesn’t pay well. Dealerships are willing to pay something under what they will get at a wholesale auction, which is quite a bit less than the blue book value.
Sell it yourself. Now you’re thinking, “He’s going to buy my car! Oh, bother.” It can be a pain, but it’s also the best way to get a decent price for your wheels.
When you sell your car, there are a few things to keep in mind, much like when you sell something on Craigslist.
Don’t be alone. There are bad people in the world, but they don’t like witnesses. Bad things are much less likely to happen if you have company.
Know your price. Specifically, know three price: your dream price, the price that would make you happy, and the absolute lowest price you are willing to accept. Make sure you figure these numbers out ahead of time. Know what you are comfortable with before it comes time to close the deal.
Check IDs. The buyer is going to want to test-drive your car. That’s fine, but you want to make sure you know who is driving off in your car. “Officer, Sumdood took my car. He was wearing jeans.” That won’t get your car back.
Clean it up. Get the car detailed before you show it to a potential buyer. A sparkling-clean car will almost always bring in a few hundred extra dollars. It’s well worth the expense.
Following this plan should make the sale go as smoothly as possible and bring you the most possible money.
Readers, what have you done to dispose of an old car?
This is a sponsored post written to provide some insight into the world of used car retail.
Turning the heat on can strike fear into the hearts of many a home owner. Rising heating bills are not a thing of the past. They are present and there is no end in sight. Relief for high winter heat costs can be found in every leaky window, poorly sealed storm door, inaccurate thermostats and many other locations in and around your home. Seeking out the cheapest gas and electricity prices from local suppliers can help reduce total energy costs and should include home energy audits and payment plans to equalize summer and winter energy bills.
Top 5 Tips for Year Round Home Energy Savings
1. Obtain a free energy audit kit from your local electric or gas provider. Approach your home energy audit as a family. Involving children is one of the best ways to decrease overall energy consumption. Teach the kids about leaving doors open, leaving lights on and the television on when not in the room. Appoint an energy officer for the house who will be responsible for reminding family members about energy conserving activities.
2. Install a digital thermostat, which can be programmed to automatically raise or reduce home temperatures when the house is not occupied such as when parents are at work and the kids are at school. Lowering temperatures to 60 degrees on mild winter days for just six hours during the work day can save on your heating bills without compromising comfort. By limiting the time not to exceed six hours the cost for bringing the home back to acceptable living temperatures is minimal; much longer and the bounce back time is increased sufficiently to mitigate any daytime savings. Reducing overall temperatures by one degree Fahrenheit can save as much as three percent on the total heating bill. Reduce the household temperature by five degrees Fahrenheit and experience a 15 percent saving which is a number most families can easily live with.
3. Comparison shop for the cheapest gas and electricity from local private energy suppliers. Ask about payment plans, adjustable billing cycles and energy reform programs. State and local governments have options for lower income homes, providing subsidies for high winter heating bills. Grants for home improvement along with energy conservation tax credits, which can be applied to heating costs, are another way to reduce budget impacting heating bills this winter.
4. Close vents, use energy efficient space heaters and alternative heat sources for additional energy savings. Closing vents to unused rooms will reduce energy consumption for the entire house. Heating less square footage will require less energy. When closing vents, be sure to seal those rooms well. Install thermal window coverings to reduce heat loss and temperature fluctuations and reduce air exchange at door thresholds with the use of a draft dodger. Using an energy efficient space heater in cold rooms can improve comfort without increasing overall heating costs. Spaces such as basements and laundry rooms can benefit from temporary use of space heaters to increase temperatures for those rooms temporarily. Consider alternative heat sources such as wood stoves and fireplace inserts. Fireplaces are generally inefficient as heat sources. However, wood stoves using catalytic converters can have energy efficiency ratings that rival high tech heat pumps.
5. Appliance energy hogs such as hot water heaters, washers, dryers, ovens and dishwashers should be evaluated each season. Lowering the hot water heater temperature and insulating the water heater and the pipes can reduce energy consumption of this one appliance by as much as seven percent. Wash clothing on cold water settings whenever possible, reserving hot water for only items needing sterilization, such as sick room bedding or cloth diapers. Never start the dishwasher if it is not completely full. The same amount of water and energy will be used to wash five plates and three glasses and will be required to wash a full meal’s worth of dishes for a family of six.
If you want to make money, help someone get healthy, wealthy or laid.
This section was quick.
Seriously, those three topics have been making people rich since the invention of rich. Knowing that isn’t enough. If you want to make some money in the health niche, are you going to help people lose weight, add muscle, relieve stress, or reduce the symptoms of some unpleasant medical condition? Those are called “sub-niches”. (Side question: Viagra is a sub-niche of which topic?)
Still not enough.
If you’re going to offer a product to help lose weight, does it revolve around diet, exercise, or both? For medical conditions, is it a way to soothe eczema, instructions for a diabetic diet, a cure for boils, or help with acne? Those are micro-niches.
That’s where you want to be. The “make money” niche is far too broad for anyone to effectively compete. The “make money online” sub-niche is still crazy. When you get to the “make money buying and selling websites” micro-niche, you’re in a territory that leaves room for competition, without costing thousands of dollars to get involved.
Remember that: The more narrowly you define your niche market, the easier it is to compete. You can take that too far. The “lose weight by eating nothing but onions, alfalfa, and imitation caramel sauce” micro-niche is probably too narrowly defined to have a market worth pursuing. You need a micro-niche with buyers, preferably a lot of them.
Now the hard part.
How do you find a niche with a lot of potential customers? Big companies pay millions of dollars every year to do that kind of market research.
Naturally, I recommend you spend millions of dollars on market research.
No?
Here’s the part where I make this entire series worth every penny you’ve paid. Times 10.
Steal the research.
My favorite source of niche market research to steal is http://www.dummies.com/. Click the link and notice all of the wonderful niches at the top of the page. Jon Wiley & Sons, Inc. spends millions of dollars to know what topics will be good sellers. They’ve been doing this a long time. Trust their work.
Click for full-size image
You don’t have to concentrate on the topics I’ve helpfully highlighted, but they will make it easier for you. Other niches can be profitable, too.
Golf is a great example. Golfers spend money to play the game. You don’t become a golfer without having some discretionary money to spend on it. I’d recommend against consumer electronics. There is a lot of competition for anything popular, and most of that is available for free. If you choose to promote some high-end gear using your Amazon affiliate link, you’re still only looking at a 3% commission.
I like to stick to topics that people “need” an answer for, and can find that answer in ebook form, since I will be promoting a specific product.
With that in mind, pick a topic, then click one of the links to the actual titles for sale. The “best selling titles” links are a gold mine. You can jump straight to the dummies store, if you’d like.
Of the topics above, here’s how I would narrow it down:
1. Business and Careers. The bestsellers here are Quickbooks and home buying. I’m not interested in either topic, so I’ll go into “More titles”. Here, the “urgent” niches look like job hunting and dealing with horrible coworkers. I’m also going to throw “writing copy” into the list because it’s something I have a hard time with.
Bestsellers
2. Health and Fitness. My first thought was to do a site on diabetic cooking, but the cooking niche is too competitive. Childhood obesity, detox diets and back pain remedies strike me as worth pursuing. I’m leaning towards back pain, because I have a bad back. When you’ve thrown your back out, you’ve got nothing to do but lie on the couch and look for ways to make the pain stop. That’s urgency.
3. Personal Finance. The topics that look like good bets are foreclosures and bankruptcies. These are topics that can cost thousands of dollars if you get them wrong. I hate to promote a bankruptcy, but some people are out of choices. Foreclosure defense seems like a good choice. Losing your home comes with a sense of urgency, and helping people stay in their home makes me feel good.
4. Relationships and Family. Of these topics, divorce is probably a good seller. Dating advice definitely is. I’m not going to detail either one of those niches here. Divorce is depressing and sex, while fun, isn’t a topic I’m going to get into here. I try to be family friendly, most of the time. Weddings are great topic. Brides are planning to spend money and there’s no shortage of resources to promote.
So, the niches I’ve chosen are:
Back pain
Bankruptcy
Conflict resolution at work
Detox diets
Fat kids
Foreclosure avoidance
Job hunting
Weddings
Writing copy
I won’t be building 9 niche sites in this series. From here, I’m going to explore effective keywords/search terms and good products to support. There’s no guarantee I’ll find a good product with an affiliate program for a niche I’ve chosen that has keywords that are both highly searched and low competition, so I’m giving myself alternatives.
For those of you following along at home, take some time to find 5-10 niches you’d be willing to promote.
The important things to consider are:
1. Does it make me feel dirty to promote it?
2. Will there be customers willing to spend money on it?
3. Will those customers have an urgent need to solve a problem?
I’ve built sites that ignore #3, and they don’t perform nearly as well as those that consider it. When I do niche sites, I promote a specific product. It’s pure affiliate marketing, so customers willing to spend money are necessarily my target audience.
When you’re setting up a niche site, you need to monetize it. You need to have a way to make money, or it’s a waste of time.
There are two main ways to do that: AdSense or product promotion. To set up an AdSense site, you write a bunch of articles, post them on a website with some Google ads, and wait for the money to roll in.
I don’t do that.
I don’t own a single AdSense site and have never set one up. This article is not about setting up an Adsense site.
My niches site are all product-promotion sites. I pick a product–generally an e-book or video course–and set up a site dedicated to it.
Naturally, picking a good product is an important part of the equation.
The most important part of product selection is that the product has an affiliate program. Without that, there’s no money to be made. There are a lot of places to find affiliate programs. Here are a few:
Amazon. If you don’t live in one of the states that Amazon has dropped in retaliation for passing laws that attempt to circumvent the Supreme Court’s ruling on collecting sales tax, you can sign up as an associate and collect a commission on every referral you send that turns into a purchase. That means you have a lot of product to choose from. Unfortunately, your commission is small, so you need to promote fairly expensive products to get a decent return. On the other hand, people trust Amazon, so that’s one less hurdle to making a sale.
Commission Junction. These are the people managing affiliate programs for a large number of credit cards and banks. If you’ve opened an account with INGDirect through one of my links, I got a commission for the referral. (Thank you!) They have a lot of other products, too.
e-Junkie. This one is a popular distribution system for bloggers. It’s likely that, if you’ve bought an ebook from a blogger, e-Junkie handled the fulfillment process. A lot of the products available there have an affiliate program, but that is up to the owner of the product.
ClickBank. My favorite. This is one of the largest affiliate networks specializing in electronic products, whether that’s membership sites, ebooks, or video courses. Commissions are good, often 50-75%. They also offer a 60 day guarantee of every product sold through their site, which helps soothe the wary customer. This is the site I’ll be using for this series.
The first thing you need to do is sign up for whichever program you intend to use.
If you’re not going with Clickbank, feel free to skip ahead to the section on keyword research.
Once you are signed up and logged in, click on the “Marketplace” link at the top of the screen.
From here, it’s just a matter of finding a good product to sell. Here are the niches we’re going to be looking for:
Back pain
Bankruptcy
Conflict resolution at work
Detox diets
Fat kids
Foreclosure avoidance
Job hunting
Weddings
Writing sales copy
I’m going to look for one or two good products in each niche. When that’s done we’ll narrow it down by consumer demand.
For now, go to advanced search.
Enter your keyword, pick the category and set the advanced search stats. Gravity is the number of affiliates who have made sales in the last month. I don’t like super-high numbers, but I also want to make sure that the item is sellable. Over 10 and under 50 or so seems to be a good balance.
The average sale just ensures that I’ll make a decent amount of money when someone buys the product. I usually aim for $25 or more in commissions per sale. Also, further down, check the affiliate tools box. That means the seller will have some resources for you to use.
This combination will give us 36 products to check out for back pain, unfortunately, none of the results are for back pain products. After unchecking the affiliate tools and setting the gravity to greater than 1, I’ve got 211 results. Sorting by keyword relevance, I see three products, two of which look like something I’d be interested in promoting. One has a 45% commission, the other is 55%. The X-Pain Method has an initial commission of $34 and claims a 5% refund rate. Back Pain, Sciatica, and Bulging Disc Relief pays $16, which will make it a potentially easier sale. I’ll add both to the list for further research.
I’m not going to detail the search for the rest of the niches. That would be repetitive. You can see my selections here:
Bankruptcy – I’m dropping this one from the list. It’s too complicated and deserves an attorney. I don’t know enough about the topic to make sure it is up to date.
Now we’re going to go through a few steps for each of these products.
The Sales Page
We need to make sure the sales page doesn’t suck. If the site doesn’t work, is hard to read or navigate, has a hard-to-find order button, or just doesn’t look professional, it’s getting cut.
Raw Foods is eliminated. The sales video is horrible and the order link is at the bottom of several screens worth of nothing. It’s a crap site.
The 7 day foreclosure-avoidance product is out. Site’s down today. I want reliability.
Management Training By The Book is out. I don’t like typos on the sales page, especially in the page title.
The Email List
If it has an email subscription form, we’ll need to subscribe, then double-check to make sure our affiliate information isn’t getting dropped in the emails. If it is, the seller is effectively stealing commissions. In the interest of time and laziness, I’m going to eliminate anyone pushing for an email subscription. It’s harder–and time-consuming–to monitor that. On of my niche site had a seller completely drop their product. Instead, they pushed for email subscriptions so they could promote other products as an affiliate. Absolutely unethical.
Wedding speeches is eliminated for throwing a mandatory email entry into the order process. There’s no guarantee they are up to anything shady, but I’m taking the simple route.
Checkout and Credit
Finally, we’re going to visit the checkout page. You need to do this from every links in the newsletter and the links on the sales page, just to make sure you’ll get your money.
The way to tell who’s being credited is to look at the bottom of the order page, under the payment information. It should say [affiliate = xxx] where xxxis your ClickBank ID. Anything else, and the product gets cut from the list.
When you are checking these, don’t click on every possible link at once. That confuses the cookies. Do one at a time. I tried to do it in one batch for this post and lost half of the cookies. If it weren’t for the fact that I already own one of the products and bought it through my own link and got credited, I would have been talking undeserved trash about thieving companies.
Other Factors
Sometimes, when you’re examining a product, it just doesn’t feel right. When that happens, drop it. There are millions of other products you can promote. In this case, I’m dropping the anger management program because, in my experience, angry people don’t think they are the problem. Here’s a life tip: If everyone else is a jerk, the problem probably isn’t everyone else.
Another important factor is the sales page itself. If it doesn’t make you want to buy the product, why would anyone else?
Amazing Cover Letters is eliminated because it’s too easy to overlook the buy link. If I have to hunt for it, it’s losing customers.
Amazing Wedding Planning is getting eliminated because I don’t like the sales page. The buy link is easy to overlook, and it doesn’t compel me to buy.
Now we’re down to 10 products in 6 niches. At this point, we’re comfortable with the sales pages and we know that they are crediting commissions. As it stands right now, all of the products are worth promoting.
We’ll make the final determination after doing some heavy keyword research in the next installment. That’s where we’ll find out how hard it is to compete.
Life cover insurance acts as a safety net to pay for a family’s expenses should a wage earner become critically ill or die prematurely. Life cover includes life insurance as well as disability, critical illness, mortgage and income protection insurance policies.
Importance of life cover insurance
In most families, at least one adult is a wage earner and uses their income to pay for necessities such as food, clothing and rent or mortgage. If the wage earner becomes disabled, too ill to work, or dies, life cover insurance can pay for these expenses.
Stay-at-home parents provide valuable, though unpaid, services to the family. Without that person, the family would have to pay for childcare, household upkeep, errand running, and every other chore the stay-at-home parent did. If the stay-at-home parent has life insurance, these expenses can be covered.
Life cover insurance can pay off mortgages and education loans.
Live cover insurance policies will pay funeral costs, which can be substantial.
Family owned businesses can be insured and protected if the owner dies.
Objections
Life cover insurance is too expensive.
Insurance companies have plans to suit every budget and life circumstance. While young and healthy adults will generally receive the most affordable policies, older adults have plenty of reasonably priced options as well.
Disability or severe illness is unlikely.
Actually, 32% of men and 25% of women, ages 40 to 70, will experience a critical illness or disability. http://www.healthinsuranceguide.co.uk/statistics_mainbody.asp
Discussing disability or death is awkward and uncomfortable.
Agreed, but avoiding the topic puts loved ones into economic jeopardy. Without the wage earner’s life cover, a family could lose their home and have to lower their standard of living.
Variety of life cover insurances
Life Insurance
Term insurance is a protection policy, paid for during a specific time period (term), and is active during that time only. Permanent, whole, variable, universal and universal variable life insurance policies all are investment policies. They combine a death benefit (the amount paid out when the insured person dies) with an investment account. Licensed and experienced life insurance agents can help individuals make the best choice for their life situation.
Critical Illness/Disability Insurance
This type of insurance pays for living expenses if a person is diagnosed with a serious illness or disabled and can no longer work.
Mortgage Insurance
This is paid when the mortgage owner dies. This could help prevent the surviving family from having to sell the home.
The time to buy life cover insurance is now!
A 2010 survey (http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ownership-of-individual-life-insurance-falls-to-50-year-low-limra-reports-101789323.html) stated that individual life insurance ownership was at a 50 year low in the United States. An estimated 35 million (30% of households) Americans do not have life insurance, and 11 million of these households have children under 18. Already living paycheck to paycheck, any debilitating injury or death of a wage earning adult could spell financial disaster to the family. Buying life cover insurance is a vital part of caring for loved ones. Just as a wage earner provides a home, food and daily necessities for their family, life cover insurance can take over and provide for the family if the wage earner unable to do so.
