Howe I Make Money On-Line

[narres]

How I make money on-line ?...We will get to that in a minute.

Sitting here watching "Cops" on the TV and seeing a black guy getting tasered over and over again, for no apparent reason other than that he is Big, Black and a Have Not, makes me think about my own journey through life. Seeing that mayhem , makes me glad that I am Big, White and that I am a Have. To Have whatever I need or want, at any time, day or night.

The Big and White part of me came from my parents, but the Have part is obtained by myself with working long hours every day for up to 75 hours per week.
I managed to do that for over a 30 years period, to the tune of people calling me a "workaholic".
Possibly they were right, but in order to succeed, where my parent did not, I was convinced that that was what I had to do to in order to provide for my family.

My life lessons where learned early on when my "Dad" decided that it was time to "get the hell out off my house" at age 16.
To start fending for yourself at that age makes one grow op fast and take responsibility for one's own wellbeing.

Well ...I did grow up, fast, and with the help of the army (MP) I even became a responsible individual, husband of 43 yrs and father of 3.
The army took me from a "Cock Sure Punk" to a sniveling, crying piece of human excrement, crawling on my belly in the mud and rain through an imaginary minefield to a safe zone that did not exist.
Then came the rebuilding of the confident, self assured, motivated, fair and honest person that I know have I become.
For that I thank them.

I told you about the long hours I used to work in the past and finally they were wearing me out.
That all stopped about ten years ago as my body started to complain and my personal "veterinarian" told me to slow down a little or I would regret it big time.
So I listened ...sold my companies', and got myself a 35 hr per week job in the local jail-house, managing people that did not have the same sense of responsibility and self worth that most of us have.

That is about the same time that I started selling on Ebay as I had more time on my hands. The way I found my first product to sell was when I was looking to buy a Sonar Fish Finder on Ebay.
After having found one, and finding it interesting, I started doing some more research using the info that was given in the listing. I found that some of the description was in poor English and seem to be copied and pasted from some Website.

After pasting that information into Google I quickly came across the site of the manufacturer where the info was taken from. A few email back and forth, and a money transfer, I was the proud owner of 200 units delivered to my door at about 33% of the Ebay sellers cost.

My start selling on Ebay went smooth so I decided to start compete with myself by adding two more Ebay sites to sell the same product. Site one, Amateurish. Site two, Normal. Site three, Slick.
Different pictures, price and body text. This method gave me some insight in how people where buying. (Split testing)

I did and still do sell only "buy it now" and saw quite a difference among the buying patterns between Canadian and the USA buyers regarding the sites used. I have and still use that same technique selling multiple different electronic products using 12 to 15 Ebay sites. In fact I have sold $1200.00 of product in the last 45 min. with a 50% + net profit.

Is that special ...no, not to me. Remember. I have been at it for about ten years and this runs almost automatic. Now I know I have to ship real product and that when I place a $20-30000.00 order to buy the product, that most young people cannot do that. But you can do it cheaper to. I have a product that I got into by accident.

When I sold my last retail store about four years ago I ended up with some excess inventory at my house. What to do with it?
It was an inexpensive item, in a very, very small niche, with NOBODY selling it on Ebay at the time, So ...why not try it.
I had 100 units at home and did not want to dispose off them. I did my three page thing and started selling them in predetermined quantities, and never looked back.

This little "Gem" is more or less still exclusively mine, and sold over 6000 units this year with a net of about $1.00 ea. As of the new year I am going to start selling this "Gem" solo and drop the electronics from China.

I will not reorder electronics and sell out what I have in stock. Although there is a good margin in the electronic product I no longer want to deal with the import and warranty related work.

Besides the boss (wife) insists on going on a cruise over the holiday season and to Europe in the spring.

OK, that is it, back to the subject at hand.

The Niche Choppers family gave me lots of food for thought. One of the most important thing that I take away from this forum is that I am actually going to use some of the information that I gathered here,

IE: Article marketing to boost the sales of my little "Gem". Let's see if I can increase the sales, by what kind of volume can this be done, and in what time span.

It will be low key as it is not important to my survival but only a research tool to ad to my resume. At the moment I have no aspirations in becoming a Internet Marketing "Guru" as my life is to short and my income is more than generous. Therefore there is no driving urge to generate income and all this is done to amuse and test myself.

Having said that, it is still an goal of mine to have some of the things I am working on at the moment, produce income on the Internet if only to satisfy my own drive to accomplishment.

I have been Marketing myself and my services for 50 years and feel I have done well in realizing my dreams so it is time to rest a little and smell the flowers.

I came to Niche Choppers by accident, (free membership with a $77 PPV product, with bad video production, I do not even use), over a month ago.

It has given me a new perspective and appreciation for some of our younger members and new hope for the future entrepreneurs.

As for my future ... I can see nothing but good fortune knowing that my "Gem" will be there for me and that my newly found skills and friendships will prove to be fruitful in the upcoming months.

Anyway, it would be no problem for me to bore you all to death with more small talk and stories of my trail and errors but my coffee is getting cold.

Besides, I am probably one of the worst copy writer on Niche Choppers who is having fun doing so.

See ye !!

[NCMedia]

I like this post.

Can't learn about everyone's journey's unless they post them, so don't find this a bore - it's a therapeutic process for any marketer to 'look back' and review/project forward...

It's cool to know you made your lil' corner of web money through ebay - I'm sure most here loathe the thought of actually having to 'ship and handle' anything, as we're all so used to automation and taking advantage of a digital marketplace.

You're oldschool indeed, and if the money is still there for you, no need to change or try to take over the web, however yes I agree that you should be able to take quite a bit from here to apply to your ebay biz and outreach campaigns.

Important points I found above:

* Split testing for everything from copy/theme/price/etc. < good on you.

* Geo targeting and analyzing buying/customer patterns. < good for all marketplaces/products

* Using other means of traffic other than traditional ebay/ppc outreach.

You should be able to quickly and rather inexpensively further build your campaigns around your most popular offer, and potentially double/triple your return with little work (or automate it by assigning a chopper or two to help for commission or for a one time fee). I'm sure most here overlook ebay, myself included, however the principles of generating awareness and clicks is still the same (more traffic = more money).

Cheers to your further success,
N.

[bruusk]

Yep, cool stuff.. Who knew Narres was making mad money online already Congrats man, and great post.

Ebay is not really atractive/sexy for me, (boob size?) but still it's one of the biggest online sellers so might be worth a second look.

[cliqz]

I too used to do pretty well on eBay back in the day selling websites. I was one of the bigger sellers in the cheap cigarette sites niche

1) Set up an OsCommerce site on a good domain with a nice free template.
2) Fill it with a database dump of products and images.
3) Profit.

But I dropped out when the market started getting saturated by rock bottom price under-cutters and eBay started getting extortionate with its fees.

Also former Army communicator here hooah!

[Russ]

Good to see that it's possible. What this illustrates is that the 'drive' to be successful in 'real life' needs to be present in the virtual world as well.