THROUGH A GLASS GRIMLY, PART 3

This is the third installment of a joint series of posts with our friend, Dot of Deeper Issues.  If you’re just joining us, the first two posts detailed how Dot was dismayed to discover her income was going to take a significant hit in retirement.  We offered to share some of the steps we’re taking to deal with similar circumstances, and all of a sudden, a series was born!  You can read Part 1 here, and Part 2 here.

In this post, we’ll take up where Dot left off in Part 2 with excerpts from our email conversations.  Her responses are in italics, and my responses to her responses are in blue. Dizzy yet? 

About collaborating – that’s not only a great idea, it might even make a great niche! A new blog topic – disappointment about Social Security, loss of our dreams, the bad economy, what we can do instead, where does that leave us, etc. I have a 75-year-old friend who is doing fine. I could possibly interview her on what steps she’s taking to protect her income, or on how she set it up (for the younger readers). One thing she did was buy a bunch of CDs (the bank kind) that came due 10 years apart, so she’d be able to travel each time one came due.

I’ve seen CafePress before, and went to visit Pete’s Zazzle site. I like the idea of photos on products. There’s only so much wall space, but clothing goes on forever. I like the tote bags, but my Borders $5 one is still going strong. $30, phew! Well, I’m not the consumer, I’m the trainee. I’d like to do cards, but who sends cards any more. It’s all email. Hmm. You guys are so full of percolating ideas! I wish I had someone to share this with, so it might feel more fun.

The tote bags are not big sellers. Cards sell – but only the ones that are sent in multiples – like new home, save the date, and now they’re coming out with invitations – those should be good. It’s like trading stock. You do the same amount of work trading auntie’s two shares of IBM as you do 200,000 shares for Wells Fargo – or so my ex told me.

Now. Here is something hilarious. Pete has made over $2K selling his comic books on E-bay. I bitched about them and said get rid of them and this gnarly old trunk they’re in – taking up too much space. So he posts this long whiny narrative about how his wife is making him sell them, and these collectors respond with how their wives hate their comic books too and then they bid them up and buy them from him! Too funny.

About Pete’s comic books, that reminds me of the time a guy tried to sell a wedding dress with a big sob story, and he wore the dress in the photos. Sure gets attention.

Do you have any collectibles or dustibles that you could sell on E-bay? My niece bought a garbage bag full of Legos at a garage sale for $4 and sold them for $120 on E-bay recently. Also she sold a $4 pair of garage sale designer genes for over $100.

Same niece sells her crochet hats in an etsy.com store, and an online retailer just placed a bulk order from her for resale. . . Do you have a craft or handiwork? Slower way to make money depending on what it is. But if you’re creative it’s a great outlet for your art. All kinds of artisans are on there.

I always thought that people who did CafePress and etsy HAD to work at it full time to make any money. Guess I was wrong. I tried to sell crafts years ago but I’m usually not good with the trends and also I can’t sit and do that stuff for too long. I crochet, used to knit and sew a lot, and right now I’m doing (shhh) plastic canvas, which you can’t even sell at yard sales. Small crochet items might work, but only a few at a time.

Your niece has a good eye for what to sell. Legos, who’da thunk it?. . .

I don’t have any great collectibles, except my hurricane lamps, which I’ve been meaning to sell on eBay. I’ve tried to sell books but it’s just too much work for the profit you get. When I get home from sitting at the computer all day, it’s hard to sit at the computer some more. My limits are both time and energy.  I posted the link to my niece’s etsy store on Facebook. The little hats she can do in less than an hour. That’s not a bad return.

We are experimenting with Google Adsense on our sites. So far, we have made $1.60. HAHAHA but it begs the observation that affiliate sales and cross-selling to our other businesses is something that we have not maximized. As you mentioned in your recent post, you started your blog to serve one purpose. But Dot, it could serve all types of purpose, not the least of which is a vehicle from which you could hub your extra-curricular, money-making activities.

Yeah, Adsense. We’re not supposed to talk about what we make. I had two people buy something when I first put up the ads, but nothing since. Mike Goad makes some quite good pocket change on his site for trailers. That’s a big ticket item he can talk authoritatively about. Are you an Amazon affiliate? We are, and have thought we could work that better, too. Yeah, I’m an Amazon affiliate. I put that on my new Resources page. They pay better than Adsense, I think, but people have to be crazy to pay full price for books.

We are actively working our travel business, for example: PassingThru Travel. We have yet to even fully tap the reach the blog has. I want to build an email list on travel-related topics. That’s in my plan. With our travel business, we can sell product (wholesale travel club and booking website) to people, we can get commission off their travel bookings on our site, or we can also sign them up for the business opportunity and they can in turn sell it.

People have varying opinions about network marketing. For us, with our interests, this made sense – we love to travel, and we like to hang out with people who do, too. The positive energy is remarkable and uplifting by comparison with the rest of the messages in this economy.  If you are looking at a network marketing opportunity, consider the following aspects:

• you have to love the product
• the product shouldn’t ask people to change their habits (like take this supplement, or use this make-up that makes your face break out, or whatever)
• avoid having to pay up front for merchandise samples
• steer clear of having to distribute physical merchandise.

I wish I had given my blog a better name for other topics. People always start out wanting their domain name to help advertise their site, and then later, it becomes a burden. Something like Blue Duck would have worked much better – could be anything. But I could still hook things onto there. I’m working on hooking my genealogy site onto it,. but that’s tedious work. I like Deeper Issues, I think it can be whatever it wants to be.

We have been discussing e-books. I have made my first one – for my friend John, consisting of the series of blog posts we did for his Alaska trip. I did it as a gift to him and to see if I could proficiently design one. Now we are going to work on some others, and set them up within an affiliate system like e-junkie. We have been sorta scared about this one – but it’s time now. We have knowledge to share, and perhaps we can cross-market with squidoo lenses and on our blogs.

Books could be fun. I’ve even thought about making books, as someone else does on Etsy, from homemade paper, but that takes forever. Better to make e-books.

We also haven’t ruled out more blogs – I am a big fan of Shoemoney’s 12 week FREE series on how to get started with niche blogs – check that out: shoemoneyx.com. Let me know if you can’t find it and I will send you the 12 pdf’s. This is the most comprehensive blueprint to internet marketing I have ever seen. Step by step. Not rocket science. Written for real people.

I went to ShoeMoney but a search didn’t find the series. It does look like an interesting site, though. I will send you the series. There are 12.

The huge stumbling block is time. We are having lots of fun at all of this, and we find ourselves working a lot in our home office. Because it’s fun, it doesn’t seem like drudgery and we are setting our own pace. I think you could, too. Get started now, even if it’s baby steps. A couple extra hundred a month is nothing to sneeze at.

I was thinking last night that one thing we Baby Boomers are going to be seeing a lot of is death. It may sound morbid, but I was wondering whether there was a way to invest in stock for a funeral home chain.

Adventures in Customer Service. A lens on that would be good. No one would ever see it, though, until it’s too late. I do think you’re on to something with “Issues that aging boomers are starting to think about.” Funeral and DNR directives, “death panels,” medicare and medicaid, accessible architecture and interior fixture modifications, the differences between assisted living setups, co-ops vs. renting, downsizing. Those are great ideas. The biggest problem is, boomers are mostly not bloggers, so I wonder how online they are at all. It’s a huge audience, but where to reach them? I’m excited about this!

“Through a glass, grimly.” Hah!  I like that!