The concept is simple.  Buy an empty lot, build a little office,  toss in  a desk and two chairs.   Go through the newspaper classifieds and buy a dozen used cars.  Hose the cars down, put on a fresh layer of wax, buff and shine, vacuum the carpets, Armor-all the interior and kick the tires to make sure the car holds together.  Get a bright shiny red pen and write a price on the windshield – add an exclamation point and circle.  Then wait for the customers to arrive.

Had I been born 30 years ago I would have tried being  a used car salesman.  I understand cars, know how to fix and clean them.  Nothing about the prospect of selling cars would of scared me.  Just like blogging – easy money.

But this website has taught me that I would have been a terrible used car salesman and would not of made any money – just like blogging.

A family walks onto the lot, I approach them.  They tell me what they want and I show them a car.  They like the color, it is clean and it runs.  Does it run well the father asks.  Yes, it runs well I reply with honest smile.  The man takes it for a test run.  Good acceleration, good brakes.  The kids like it too.  Daddy, buy this car.  The man looks at the price, then at the sky, then at his shoes and finally after a short pause at me.  The car is a little out of our price range.  What is your price range?  The man looks at his kids, then at the car and then at me.  He coughs out a price 40% lower then the sticker price.

The family drives off in their old car.  Another sale lost.  Haven’t sold a car in weeks.  I would have been a terrible used car salesman because I cannot convince people to buy at sticker price. That is why I am also not making money with this website.

It Is All About The Dazzle, Lights And Big Signs

Used car salesmen do not work with new content.  They are selling used cars, not making new ones.  Every used car lot has the same bunch of cars.  Being successful is all about how you present the used cars.

Successful  used car salesmen are flashy, fast talking, excited, and they can convince their customers that lemons are chocolate ice creams with rainbow sprinkles on top.  Their lots have blinking lights and neon sings.  Prices are crossed out, slashed and reduced.  They have the best deals in town.  Their deals will not last – limited time offers.  They have grand openings, clear out sales, end of years sale bonanzas.

They will do almost anything to sell you a car.  No restraint – it does not embarrass them to embellish.  The actual condition of the car is irrelevant.  It is everything around the car that matters – the salesman’s slick haircut, the sexy receptionist, the bright lights and exlamation marks.

Successful bloggers would be great used cars salesmen.  Especially the bloggers in my niche – ‘make money online’.  There is no new content in this niche (true for most niches except probably astronomy and Britney Spears)  – it is all used content.  Everything about making money has been said.  There is no new information – it is just repackaged information.

But there are good salesmen on the internet.  They can take used information, put lights on it, wax it, call it a limited offer, and make you feel like you need it.  They can take something that is free and sell it for $99.99.  It is not the information that they provide, it is the packaging they present it in.

Being a used car salesman is a talent.  Not everybody can do it.  Not everybody can get into the roles of adding value to something by making it sparkle and shine.

Becoming a successful blogger is the same as being a successful used car salesman.  It is not enough to just get a lot and put cars on it.  You need to get into character.  Your content is the least valuable part of the blog.  Everybody has content.  It is all about how you present the content.

Have a look at the successful bloggers.  There are some wild characters out there -  successful used car salesmen.  Cowboy hat, chest hair growing out in-between his top shirt buttons, proud father of a new baby boy.  A college football trophy on his desk.  You feel good around him –a friend.  All smiles and good news.  With all the lights and sounds of the lot every day is New Years Eve party.

Compare that with this blog – a parking lot with a bunch of old cars on it.  Someone approaches and asks, can I make money online?  In plain black unbolded text I reply, ‘ya maybe, but it’s a lot of work’.  No wonder nobody is buying cars from me.

Making More Money Online, What YOU Expect vs Reality, What YOU Should Do

Time to blow some dust off this blog.  It has been over a month since my last entry.  Many things could of happened to explain the lack of blog posts:

• A terrible accident with the lawn mower– all my fingers scattered in the backyard.  I tried typing with my elbows but found it very uncomfortable.
• A friend gave me a dog as a present.  The dog cannot deciede where he wants to be.  He wants to go outside, then back inside, then outside, then in, out, in, out, in, out.  My days are spent opening and closing the door. 
• I could not see the words on the screen through my tears.  Tears that formed every time I looked at my AdSense revenue.
• I stumbled over a tree root and hit my head on a rock.  When I woke up I experienced a  instance of perfect clarity and reason in which I realized that this website was a big waste of time.  So I quite this blog and went back to watching TV reruns.

All these are possibilities but none of them is what happened.

The Website Starter Kit

About a month ago, just after my last post, I was walking across a parking lot carrying a bag of potatoes and a big chuck of cheese when I suddenly realized that I know a lot more then I give myself credit.  I know things, things that other people do not know, things that I could sell them.

During dinner as I munched on my baked potato I started to formulate what was to become the ‘Build Your Own Website – Starter Kit’.  A complete package composing of a few ebooks and website templates.  The ebooks would explain to the beginner everything they need to know to start their own money making website:

• How to create a website
• How to setup a web hosting account and domain name
• How to decide on a Niche
• How to write content for your website
• How to get traffic to your website
• How to setup AdSense and generate revenue
• How to become an affiliate and generate revenue

As you probably know ebooks about this topic are plentiful.  Ebooks about ‘making money online’ are offered like trinkets in a Mexican resort town.  So I needed to differentiate myself somehow.  That is why I also created a special template that comes with the ebooks.  It is a complete website template  – the same one used my howthiswebsitemakesmoney.com.

A person who buys my Starter Kit will get all the information they need to be able to understand the ‘make money online’ business and they will get a website to apply their knowledge.  All they need to do is add their own content and make a few stylistic changes to make their website unique.  What took me months to accomplish on my website, doing all the research and creating the website, can be done in a matter of days with the Website Starter Kit.

I loved my idea the instant I came up with it.  So for the next month I sat at my computer and punched away.  I could think of nothing else but my Starter Kit.  If I have a flaw then this is it – I can only focus on one thing at a time.  I had to complete the entire package before I could write another blog post.  Even though my traffic started to suffer – where once I was averaging about 70 visitors a day I was now averaging around 45.  The blog was calling me but I was not listening – must finish the Starter Kit first.

The ebook ended up being 5 main parts and over 200 pages.  I am so glad that it is finally complete.

One of my biggest fears is the blank page and everyday I had to confront it, 200 times in total.  And on top of that some parts of the ebook were extremely boring to write.  Specifically the tutorials on how to use the website template.  The tutorials are step by step screen shot based guides.  So I had to do every step, take a screen shot, format the image and then place it properly into the document.  Hours spent fiddling with margins and padding just to get the images to appear properly on the page.  There are 80 images in the ebook – 80 instances of grief and frustration. 

But that is the past.  It is all done now.  The past me suffered but the present me will benefit.  Now all I have to do is sell it.

The Damn Button

You have probably had this experience or something similar.  You buy a large shelving unit from IKEA,  you are a handy person so putting it all together will not be a problem.  Following the instructions and using the special tools you put the cabinet together.  You are almost done – everything goes without a problem, all that remains is to put on the last little cabinet door.  So far to build the entire cabinet has taken two hours.  But now the stupid little door just does not go on.  For the next 3 hours you try everything to get the door on.  It just does not fit properly – the fu*king thing won’t close.  What started out as a pleasant Saturday afternoon project turns into a red faced cursing day in hell.

That cute little button you see at the top right corner of every page on this website was my last cabinet door.  The entire Starter Kit went relatively well.  The ebooks, the templates, the landing page all went quite smoothly.  All were done in calmness and in a state resembling nirvana.  Sometimes I whistled while I worked.

The little button was left for last.  Such a simple thing – make a little button and place it in the top right corner.  I did not even consider it as a task.  It was just something I needed to do after I was done the Starter Kit – put the ribbon on the Christmas present.  I allotted 30 minutes.

Now looking back I am surprised my laptop lived through the ordeal.  If I would of expressed my frustration in a physical manner the laptop would be on the floor scattered in a million pieces, the bottoms of my feet would be full of computer parts lodged under the skin.  But fortunately I am able to keep my feelings of hate and disgust safely to myself.

It ended up taking 3 hours to put that button where it is.  Sometimes it was on the top left corner, sometimes it was in the middle of page, sometimes it moved around when I re-sized the browser window, and worst of all, sometimes I could not find it anywhere on the page.

But now like the cabinet door which now opens and closes perfectly, the button sits where it should.  It does not move, and looks the same on all pages and on all browser versions.  There were some good things that came out of the experience.

1. In CSS I fully understand the difference between absolute and relative position.
2. To make absolute position work on a <DIV> tag the container in which the <DIV> tag sits must have have the position element set as relative.
3. browsershots.org is a great website to check the browser compatibility of your website.
4. For the little cabinet door you need to use number 13 screws not 18.

First Two Starter Kits Are Sold

If you have been keeping an eye on the number (total revenue) on the homepage then you must of noticed the recent large increase.  For the first 160 days this website managed to make $150 and then in a matter of days it jumps to over $400 hundred dollars.  Looking at the revenue graph you can barley see the Adsense revenue for the last 30 days – the Starter Kit and hosting Affiliate sales dominate the graph like four skyskrapers in an native African village:

The explanation is simple – I sold two copies of the Website Starter Kit.  The two sales of the Starter Kit completely overshadow 6 months of AdSense earnings.  Am I excited?  No.  These two sales did not come easy.  I had to invite a couple of my friends over for dinner, fill them up with alcohol, and then spend the night persuading them to buy the kit.  Being my friends, and drunk, they capitulated.  The day I put the kit up for sale they bought it.  The money is real, but the sale was forced.

If I could get you drunk and force you to buy the Starter Kit I would.  But unfortunately I cannot.  Selling to you and other visitors is a lot harder.  I will be excited when someone buys the Starter Kit through the traditional method: Loving this website, wanting one of their own, clicking the landing page button, reading the landing page, clicking the buy button.

You can find the website starter kit here.

Making More Money Online, Optimistic and Motivational, So You Want To Be A Webmaster...Get in my Head, What YOU Should Do

Albert Einstein famously asked himself, “What would it be like to ride on a beam of light?”.  By answering his own question he was able to completely change our understanding of time and space.  Time became relative and space was curved.  He changed the world.

A couple days ago I asked myself, “What would it be like to be the only affiliate for all of Amazon’s products?”  What if everybody who buys a product from Amazon did so through my website?  For Albert it took years to answer his question, I had my answer in a matter of seconds:  My website would crash.  And I would be have a #$@! load of money.

The Standard Amazon Affiliate Model

The standard method of being a affiliate for Amazon is as follows.  Review a product and place a link to the product at Amazon.com.  If the visitor is persuaded by your review they will click on the link and purchase the product from Amazon.  You get paid a  commission for sending the visitor to Amazon. 

This website is about making money online.  The only products I could review are make money online books.  But for me to review them I would have to read them – and like them.  Find a few books I enjoy, write a review and try to peddle them off on my visitors.  If I do manage to convince someone to purchase a book Amazon would reward me 5% commission.   I could never become rich this way.

I do not want to review products.  I want people to simply use my site to buy products from Amazon.  And not just some products – all products.

How To Get People To Buy Products From My Website

The most obvious way is to ask them to.  I could post a picture of me on bended knees with hands clasped together under my chin, begging them to use my website.  With caption, “Please use my site to buy your Amazon products.  If you do I will become rich.”.  Although this is the easiest way, it is also the most infective.  Nobody cares whether I make lots of money.  There needs to be incentive, other then my financial gain, to convince people to buy products from my site.

The World Needs Help

Before Adam’s grumpy stomach overtook him and he bit into a fresh apple, the world was a happy place. The skies were an unpolluted blue, the trees tall and full of singing birds.  Everybody got along, had what they needed, and were happy. But times have changed.  The world needs help.  People are fighting, hungry and abused.   The environment is changing, skies are graying and choking;  the seas are murky and sick;  animals are fighting for their existence. The world is far from being a paradise. 

It is not all that bad.  There are places in the world doing well.  There are people doing well. People with plenty of food and living in peace. Parks and sanctuaries where animals and plants thrive. The universe  hands out fortune randomly.  Some have lots of fortune, while others are completely without.  Lady Fortuna deals her cards blindfolded.  Only the fortunate have the luxury to help those dealt a poor hand.

So far I am one of the fortunate ones.  I am better off then the world average.  But if everybody used this website to make their Amazon purchases then that would change.  I would become abundantly fortunate.  Too much fortune to handle by myself.  It would have to give it away.  Push my fortune down and pull other’s fortune up.

People Do Not Care About Me, They Care About The World

This website donates most of the revenue earned from Amazon to charity.  The possibilities are amazing.

According to Amazon’s 2008 income statement they receive almost 20 billion dollars in revenue annually.  Amazon pays approximately 5% of purchase price to affiliates.  This means that if in 2008 all products where sold through this website, Amazon would have had to pay this website (5% of 20 billion) 1 billion dollars.  Compared to how much this website makes now, that would have been a really good year.

1 billion dollars – that is a lot of fortune that can be passed on to the less fortunate.  And that is what this website intends to do.  Take most of the money and pass it onto the those that need it.

People might not care about me, but they care about the world.  By using this website to make their Amazon purchases the state of the world can be improved.  They will do it to help the less fortunate – people, environment, animals.  This website will make money by tipping the scale of fortune towards a more even tilt.

To answer the question: What would it be like to be the only affiliate for all of Amazon’s products?  It would be having hundreds of millions of dollars to give the less fortunate.  Change the world.

Update September 2009 – This idea was a total bomb.  The charity page was up for a couple months and only two people purchased a book from Amazon.  So the charity page has been removed.  The Lesson: Do not depend on people’s chairty to make you money online.

Making More Money Online, Optimistic and Motivational