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Time to Get Back to Work – in 2 weeks

January 9th, 2012 by Kenric

Now that Xmas is over with it’s time to do all the work that I’ve been putting off.

I know that I need to do the following for the stores:

1. Move stores to dedicated server.  I really hate to increase my expenses by $400 a month, but I know I have to.  With sales slowing down I can afford to migrate the stores over to new hosting.
2. SEO Ebiz H & I – My rankings on these dropped over the past few months.  I need to jump start them again.
3. Ebiz K somehow jumped to #1 in Google.  Unfortunately the store is not converting so I need to add content to this store.
4. Ebiz L – The products in this niche are somewhat dynamic.  The suppliers seem to keep changing them on me.  Not sure if I want to stay in this niche.
5. Create a new store for wholesale – Right now I am manually processing wholesale orders.  But the volume is increasing so I’m creating a store so that they can order directly from it.
6. Content Content Content… I need to make more videos

For the SEO business:

1. Get website up (This is 75% done)
2. Get first paying SEO customer by mid February
3. Get first website rental customer by April 1st

But first things first… I am leaving for Taiwan on Tuesday for two weeks.  I will be visiting a factory over there to find new potential products but it’s mostly a vacation trip.  I’ll get started on my list above when I get back. :)

Posted in Ebiz, Vacations | 3 Comments »

Post Christmas Update

December 28th, 2011 by Kenric

Christmas 2011 has come and gone.  I think I will come up about $4,000 short of my goal that I set back in January.  While it does suck that I won’t hit the goal, the fact that I’m only $4k short means I had a great year.  I actually had 200 less orders in Dec 2011 than Dec 2010, but surprisingly I made way more in Dec 2011 with less orders.  My margins have increased very nicely.

So far, there have been only a few returns or messed up shipments.

So what’s new for 2012?

I am feeling a need for business diversification.  You never want to put your eggs in one basket.  Right now I have 2 very different businesses, ecommerce and a service.  They are 100% independent of each other.

Within ecommerce, you can diversify by going into totally different niches.  I think you have to do this in case something catastrophic happens in your niche. What if Google slaps my sites?  What if Walmart decides to order 100,000 units and sinks the market?  You never know.  So I can choose to diversify by opening up more stores.  But to be honest, opening stores is no longer exciting to me.  It’s so cookie cutter to me.

The service business can also get devastated by things beyond my control.

But the nice thing is that right now I have 2 diversified businesses.  However, I think that 3 independent businesses would make me feel alot more comfortable.

So I’ve decided to get into a totally new arena.  I will be opening an SEO company and also a website rental business.  The SEO business is self explanatory.  In fact, I get asked often enough to help with SEO services that I probably should have done this a while ago.  The website rental industry is fairly new.  I have been thinking about this for probably at least 2 years and just never pulled the trigger.  I met this 17 year old kid who started this earlier this year and made $450,000 in 3 months.  Now he was doing something different in that instead of renting the website to the company for $5000/mo, he negotiated a deal that gave him 10% of the contracts that his website brought in.  Needless to say, the company landed a $4.5 million dollar job through the site!

The premise is fairly simple.  You create a website, get it ranked for certain terms and then rent the website out to a business.  The nice thing about this business is that it is very low maintenance and has high returns.  You can’t even compare the amount of work and money in real estate that you need to do to make $300/mo cashflow to a website.

I figure that it would cost me at the most $500 to make a website that I could rent out for $500-$1000 a month.  I wonder if I should rent it out on a 3 month trial at $250 first.  If it works well, I can jack the rent up to $1000 a month.  I bet they’ll want to sign a long term lease at that point!  The nice thing about this is that I create an asset that I can control.  I can control the lease and if the people don’t pay, I just shut it off or go to someone else.

I guess I will never know how this will work until I do it.

Real Estate

I haven’t talked about my REI in a while.  I guess that is good news.  Actually writing this post just reminded me that I need to contact my tenant in Chicago.  He likes to pay for many months at a time.  I think he paid for Sept-Dec in one check, so I need to email him to remind him that January rent is due.

My SLC townhomes are almost 6 years old.  My property manager is telling me that the carpets need changing soon.  My PM is telling me that the rental market is good as nobody is buying and everyone wants to rent.  That’s good for me as a landlord but bad  for me in property values.  I guess that’s why they say you need to buy and hold!

 

 

Posted in Making Money Online | 9 Comments »

Got my Stuff from Customs

December 12th, 2011 by Kenric

Customs

My shipment was cleared the day after my last post.  I guess they wanted to open up the shipment to make sure that it was what my paperwork said it was.  Everything being imported is taxed at a certain rate.  The rate depends on what you are importing and what country it comes from.  It’s a complicated decision process that my customs company determines.  I pay about 9% on my product.

US Customs opened up one box in each palette and they also took one of the products I guess for sampling?  So I only got 749 out of my 750 pieces.  I don’t know if they are allowed to do that, but it’s really a small cost.  Just having customs decide that they wanted to inspect my shipment cost me $400 more in transportation and storage charges.  I guess that’s just part of doing business.

Servers

One of my stores went down 3 times last Friday and is going down probably 3 times a day now.  Each outage ranges from 10 minutes to 30 minutes which sucks.  Of course, this is 100% my fault so I don’t harp on it.  The irony is that this isn’t even the store that I wanted to move over to the dedicated server last month.  That store has only gone down twice in the past weekend.

With a dedicated server costing a minimum of $150 a month, I have to figure if my downtime is costing me more than that.  Right now, I don’t think so.  A dedicated server would cost me $1800 a year.  So the big question is, am I losing out on $1800 worth of profit during the downtime of my stores?  $1800 is about 35-50 orders.  Right now I don’t think I’m losing money based on the outage times, but if I go down much more often this week then I probably will be.

There are other benefits such as site speed and good neighborhood SEO in a dedicated server.  I know that I will eventually have to do this, but once I get past Xmas I can wait until September 2012 to do it.

Posted in Ebiz | 2 Comments »

December Update

December 6th, 2011 by Kenric

This update is a little late because I’ve been fairly busy with Xmas stuff.   November turned out to be decent, but I was hoping for more.  I think my expectations are increasing too fast now.

STORES

Ebiz “A”  and Ebiz “E” were neck and neck and both ended up being within $50 profit to each other.

Ebiz “G” - This blocker store had a few sales making a mere $130.  One day I’ll do something with it.

Ebiz “H” & Ebiz “I” – Winter must not be the season for this niche because it again dropped in sales. It looks like this product peaks in August and September.  I’ll be ready for this next year.  That being said, both of these stores still made $2k last month total.

Ebiz “K”- Again, made about $250.  Slow and steady.  Traffic is increasing and it’s now solidly on the front page of google.  Again, next year I’ll be ready and I predict it will be a $50k year site.

Ebiz “L” – 1 sale which made about $30.  I don’t know if this niche is going to work.  The products are always being discontinued or out of stock.  I’m just sitting on this site and will revisit it next year.

Ebiz “M” – No new news.  It sits there get 5 hits a day.  This is how most people open up stores BTW and then wonder why they get no sales.

Ebiz “N” – Haven’t done much with this store.

DEDICATED SERVER

I ended up cancelling my $200/mo dedicated server and staying on the shared hosting.  Basically what happened was that the migration was a nightmare and I couldn’t risk cutting over a store just before Black Friday.  So I cancelled the server and moved everything back.  So far so good.

I did order a VPS for $30 a month that I’m messing with now.  I can stomach wasting a server for $30/mo while I figure things out, but I couldn’t do that for $200/mo.

CUSTOMS

I have a huge shipment stuck in customs for the past two weeks.  This is stressing me out because I already have about 75 backorders to fill from this shipment.  The shipment contains about $70,000 worth of product of which I’ve sold $6400 of it.  I really believe that I could possibly sell 50% of it in the next 2 weeks.  If this shipment gets rejected or delayed longer I’ll probably be kissing goodbye about $25,000 in profit for the month.

GOALS

I’ve been trying to figure out what a good goal would be for 2012.  I’ve come up with the following goals.  Let me know what you think.

“I will increase my net profits by $50,000 in 2012″
“I will pay off one of my rental properties in 2012″

The first goal should in theory be easy if I open up 2 more stores.  But I’m sort of
tired of opening stores right now.  It’s not exciting anymore.

The second goal is a good doable goal, but the problem is that all my rental properties have interest rates below 3%.  The loans are about $110,000 on each one.  It’s probably not a great use of cash, but paying off a property always feels good to me.

CYCLES

Ebiz for me seems to have a clear cycle.  I notice that in the 4th quarter, where you make the most money, you are also the most motivated to open more stores.  This is probably because you see money coming in.  This is the worst time to open a store, it’s too late.

Then January comes around and your motivation goes out the window and you do nothing.  However this is the best time to open stores because you have 10 months to build them up before the big shopping season hits.

So you should be building stores and SEOing them from January to September, and then sitting back and collecting money from October to December.  I think that’s the proper cycle and I’ll try to follow it in 2012.

EMPLOYEES’ STORES

I am proud to say that both of my employees now have their own stores!  I am sure they will start making money very soon.

Posted in Ebiz | 7 Comments »

Halfway through November

November 15th, 2011 by Kenric

Not really that much to write about this month.  After the great October that I had, November is just looking so-so, even though it really is doing well.

I guess there is new news.  I finally decided to switch to a dedicated server for my stores.  I was going to order up one monster server and run 10 stores on it for about $400/mo.  But I decided to go with 2 small servers at about $200/mo each.  This will give me a level of redundancy in case a server fails.  That way I don’t lose all my stores at once.

The migration has been very time consuming.  I have only migrated one store over and it should have gone smoothly, but I really don’t know what I’m doing so I’m learning as I go.  Luckily I migrated a store that doesn’t make that much and it was only down 1 day due to DNS propagation.

I don’t know if I want to migrate one of my major stores over yet.  If I do, it will have to be done before next week.  I started running Black Friday sales already.

BTW, in case you are wondering about maintenance Ferrari.  Oil changes recommended every 12,500 miles or 12 months are $450.  Annual service for fluids including an oil change is $1100.  Bi-annual service is $2000 and a timing belt change every 3 years is $2500.  New clutch is $3500.  So if I keep the car for 3 years, I’d spend $6,100 on maintenance on it, assuming I don’t need a new clutch.  So it’s not too bad.

 

 

Posted in LIVE | 13 Comments »

October 2011 Update

November 1st, 2011 by Kenric

I got this update out quick because I have been calculating my numbers daily.  I was soooo close to hitting a milestone and ended up falling short.   About 3 weeks into this month I thought I had a chance to hit six-figures in gross revenue this month.  But as it stands I finished the month at $98,500.  It definitely was a good month for me and the numbers exceeded my projections by about 20%.

October did have some other milestones:

Ebiz “A” - Still going strong.  Nothing new.

Ebiz “E” - Had a very strong month.  Database crashed due to too many visitors for about 20 minutes.  Time to upgrade servers.

Ebiz “G” - Got enough sales to make few a hundred bucks.

Ebiz “H” – Had a poor month.  Sales dropped to month 2 numbers.  Lost some traffic due to dropping search engine rankings.

Ebiz “I” – Finally getting consistent sales and made $1000 this month.  I can safely say that this site is in the black.

Ebiz “K”- 3 total sales.  one sale lost money,  one sale I had to cancel because the product was discontinued, one sale made $250.  Woo hoo!

Ebiz “L” – 2 total sales.  Lost money on the first sale.  Made $76 on the second.

For those wondering how I lose money on some sales, it’s because when I venture into a new niche with a new supplier I don’t spend alot of time setting my prices and shipping tables.  I usually either copy other stores’ pricing or just add $50-$100 to my cost.  After I get a few orders I get a better sense of where my pricing should be.

In both of the cases above where I lost money, it was due to shipping.  I greatly underestimated the shipping costs of some products due to either size or weight or both.  But once I get a handle on them, I dial them in and start to make money afterwards.

Ebiz “M” – No new news

Ebiz “N” – That’s right a new store!!  Just started entering products on this one.  It realistically won’t be ready for business until January 2012.

Posted in Ebiz | 1 Comment »

Crested Butte Biking Video 2011

October 31st, 2011 by Kenric

I just realized that I never posted my biking video from this year.

My video editing skills have gone a little downhill lately because I haven’t had as much time to sit and edit them. Each video takes usually a few days to do well. I’ve been putting these together in a few hours.

Posted in Vacations | 1 Comment »