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Yesterday I read You Can Earn A Fortune Creating And Marketing Your Own Ebooks which has some great ideas. Not only that, but the blog has a tremendous amount of motivational information and advice for helping people get started (check out all the links at the very bottom).
The idea of writing a book has always been interesting to me, and I’m intrigued by the suggestion to prepare one and make it available electronically. Once the book is written, there are no ongoing costs for electronic delivery and no expensive inventory to store.
Alternatively, there are methods of self-publishing available to aspiring authors. Some companies’ services are geared more toward hobbyists and people looking for a novel gift or professional-looking family history and not so much for the new author with low-volume sales. I say that because small print runs can be very expensive per unit. You’ll see what I mean; here are a couple of companies that I’ve come across:
I do have a friend who works at a publishing company and I’m thinking about running my outline and first chapter by him before resigning myself to eBook format. Managing my expectations is important, however, because he has a story that he likes to share which goes something like this:
“I’m thinking about writing a book,” a dentist confides to his friend (a respected author who will remain nameless).
“I’m thinking about taking up dentistry,” the friend replies (facetiously).
On the one hand, I can see the point that he’s trying to make which is that there’s more to writing than simply getting words down on a piece of paper. There is a strong element of talent, intellect, etc.
Where the comparison breaks down is that we all write things every day, whereas none of us does anything that overlaps the job responsibilities of a dentist. Additionally, there’s such a broad spectrum of topics, writing styles, and book types that it’s reasonable to expect that there might be a market for books in which the publishing industry may have no interest. Books are usually reviewed and proofed by professionals who can really raise the quality of a written work as opposed to dentists who must rely on their own knowledge, skills, etc.
So back to the idea of writing an eBook — the questions I would like to resolve before moving (too much further) forward include:
- Will people be satisfied with paying then waiting for me to e-mail them the eBook? Or is there a quick and easy way to have them receive it automatically (without it costing me much or any money)?
- How long should the books be?
- Is there really a market for the types of eBooks that I might be interested in writing?
- How do I determine pricing?
- What’s the most effective way to market it/them?
- Is there any inexpensive way to protect your work (i.e., prevent unauthorized distribution)?
Question(s) of the day:
Have you thought about writing an eBook and selling it on your blog? If you’ve already done it, what tips and tricks can you pass along?
You won’t notice any difference unless there’s a problem, but I finally broke down and upgraded from WordPress 2.0.4 to 2.0.5 only a month after it came out. I let my mom’s blog be the guinea pig (don’t tell her I said so!) and everything went smoothly, so I decided to take the plunge.
First I backed up the files to my hard drive then backed up the database. It was easy as pie. All told, it took less than three minutes if you don’t count waiting for the FTP client to finish transferring files back and forth.
If you’re still running 2.0.4 (or an even earlier version) you will probably want to think about the upgrade, especially since it includes some security updates according to the official WordPress blog.
I was reading Ideas For A “Debt-Free Christmas”: Relatives over at NoCreditNeeded.com and I think they’ve really hit on something with the photo CDs for parents and grandparents. This is a great gift that they’ll really enjoy, and it’s fairly inexpensive.
This year, burn a CD for each set of parents and grandparents with all your digital pictures. Next year, just give them the update (a new CD with your photos from 2007). You can put in some time to really do something special with the presentation of the pictures, but even if you don’t have a lot of time, burn a copy of all your pictures.
My parents often ask for the high-resolution versions of our digital photos, but it’s a real pain to send one or two at a time via e-mail. I never get around to burning a few pictures to CD here, and a few more there. Let each Christmas or holiday season be your chance to give them what they’re looking for.
As an IT guy, backups of important information are always on my mind, if for no other reason than it would be really embarrassing to admit to someone else that a supposed IT professional didn’t take the proper steps to backup and safeguard his information! (My primary motivation, whether you believe me or not, is that I don’t want to lose any irreplaceable data.) If your grandparents live far away, you’ve just created two new off-site backups of your photos. Even if your computer hard drives fail, your external hard drive dies, and your CD and DVD backups melt when your house burns down, there’s a great chance you will be able to get your pictures back.
Quick recap:
- Grandparents get all the photos they could ever want (and probably more)
- You get peace of mind knowing that you’ve got an off-site backup
Question of the day:
How do you backup your digital photos, and are they adequately protected against all kinds of loss?
In an attempt to setup a means of earning passive income, I’ve ventured into investing in domain names. The ride (after a little less than 30 days) has been different from what I had expected, but that shouldn’t be too surprising since I didn’t know too much about it when I started buying domain names.
Be sure to read my first two posts (if you haven’t already) to hear how I got started:
After writing those two posts, Matt from DomainersEdge.com offered to let me try the services he offers and I’ve really enjoyed that opportunity. In the interest of full disclosure, he has given me a one month free trial. You’ll be the judge of whether or not that colors my opinions or description of his site. At a future date I’ll write a post describing what I like and dislike about his site. For now I’ll speak in general terms about how it’s helped me.
In my ongoing research, I came across a post by a domainer who started out the way I did: indiscriminately purchasing a bunch of domains because they sounded good. As Matt from DomainersEdge.com rightly points out, traffic (which translates into cash) is king. None of my first 100+ domains were really going anywhere because they had no traffic. They were virtually all newly-registered domain names with no history, expiring links, Alexa.com ranking, link popularity, etc.
If those terms are new to you (just a short time ago, they were to me too) check out Matt’s screen casts which will show you more about what his site will help you do. He also shares some very useful information regarding what makes a domain valuable:
http://www.screencast.com/users/AntiSoma/collections/85afd561-b758-4723-b3aa-8d659254b132
Matt has also been very kind to answer several questions that I’ve posed to him via e-mail. He’s been patient and has given me some great information. Though his time is probably in short enough supply that he can’t offer as much personal attention to a large group of people, his insights have been sufficient to keep me going at a hobby that I thought I’d need to leave behind after some bad initial luck.
After conducting fairly extensive research into which domains might be worth purchasing, I settled on 22 and again purchased them at GoDaddy.com for the following reasons:
- For some reason I still like the DomainsByProxy.com service which is free when you purchase (I believe it’s) six or more domains
- I wanted to participate in some of their auctions which requires an annual membership fee of $4.95, and I got two cheap domains with that non-domain purchase
- I found an online coupon code that saved me an additional $5 or so off my total purchase
I immediately parked the domains at Sedo.com and in about two days I’ve had 70 page views with 2 clicks for a total of $0.10. That doesn’t establish any kind of trend that will result in my early retirement, but it is quite a bit better than my other 50+ domains which have taken about a month to give me 303 page views with 15 clicks and $0.67.
DomainersEdge.com also gave me enough info to venture into backordering domain names. Since I’m still not very experienced, I was nervous to throw too much money at a single domain name, especially since I’ve had such trouble picking good ones in the past. I opened accounts at Pool.com and SnapNames.com and backordered the same list of domains with both services. Other people (who I guess know more about the true value of the domain names) have outbid me on virtually every auction. It’s unlikely that I’ll really push the envelope on those auctions, but I’m anxious to see what the domains ultimately sell for. I also bought a couple domains through GoDaddy.com’s auction and I have a couple more bids in there.
It’s generally accepted that if you really want a domain name that’s expiring, you should backorder it at all the sites offering that service (Enom.com, SnapNames.com, Pool.com, etc.). That gives you the best chances of getting it. If multiple people backorder the same domain name, it goes into a private auction where the highest bidder takes it. Last I checked, Flckr.com was up to $520. Is it worth that much? (That’s not a rhetorical question — I don’t know the answer.)
I can’t take full credit for these latest moves; Matt recommended looking at (and participating in) some auctions to get a better feel for what people are willing to pay for different domains. It has been very interesting. Maybe I’ll even get to a point where I feel comfortable spending more than $100 for a single domain name. It would be nice if I knew it was worth that much money, but I suppose there’s an element of risk and uncertainty in everything.
There are several steps that I plan to take going forward:
- Get all my domains that are parked at GoDaddy.com moved over to Sedo.com and optimize them
- Further optimize my parked domains at Sedo.com – I have some domains with decent (by my standards) unique page views and pitiful click throughs
- Continue using DomainersEdge.com to research and purchase domain names
- Keep posting information about my experience to help you determine whether it’s something you’d like to do (or help you a little if you’ve already started)
Question of the day:
What have been your most successful techniques in making money with domaining?
Sometimes I wonder how I kept track of my personal finances before using my financial software. Those were simpler times when most of my purchases were either by check or debit card so my check register and other menial approaches were adequate. Now things are more complex with accounts at several banks and credit cards whose rewards programs we take advantage of.
Bringing all that information together in one place, let alone managing it effectively, is a daunting and potentially time-consuming task. It doesn’t need to be, though, with the software packages that are available. Microsoft Money and Quicken are perhaps the two most popular financial software packages on the market at present. Both have very similar functionality that facilitate the following useful activities:
- Downloading and reconciling monthly statements
- Categorizing purchases
- Creating and reviewing budgets
- Determining your full financial picture (i.e., net worth)
At first I wasn’t sold on the possible benefits of moving all my financial information into a single piece of software. Excel seemed to be working fairly well, and I had a nice system going — I thought. On the advice of a friend whose opinion I trust, I bought a copy of MS Money and began using it. There were lots of new things to get used to.
Note: Though in this post I’ll describe my experience with MS Money, the approach and thoughts likely apply more generally to the other packages available on the market.
What does it take to get started?
Within MS Money you set up accounts for bank accounts, credit cards, CDs, car loans, mortgages, retirement accounts, cash, etc. You also create categories for your income (wages and tips, interest, etc.) and expenses (groceries, insurance, etc.), and transactions in any account can be assigned to any of those categories. The categories don’t all need to be in place before you begin using the software because you can add them at any time, plus MS Money has a number of built-in categories. Still, you may want to give some up-front thought to what you want to track and in how much detail. More about that a little later.
Setting up the accounts requires familiarity with the software or a willingness to jump in with both feet and learn. It’s a bit of a catch-22 because until you have your accounts set up, you can’t really learn how to effectively use the software. Setting up just one account and using the software doesn’t work because in order to properly categorize and account for all your transactions, money moving from one account to another must be classified as a transfer. Even a payment on a credit card must be setup as a transfer or else it the software will think you spent the money twice: once in your credit card account and once in your checking account.
As you set up your accounts, you’ll need to draw a line in the sand that divides your financial history into two periods: “pre-MS Money” and “with MS Money.” Reconcile all your accounts up to that line so you can enter a starting balance for each. For some of the more complex accounts such as your mortgage, you may want to take the history back further, but that’s your call.
What happens on a monthly basis?
Your experience and preferences may lead you to a different way of interacting with the software, but here are the steps I take:
- Download transaction data for all of my accounts. MS Money is capable of directly connecting to some financial institutions (such as some of our retirement accounts and credit cards) while other accounts (credit union and other bank accounts) require logging into the banks’ websites and manually downloading the transactions.
- Review my receipts categorizing individual transactions and marking them as “accepted.” – MS Money has a screen for each account that shows all the transactions for that account, and transactions that aren’t accepted yet show up bolded. Fortunately you can specify a date range so you’re not looking at everything since the beginning of time. We collect our receipts/statements/paid bills/etc. in a folder marked “not posted” until I’m able to review each one. I take the receipt out of the folder, confirm that the dollar amounts match, and file the receipts in the way I talk about in Filing Personal Receipts.
- Review any transactions not marked as “accepted.” – If there are remaining transactions that haven’t been accepted (there inevitably are), it means that I didn’t have the receipt. Sometimes we lose a receipt or pay a babysitter with a check, so a missing receipt isn’t a sure-fire sign of fraudulent charges. It’s still important to look into each one though, because it could be a mistake or an indication of problems.
- Reconcile each individual account using the respective monthly statements. – This is a step that has evolved over the years that I’ve used MS Money.
- Originally: I would step through each transaction to make sure the paper statement lined up perfectly. This approach was very time consuming and recently I determined that it didn’t add much value despite taking so much time.
- Presently: In MS Money I sort the transactions chronologically and find the last transaction that’s included on my paper statement. The running balance for that line should show the same total as 1. the amount due on the credit card statement or 2. the period ending balance on a savings or checking account. If the two numbers match, I mark all the transactions as reconciled in MS Money. If not, I spot check the transactions until I figure out where the mistake was made.
- Check the built-in “Spending By Category” report. – Any transactions that aren’t categorized are assigned to one called (this should surprise you) “uncategorized.” This report allows you to specify a date range and then drill down to (and edit) the individual transactions within a category. I first review anything in the category “uncategorized” and assign them as appropriate. Then I spot check some categories and look more closely into any where spending seems to be excessive. Sometimes I’ve miscategorized transactions, but more often than not we’ve just made a big one-time purchase.
- Check the built-in report showing spending by category per month. – This report is useful for identifying spending trends. Are we spending more on groceries compared to this time last year? Has it been growing steadily or did it jump up suddenly one month?
- Review how closely the budget matched actual spending. – Having a budget does you no good if you don’t review it to see how closely you’re following it. When there are differences, I will sometimes adjust the budget up or down depending on external changes (e.g., a gym membership that ended, gas prices rising, etc.). Usually I’ll print out the budget so my wife and I can discuss how we’re doing.
(For additional information on categories and how I use them to track our spending, you’ll want to check here for a link to my other post — I’ll insert a link here once I get it written!)
Those who want to keep close track of their personal or family finances would be well served to utilize software to do so. It can eliminate many of the tedious and repetitive tasks normally associated with “keeping the books.” The software is a single repository that will help you manage your earning and spending more carefully, and at any given moment you can get a feeling for your net worth. You may be different, but I personally enjoy knowing where I stand financially and watching it slowly improve each month.
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