I’m a big fan of the saying “you make your own luck”, and today’s just a good as any day to start.

In the make more money department I have decided to resurrect photodailynews.com. When I started this site in the fall of 2008 I thought I’d scan the websites related to photography and link to news/stories and deals.All started OK, and by the end of 2008 I made over $1000 through affiliate commissions. But I got distracted with a few other projects and before you know it I haven’t updated the site. I tried some get rich quick stuff with it, and failed miserably.

The big reason for my failure with photodailynews was I tried to do it all. I tried to be a news site, and review site, and deals site. I found that I hated doing reviews as I don’t use half of the feature set on most cameras and could care less about a lot of the stuff available on today’s cameras. And, the shipping it back and forth was something I didnt’ enjoy either.

But I found I was pretty good at finding deals on camera gear, and I’m real good at comparing prices on memory, so for 2010 I’m taking the skills I have with comparing memory prices and applying it to phographic equipment. Why. I’m interested and passionate about photo gear. I’m sure I like the ‘gear’ part of photography just as much as the actual shooting part and I have the skills and tools to compare prices. The camera resellers pay about four percent on the camera gear. A point and shoot priced at $200, which earn me an $8 commission through Amazon and other resellers. A dslr or fancy lens can even earn a greater commission.

I’ve just changed the domain name over photodailynews.com and I have started to compare prices on a few digital cameras just to get started. It will take the search engines about a month to realize that photodailynews.com is all about photography and prices anyway, so this will give me time to work on comparing more prices. Amazon offers over 7000 different digital camera products on their site, and the prices change over time. New hot cameras are usually at list price, but the duds or discontinued cameras get priced at hefty discount.

It’s worth a shot. I’ll write about my failures with photodailynews here. I’ll share the good and the bad and the ugly, just as I have done with my ebay sales. The plan is take any earnings from commissions and put it back into the site by advertising. It’s a competitive niche, but it’s one I’m interested in and am compassionate about.The photo gear available and what it can do is quite amazing. Worse Case: it’s a story to tell. Best case, it’s a success, and a year from now I’m at my magical $100/day by working at home in my underwear. Probably the best part is that there’s always new products being released. If this is even remotely successful I can work on expanding and taking the profits and re-investing in the site. It really is just a numbers game. If I can figure out that I make, I dunno ten cents per visitor. I can pay up to nine cents to get that visitor and still be ahead of the game.

Another benefit of doing this is this will allow me to shop for photo gear, but not actually buy it. I get to scratch my shopping itch and I just might make a buck to boot. To me, more than half the fun is getting the deal in the first place. Anybody can pay MSRP, and with the internet there’s not much reason you should.

So for the first day of the new year, that’s the plan. Shop for camera gear, in the hopes of making a buck or two from commissions on sales. We’ll See..

Related posts:

1. How to save almost $500 a year by failing miserably.
2. I’m a Professional Photographer
3. Just Another Manic Monday. Day 48

Well, I think I’ve got that pretty much under control. Sure, I still waffle a bit and before you know it the invisible force field in front of the starbucks pulls me in and I’m handing over all of my money to the baristas and their green little aprons. But for the most part, I’ve got the spend less part pretty much down pat. I’m cooking at home, reducing my starbucks intake, and just generally being happy with the now, and what’ I’ve got, rather than chasing the next purchase or BMW, or fancy house. If there’s one thing I’ve learned is that money doesn’t really buy happiness. Enough money does. There’s the differnce. If you have enough money for your needs, not wants, the rest is gravy.

So, this leads me to the next part of the equation: How to make more money? There’s a myriad of ways to do this, but when it comes down to it there’s really only two ways:

1. Do it yourself. Work for yourself.
2. work for the man.

As my income is created from online ventures, I’ll talk about the the online methods today. I haven’t had a job in some time but it might be an avenue to explore.

How to Make Money Online By Working For Yourself.

The first thing you really need to do is just create value. That really is key. There’s no easy pill or ebook, or 12-step course that will provide you with the magic bullet. Believe me, I’ve tried. And with internet, and free tools from the web there’s no reason why you can’t create value too. Everybody is an expert at something, and you are too. Maybe it’s a website about all the different types of cables for your TV, or your gardening. What do you like to do? Can you write about it? Can’t write? Can you talk? Can you record a video of yourself? I worked with a sports editor who could rhyme off stats non stop about sports. If he started to share his knowledge online, over time the search engines and more importantly, other people would notice and he would be creating more value every day, with every little sports tidbit he knew.

Take ramseeker.com for example: I started ramseeker because I read somewhere online once that memory for a particular mac was hard to find. At the time, the only other site that listed memory prices, only listed the high/low/averages of computer memory but not the memory prices that the different vendors charge. And I thought that was kindof silly. That site was obviously tracking the prices anyway, so why not go the extra mile and list the prices? So I made a list. And value was created. People visited ramseeker.com because I had done the legwork. It wasn’t rocket science. I visited the online stores, checked out their prices and made a list of what I found.

Over time, the memory vendors that I listed for free started to notice that the traffic was coming from ramseeker.com. They started to write and ask how they could make their listing stand out? That was easy, I replied. Get your checkbook out and there’s a world of possibilities.
And, they did. And a few years later, I quit a perfectly good day job due to the fact that I created the value of listing and tracking the memory prices online.

Once you’ve got the value created, the rest just kindof takes care of itself. If you can create something that’s unique to you, and distribute it, then you can create value and profit from it. It’s that simple.

So the question I’m asking myself right now is how can I create more value? I’m doing it with this site. Now it’s only 28days old and truth be told there’s not a lot of value created. Yet. I’ve got 972 days to go to keep on writing, to keep on sharing you with my successes and failures and my ebay sales, and any other income I’m making.

In essence I’m telling a story. It’s unique to me. There’s no other Jim Fitzsimmons’s out there (Well, there are, but no sad sacks like me that are 28k behind the 8 ball). And it’s my story.

Tomorrow, I’ll explore how to make money from telling my story.

Sacrifice of the day

Three quesses what it is! That’s right, you win! More cables. I’m still sorting box after box of these things so we’ll be here a while doing this. I have some other more pricier things I can sell but this is a good way to test the ebay waters without losing my shirt. It’s a generic s-video cable today – 9 feet in length. The auction on eBay starts at $1 on this.

Updates

Not much to report today, except that I made somebody’s day. A buyer of my tennis string wrote to say I’m the best ebay seller he’s come across and he’s pleased as punch to get the tennis string and how happy he was with the purchase. This is something you can’t put a price on. Tecnically, I probably lost money if I researched how much I spent, and then what I spent to ship and what the auction ended at. But you know what? who cares? I’ve got a bit more cash flow, don’t have to deal with the string, and made somebody in the world a bit happier today. It’s been a good day.

Related posts:

1. How to Make More Money Creating Value
2. A year from today. Day 45
3. Ways to Make More Money With Your Blog. Day 29

Firstly, welcome. Chances are you’re reading this – coming from what you thought was completely different to your search engine search but here you are and you’re going ‘huh’? and probably running for the back button as fast as you can. Well, don’t go yet. I share failures and successes and today is definitely failure Monday (kindof fitting that it would be on a Monday – no?)

The song remains the same. The domain name doesn’t.

It’s a good chance you’ve arrived looking for another site. Well, today I took all of about 45 sites and consolidated the nameservers so they point to this site. The sites you were looking at were failures anyway, so you’re not missing much, really. It’s more interesting over here. This is not some scam to show you one site and the search engines another. It’s just that you’re one of the first visitors since I switched and it’ll take a few days for the search engines to figure it out.

But, the good news is I saved $45/monthly by doing this. Let me explain: I am currently using pair.com for hosting and when I get an new domain name for a new site, or project, or just to test an idea – I create a record at pair and they charge me a $1 fee for a dedicated IP address. I like to do things this way as opposed to sharing an IP because in my mind, it keeps things more organized. The bad news: the dedicated IP address costs $1/month. Not much right? Until you realized you’ve got 45 domain names/projects/failures that you registered over time. That’s $45/month and almost $500 yearly. I’d rather take the $500/yearly for a trip than give it to my web host. Now, they say you can’t win if you don’t play, and it was quite possible that one of those projects could have taken off and paid the $1/month in spades for years to come. But, not so with this batch of domain names. So, I forwarded all the domains names here, to aggregate all my little projects into this one. I think it’s better to have focus on one or two websites than spread yourself too thin doing too many things at once.

What were these websites? Glad you asked. Every site has a story, and in a way it’s like a little digital journal of your life:

ReviewCouple.com I registered this in hopes my girlfriend at the time would play along: We could get review samples of stuff (I’m pretty good at asking for stuff, and getting it) and I’d review it – let’s say a digital camera and there would be two reviews. One with my opinion and one with hers. Sadly, she’s no longer my girl, and this domain sits dormant, unused and unwanted. Just like me.

DDR2MemoryDeals.info, DesktopMemoryDeals.info, NotebookMemoryDeals.info and a few more along those lines. To be honest, I have no idea what i was going to use these for. Something to do with ramseeker, I bet.

ElectronicsPrices.com. This, is actually a good domain and I had a shopping site on it but my heart wasn’t in it. There’s millions and millions of shopping sites already. (Still, I like the domain). One day, maybe.

FloralPrices.com. Again, I was going to start a site about flowers. Only one problem: Except for buying the odd bouquet of roses, I know nothing about flowers.

GreatRam.com. A great name, and a great idea, I’m sure. I could forward this domain over to ramseeker.com (and probably should)

MyBlogCan.com My first foray into blogging… really crappy domain name, might be a good idea. I wanted to experiment with blogging.. I wrote a few posts and they started to see a very small amount of traffic.

PhotoDailyNews.com
This one actually made me about $750 this time last year. I was on a bit of a photo kick, (still am, in a way). I went to school for photography and thought heck, I’m pretty good with a mouse and I actually worked as a photo editor for a daily newspaper for 8 years, so I might not be an expert but at least I’ve got some knowledge. I started with just gathering links from other photo sites, and doing that but with RSS readers, this is really redundant and after a while you realize all the same sites are just regurgitating the same press releases anyway. Then I tried doing reviews on photo equipment and the like but I’m not that technically inclined to write about every little button and megapixel. And then I made the mistake of stopping, and that was the death knell for this site. For a laugh, check out my press release for this site. I thought this was going to be the next big thing for me. Live and learn.

Lightbox7.com This was a site I bought and paid for. Over 2 grand, when times were more fiscally secure than they are now. It was a free photo hosting site, and was actually quite popular. It never made any money though and was a pain to police all the naughty photos that would eventually land up there. Free, can be a bad thing some times. Lesson learned: only buy a site that actually makes money, not one that COULD make money.

LB7.com
I paid $350 for this domain name. (what’s that about fools and their money?). A shorter name for Lightbox7.com, or so I thought.

Sportprices.com
This is actually a pretty good domain name. Too bad I don’t know a lick about sports.

Theaterprices.com. Bought at the same time I bought sportprices.com. This might be a project one rainy day? But theaters? Who knows.. it’s only ten bucks a year to renew.

There’s a few more, but those are the best of the bunch that have a story to tell. Do you have any domain names saved for a rainy day? or ideas that never got off the ground? or seemed like a good idea at the time?

Watch out for those little expenses, they add up.

Related posts:

1. A year from today. Day 45
2. Another Year Older. And Deeper in Debt.
3. How To Work Your Way Through Analysis Paralysis