Making Money

Ideas for making money, including my own business, websites, and ideas!

Sponsored Reviews: Improving, but still opportunities lost

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After reviewing the Sponsored Reviews a few months ago, and getting a great comment response from Jarrod Hunt who promised to tackle the problems I had experienced. There have been a number of improvements in the way that the site operates, but I recently checked my stats. They are not impressive.

Out of a total 40 possible projects, I have managed to complete only 7.5%. Another 25% have been rejected (which is fine – I’m glad that the advertiser took the time to look at my offer!).

But the underlying problem with SR’s review system still remains. In fact, the situation seems to get worse, not better as nearly 2/3rds of the reviews that I have responded have either gone unanswered or simply expired.

This is a significant failure to make deals on the part of the advertiser, the blogger, and the intermediary (ie. SR itself). Now this is a pity… Especially since each time that a deal fails to be made, SR’s potential for a fee disappears. Moreover, success in the first campaign would encourage SR’s advertisers and bloggers to come back more often, and do even more deals!

Jarrod, you need to find a way to speed up the dealing system; eliminate some of the reasons that campaigns go unfulfilled; and build confidence in the site! SR has a lot of potential to offer a good alternative to ReviewME, but it is shooting itself in the foot right now!

Needing Goals? Having difficulty following through? Set better goals: step 1 of four

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Many people encourage goal setting as a means to enabling wealth and creating targets to measure success by. I am not one of them. I wish I was. But goals expressed in numbers just don’t interest me. I don’t know why.

I have set goals in this blog, but sometimes I seem so far away from achieving them, that I have a tendency to give up right before I could achieve something. So I’m writing this posting to remind myself of my goals.

 Step 1: Remind yourself of where you are

Right now, my blog is attracting about 900 uniques per 30 days. It has an Alexa/Technorati Ranking of about 110K with daily upticks. In ten months, I have successfully created $4,500 in additional income (though some of the sources pre-existed the blog), with approximately 63% generated since September 1st, 2006 from new sources.

The remaining 37% was from bank accounts, stocks and our business (though, in fact, 2 out 3 of these actually registered a significant increase since the same date). You could say that even that second batch benefited from my increased scrutiny. My bank account interest has doubled since I consolidated my accounts, and created additional term deposits. My dividends have increased by 40%, too, as I have sought additional cash by selling underperforming stocks to buy better performers. The only underperformer this year has been our business. How it improves only time will tell.

Step 2: Consider your current goals and timescale

Step 3: Set your new goals and timescale

Step 4: Evaluate your goals and repeat steps 1 ~ 4 as necessary.

drip, drip, drip – wealth accumulation is silent!

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Drip, drip, drip! Is that the sound of rainwater dripping from the guttering? Or is that the sound of your wealth dripping gradually into your account?

We’ve owned a number of different assets and asset classes over the last fifteen year: property, a business, stocks, mutual funds, bonds, bank accounts, etc.. and each of them has prospered over that time in the same fashion – Drip, drip, drip!

In Taiwan, house property is measured per ping. A ping is generally the size of a traditional Japanese tatami mat. Since we purchased our house, we’ve seen our house value increase about 50% or more per ping in seven years. In addition, we were fortunate enough to be able to buy an additional car park. More than that, we’ve spent the last seven years paying down our mortgage slowly. All of these have resulted in a net increase in our equity stake in our house to approaching 60% from the initial 20% at outset. But all of this has been achieved quietly, regularly, and opportunely.

Our business, too, rarely has much excitement, though the students making progress and developing mastery of a complex linguistic system is thrillling. As a business, the mechanics are silent: counting the bills, updating the accounts, paying the bills and taxes, figuring out our profit margin (if there is any!), and so on. There is little hype compared to working for an Internet giant, like Google.

Stocks and mutual funds, too, move up and down silently. They pay (usually) dividends that are paid quarterly into your account. There is little fuss, excitement or pzzazz over the payments, profits, or losses. The numbers just sit there mocking you if you are doing badly, teasing you if you are doing well.

Bonds, CDs and bank accounts pay interest in similar ways: you go into the bank, update your passbook, check your account or renew your CD, and suddenly the interest payments are there. Silently. Mechanically.

There are no whooshing sounds, no zaps of lightening, no cheering or clapping: just the sound of footsteps to the banking machine to pay the regular payments, and to take care of the other regular details. It’s the silent wealth effect. It’s a lot less glamorous, less fun, less attention seeking than winning at Las Vegas on the poker table, getting a jackpot at Atlantic City on the slots, or winning the Lottery.

Which would you rather have – the drip, drip, drip or the heavy thunderstorm of wealth building?