Flea Markets: Can they be fun?

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It’s fun to try different things when you have your own business. I’d seen a ‘flea market’ in the TV show ‘The Apprentice’, in fact in the first series when the contestants were asked to sell items at a flea market. I’d always wondered what we’d learn about doing that.

Well, on the weekend last, our community had its own flea market, and so we decided to see if we could sell some English Books to passersby. Terry, Christine, and I set out our stall in the main area, with a lot of traffic walking by. Our target market was parents who wanted to buy books for their children, and children who liked books.

Our price points were about US$3.00 for paperback books and $7.00 for hardback children’s books. Generally, for new books, in Taiwan, these prices were already good value. But for English language, American books, the prices were extraordinary value.

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Terry checking the stand to see if the books would stand up or not against the wind. They didn’t.

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“Now where should we put those books?”

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We’re all taking a breather, and reading the books to see what we could sell.

At the start, we all were quite excited: business was brisk as we sold 6 in about 15 minutes. But the next few hours didn’t produce any more sales at all. At about lunch time, we started wrapping things up as we realized the heat of the day was coming and most people would be taking a siesta after lunch.

Overall, we learned a lot about taking part in a flea market, though. We talked it over and here are the benefits of our experience:

1. Pick your product: not all products can sell well in a flea market. People don’t go to them to buy NEW items, but rather items that are second hand usually.

2. Pick your price point: in a flea market, people will readily hand over good cash for junk, but are often reluctant to part with cash for things of value. Perversely, they seem willing to throw away $100 on a piece of junk that they may never use. Yet, to buy a book at the same price, esp. a new one, a great deal, seems weird.

3. Selling books: there are places to sell books, and places NOT to sell books. Most bookstores carve out a real atmosphere for themselves, even 2nd hand ones. A flea market like the one we attended has none. Nada. Zip.

4. Market well!: we originally had intended to do other marketing of our books to our students, but we didn’t. Big mistake. If some of our own students and their parents had dropped by, we might have sold MANY more books than we did.

5. Our profit margins: we didn’t have sufficient profit margins on the books to make the whole effort worthwhile. While we charged a 35% markup on the books, we figured that buying a cup of coffee basically killed any money that we made. We realized that to make any money on books, … well, it’s difficult.

Unfortunately, for #4 above, we failed to market our books to our students and we failed to market our courses and classes to our book customers. This had been the primary set of objectives (not making money as in #5). In this respect, we absolutely failed.

So if I was sitting in the boardroom with Donald Trump, I’m afraid that I’d be the one taking the rap for failing on so many counts! But then we aren’t. We were happy to try this approach, and see what we could make of it. Perhaps we’ll try it again, perhaps not. We’ll see. Did we learn anything? You bet, a whole lot! And it was kind of fun!

Have you ever sold anything in a flea market? How did you approach the whole thing?

PayPerPost’s Best Practices: Best for Bloggers?

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Payperpost recently celebrated its first full year as a company, and in that time things have changed a lot for them, for their bloggers and their advertisers. One recent innovation has been the introduction of lots of tools for bloggers, including the Marketplace, PPP Direct, a referral program and so on.

Best Practices: Best for Bloggers?
They’ve just added their own best practices guidelines , too, with lots of useful suggestions for PPP bloggers and non-PPP bloggers. Naturally, this is a good thing in general as there has been quite a problem with splogs and spamblogs created by bloggers for the sole purpose of making money from PPP. With a lively community in Payperpost Boards, extensive tools, and good support in place, it’s looking like Payperpost could be the best online to do sponsored postings.

Synopsis of the Practices
However, if you read the guidelines carefully , there are quite a few places where the guidelines are really telling you WHAT and HOW to post on your blog. Let’s look at a few examples:

 

  • You HAVE to maintain a balance of posts/sponsored posts, no matter what the source of your sponsored posts or how your posts have been sponsored.
  • Archives… well, obviously archives are a good idea for most blog types. They provide backlinks and lots of fodder for new readers. But what if your blog doesn’t archive posts…
  • Link placement: It may be obvious to place links inside the text, but there are huge exceptions to this, including graphics, emphasis, ..
  • Relevance: Another obvious one. If you write a tech and investing blog like this one, but you suddenly blog on women’s hats, or underwear for pets, or whatever. But what if you’re blogging on the underlying companies that provide these prodcuts…? Well, that’s relevant. But what if you’re a general blogger?…
  • Word count: While this is obvious, the last comment is less so: “Also, stay on topic. If a car rental site is requesting 200 words, 200+ words should be about car rentals.”
  • Choosing Opportunities: Choosing carefully and personalizing your postings. But we can’t go overboard or be inventive or *cough* creative *cough* regarding our ‘personal’ experiences…
  • Titles & Categories: We can’t use “PPP” in the title of the post, nor a special category for such posts (why not?)
  • Money: We can’t talk about how much we were paid (why not?) nor can we talk excessively about money or post it near a PPP posting.
  • Look and Feel: We have to follow guidelines for blogs, fonts, colors, pictures, pop up links, etc….
  • Content link ads: We can use content link ads like Contera in our posts.
  • There are further ‘suggestions’ on search, finding friends, TOS, and FAQs. Not to mention Customer Love (how 1984?).

The Big Picture?
Well, individually taken, many, if not most, of these are great suggestions. Taken together, bloggers are beginning to see the influence of advertising money on not just the WHAT we blog (the opportunities or advertisements, whether they are ‘buzzes’ ‘opinions’ or ‘reviews’ or whatever) but also the HOW of blogging, that goes for both form (the blog’s appearance – archives, links, look and feel) and the content (balance, linking, word count, relevance,…).

Other Discussions
Given many of these requirements are already rules (balance, categories, titles, content links, etc.), one has to wonder how many of the rest will be formalized sooner or later. There’s quite a discussion going at Payperpost’s Community Boards (which are an excellent insight to the whole PPP game) with one British blogger summarizing their feelings quite appropriately: “I can definitely live without the £3 a day (if I am lucky lol) if it means NOT feeling like PPP own my soul “.

On the otherside, scorpy01 noted: “This Best Practices suggestion isn’t about being deceptive, it’s about giving the advertiser the best exposure possible.” This is a sentiment I also understand, as a businessperson. The challenge going forward for PayperPost is going to be the same as always: providing a valuable marketplace of bloggers for advertisers, while balancing the needs of bloggers especially the more popular bloggers who can go it alone, to be independent. Ted Murphy has created an amazing company, but the balancing act could so easily fail, if the company rules become excessively strict ( there are increasingly long TOS, FAQs, Practices, etc.) that are sapping some of the freedom and joy of the basic motif ‘Be paid to blog about the things you love’.

My Own Thoughts
I think my own personal feelings run more like BSN’s who noted:

‘…it’s another case of someone trying to control how I organize my blog. As I said earlier, this isn’t about disclosure to me, because I use other methods to disclose. And since I respect the advertisers wishes by not taking those opps that say ‘no sponsored post category’, it’s really my business how I organize/categorize my blog. I understand there might be some opportunity cost associated with how I organize my blog and I can live with it. My blog, my decision . (my emphasis).

My own opinion is clearly reflected in my own postings from PayPerPost. Increasingly, I’m finding that I am less and less willing to go through all the hoops: minimum words, disclosure, relevance, links, images, image links, PR ranking, segmentation, checking and double checking, queries, errors, and so on just to get $5. I’m afraid that “My blog, my decision” may become my motto for many things related to PPP. (An afterthought: I wonder how long it is before we are expressly told not to talk about the TOS publicly or mention how much we make…? You think I’m joking: look what happened to Google’s TOS!)

Effects on my Blogging
This has resulted in my blogging a lot less for Payperpost over the last year. In fact, I haven’t posted anything in September. Here you can see what I mean…

  • Sept 12
  • Oct 5
  • Nov 14
  • December 27
  • Jan 25
  • Feb 15
  • March 11
  • April 12
  • May 11
  • June 7
  • July 3
  • August 8
  • September 0

Great for Newbies!
I wouldn’t discourage new bloggers from getting involved with PayPerPost at all, quite the contrary. It’s a great way to start blogging regularly, make a *little* money, meet great people, and find some good reading! All of these are great pluses in the system. But if you are a little seasoned, with 50K bloggers now in the system, it’s difficult to make any real money, posting rates have declined somewhat for individual bloggers, esp. those with rankings above PR4, though there are many more opps now; and I no longer login and refresh as much as I used to. I’d rather get on with my ‘work’.

Perhaps, the new Argus system will make things better for us more established bloggers, perhaps not. The Marketplace hasn’t brought me any new offers at all. In fact, I’ve had more luck finding my own clients than using them or even Sponsored Reviews or ReviewME. My blog tends to get lost amongst all the others… That’s something I need to work on, I guess…

Disclaimer: this Blogger has posted extensively for PayPerPost over the past year, and this post contains affiliate type links, but it is NOT sponsored.

Blog Forgetfulness: What a naughty boy you’ve been

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Well, I just noticed today’s date! It’s been nearly four days since I updated my blog… There’s a gap. I had a look at my traffic for the last few days, and it’s dropped off quite a bit! Somehow, failing to post has impacted the traffic… I’ve been quite busy on one of my other pet projects, a language journal.

So this post will outline some effective strategies for daily postings: I’ll promise to try some of them, though I can’t guarantee success.

1. the backlist.

It’s a great idea to keep a list of back posts that you can publish. This works quite well, if the content isn’t dated; or is of more universal value than a daily post might be. News headlines wouldn’t be included in this, nor the latest gadget story. But a general story on principles or a feature story that is less time critical should be fine.

2. short posts.

There are a number of strategies for creating content that can be used in situations where you are time pressed.

Others include: a 50-word post, a video clip, a quotation, some photographs, a question for discussion, etc..

To this, I’d like to add one of Matt Coutts’ ideas: you simple look at your browser bar tabs (not necessarily possible in IE6.0) and create a short post out of the remaining tabs that haven’t been closed. It’s a kind of what I’ve been doing today post. Should work nicely, esp. for things like interesting links and stories that you wouldn’t otherwise blog about!

3. use what’s around you

You could just write about the useful reading matter and links you find everywhere, and create short posts out of that! I’d suggest 50 words for each link. In fact, I’ll be doing that myself. I do surf almost everyday but I forget to write any stubs for myself with links that could turn into short articles.

4. guest bloggers

Though CashQuests.com’s blogger author doesn’t recommend ‘guest’ bloggers, it could help when things are so busy… John Chow uses a lot of guest bloggers.

5. scheduling posts

You can always schedule posts in Wordpress for days in advance. Though getting the server time zone right and you’re own upload time agreeing seems to be an art I haven’t mastered (I use ‘BlogDesk’), it should work well enough.

6. plan ahead…

Well, it’s obvious enough to me… but I still don’t do it.

How do you bloggers deal with crunch times when you have to be in six places at once, or get so busy that your blog gets forgotten?