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Unfortunately, no iPhones through letstalk, but if you're looking for android phones, they have the best deals for new customers that I've found.

Droid X

It's been a long time since I posted, and a long time since I've gotten a new gadget. So I thought I might take care of both at once. I've been wanting an android phone for a while now. I didn't like the motorola droid when it came out because of that keyboard (which I don't need, why waste space). Then the incredible came out, but I didn't like the screen's performance outside. Then, finally there is a phone I can dig. The Droid X looks awesome!

I started looking around for deals (BTW, I highly recommend slickdeals.net if you don't already visit there). I found out that letstalk.com has a $50 discount going on now (bring the price down to $150), plus a $30 bill credit! Sweet! I'm going to buy!

BTW, here is a pretty cool video comparing the iPhone 4 and the Droid X

Nature Cleanse wrap-up: 60 days, what happened?

Hi all, thanks for reading. I kind of fell off the CPA bandwagon on 7/23 and turned off my google campaigns. My initial plan was to let it run for 60 days, but I didn't have enough time to watch every day and do proper analysis (work, life & family got a little chaotic for a bit).

During the period of 6/12 and 7/23 or 42 days, I conducted an experiment in CPA with a product called Nature Cleanse. There was a lot of tweaking work the first week, but for most of the campaign it was just sit back and watch. I did try to use yahoo keywords mid-campaign, and spent far too much money with them for no results. For this product, google adwords seemed to be the right choice.

So here is the summary report:

Earnings	Google	Yahoo	GoDaddy	Profit	ROI	Daily Profit
$256	$116.09	$65.49	$11.17	$63.25	32.8%	$1.50

If I wouldn't have blow so much at yahoo (in fact, one day was over $34, for nothing!!) this would have been a much better ROI campaign.

Will I do it again you ask? Oh heck yea, I just want to make sure Copeac is actually going to pay me. They have a $100/mo minimum, so my first month I didn't get paid since I only earned $96, but month two should be rolling around here so and I should have enough for a paycheck. I can't wait to see what happens.

Did I learn a lot? Oh heck yea! I'll definitely do things slightly differently next time.

Is this a legit biz? I'm still on the fence. None of my sells ever came from a click through, however click through volume from google definitely affected the number of products I sold. Does that sound strange? All my sells came from someone typing in "Nature Cleanse Trial" into google and finding my landing page, and buying from there. Once I turned off my google ads, people ironically stopped typing Nature Cleanse Trial into google. One IP address actually signed up 2 times!! I just don't get it. My only guesses are that someone saw my add, and then searched on the landing page name keywords to look for reviews or something similar and bought based on a good google page rank. This is a little discouraging because I'd really like them to trust the click and drive them that way. I need to work on how I phrase my ads maybe.

7/1 Update on Nature Cleanse

Right after I posted that last blog entry, I ended up with 2 more sales on Nature Cleanse, wow! I think I may just leave this campaign alone (google seems to have stopped slapping me) and see what it can do. I've done no more work on it since my last report, only watch the money go in (commissions) and out (adwords).

Date	Commissions	PPC Costs	Godaddy Costs	Landing Page?
06/30/2009		$2.44		Yes
07/01/2009	$64.00	$1.77		Yes

To date (including all my mistakes) on this campaign, I'm at $160 revenue, $85.57 expense, $74.43 profit (46.5%). My target profit should be around 50% (from what I've read), and I'm getting pretty close even with some serious mistakes.

If I could just figure out how to get more clicks!! Maybe it's time to start playing with Yahoo and Bing and other traffic sources.

Update on Nature Cleanse

So the Nature Cleanse Trial through Copeac has been going well. I am making a slight profit with it, and quite happy with my lessons learned. The big thing I learned was to have a landing page!! I was able to get my click costs cut in half, unfortunately I'm having a hard time getting traffic on the keywords I can afford (some are priced way to high in the $2-10 per click range). The cheapest keyword ironically is just a simple plain "colon", unfortunately I get a lot of unrelated traffic there and it's hard to filter out just those looking for the body part colon and some health product to use with it.

Here are my up to date stats on this campaign:

Date	Commissions	PPC Costs	Godaddy Costs	Landing Page?
06/12/2009	$32.00	$49.03 (sale was in the first $20)		No
06/13/2009			11.17	Yes
06/14/2009		$2.09		Yes
06/15/2009		$.27		Yes
06/16/2009		$1.13		Yes
06/20/2009		$1.05		Yes
06/21/2009		$1.18		Yes
06/22/2009		$0.90		Yes
06/23/2009		$3.69		Yes
06/24/2009	$32.00	$3.69		Yes
06/27/2009		$5.29		Yes
06/28/2009		$1.85		Yes
06/29/2009	$32.00	$2.02		Yes

So far, I'm at a net profit of $14.64, however you can tell that I'm doing much better between click 2 and click 3, where the cost to convert was $9.16 and commission was $32.

Also, something important to notice here is how drastically my PPC costs changed after I spent the $11.17 at godaddy to get a landing page (and that costs covers 2 months worth of hosting!!). I can't emphasis enough, if you're serious about marketing a product, get your own landing page!

Lessons Learned:
Spending a few bucks on a landing page is worth it's weight in gold. You have to keep an eye on google, I did have a couple of google "slaps" where they basically made my keyword costs way to high and I had to re-start my campaign by tweaking it a bit. That's what explains the few dead dates with no clicks. And probably the last tip I learned, when you buy a landing page, make it a little generic. I named mine NatureCleanseTrial.com which means I basically can only market Nature Cleanse on there. I probably should have considered getting something more generic like ColonCleanseCentral.com or something along those lines (this example is already registered, and setup basically how I should have set it up).

For those keeping track, I've probably put about 10 hours into the nature cleanse promotion, leaving me making around $1.40/hr. Not all that exciting, and I'm not quitting my day job anytime soon, but I like to think the education I'm getting while doing this experiment has been amazing. I can't believe how much I know about this little known world now.

Experiments in PPC & CPA

I'm doing some experiments with PPC arbitrage, or sometimes known as traffic brokering, or in the industry terms, CPA (Cost Per Action). Basically the idea is to find a product to help sell, and take a commission on it. If your strategy works well, you pay less for advertising/marketing than you make in commission, and you're left with your profit as the difference.

The problem is that there are a ton of crappy products out there, a lot of scams, a lot of spammy stuff, but I've found some good networks of solid products that I can at least (on the surface) believe are not scams. Most are these As Seen on TV style products. I mean, if there is a store dedicated in the mall to them, how bad can they really be.

The first one I'm testing with is called Nature Cleanse, and it's a all natural colon cleanse system that you subscribe to monthly mailings. The first month is free, you only pay shipping and handling. I've bought several similar colon cleanse products in the past and have had good experience with them, so this seems right up my alley.

I also have a Nature Cleanse Trial blog going as well.

Tinkering with PPC Internet Marketing again

Back last year, I experimented a bit with Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising with Google and a few different products on Clickbank.com and Amazon.com. I only lost money, but I did learn a lot about the world of internet marketing. Luckily I only lost about $50, so it wasn't a crushing defeat for me. I kind of put it on the back burner as something I knew was possible to make money with, but I just hadn't quite figured it out yet. I only sold a few things through amazon and never made a profit on it, and clickbank was a total waste of my money. I never sold a SINGLE ITEM!! UGH!

This year while networking with real estate investors, I ran across a guy online who was showing his affiliate accounts and Bank of America small business accounts in videos where he was clearing $20-50k a day (after google, yahoo, and msn expenses). I figured I had to have another shot at this.

I started doing more research with clickbank and decided to go with their top 2 products and try to market them. Here are the details of those tests.

Date	PPC Expense	Commissions	Product
06/07/2009	$2.00	$11.98	Twitter Traffic Machine
06/08/2009	$15.68	$0	Twitter Traffic Machine
06/09/2009	$12.38	$0	Twitter Traffic Machine
06/09/2009	$7.44	$42.13	Clickbank Code
06/10/2009	$37.48	$0	Clickbank Code

As you can see I experienced beginners luck on both of them on the first day, and the addiction drove me wild. I spent well more than my earnings (commissions column) to try and get the second sale on both those products for nothing!! UGH!! How frustrating.

Lessons Learned:
I was a bit too eager, I was doing direct linking instead of getting my own landing page (as almost every profitable PPC or CPA advertiser will tell you that you need). I think this led to higher than normal google adwords costs (twitter traffic machine was 34 clicks at ~$0.88/ea, clickbank code was 71 clicks at ~$0.63). I think if I could have got my click costs at $.40 or less for CBC and $.20 or less for TTM, I could have made them profitable.

Overall, I'm very satisfied I was actually able to convert some products, which I was NEVER able to do last year. Like I said, I've learned a lot. Net loss = $20.87.

Credit Card Abitrage is Back: Citi Cards No Fees 0% Offer

I was surprised to get a 0% balance transfer offer with no balance transfer fee today from Citi Cards. Lately they seem to all be 3% fee and have gone from $99 caps to no caps. It seemed like the days of no fees were well gone, as I hadn't gotten an offer like that in over 9mos. What a difference from having them regularly 2-3/mo from any number of banks for years. Does this mean that the credit markets are turning back up, or that Citi is just desperate to get more customers in their card business?

In any case, I'll take free money for 12 months any day of the week. The arbitrage benefits aren't as good these days: high yield savings are pretty low, and heloc payments aren't bad either with prime at 3.25%. Like I said, free money. It's very easy to make $300-400 off the deal still even in a bad yield market.

New Photos and Video

It's been far too long since I uploaded photos and videos. I'm happy to say that everything is up to date now:

Photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/zhunzi/

Videos: http://youtube.com/profile_videos?user=zhunzi

In other news fronts, I'm nearly done with my an adwords experiment. It's not going as well as I liked, and I'll write more about that later. I've been reading a few books, trying to soak up as much information about time management and making money as possible.

The reading list:

Jim Cramer - Real Money (currently reading)

Robert Kiyosaki - Who Took My Money

Robert Kiyosaki - Choose to Be Rich

Tim Ferriss - The Four Hour Work Week

Prosper Arbitrage?

First off, if you haven't seen Prosper.com yet, you should. I get absolutely no commission for telling you that.

When I first saw prosper, I thought it was great. I deposited $50 and lent out my first partial loan at 19%. I'm still getting payments from the person, and they're on target to pay me back the complete $50+interest at around $1.80/mo. My only complaint about the company is that you get locked into these 3 year loans. There aren't any means for folks to take out various term lengths, so that you could essentially stack your money as you would in CD investments. The only way to have a constant flow of funds that can be available immediately is to just continually fund small portions of loans each month over the next 3 years. That's kind of annoying.

All that being said, I work for a large bank, and I know how they make money. One of the main ways is to lend money on one side, and convince folks to deposit money (usually by paying them interest) on the other side. They always lend for more than they pay. It's pure arbitrage. I also know that there is often very little margin in it for banks. They need LOTS of customers to make it work. So I got to thinking, could an individual make arbitrage work at Prosper? I searched around and sure enough, there are plenty of folks lending money at 5-6% in order to then lend that money out again at 15-20% to make a profit. Unfortunately, I'm not sure it's a great living. Look at the chart I created below based on $5000 being borrowed at 6%. You need to get a very high return (which is hard, because the higher the rate, the riskier the customer).

$5000 Arbitrage	Personal Loan @ 6%	Lend Out @ 12%	Lend Out @ 18%
Interest + is in, - is out	-475.96	978.6	1507.46
Income minus Expenses		502.64	1031.5
Income minus Expenses / 36 months		13.96	28.65
Income minus Taxes (25%) minus Expenses		257.99	654.64
Income minus Taxes (25%) minus Expenses / 36		7.16	18.18

So if you could borrow at 6% and lend at 18% with no mishaps, you would make roughly $18.18/mo off a $5000 arbitrage after taxes. To be honest, managing between 10-100 loans (depending on how large your contributions per loan is) is not going to be worth $18.18 of your time. Not unless you say live in a seriously deprived location where that might buy you a royal lifestyle for the week. In which case, you probably don't have good credit, nor access to the internet. The numbers scale linerally, so if you wanted to aim for making $1818/mo you'd need to lend 100x the $5000 or $500,000 to be exact. Now that to me, looks like A LOT of risk!

My thoughts: Arbitrage doesn't work at Prosper.