I FINALLY got my refund!

I'm not sure why it took so long, but I FINALLY got my official refund. Acutally, now I have two refunds. Before I didn't have my money and now I am swimming in it. The day after Visa gave me my temporary refund, the REAL refund came through. But I ended up losing over 20 bucks in the exchange rate difference from today compared to the day I bought it. At this point, I am willing to suck up the loss as payment for a HUGE lesson. DON'T TIE UP ALL OF YOUR MONEY IN ONE SINGLE VENTURE... EVER! I'm a bit behind what I should be, but at least I have most of the money I worked hard for. I'm already eyeing another venture, but this one is free for two weeks and then only costs $45 per month after that. I'm hoping to use the 2 week trial to see if it is profitable and then after that either cancel before I have to pay, or keep going. That's a MUCH safer way to do it. whew! I am so relieved. I was getting sick of seeing negative numbers on the left side of the screen.

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GIVE ME MY MONEY!

Ok, I'm on a roller coaster ride here. I logged in to find an e-mail saying that Google Cash Detective has already issued a refund to me all the way back on August 6th. Yikes! Now I'm getting really worried. So I e-mailed back to tell them that I never received it. After sweating a few bullets I decide to call Visa to see if they can help. After explaining my story, they were actually quite helpful. They credited my account temporarily. Once they confirm with the Google Cash Detective people that they want to give me a refund, the temporary refund becomes a permanant refund. I'll know it is permanent becuase the GCD guys have 30 days to dispute it. So on September 26th, if it is still there then I know I got my money back. Whew! Talk about a mistake. I think the Double up gods are punishing me for breaking the rules. Stay tuned. Things are looking better.

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A ray of hope

I have been getting increasingly worried about getting my refund back from the Google Cash Detective guys. I e-mailed them and used thier help forums without a response for a few days. They FINALLY have responded and said that they submitted my refund to thier financial people on August 5th and that they would follow up to find out the status. I'm still slightly worried, but I feel a bit better. I hope I get it soon. It's very annoying having my entire stake (and then some) tied up all this time. I have DEFINITELY learned not to put all my eggs in one basket. I'm sure no millionaire would ever put all thier money into one thing. Lesson learned!
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Show me the Money!

Ok, I'm getting worried. I havn't received the refund yet. It's been 16 days now. I sent an e-mail yesterday asking where the refund is, but I didn't receive a response. Now I've tried their special message board, which they seem to check more often. If I don't receive a response to this then that might be it. I don't know. I really thought I was going to get it. They said I would. Maybe this is just a hard lesson about not risking my entire stake on one purchase. That would be an entire years worth of effort down the drain. I havn't given up yet, but I'm less optomistic. Besides, if I keep doubling from my current stake of negative 12 dollars, I will end up doubling to negative a million. LOL

Worried in Canada,
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ZZZZZzzzzzz.......

So much for the 1/2 hour of work I planned for this morning. My son had other ideas. He was up ALL night. Not crying - just bouncing around like it was time to play. He drove me CRAZY and forced me to sleep through my 1/2 hour in the morning (on purpose by that time). This is going to be a tough day at work. Hopefully I can keep my eyes open.

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RSS Feeds and 1/2 hour in the Morning!

Wow! The more I use these RSS feeds the more I love them! I know, I know - they've probably been around forever. I'm such a newbie! Still, I love them. You've got to set yourself up if you havn't done so. It's SUCH a time saver. I can check everyone's double blogs in one tenth of the time! And if no one has posted I know that immediately also! On another topic, I've decided that every morning I am going to devote 30 minutes to my Double Challenge. I was finding that there was no time in the day to really work on it with work all day and then raising a 1.5 year old at night. By the end of the day I am always so tired that I really don't have the energy, and the few times I did, I ended up surfing You Tube or some silly thing like that. Focus, focus, focus. If it's one thing I have learned you really need to focus or you're not going anywhere with this project. So, 1/2 hour in the morning every morning. I'll let you know how it goes.
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Subscribe to The Double Challenge!

Ok, I think I figured out this whole feed thing. For those of you who are like me and just figuring this stuff out, you can set up your blog so that people can subscribe to it via news readers like Bloglines. I THINK people can now subscribe to my blog so they don't have to continually keep dropping in to check it out (yeah, like there's thousands of people who rush home at night to read my blog). This way you can follow your favorite blogs all in one place. This sounds really great. I wish I had looked into it before now, but I always sort of looked at the links and thought to myself, "I don't know what this stuff is all about." The way I set up my feed is to go to Feedburner and click on register. The rest sort of explains itself. Then you can add things to promote your feed on your blog. It's all there. There may be an easier way - or maybe blogger already provides a feed. I'm still trying to figure all this out - but I think I have set it up so you can subscribe to me. So what are you waiting for? Do you really want my subscription number to remain at zero any longer? Of course not! Sign up! All you have to do is click on the icon on the far left that looks like this:

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Secrets and Wholesaling

It's funny. These types of blogs are partially set up to try and help others to accomplish thier goals by learning from the bloggers mistakes, but when we find something really good, we are so reluctant to tell the world in fear that everyone will jump on the bandwagon, thus making the opportunity no longer profitable. So do I want to help people or not? Well, I do, but I guess I don't want to at the expense of my own success. But how many people would REALLY jump on the bandwagon. I mean - how many people are really going to drop everything and cut me out of my market. Maybe if I had a larger readership, but I don't. Still - I think I'll keep the details to myself. I have been looking at wholesaling and I think I know which product I will be starting with. There seems to be lots of activity on Ebay for this product, so I am fairly sure it will sell and I'm hoping at a profit. This is a better use of my money as I will be risking only a small portion instead of the entire thing. I'm still waiting for my refund for the Google Cash Detective , and I must admit I am starting to get a bit worried. I still have faith though. I still think they're a reputable company, but I would feel better if I had the money in my hands. I can't do anything other than research on this until I get this money. Lesson learned - Never invest ALL of your money into something or you will be risking starting from zero. I'll never forget that one.

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Are Real Estate Agents Worth the Cost?

The engineer is coming out in me again. I find it very difficult to bring myself to call a Real Estate Agent, as opposed to trying to sell my house myself. There is a local company in Ottawa that is doing quite well that helps people sell thier houses themselves. It's called Grape Vine. I just can't bring myself to give such a large commission to sell my house when I can do it myself. But is this just another case of me not giving Marketing the respect it deserves? Perhaps I can save a bit of cash if I sell it myself, but how much exposure am I passing up on? Is it really good to save $4,000 if it takes you an extra six months to sell. Or maybe it will never sell. Without the MLS listing that a Real Estate Agent gives you, you're really only going to get local people who know about Grape Vine to check out your house. I hope this doesn't turn out to be another tough marketing lesson. I just can't bring myself to pay the extra money. I'm so cheap!

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$1.25 That is the amount of money I grossed at my garage sale. I sold one book and one cup. That's it. What a waste of time. I didn't even cover the cost of the signs for the garage sale. The Bristol Board was $1.63 alone and the marker was $1.99. That's right. I didn't even make enough money to purchase a marker. How depressing. Well, like I said in my previous post, I learned a valuable lesson about marketing. I should have had this sale much earlier in the year and certainly spent more time advertising and thinking about the best day. Well, you learn from your mistakes so the day was not a complete waste. Still, I have so much more I could have done to sell my house. I think I'll drown my sorrows in a beer.

Later,
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Marketing Matters

I'm sitting in a chair on my driveway with all my junk around me. I'm having a garage sale before I move to try and reduce the amount of crap I need to move. It's scheduled from 8:00 to 12:00. It's 8:45 and I have not had a single customer. All is quite on the garage sale front. I think I am going to learn a hard lession in marketing today. I'm an engineer, so by nature I am more interested in getting the job done than trying to sell it. At work I work all day to make the perfect product. In the past I am sure I thought that if you make a good enough product then people will come and buy it... because it's a good product. I am starting to see that making a good product is only half of the work and that marketing IS VERY IMPORTANT. For this garage sale I worked hard cleaning my house, finding things to sell, but the marketing was an afterthought. With a few days to go I figured I should make a few signs. I posted on a few local message boards about it too. What I forgot until the day before was that since Monday was a holiday in Canada, garbage day is pushed back one day to Saturday morning... right when I wanted to have my garage sale. I figure no one wants to walk past loads of garbage to get to my stuff, so I changed it at the last minute to Sunday. Luckily I forgot to put the day on my signs so I could change them easily, but my two message board postings were now wrong. I corrected one, but ran out of time to fix the other one. I didn't post my signs in the neighborhood until 5PM the night before. Looking back, I did a real crappy job marketing this garage sale and I am paying for it now. If no one comes then I all I did was waste my time dragging all my crap onto my driveway and now I have to drag it back in a few hours and STILL have to move it to my new house. For some reason I never seem to give marketing the respect it deserves. Hopefully today will make me see the light. Marketing matters!

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Dropping Take the Internet Back

I've been doing the Take The Internet Back program for about 8 months now. I have only made 4 dollars so far (plus the 10 bonus dollars for signing up). This seems painfully slow for someone who needed four dollars to double up months ago. Now it's barely going to change my situation when I finally DO get paid. You need $20 to make a withdrawl, so at this rate it would be more than another year before I received my $20. Despite this, I was going to chug along and not be a quitter. The other thing you need to do to get paid is bring in a referral (now it is two, but I got mine before they made this change). I had my referral, but they have since taken it away from me because he is not active any more. This is very frustrating since it was so difficult to get the referral in the first place. I've decided to make a business decision to stop doing the Take The Internet Back program as it takes up too much time for so little gain. Check it out if you want. It is a good program... I do think they are a reputable company, but I'm not going to spend any more time on this.

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One Year Anniversary!

I just realised that yesterday was the 1 year anniversary of the Double Challenge. Yay! I have mixed feelings about my accomplishments. I think I did amazing in the first six months, but after that I haven't really done anything as far as making money goes. A big part of that is due to my workload at work going up significantly and that I am in the middle of building a house (not to mention, trying to get my own ready to sell). Work has died down a bit, but I am still in the middle of getting my house ready for sale. After I move then I am really hoping to get serious and try to make some dough. It's kind of funny that my total after a year is less than zero, but i really think my refund will come through (please?).

On the non-money front, I am very proud of myself. I learned A LOT about different things like how affiliate marketing works, some html, some marketing, bargaining skills and yes - how to make a blog. I even purchased my own domain name and have a sales page hosted on it. I was also hosting my Google Cash Detective database on it too, but that is now worthless (still waiting for my refund). One of the most important things I learned is to finish one project before you start another. Losing focus and spreading yourself too thin is one good way to not make any money. Focus, focus, focus... The other thing I learned is that sometimes the audience is more important than the product. Mike at Mikes Money Making Mission figured he would try making money from blogging. He started trying to get traffic and THEN started worrying about how to make the money. It seems to have worked like a charm for him. After 42 weeks he has made $2730 just from blogging. That's six times more than I have made in a year and his year isn't even over yet. It's all about the people. Because of this, I am going to really try and make sure I post every day (or every other day) and try to write good content. That way, when I finally DO have a product to promote (like the financial oriented e-book I am writing) I will have an audience ready to hear it. It makes so much sense.

Here's to a better second year to the Double Challenge. I KNOW it will be more successful than the first.

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$0.25 charge for Google Adwords

Looks like I had one Google Adwords campaign that I forgot to stop. It had been going for a while and I finally got my first click ever on it. It was the first click after 7638 impressions, which gives me a 0.013% click through rate, which is horrendous! Google wants you to have a 0.5% click through rate to keep your campaign active all the time. Well, it didn't turn into a sale, but it did cost me $0.25 so I have taken this away from my total. Still waiting for my refund... getting nervous.

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Fraudulent Charges!

I have been watching my credit card on line like a hawk, waiting for the refund. I had a not so nice surprise today. All of the sudden there appears nine charges for a Famous Players theatre in Quebec totalling over $500! At first I didn't know what to do because I had to cancel my card to stop the theives from charging any more, but I also was waiting for my refund. Luckily (if you can call it that) it was my wife's card that was comprimised, so we cancelled her card, but mine can keep going waiting for the refund. I can't believe there are people out there who do this crap. Visa said I would get my money back, but it still irks me. I just wish I knew where it happened.

By the way, I found $2.59 over the past two months (A $2 coin in one shot!), so I have adjusted the total.

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A confession and a new resolution

It has been two months since my last post. The reason I have taken so long to post is because I was not sure what to write. I have a confession to make. I purchased some software with my Double Challenge money that cost more than the total amount of money I have. This is some really cool software called the Google Cash Detective that keeps track of other people's Google Adwords ads so that you can eventually, over time see which ads are working and which ads are not. This takes all of the guess work out of trying to select affiliate programs that are profitable and let's you go right for where the money is. This software cost me $432.31CAD (which was $397USD). At the time I only had $417.02, which means I shouldn't have been able to purchase it. I was able to purchase this software on the opening day and with a discount because I had previously purchased the Google Cash E-book. I havn't posted because I kept on changing my mind on how to handle this. At one point I thought that perhaps I would not make this a Double Challenge purchase, but that would not really be the truth. The goal of the Double Challenge is to make money in ways I never would have before without jeopordizing my real life's money. There is no way I would have bought this software if I was not doing the Double Challenge. If I used my real money for this then nothing would stop me from risking my real money in the future. Then I thought that perhaps I would pay $200 from the Double Challenge and loan the rest of the money from the "real me" at a nice interest rate. I really thought this is what I would do, but I just couldn't bring myself to write the post. I knew I was breaking the rules, so I couldn't go through with the post. I have decided that I have to pay for it using all Double Challenge money. This is the only way I will learn that I can't play games with this. If I want to get rich then I have to follow my rules. I now have a negative balance, but the fine folks at the Google Cash Detective have assured me that they will honour my refund request. I'll report back when I receive it and, if all goes well, I will finally be back where I was with my honour intact. From now on I will stick to the rules and get back to making money!

For what it is worth I can confirm that the Google Cash Detective does exactly what they say it does. It keeps track of ads displayed for different search keywords on the Google network. You get to find out without risking any more money, which ads are prospering (ie. there still there after a long time) and which ones aren't (ie. they are pulled because they aren't performing). This is an unbeliebably powerful tool once you learn how to use it and at an unbelievably low price given what it can do for you. They seem to be a very reputable company as they offer free coaching when you purchase thier software. I am not concerned about my refund. I am quite sure I will get it and will report back here when I do. Give it a try. If it doesn't work out then you can request a refund like I did. If you do purchase then it would be nice if you purchased through my link as I'm now an affiliate. Hey, might as well promote it since I like it and have actually seen it in action.

Sheepishly,
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