Sold the VCR!

I sold the VCR I had for $20! Not bad considering I almost sold it for $15 last week (the guy didn't show up). Once I saw how many responses i had for it I knew I could easily find a buyer any time I wanted - so I might as well hold out for $20 instead. It is SOOO nice to finally be making money for this project again. Focus is all i needed. That and doing SOMETHING every week. Last week i was going to find more joe blow places to post my spreadsheet. I posted on Craigslist, but so far it hasn't produced anything.

As I was checking in with other doublers i noticed that most of them have really stagnated (kind of like I did for a whole year). In fact, most of them don't seem to post very much at all and some seem to have given up. One doubler that has not though, and posts VERY VERY regularly. I am talking of Rachel over at Turn One Pound into a Million. I must admit that I had stopped reading her blog regularly because she had so many advertisements and my bloglines RSS feed would fill up so fast, but I recently noticed a post about how she has almost reached 1000 pounds a month at this point. Hang on! Why am I NOT reading about a doubler who is almost making 1000 pounds a month. Rachels blog should be my Bible! I should find out exactly what she is doing and replicate it as soon as possible. She obviously knows what she is doing! Way to go Rachel. So my task for this week is to completely read her blog and implement what I can immediately. I've already signed up for 20 Million Hits, which is a site that Rachel recommended and is basicly a scheme to promote your website to lots and lots of people. Check it out. I used it to promote my Financial Tracker. I'll let you know how (if) it worked for me.

FINANCIAL TRACKER SOLD!

That's right. I have sold my first spreadsheet in 10 months. TEN MONTHS! It feels so great to finally sell something. Yes, I fully admit that I could have put more effort in, but there were times I put a lot of effort in trying to sell these things. I mean, I know it's just an excel spreadsheet - it's not like its the cure for cancer, but you'd think after all that effort it wouldn't have taken me 10 months to make a sale. I still can't believe that it seems that I only sell them when I seem like some average Joe just trying to make a few bucks as opposed to trying to appear like a legitimate business. Weird. I'm going to post on Craigslist Newyork tonight to see if maybe I'm on to something. So - now I am up an additional $3.57 USD after paypal fees. Yeah - I sold it cheap, but after 10 months you're willing to try anything to get things rolling again.

A good start (again)

Well my goal last week was to post the golf clubs and VCR on line for sale. I accomplished these goals and agreed to sell the VCR, but the guy never showed up. Apparently no one is interested in golf clubs in the middle of the winter - to be expected, but I needed to at least try. I even put up an advertisement for my spreadsheet again, figuring nothing would happen. It turns out, I did get a response from someone who might want me to make a customized version for him, which I could charge a bit more for. So how come I had my spreadsheet on this site for a year with no bites and as soon as I decide to post again I have interest? I think it might be because people only look at the new posts, so I'm going to do an experiment and re-post it every 2 weeks or so. The other thing that is really interesting is that it seems the only place I can find people interested are on this local site. 4 out of 5 that I have sold have been from there and the other one was a Google Ad. People seem to be responding more to crappy amateur ads that say, "Hey, I made this spreadsheet in my spare time - anyone want a copy" compared to links to my more professional looking website. I haven't completely figured it out - maybe its some sort of trust thing where people are willing to trust their neighbors as opposed to a faceless company. Not sure. The important thing is things are starting to happen again - all I had to do was start moving.

Double Goals for This week:
- Explore more 'Joe Blow' type places I can advertise my spreadsheet.
- Advertise two speakers that I have and forgot to include in the list of what the Double Project owns.

A New Beginning

You may have noticed that I have not posted in a long, long time. I decided I needed a break from the Double Challenge to recharge my batteries. That and I also moved houses, had Christmas and got sick for 2 weeks. I guess my heart wasn't in it anymore because my total had stagnated for so long. It seemed that if I hunted for things to buy and sell I could make some money (I made $400 in the first four months!), but if I tried to do ANYTHING else I was just spinning my wheels. I tried selling my financial spreadsheet and I did sell a few, but then it all stopped. So I made a hack job of a website to try to drive traffic to. After that didn't work I put a lot of effort into a better website to no avail. I learned how to do Google Adwords, purchased a domain name, and learned how to get a webpage on line. All great stuff! But it didn't work. I wrote some of an e-book to get out of debt, but didn't finish it. I started to try to get a collection together of the works of H.G. Wells (copywrite has expired). I tried Google Cash and Google Cash Detective, but nothing other than simply buying and selling things brought me cash. I'm back with a good attitude again. Perhaps I didn't make any money, but I really did learn a lot and I can honestly say I know more than I did before so perhaps this was just an investment in time that is still to pay off. I think I will do some thinking about where to put my efforts. If its one thing I have learned it is that I don't have much free time (2 year olds will do that to you) so I need to focus my efforts when I DO have time.
Here is an inventory of everything the Double Challenge owns:
$414.47 CAD
$4.30 CAD in my paypal account
$4.45 US in my paypal account
1 Set of old golfclubs 1 golf bag
1 VCR
1 Crappy Coffee Maker (left over from the OneGreenPaperFlip project).
$7 Secrets E-book (100% Resale Rights)
Google Cash E-book
A few boxes of Readers Digest and National Geographic books. (I donated some - I can barely give this stuff away)

I think instead of thinking of progress in terms of cash made, I have to start making weekly goals and try to accomplish them. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. So my weekly goal (actually, this was supposed to be posted on Wednesday so that will be the start of my 'week' from now on) this week is to get the golf clubs and the VCR on the local For Sale boards again. Sound simple? It is. I should have no problem doing this, but without this goal, I probably would have procrastinated thinking the project too great and no progress made. We'll see if this gets me going again.
Oh, and since I posted I spent $0.06 on a Google advertisement for my builder (they give a $500 referral bonus) and made $1.50 from poker winnings. In the past, I was gambling 10% with my double money. From now on 50% of my gambling (doesn't happen often) will be from my double money.
Flip