Quebec Valley

Making money these days is not as easy as it used to be. Even if you have fresh hot cakes, you still need to convince people to buy them. So how do you use this bad economy to your advantage?

There are various ways and here’s the message that you need to remember. If you go back to the gold rush era, people who earned the most money were not the gold propectors themselves but rather the small businesses selling shovels and other gold digging equipment.

This is what you must remember! So in these hard days, selling something new is much harder than selling something that people need to survive. Sounds simple but look at what you’re doing right now. Are you working on something innovative, where you’ll have to twist people’s arm, or something where there is an actual demand?

I have two examples for you. Mind you they are not the best examples but they’ve proven to be quite popular. However, I think that the popularity is due to the current economy, rather than my coding skills :)

You probably heard about Daily Dollar Deal, one of my pet projects. I invested about 10 hours of my time. The goal was to make something really simple for the user (and for me). I could’ve done way better but I wanted to give what the user wanted: an easy way to browse items under 1$ on eBay. No AJAX stuff, no this and that. Just 1 page. Check it out for yourself, how simpler can it get? And how about the ROI on time invested? Pretty amazing…

Then there is another of my pet project. It’s simply called “1000 Dollars Cars” and, you guessed it, it’s based on the succesful recipe of Daily Dollar Deal. When a recipe is good, why change it? Just duplicate it! I haven’t actually talked about it here and I haven’t made any advertising yet but Google “found” it and brought some people in. Since I never talked about it before, let me introduce it officially. 1000 Dollars Cars is, if you haven’t figured out yet, a market place for cars under 1000$. Why? Because once again, with the current economy, there is a high demand for used cars.

The whole idea behind this project is based on the “1000$ car theory”, which is:

Cars cost money to buy and run. The more expensive a car you buy, the more money you will lose on it, by depreciation alone if nothing else. A good way to save money on a car is to buy an old beater for a meager sum, usually not exceeding the equivalent of $1,000. If it is still capable of moving under its own power, it is statistically likely to stay mobile for more months than it would usually take you to spend $1k on payments for a new car. Once it requires anything more than a trivial sledgehammer-and-WD40 fix, you scrap it and get something new.

So it makes sense for a lot of people to buy an old car. It’s eco-friendly, cheaper and you recycle cars that would otherwise end up in the junk yard.  If you buy a brand new car (valued at $20,000) and keep it for 10 years then you can buy 20 cars at $1,000 each for the same price. That’s not considering insurance & interest paid on the $20K. Also remember that most used cars will live longer than 1 year.

Check it out for yourself and you’ll be amazed at how many cars are available at under 1000$. eBay alone lists over 40,000 cars on a daily basis! The only problem is that It’s currently only available in the USA.

These two projects use an affiliate model. This means that I get paid a small share everytime a sale is made through my website. This model has proven to be quite effective for me and I plan to use those models more often this year by building various sites. I will keep you posted on my experiences! I’d be curious to know if anyone else had success with affiliate marketing?