A Buck A Night

Saturday morning I woke and realized I had three long days stretched out before me, with no direct work plan. I decided that I’d get off my butt and try to earn $1000 that weekend; I could fall short, sure, but it would be worth the attempt. It doesn’t hurt that the mortgage is due.

So here’s a list of things i could do for $1000.

1. Some PPC program
2. Drive traffic to some AFF program
3. Find someone who would pay me $1000 for a project
4. Find two someones who would pay me $500 for a project
5. Since the “finding” part is non-billable, and I wanted the task completed by Monday, I didn’t go to “find ten people who want $100 projects” but I went to “find or write something I can sell 10 times for $100 each.”
6. Find or write something I can sell 50 times for $20 each
7. Find or write something I can sell 200 times for $5 each

Well, ok, PPC, out- have you seen my record with PPC? I’m running at about PPC 120, Me, 0. It’s like my High School Homecoming football game where we lost 56 to 0. Obviously I’m still trying to figure out the whole “traffic” thing, so I don’t have a good way to “drive traffic to an aff program.” A grand for one project? Not likely; a $1000 project will take much longer than a weekend to put together. Same with two $500 projects. Besides, I can’t stand rentacoder’s 15% cut. But I could possibly get together a $100 package; I’d only have to sell 10 of them.

One thing I keep seeing pop up in some forums is “how do I cloak an affiliate link.” Noobies looking to make their big break have been looking for this. Every time it’s the same thing; either do a php redirect, a meta refresh or a javascript location change. What if I had a script that would do that for the newbies? What would I want in such a script? What would I expect if I were going to pay $100?

And then, of course, who would I sell it to?

At this point, I realized I could put together a very basic redirection tool, with no frills, just “go here, using this method” in about an hour ( which is almost always two hours because of development time). So I spent the morning assembling that little script, and released “Low Redir.” I priced it at $5.00 at e-Junkie and went over to that forum to post a sales page. And then headed over to some other forums too.

My grand total for the weekend? Zilch. Talking wiht a guru showed me the problem.

[17:21] yeah you didn’t sell it
[17:21] see something like that is all sales
[17:21] not code
[17:21] code is simple
[17:21] tell a story about how not redirecting through a bounce server cost you x and how this helped you
[17:21] for only 5$ I saved myself 500$
[17:22] you need a small sales page and a admin section to adjust redirects
[17:22] and maybe a simple counter
[17:22] people would buy that for 5 bux

Well, shit. He’s right, of course. And not only because he’s a guru. I mean, Jonathan Ledger would do the same thing; in fact, he does. And while I tend to think of myself as “not a salesman” in a good way ( I don’t practice my oily smile to get people to buy cars they don’t need ), it’s actually in a bad way. I don’t even think of what the guru tells me there.

So I suppose my next couple of days will be putting together what the guru tells me. And then I’ll go and blag more about it on the forums.