Raising Funds

As the days and weeks go by without an order (though I did sell two used books on Amazon.com recently), I am beginning to reevaluate this whole Personalized Book business. I knew things would be slow this time of year, and there is a lot of competition on the web, but this is getting rediculous. So if I can't make money through the web site, I'll have to make money the old fashion way, that is sell locally, and use my local contacts.

I called this post Raising Funds, but that is really a play on what I am really talking about - FundRaising. I've been putting together order forms and brochures, looking to offer my fundraising plans to the Elementary school where my kids go (and my wife teaches) and the soccer club where my kids play (and my wife and I both coach.) I feel weird mixing my business with this other side of me - My Family life, but as I said I am getting a bit desparate. I sent an email over to the director of the club yesterday, still got a bit of work to do before I contact the school (or rather the school parent organization that handles fundraising.) No word yet from Director Raul (he is from Spain so perhaps he is still mourning Spain's exit from the World Cup).

World Cup Fever

Okay, I admit it. I have taken time off from working to watch some of the World Cup Games. Not all of them mind you, just a few minutes here and there. Or maybe a few halves here and there...

But that is the advantage, right, of owning your own business and working from home-you can take of whenever you please and set your own hours. It is also the danger of course, so many distractions so close at hand, easy to get off track and not get anything done. Summertime now and the kids are off from school. My youngest daughter usually makes an appearance in my office arround 7:30 or 8:00, with something to show me, or to hint that she wants something for breakfast that she can't make herself and doesn't want to wait for mom to get up (my wife is a school teacher, so she is also off from school/work, and relishes the opportunity to sleep in). Hot afternoons, I want to take off and go to the pool with them. We've promised them day trips to the zoo, the museums, hiking to the waterfalls, Kings Dominion theme park. So what does all this rambling mean? Just that I can not really afford to watch any of the World Cup games- I do have a lot of...stuff (crap, work?) that I need to get done. But... but Brazil plays Ghana this morning, and so it goes.

I did add the Soccer Personalized Book to the highlited books on my homepage in the spirit of the World Cup...

Webmaster Forums

I have been lurking around a couple of webmaster forums, for the last several months, trying to garner any information that will help me get the web sales moving. (My last order was on May 29th, and that was from a woman who works with my wife so doesn't really count...)

Best Practices Search Engine Forums focuses of course on Search Engine Optimization and has sections on specific search engines: google, yahoo, msn, etc. and directories: yahoo directory, dmoz, joeant, goguides, etc. etc. To be honest I have hardly glanced at most of the forums, focusing instead on the Google and yahoo sections. But there is a lot of good info there and seems to be well moderated.

Cre8asite Forums focus is more on overall website design with of course SEO thrown in. One of the most interesting forums they offer is the Website Hospital, where you can submit your website for review and have the forum members critique it. I am trying to get the courage up to submit the ol' Personalized Books website to it. (I do not take criticism well...)

Business Blogging

Besides trying to blog regularly (stress trying) on this blog, I also post a couple times a week to MadLuck Books blog. The MadLuck Books Blog is the official (as opposed to this blog which is more or less just for fun) blog of madluckbooks.com, my personalized books ecommerce website. I have been having a terrible time trying to figure out what to post on the MadLuck Books Blog. For a while, I thought of posting weekly "blog specials". Putting four or five books on sale and listing them on a post each week. But that meant having to change prices around all the time on the website, updating my Froogle listing, etc., etc.. And than the posts are still there once the week is up and the prices change again. Do I edit them? Do I delete them? I even had trouble deciding on a template, and have changed it several times in the last few weeks (which means redoing all the customization of the template). What is the point here besides whining about my indecision and all the extra work it causes me? The point is that I have figured it out (I think...)

So the new and improved MadLuck Books Blog will showcase all the stuff that I don't have room to put on the website because of the stupid hosting plan I am under (that is another ten blogs in itself). I already have three parenting artcles blogs posted and today I posted my first Product Spotlight - the Mother Goose Personalized Book is in the spotlight. Of course putting all this "quality content" (look at me throwing out the SEO terms) on blogspot.com is optimizing blogspot.com as opposed to madluckbooks.com as the SEO experts would say, but what can I do? I say I am optimizing for my human visitors, not those nasty little search engine bots.

Selling Used Books on amazon.com

Before I came up with the great idea of selling personalized children's books, I tried selling used books on amazon.com. I even bought ten or twenty first edition novels from a local library (they only cost about a dollar a book) to list on Amazon. When I went to list the books however, I found that most of them were already being sold for as low as a penny a book. I couldn't make any money that way so I gave up on the idea.

Well a couple of weeks ago I stumbled on Steve Weber's Blog - Selling Books. Apparently he has been able to make a decent income doing just that - selling used books on Amazon. Needless to say my interest was renewed. Weber published a How to Guide - The Home Based Bookstore, which I haven't purchased but I did read enough of the sample pages to find out what I had done wrong in my first attempt to sell used books. I tried selling fiction, novels, when I should have been selling Non-Fiction. Apparently, Publishers tend to over print fiction titles and there are always tons of extra copies around. Non-fiction titles are published in smaller batches, go out of print quicker, and are therefore more valuable from a used book point of view.

So I went to my local library sale, Friday, (which had halved the prices on all their books because they are getting ready to shut down for renovations). and bought seventeen hardback non-fiction titles for a total of $10.00. I have them listed on Amazon now, along with a few other books I had lying around the house. I did pretty good picking books - of those seventeen books which cost me $10.00, I'm listing one for $45.00, two others for $35.00 and $25.00 and most of the rest for between 5 and 10 dollars. Now I can actually make some money that way...

Offline Marketing Part 2

So that was not too bad. I did have to shower and shave and get out of the sweats, put on the khakis and the collared shirt - something I haven't had to do since I quit the day job back in April. I ended up taking my books, all ready with with their envelope pockets stuffed with order forms, to five doctor's offices (actually one was a dentist and the other an orthodontist). Everyone smiled and agreed to take them (or at least show them to the doctor's for their approval). No hard sales needed (I was giving the books away afterall, and everybody loves a freebie...)

Afterwards I got my hair shaved off and was able to post a business card on the board at the barbers (Offline Marketing Part 3?) .

Back home in time to catch the last ten minutes of the Costa Rica/Germany World Cup Match (after changing thankfully into shorts and a t-shirt.)

Offline Marketing? Part 1

That's what I am getting ready to do - Offline Marketing. Otherwise known as wandering around town sticking personalized books in doctor's offices, (and dentists, autorepair joints, etc., etc.) If they will let me, with the big order forms in the back... (I know, that's not really a sentence there.) I am not really looking forward to it - too much like a traveling salesman gig or something. So why am I doing it? Necessity, the mother of invention. I have sold all of two, count them two, books from the internet site in the last month or so. Not really going to pay the bills that way. So I will go out and Slay the Dragon, fight the good fight, and hopefully sale some books... Offline Marketing Part 2 will follow upon my return.

Google top ten listing

Well we reached a milestone with the personalized books website - a top ten listing on Google. I was checking my visitor stats on statcounter.com (I only get three or four visitors a day and half of them are search engine bots) when I noticed a visitor had come to the site by way of a search on Personalized Story of a lifetime. So I clicked on it and there we were, madluckbooks.com listed number five on Google's results. And I thought all this time that Google hated me for some reason... Of course a search on nichebot came up with something like only two searches a year on Personalized Story of a Lifetime, so I don't expect to see much traffice from it. But hey, at this point I will take whatever I can get. Now if I could just get them to list me for personalized books, or personalized story books, or personalized children's books...(Think I can add in anymore gratuitous links?)