Pimp My Hundred Bucks - Part Seventeen
This week I took the mincemeat of my mangled emotions and made meat patties.
In my last blog I explained that I was left bruised and ego-impaired after I posted a link to this series in a Public Forum… of course I should have expected that when the title of my post read, “How to turn $100 into $500” when in fact I haven’t quite done it yet, and am doing it rather slowly… hence the mince meat I felt like as I entered into the new week.
Probably because of despair or perhaps because a friend shouted me a subscription to World of Warcraft, I only managed to list twenty new items this week, keeping my stock at about the 300 mark for the past seven days…
Nevertheless, it didn’t mean I was not busy with other things pertaining to this titanic task. For one thing I did not abandon the Trademe Message Board entirely, but have rather started a few random threads so that people will note me as a trader of interest and check out my stock. Threads like, “Hey has anyone ever been abducted by aliens?” or “So, why is there no religion category on the message board” which sparked over 500 comments in only 4 days! Yep, message boards are fun. Here's a link to some of the message boards I've been "message bombing" lately, but sorry if you’re outside New Zealand and Australia you won’t be able to view them because Trademe hasn’t discovered the global community yet…
Another thing is I’ve been managing my account from my PC now that I actually have a PC, which has been pretty good and in the future will help me to list way more items in a shorter period of time. All of my listings so far have been via texting on my iphone, which makes you want to throw your phone at the first person who walks through the door at the end of the day.
Also I applied with Trademe for the Pay Now option which means at some point in the near future customers will be able to purchase items from me using their credit card –without the need of Pay Pal which is just awesome in my book. Unfortunately this will incur a small fee of about 1.64% of every payment made to me that way, but still it could potentially mean more customers who shop for convenience.
The last thing I’ve been doing a tad differently is that recently I have been setting the Start Price for new listings at $4 instead of the usual $3. My reasoning wasn’t so that I would make an extra dollar every time I sold a book, but rather because a significant number of the books I sell each week come from Fixed Price Offers. These are the offers you send to individual customers when an auction closes but does not sell. Often I will have potential customers watching an item but not placing a bid either because they forgot about it or because they like to torment me. Anyway, Trademe gives you the option to send said watchers a special onetime offer before relisting the item. I found that when my books were only $3 I couldn’t afford to offer such customers anything special as $3 was the absolute lowest I could sell them for! At least now when someone has been watching an item that was originally listed at $4 will react with a “Wow, this guy is now offering me the book for $3! That’s like a whole dollar cheaper than it was before, I HAVE to buy it.” And so he/she does. So they get a bargain and I get the exact amount I actually wanted for the book in the first place. I’m not sure if this is an ethical issue, the small voice in the back of my head says it’s just business. What do you think?
Unfortunately in my recent despair and/distraction I somehow managed to delete a whole bunch of the listings I sold recently from the “sold” tab of my Trademe account so I have spent the last several days convinced that I had not made a profit at all. Quite literally my left hand did not know what my right hand was doing as I said to my wife this afternoon, “I haven’t made a profit this week, this isn’t going as well as I thought” and then sent her a telepathic sad face with a colon and a bracket symbol “: (“ through the atmosphere in our living room, but I think she could tell by the look on my face that I wasn’t particularly happy about it.
But then I sat down to write this blog and as I did my accounting, or what passes for accounting in my feeble and limited understanding of the procedure, I discovered that I was thankfully wrong!
Normally this is where I would list the books I sold but because I deleted a big chunk of them I’ll have to dispense with the cliché and just tell you that I sold 18 books for $68.50 making a profit of $39.25 when all is said and done…
Finally remembering to include the $20 I invested in Bonus Bonds way back in the Beginning Time of this misadventure, I now have $344.17 with only $155.13 to go until I can shout for joy and say, “Yes!” while making a fist and looking like I’d just done something really amazing and personally fulfilling. Chances are we will have a new Pope before that happens.
To think that only a few blogs ago I was saying I might only have three weeks of this to go, more like three weeks on a planet with a 28 day week!
Finally I won't be purchasing new stock this week, I'm still trying to list all those sci fi books from two weeks ago!
So until the next time we meet, your homework is to hover over the “Like” button and click it at least one hundred million times, or failing that once will be enough. Also for extra credit you can leave me a comment and say something encouraging like, “Hey man, you’re really cool, I like what you are doing here and am going to post a link to your site on my own site that gets like a million views a day and tell everyone that they have to visit your site because it’s like totally rad.” Yep, that’s the kind of comment I want to get!
Until next time, I’m off to listen to some Enya or something.
Click Here to read Part Eighteen in this series!
Click Here if you would like to follow my progress on Facebook!
Click Here to read this series from the beginning!
Click Here to read my awesome last series, Pimp My Twenty Bucks
Click Here to view my Trademe Listings
For some great money related articles please visit workingathomeinternet.com for some great monetary wisdom... see you there!
In my last blog I explained that I was left bruised and ego-impaired after I posted a link to this series in a Public Forum… of course I should have expected that when the title of my post read, “How to turn $100 into $500” when in fact I haven’t quite done it yet, and am doing it rather slowly… hence the mince meat I felt like as I entered into the new week.
Probably because of despair or perhaps because a friend shouted me a subscription to World of Warcraft, I only managed to list twenty new items this week, keeping my stock at about the 300 mark for the past seven days…
Nevertheless, it didn’t mean I was not busy with other things pertaining to this titanic task. For one thing I did not abandon the Trademe Message Board entirely, but have rather started a few random threads so that people will note me as a trader of interest and check out my stock. Threads like, “Hey has anyone ever been abducted by aliens?” or “So, why is there no religion category on the message board” which sparked over 500 comments in only 4 days! Yep, message boards are fun. Here's a link to some of the message boards I've been "message bombing" lately, but sorry if you’re outside New Zealand and Australia you won’t be able to view them because Trademe hasn’t discovered the global community yet…
Another thing is I’ve been managing my account from my PC now that I actually have a PC, which has been pretty good and in the future will help me to list way more items in a shorter period of time. All of my listings so far have been via texting on my iphone, which makes you want to throw your phone at the first person who walks through the door at the end of the day.
Also I applied with Trademe for the Pay Now option which means at some point in the near future customers will be able to purchase items from me using their credit card –without the need of Pay Pal which is just awesome in my book. Unfortunately this will incur a small fee of about 1.64% of every payment made to me that way, but still it could potentially mean more customers who shop for convenience.
The last thing I’ve been doing a tad differently is that recently I have been setting the Start Price for new listings at $4 instead of the usual $3. My reasoning wasn’t so that I would make an extra dollar every time I sold a book, but rather because a significant number of the books I sell each week come from Fixed Price Offers. These are the offers you send to individual customers when an auction closes but does not sell. Often I will have potential customers watching an item but not placing a bid either because they forgot about it or because they like to torment me. Anyway, Trademe gives you the option to send said watchers a special onetime offer before relisting the item. I found that when my books were only $3 I couldn’t afford to offer such customers anything special as $3 was the absolute lowest I could sell them for! At least now when someone has been watching an item that was originally listed at $4 will react with a “Wow, this guy is now offering me the book for $3! That’s like a whole dollar cheaper than it was before, I HAVE to buy it.” And so he/she does. So they get a bargain and I get the exact amount I actually wanted for the book in the first place. I’m not sure if this is an ethical issue, the small voice in the back of my head says it’s just business. What do you think?
Unfortunately in my recent despair and/distraction I somehow managed to delete a whole bunch of the listings I sold recently from the “sold” tab of my Trademe account so I have spent the last several days convinced that I had not made a profit at all. Quite literally my left hand did not know what my right hand was doing as I said to my wife this afternoon, “I haven’t made a profit this week, this isn’t going as well as I thought” and then sent her a telepathic sad face with a colon and a bracket symbol “: (“ through the atmosphere in our living room, but I think she could tell by the look on my face that I wasn’t particularly happy about it.
But then I sat down to write this blog and as I did my accounting, or what passes for accounting in my feeble and limited understanding of the procedure, I discovered that I was thankfully wrong!
Normally this is where I would list the books I sold but because I deleted a big chunk of them I’ll have to dispense with the cliché and just tell you that I sold 18 books for $68.50 making a profit of $39.25 when all is said and done…
Finally remembering to include the $20 I invested in Bonus Bonds way back in the Beginning Time of this misadventure, I now have $344.17 with only $155.13 to go until I can shout for joy and say, “Yes!” while making a fist and looking like I’d just done something really amazing and personally fulfilling. Chances are we will have a new Pope before that happens.
To think that only a few blogs ago I was saying I might only have three weeks of this to go, more like three weeks on a planet with a 28 day week!
Finally I won't be purchasing new stock this week, I'm still trying to list all those sci fi books from two weeks ago!
So until the next time we meet, your homework is to hover over the “Like” button and click it at least one hundred million times, or failing that once will be enough. Also for extra credit you can leave me a comment and say something encouraging like, “Hey man, you’re really cool, I like what you are doing here and am going to post a link to your site on my own site that gets like a million views a day and tell everyone that they have to visit your site because it’s like totally rad.” Yep, that’s the kind of comment I want to get!
Until next time, I’m off to listen to some Enya or something.
Click Here to read Part Eighteen in this series!
Click Here if you would like to follow my progress on Facebook!
Click Here to read this series from the beginning!
Click Here to read my awesome last series, Pimp My Twenty Bucks
Click Here to view my Trademe Listings
For some great money related articles please visit workingathomeinternet.com for some great monetary wisdom... see you there!
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