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Entrepreneurs

Cloud Computing, Marketing Strategies, Hopeless Jobs, and Mad as a Cat

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On days like this, my father used to say he “got up on the wrong side of the bed.” Me, I think the explanation is that God Herself is pissed off at me. Can I compute in the cloud? Can our new marketing plan bring us some decently paying work? Are we doomed to an endless series of hopeless jobs paying Third-World wages? And why does all this make me feel mad as a cat?????

It’s been one of those cranky days. Started out that way and went downhill.

Shot off to Scottsdale de bonne heure, well before seven in the ayem, dressed not quite to the nines but certainly to the eights. Good company. Friend who’s a graphic designer of some renown and substantial talent took it upon himself, volunteer-wise, to take control of Tina’s and my project to design a logo and a business card. He surfaced with a truly gorgeous design. Love it covet it want to print it NOW, today! Tina loves it. Test client loves it.

“Test client”: friend who is also a client, whose taste and honesty can be trusted.

Only problem is, designer thinks copyeditor is two words. (He are, as we used to say at picture magazine Arizona Highways, a artist, he are not a english major.) The gorgeous design engages this small misapprehension. To fix it is to TOTALLY SCREW UP THE INCREDIBLY AWESOME UNBELIEVABLY FLICKING SPECTACULAR DESIGN!

In a word: auugghhhhh!

I incline to let it fly.

Colleagues say…wait! Given the business you’re in, it had better be right.

I say, one in 100 of my clients has a snowball’s chance of noticing that copyeditor is one word. Forgodsake, most of them are graduates of Arizona’s abysmal bottom-of-the-state-rankings public school system. They can barely spell their own names. That’s why they need us.

They say, given the business you’re in, it had better be right.

Taking this under advisement, I take the proofs and drive toward Client/Friend’s office, whereinat I need to deliver a job. I figure to ask her what she thinks of the copyeditor/copy editor issue.

But…at her office, no one’s there. It’s after nine, but not a soul is around. The door is locked. And the mail slot, where in the past I’ve dropped packages  of edited copy, is sealed shut.

I walk across the street to the publisher’s bookstore. Doesn’t open till 10:00 a.m.

Visit all the shops and offices in the publisher’s building, hoping to find someone who will take delivery of the mound of work I’ve done till Client can get back and retrieve it. No one’s open. (When do these people start their workdays??????). I can see a hairdresser working on some broad’s hair, but his door is locked. I leave, the work undelivered and the pay undeliverable.

Eventually reach Client on her mobile device. She’s trapped in an all-day meeting. Says she: copyeditor. One word. Copyeditor.

Says she: bring the copy by next Thursday. Doesn’t matter: production manager is off for the week.

{groan!}

Copyeditor. We are copyeditors. Not copy editors. Another week’s delay in receipt of pay, and a shot at another job.

Arrive casa mia, a half-hour later, feeling unduly cranky.

Pup is locked up in his crate, left there by M’hijito on his way to work while I was gadding around Scottsdale shortly after dawn cracked.

Yesterday a student has said she didn’t get her graded paper. I search for it on my hard drives. None. Where????? I think I’ve read it, hope I’ve read it, don’t want to read it, certainly don’t want to read it AGAIN.

There’s a score in the gradesheet for this paper. Whence???

Search two e-mail systems, in-boxes and outboxes. No, nope, not there.

Read the damn thing. Grade it. OK. Go to upload it back to her and…yes. Of course. At that point find the flicking GRADED PAPER!!!!!!!!

There was a good hour’s time wasted.

Another student sends a late paper. I stupidly neglect to tell him to take a flying F*** at the moon. Instead, like a fool, I read it. Just. flicking. God. AWFUL!!!!!!!!!

Two hours wasted, not counting the pointless trip to south Scottsdale. We’re really talking, if you add in that junket, three hours of wasted time.

All this wastage is interrupted every few minutes by Pup, who desires to go out, who desires to chew on stuff, who desires most of ALL to pounce the corgi and tup her until he’s blue in the doggy face. This desire is not shared by the corgi, interestingly enough.

Pup is beginning to get the message of “Leave It!” But it’s a slow process. Occasionally he will stop pumping away at the corgi. Briefly. Very briefly.

This morning it occurs to me that what’s really happening is that when I give him a treat for responding to “LEAVE IT!” he thinks I’m congratulating him for pouncing the corgi. Of course. Get this: Pounce the corgi; get distracted long enough to grab doggy treat; pounce the corgi, get called over for another treat.

Uh huh.

In the process of this discussion, Pup wraps his leash around my ankles as I’m walking down the hall. I fall on my face on the concrete-hard tiles.

Fortunately, nothing breaks.

Except my temper. The air all around me turns blue.

Dog is tied to the doorknob. I go back to work.

Now I have to read, comment upon, and advise about a raft of student drafts. Group 3, the bunch whose papers I should’ve read before I went to bed at midnight last night, has a half-dozen members. Three, count’em, three students have turned in draft comp/contrast papers. One of these is actually a comparison and contrast essay.

Now, I wasn’t surprised when the 102s couldn’t do the extended definition. That’s a difficult rhetorical mode and not one normally taught in our fine public K-12 system. They had, in a word, no clue. However, the comparison & contrast paper is a cliché. By now, they should know how to do it as they know how to breathe.

Another hour wasted, trying to explain to these nuclear physicists what is meant by “comparison.”

Took pup out in the yard again. Leash wrapped around my fingers as he was taking off like a rocket. Damn near dislocated my thumb!

None of these activities did much to improve my temper.

Now it’s time to feed said Pup. A.a.a.a.a.a.a.n.d.d.d.d.d…..we have no flicking dog food! M’hijito has forgotten, for the second day running, to restock my store of dog food from his giant Costco bag of it.

I decide that, rather than traipsing (again) to his house for a baggie full of the stuff, I should go to Costco and buy my own bag of it, thereby limiting the number of future junkets in search of toxic kibble. So, along about 12:30 I arrive at Costco, using time that I need to be using to read student papers and I need to be using for our marketing campaign and that I really truly wish I were using to unwind and that I do not wish to be using to run around the city.

Decide to pick up a bottle of wine, thinking maybe a glass will soothe my frazzled nerves. Also being low on human food, I decide to grab a container of tomato soup. Arrive in the dog food department.

And…yes, you know this, don’t you?

Yes, Costco is abiding by its First Corporate Internal Law of Nature: If the customer likes it, get rid of it!

The question is, how do they know?

Costco has quit carrying the expensive, tony, very nice variety of dog food M’hijito has decided to feed Pup. The new variant of that brand is turkey and sweet potato. M’hijito has told me, in the very recent past, that he believes sweet potatoes give Pup the runs.

This means M’hijito will have to select a new brand of dog food and will AGAIN have to ease Pup from present brand to new brand. Don’t know what kibble manufacturers do to make this happen but whenever you change brands abruptly, it invariably causes canine enteritis.

Interestingly, after you’ve accustomed a dog to eating actual, real human food, you can feed the beast any damn thing you please and never see so much as a loose bowel, much less the rampant diarrhea that happens every time you change kibble brands. I wonder why that is?

Pissed, I head for the checkout stand, where the lines stretch halfway back to the flicking meat department. It’s ten to one on a Thursday afternoon. What are all these people doing here? And why the hell aren’t they at work?

Oh. That ‘s right. There is no work in Arizona.

I beat out an aggressive shopper who tries to cut me off at the relatively short line. He joins a comparably endless line, and we settle in to wait for our chance to get out of the hectic place. And. Yes. My checkout guy seems to have come to Costco from the Post Office.

He moves as though he were swimming through molasses. How do people do that? The arm sloooooowwwwwly moves from item to cash register. The fingers sloooooooowly punch in code. Meanwhile the guy’s mouth moves a mile a minute. He’s gabbling to the customer, an unending stream of small talk. He yaks. She yaks. They yak. He clears off half the conveyer belt but neglects to move it forward, so the guy in front of the guy in front of the guy in front of me can’t unload his cart. He yaks. She yaks. They yak.

Just as it looks as though he’s finally going to hand over the receipt and shovel this pair out the door, it becomes apparent that he’s not done. They’ve rolled up a flat cart bearing a gigantic televison. He’s delighted. They’re delighted. They discuss the glories of this particular television. He yaks. They yak.

I give up and leave.

Drive to M’hijito’s house, close enough to Costco to walk, if one so chose and didn’t mind risking one’s wallet and one’s health. Collect a few cups of dog food, head back to the Funny Farm, feed the dog.

Wasted another hour and a half in this exploit.

Fucking furious.

Tina e-mails to say she’s landed a course with the District, teaching Western Civ online. She hopes to get two more sections.

Her master’s degree earns her a tiny fraction of what waiting tables pays her.

She wishes nothing more than to find work that will let her quit waiting tables.

Adjunct teaching does not fit that description.

We must market our business. We must, must, MUST get better paying work.

The new client, the one who told me how tough things are before walking out of the restaurant where we met and climbing into a Lexus SUV, finally allows as to how he will pay our $60/hour rate. But he claims to be headed out of town and now begins a game of telephone tag. Okay. I can play that game. I’ve given him two pages of freebie edits and some advice on revision as a sample of what we can do. Sincerely do I hope this does not come to naught.

Late in the day, I hear from a headhunter.

He wants me to apply for a medical project management job in Chicago. I am not even faintly qualified for this job, but Tina is. Faintly, at any rate. I forward his e-mail to her, though I know she probably can’t leave the state because her child’s father lives here, sole custody notwithstanding.

The day wends on and I’m reminded, again, that really I need to look in to subscribing to Carbonite, an online backup system much recommended by the Web guru who haunts the very networking group with whom I started the day. This reminder comes by way of a review of the freshly launched iCloud. Reviewer says it’s great for mobile devices but “dead” for desktop machines.

Ducky.

Read reviews of Carbonite and Mozy. The reviewer raves; commenters rant. Three people report that Carbonite failed to actually save their data. Two report that it takes not hours, not days, not weeks, but months (!) to back up their data to its servers. Similar complaints are made about Mozy. The reviewer loses his temper and announces that henceforth he will screen comments and boot those he regards as gratuitously cranky.

I feel gratuitously cranky, myself.

After studying these ruminations, I decide that, since I’m going to have to pony up $30 a year to keep my business e-mail address, I might as well at least try to use iCloud for cloud storage, but remember nevertheless to manually back up key subdirectories to my hard drive. Then if and when the burglar breaks in and steals all my hardware, at least I’ll have a shot at rescuing some of my data from iCloud.

Dinnertime at last. I crack open a beer, being fresh out of wine. Hope it will soothe my crabbed nerves. Used up the last of the dog pork; forgot to defrost another container of cooked pork for the corgi. Feed her half a can of tuna. She hates canned tuna and leaves most of it in her dish, there to stink up the kitchen. Throw a piece of salmon on the grill; it cooks slowly. Assemble salmon and salad and buttered rice on a plate; take it and a mug of beer outside…there to be greeted by the roar of a FLICKING cop helicopter, come to take up residence over the neighborhood.

Curses!

Curses, curses, curses!

 

Entrepreneurship: How much time should I spend on…?

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The other day I remarked that contract teaching is by far the most reliable source of income among my various little enterprises.

Editorial work, however, pays better by the hour, is less taxing, and requires little or no driving around.

Blogging is entertaining and a nice sop for one’s ego but does almost nothing for the bottom line.

Thinking about how Tina and I might market and grow our editorial business, it crossed my mind to block out a certain percentage of the day or the week for each activity, thereby allowing me to schedule in a regular slot for marketing and networking. And this led straight to the question of how much is a reasonable amount of time to allot to one’s various money-making activities?

“Reasonable” aside, how much am I already allotting to this, that, and the other exploit? I spend rather more time on the blog than I should, given the tiny amount of revenues it represents. Really, until recently FaM has been the only one of the three enterprises that I’ve worked on every single day.

Exclusive of Social Security, teaching generates about 64% of my income. Editorial accounts for about 26%, and Funny about Money, about 8%. So, it would make sense for about 2/3 of my working time to be spent on teaching, about 1/4 of my time on editing, and less than 1/10 of it on blogging.

Because so much teaching work is done up-front in the form of course preparation that happens before a paycheck comes in (and therefore represents unpaid labor), it’s difficult to estimate how much of my time actually is spent on that endeavor. I spend about 9 hours a week in class, but I’ve spent hundreds of hours in course preparation, and to grade a single set of papers can take anywhere from 6 2/3 hours to 20 hours. One of my courses is online, requiring zero hours of class time. In a 16-week semester, not counting drafts, I collect about 15 sets of papers. So it would make sense to approximate an average of 6 to 8 hours a week grading papers. That’s approximately 15 to 17 hours a week, not counting the extensive course prep time. Figure about 100 hours for that, and you can add another 6.25 hours a week, for about 23 hours a week on teaching.

That’s more than 50% of a normal work week.

Editorial? Depends on what’s in house. On any given day, I can spend anything from 30 minutes to 16 hours on editing. It probably averages around 8 or 10 hours a week.

And as for blogging, I average about two hours a day on it; 14 hours a week.

So we have 23 + 8 + 14 = 45  hours of paying work a week.

If that’s accurate, then right now I’m spending about 51% of my work time on teaching, 17% of it on editorial work, and 31% of it on blogging.

What that adds up to is this: the smallest amount of my working time is spent on the best paying work. The second-largest slab of my time is spent on work that pays, at most, about $20 an hour—probably considerably less. And almost a third of my working hours are spent on an activity that brings in a laughable $200 a month.

Well. There’s a little insight, in the “what’s wrong with this picture” department!

If one is to work smarter instead of harder, it would make sense for the largest portion of working hours to be spent on the highest-earning activity, no? That would be…yes! Editorial.

I think we (by that I mean me and my associate editor) could do far better by targeting commercial enterprises—more plumbing/HVAC contractors!—than by working with individual writers and vanity presses. We need to go out into the world and meet the people who bring you all that obnoxious advertising and who blanket the Internet with “information” about their products and services. One thing that’s clear: business executives expect to pay other businesses a fair rate. Too often, individuals do not.

And if we want to earn more from better-paying work, then we need to devote more time, proportionately, to the better-paying work.

Duh!

I should probably try to up the proportion of working hours spent on The Copyeditor’s Desk from around 15% to 20% to something more like 40% to 50%.

It would be possible to do that simply by setting aside an hour or two a day to work on marketing the little business, and then intensifying that effort during the winter and summer breaks—using time that would be spent on teaching to network and market to businesses. It might require me to spend less time on teaching, and it certainly would cut into the time available for poking at a keyboard to produce blog posts.

At $50 an hour, an editor working 15 billable hours a week should earn about $750 a week, or about $37,500 a year, given a two-week break. Double the number of billable hours for marketing: 30 hours a week, and you come up with exactly the number of hours/week I’m working right now. $37,500 is about $7,950 more than projected earnings from all three enterprises in a typical year. Helle’s belles: I just got a paycheck from the community colleges for two weeks of teaching three sections.

Is that a reasonable allocation of working vs. marketing hours: 66% in peddling the business and 33% in actual work? Various self-styled experts vary, recommending that the small business entrepreneur devote between 20% and 60% of one’s working time to marketing. So if I were spending “only” 60% of my time at hustling business from other businesses, I’d have 18 hours a week to devote to actual paid editorial work, amounting to $900 a week or $45,000 a year. At 20%, I’d be pulling in $1,800 a week, or $90,000 per 50-week year.

Now that’s working smarter!

There’s another model, of course: videlicet, I do most or all of the marketing and Tina does most or all of the editing. In this scenario, I earn a salary from the S-corporation for my services and Tina gets paid an hourly contract rate.

So let’s say I manage to bring in 40 hours a week worth of work. That’s $2,000 a week, or $100,000 in a 50-week year. We split the income 50-50, and we each earn 50 grand a year.

LOL! Not likely that I could corral that much paying work at $50/hour. But anything’s possible. One never knows until one tries, does one?

😉

Benefits of Joining a Business Group

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Thursday: another early-morning trek across the Valley to the weekly breakfast meeting of the Scottsdale Business Association.

When I was invited to join this group, I privately thought it was going to be more hassle than it was worth. Because eggs make me upchuck unless they’re well diluted with flour and sugar (as in chocolate cake…), it’s always difficult for me to find something to eat for breakfast in an American restaurant. The group’s venue, the Good Egg, sounded especially unpromising {urk!}. And having to dive into the rush-hour traffic at quarter to seven was only slightly less unappealing.

However, I’ve found it really has been a very useful thing.

The benefits have extended far beyond the occasional job lead. For those of us who operate out of home offices, belonging to a local business group has the sterling quality of getting the entrepreneur away from the keyboard and out into the world. If I weren’t teaching, the only time I’d see another human being would be in choir and during shopping trips. Meeting weekly with a dozen other business people means I get to talk with professionals about topics that matter and enjoy the friendly company of a diverse and lively bunch of people.

More concrete benefits have included leads to useful business tools, such Carbonite’s cloud-based backup service, and presentations describing how various financial instruments and business-related strategies work. To those we might add practical advice: last week my dog-&-pony show was a discussion of how my associate editor and I are planning to step up marketing for our editorial business, The Copyeditor’s Desk. In response, practically everyone in the group had some idea or advice to contribute, and this morning they all wanted to know what progress we’d made on our plan.

On the other hand, except for a small local group of women bloggers, I don’t belong to associations of bloggers. Not because I don’t want to and not because I don’t see the value in linking with others who are trying to monetize their sites, but because an online network doesn’t serve the purpose of getting me out of my garret. Virtual socializing, while it has its purposes, is not the same as meeting people face to face. And it doesn’t take you off your chair and out from in front of your computer.

Too, Funny about Money doesn’t provide enough of my little corporation’s total revenue to make it worth spending a lot more time on it than I already do. One half-way decent editorial assignment returns two or three months’ worth of Adsense revenues; the recent two-week plumbing company gig paid more than seven times the amount FaM earns on Adsense in a month. Given that disparity, it makes sense to spend a lot more time on marketing the editorial business than it does to try to further monetize the blog. Really, if I spent as much time every day marketing The Copyeditor’s Desk as I do writing blog posts (hmm…like this one…), it would be earning as much as or more than I earn teaching, which other than Social Security is my only moderately reliable source of income.

Probably one doesn’t need to rub elbows with other business owners to arrive at revelations like this. But it helps.

The Sanity Discount: Ethics for Small Businesses and Bloggers

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Well. Bloggers who run ads are small businesses, of course. A couple of ripples in the daily flow of things have, over the past couple of days, led me to ruminate about integrity and ethics, and about how they should direct the course of our little side businesses, including our blogs.

First, a very nice new client recently wandered in through the door. Says he wants someone to edit website copy for a successful small business in the trades. I send my rate sheet, which frames my rates on a per-page basis. He wants to know what I’ll charge by the hour. I say sixty bucks, not an unreasonable amount in the large scheme of things (twenty years ago a friend here was getting $120 an hour for similar work). He, doing business in a large city far, far away where employees’ and independent contractors’ pay is not throttled by right-to-work laws, doesn’t even blink.

So I dive into the project, which is kind of fun. Well, “kind of fun” because it doesn’t entail a lot of technical language or esoteric theory, unlike most of the stuff I do. Mathematical biosciences this is not, nor is it abstruse postmodernist blather. But there’s a fair amount of it, and it needs substantial reorganization, rewriting, and new research & writing. I enjoy this little endeavor over the course of about 22 hours. Eventually I wrap the job and add up my bill, and…

Holy mackerel! At $60 an hour, the tab came to enough for me to buy a condo in the guy’s expensive city. It really did seem out of line, given the relative ease and mild entertainment value of the work.

Okay, it’s true that if I based my fees on how much fun the job is, I’d have to edit Poisoned Pen Press copy for free. But still…there’s a limit.

Seeking a fairer arrangement, I calculated what it would cost the client if I charged my highest page rate—justifiable, I figured, because of the amount of actual writing I did—and came up with an amount that was enough for The Copyeditor’s Desk to buy itself a couple of printer cartridges. Fairly respectable, actually, but not enough to break the bank.

So that was what I ended up billing: about four or five hundred bucks less than the hourly rate would have commanded. But at $60 an hour, the bottom line added up to a figure utterly beyond reason. In an abstract way, it didn’t seem right to charge that much for that kind of work.

Call it the Sanity Discount.

Hard on the heels of that exchange, an ongoing conundrum resurfaced. Some of you probably noticed the recent “sp0ns0r3d post” that went up recently. You may or may not have observed that it also went down.

Funny about Money is getting large enough to attract the attention of various individuals and groups who bill themselves as advertisers. Almost all of them—a good 99.9 percent of them—want me to run paid text links. And they’re willing to pay pretty well for the privilege. I could easily double or triple Funny’s revenues by selling paid text links.

These people and their brokers approach the blogger by saying either that they want to buy ad space on the site or that they are generously offering a guest post, “absolutely free to you.”

Trouble is, doing so eventually puts one afoul of Google’s arcane rules, designed to protect its search engine algorithm. To simplify a complicated story, if Google catches you publishing paid text links (which sooner or later it will), your page rank magically drops to zero.

So, after you’ve worked for months or years to build a respectable page rank, these folks come along and take advantage of it; then when their practices kill your page rank, they of course will abandon you.

That particular aspect is not at issue here, though. What we have at issue is the so-called advertiser’s strategy to evade discovery, which is to produce copy for a post that fits the blogger’s site theme. The paid link is then embedded in the post, in such a way that the link appears to point to something relevant to the post’s subject.

It’s important to understand that paid links are not advertising. They’re a device to suck link juice from a site with a relatively decent page rank into the buyer’s own site, by way of making the other site appear at or near the top of a Google search.

In other words, what looks like a real post is a deceptive device to mount self-serving links whose purpose has nothing to do with the host site’s content. Often it contains a link pointing to some outfit selling a service or product that runs counter to the host site’s very raison d’être. Why, for example, would a personal finance blogger who urges readers to get out of debt, manage money wisely, and avoid loan sharks recommend taking out a payday loan?

Why? To collect a hundred bucks for publishing two words attached to a live do-follow link, that’s why.

Such a post is, in short, advertorial. Actually, it doesn’t even rise to that level, because the articles are not really intended to be read; they exist to carry the links, which exist to use the host’s page rank to jack up the search engine page rank on the link seller’s site. While they’re billed as advertising, they’re actually a form of black-hat SEO.

Well, I started in journalism back in 1979, and over the years I’ve worked for some of the most prominent regional periodicals in my part of the country. Believe it or not, there is such a thing as journalistic ethics, and over the course of 32 years they tend to inhabit your thinking. When I came up, there was a sharp divide between advertising and editorial—in fact, the ad and circulation departments were housed on the other side of the building from where the editors and artists worked.

Magazines did publish crass little “articles” written by highly paid writers—earning far more than any of us did!—whose purpose was to plug paying advertisers. This was to be expected: magazines survive on ad revenue; subscription income does not suffice to support a print publication. However, ethical publishers mark advertorials as such: with a running header or footer saying something like “Advertisement.” Often advertorials are set off typographically and even printed on slightly different paper from the rest of the rag.

To publish advertising or SEO masquerading as an article without cluing the reader to the fact that the stuff is paid advertising is dishonest.

It is to lie.

That is why many publications do not print advertorial at all, and why those who do, if they have any decency at all, label them prominently as advertising.

Times have changed, of course, with the advent of the brave new world that is the Internet. And blogging is and is not journalism, though it has readers who presumably expect some standard of honesty from their writers. Here’s what journalistic webmaster Robert Niles says about the issue, writing at the Online Journalism Review:

The old rule: There must be a wall between advertising and editorial.

The new rule: Sell ads into ad space and report news in editorial space. And make sure to show the reader the difference.

Accordingly, I marked the paid-link peddler’s copy as a Sp0nsor3d Post!

This elicited a squawk of dismay. When I refused to remove the notice saying the post was a paid article containing links to the author’s clients’ sites, the deal fell through. Cheerfully, I removed the post from my site, and good riddance to it.

To cope with the practice of secreting paid links in fake stories, Google is now demanding that all links to commercial sites be coded as no-follow links. The would-be advertisers hate this, of course—because the link juice is what they’re paying for—and usually they will decline to place a paid link unless it’s do-follow. Many bloggers simply take a chance that Google will never catch them, and they justify the potential loss of page rank by arguing that PR doesn’t matter anyway.

Maybe it doesn’t, maybe it does. The technicalities of page rank are way above my pretty little head, and so I don’t trouble myself with them.

But one could argue, with some justice, that Google’s policy on paid do-follow links is hugely unfair, since Google Adsense places plenty of paid links on your site. And since Google pays nothing like what these often rather sleazy “advertisers” will pay, Google itself takes on a whiff of the exploitive.

About that, I say it is what it is.

Ironically, while Google’s policy is self-serving (their motive has nothing to do with ethics and everything to do with the way the company’s business model works), it in fact feeds into that fundamental journalistic ethic: the effect of the rule is to discourage deceptive content and to encourage separation of advertising and editorial.

Old-fashioned…but then so is “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

😉

Coupons for Sale or Rent…

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Did you know you can sell coupons—the kind of stuff that comes in junkmail—at online sites? Saturday’s PlayNooz reported on a New York postal carrier who was arrested for the sale of coupons he’d ripped off from residents’ mailboxes and peddled on eBay. A commenter observed that some coupons, such as the ones that come from Penny’s, are worth ten or fifteen bucks. Or more…one shoe store here routinely sends out 30%-off coupons, and all its stock is in the $100-plus range.

Turns out this enterprise is not very difficult. You simply collect coupons, organize them in some intelligible way (such as by category or by likely frequency of purchase), and advertise your stashes on eBay or Craigslist. You can even consider collecting coupons that are listed online. I have found that you can go here for Amazon coupons and a ton other top retailers. Apparently you can get as much as 50% to 75% of the coupons’ savings.

There’s actually a site that will let you resell coupons from sites like Groupon, Living Social, or Tippr. How exactly you’d make a profit on coupons you have to pay for is unclear, unless you could charge a premium the ones that sell out fast.

What a hoot! Talk about your passive income…just let that junk mail roll in!

Image: Ticket for a free glass of Coca-Cola, ca. 1888; believed to be the first coupon ever. Scanned by uploader from Wired (Nov 2010), Vol. 18, No. 11, p. 104. Public Domain.

Funny on the Radio!

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Cary Lockwood, proprietor of Your Auto Network and host of his own radio show on Phoenix’s KXXT, kindly invited Funny to do a segment on his program, Calling All Cars. It aired yesterday, June 19. You can listen to it by clicking here… Or check out Cary’s podcasts over here.

Cary, as you’ll recall, was Funny about Money’s first interviewee for the Entrepreneurs series. That post went over so well it eventually surfaced at the Wall Street Journal site, mostly because Cary’s enterprise and energy are so creative.

It was great fun talking with him. I hope you’ll enjoy the podcast and check out his show.

Thanks, Cary!