Sunday, October 28, 2012

Important before shopping for insurance

Sometimes the longer term appears thus dark in order that you can not predict what before of you may be. even supposing the longer term remains an issue, you'll do one thing vital for your future currently. It implies that you can not simply wait till the longer term comes for real. the explanation is as a result of what you are doing currently can completely have an effect on your future. as an example, it's clear that you simply don't apprehend once you die within the future, however shopping for insurance are nice for you particularly for the one you love individuals around you. shopping for insurance suggests that creating monetary protection.

Now, it's clear that purchasing insurance rather be terribly useful for you within the future. However, you ought to perceive that you simply can solely get the advantages if you get the most effective one or the foremost acceptable supported your condition. It makes examination life insurance is incredibly vital to try to to. the most effective issue you'll get by doing this can be finding the most effective insurance with the most effective worth. Now, I you have got an issue regarding wherever and the way to check the quotes, you'll attend the link I even have provided and notice the most effective one by your own.

Monday, October 22, 2012

Payday Loan for Your Common monetary issues

I met some friends this morning and shared lots of things. Finally we tend to got a heavy discussion that perceived to be quite common in our life. We tend to talked concerning a way to earn cash to satisfy our daily desires. Finally i spotted that it's terribly doable that each one might gets issues that primarily associated with cash as monetary issues. At the tip of the discussion, I might conclude that we would get monetary issues however there would be solutions we tend to might get to unravel the issues.  One in every of the most effective solutions for your monetary issues are by applying for day loan. As you recognize, it's a brief term loan of that you only have to be compelled to get involve till your next day. The most effective news you will need to understand is that you simply will apply the loan through web by visiting on-linepayday loans . It takes a quite easy and short moment to use as long as you recognize the necessities. During this case, understanding however day loans will assist you should be the primary issue you wish to understand. The next, you ought to additionally perceive that solely the most effective day loan investor can assist you as shortly as doable. If you're interested, simply follow the links I give on this reading.

Getting the most effective supply Of motorcar Insurance

Auto insurance is required for those who have vehicles. And that we see in these recent days, there ar a lot of and a lot of individuals in hand vehicles. It implies that there ar a lot of and a lot of cars on the road. This condition would possibly increase the danger of accident or something that's sudden to happen. Here, motorcar insurance is extremely necessary for them. Motorcar insurance becomes one in all the preparation actions which will be done to assist individuals get through the sudden accident or expertise. Sadly, finding the most effective and low cost insurance isn't that straightforward. One in all the solution is visiting the directory web site to seek out low cost automobile insurance in urban center, if you're close to urban center. The directory web site can direct you to some insurance suppliers site can directs seek out the most effective auto insurance for you.  We have a tendency to notice that totally {different|completely different} suppliers can have different policy.That's why we have a tendency to direct you to some totally different suppliers.
This is done to form you able to compare the coverage That's offered by some insurance suppliers. During this web Site, You'll be able To simply compare 2 or a lot of quotes of motorcar insurance to seek out the cheaper price Texas motorcar insurance.  Albeit you have got the cheaper price, it doesn't mean that you simply cannot get sensible amount. This can be wherever the importance of comparison plays it role. Once you ar comparison to or a lot of insurances from totally different suppliers, you may be able to compare several things as well as the coverage, the price, the rate, the claims, and different necessary stuff you will placed on account. Therefore, you may have the chance to urge the most effective coverage, however with the cheaper price or rate to pay.

Getting the most effective supply Of motorcar Insurance In Texas

Auto insurance is required for those who have vehicles. And that we see in these recent days, there ar a lot of and a lot of individuals in hand vehicles. It implies that there ar a lot of and a lot of cars on the road. This condition would possibly increase the danger of accident or something that's sudden to happen. Here, motorcar insurance is extremely necessary for them. Motorcar insurance becomes one in all the preparation actions which will be done to assist individuals get through the sudden accident or expertise. Sadly, finding the most effective and low cost insurance isn't that straightforward. One in all the solution is visiting the directory web site to seek out low cost automobile insurance in urban center, if you're close to urban center. The directory web site can direct you to some insurance suppliers site can directs seek out the most effective insurance for you.  We have a tendency to notice that totally {different|completely different} suppliers can have different policy.That's why we have a tendency to direct you to some totally different suppliers.
This is done to form you able to compare the coverage That's offered by some insurance suppliers. During this web Site, You'll be able To simply compare 2 or a lot of quotes of motorcar insurance to seek out the cheaper price Texas motorcar auto insurance .  Albeit you have got the cheaper price, it doesn't mean that you simply cannot get sensible amount. This can be wherever the importance of comparison plays it role. Once you ar comparison to or a lot of insurances from totally different suppliers, you may be able to compare several things as well as the coverage, the price, the rate, the claims, and different necessary stuff you will placed on account. Therefore, you may have the chance to urge the most effective coverage, however with the cheaper price or rate to pay.

Friday, August 3, 2012

Google Knows Best

Some sweat and cussing finally got Google’s Product Listing ads working after I grokked that I had to create an ad group without adding keywords or writing ads -- Google knows best, and I needn’t worry my homely little head over the details. I still don’t quite understand what triggers these ads, where they appear, or what they look like, but the campaign came roaring out of the chute with a click-through rate over 3% (six times the rate of my main AdWords campaign) on Monday. Twenty-three clicks only cost me $0.16 each and brought three sales for an astronomical 13% conversion rate (anything over 2% is pretty good). Sadly, it faded after that debut and I ended up with another lousy week. Traffic is running at 200 visitors a day, but nobody’s buying. I blame the competing demand of back-to-school shopping.

Because Product Listing ads are built from an exported file containing my whole inventory, I get (and pay for) hits from search phrases that I would never choose to buy, such as “beach towels under $5.” I had a few towels left over from my original product assortment, which I marked down to cost years ago. All of a sudden, they sold out last week. With no ad to turn off or keywords to deactivate, Product Listing continued to send me traffic for a nonexistent product. Whereas I only used to update my product feed once a month, I must now upload a new file almost daily as products sell out and reorders arrive.


I’ve been having fun (inasmuch as anything work-related is ever fun) watching the realtime reporting in Google Analytics – that’s how I figured out the “beach towels” thing. I feel like a voyeur. On average, only 2% of my visitors ever buy anything, but watching the other 98% come and go is fascinating. 


What’s weird is that virtually all of my sales come between midnight and 11 am. I have developed this superstition that if there are no sales waiting for me when I fire up my computer in the morning, I’ll go through the whole day with nothing. 


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The Squeaky Wheel Gets the Grease: A credit card processing company pitched me an offer good enough to tempt me away from CDG Commerce. This proposal would have cut $40 per month from an expense category that’s consistently over budget. 


The pitch looked like this:
 

(Existing deal from CDG)

2.35% qual (debit, and qualified)
4.01% Non qual (rewards and non qualified)
$0.10 transaction
$10 maintenance fee
$0.25 capture fee
 
(Proposal from competitor)

1.89% Debit
1.99% Qualified
2.47% Mid Qualified
3.47% Non Qualified
$0.10 per transaction
$0 statement or monthly fees
$0.25 capture fee
Superficially, that's a clear winner. But when I started probing I found a $10 monthly gateway fee (my current gateway is free) and a $96 annual PCI compliance fee (I currently don’t pay one). Moreover, they changed the original four-tier rate offer to a slightly weaker three-tier structure (1.99, 2.35, and 3.37%) in the contract.

Because I loathe perturbing a system that’s working and because CDG has been decent enough, I asked them to make a counteroffer. They finally came back with rate reductions to 2.05 qualified and 3.15 non-qualified…and they removed the $0.25 daily batch fee. That saves me a little money without the hassle of jumping ship and ought to bring my processing costs back into line with my budget. Assuming, that is, that I can stay afloat until Christmas season begins in another month. 

Friday, July 27, 2012

Did You Miss Me?

Owning a business is almost as bad as having a child – it’s a constant bundle of needs that never goes away. Sometimes you have to send it away to summer camp for sanity’s sake. “Closing” Curio City for a week is always a nice break, even if I do still check in on it daily.

I turn off all of my ads, disable the expedited shipping options, post notices on my News page, on my Shipping & Returns page, and on my front page, and make a Facebook announcement. Despite those measures, I typically still get 1-2 sales per day from natural search and repeat customers. Those people get emails inviting them to cancel if the delay is unacceptable. Every now and then, somebody does.


This year’s vacation should’ve easily gained some ground on LY, when I spent the whole week fighting with HostGator (worst host ever…no link here) while finding MDD Hosting (best host ever). But my store-closing measures must’ve been particularly effective this year, because the week finished with a paltry $102.


Oh well. Vacation week is supposed be a black hole, and business always snaps right back after I revive everything. Or does it? This year sales remain becalmed even as traffic has rebounded to >150 daily visits. Google’s realtime reporting lets me watch people navigate my site. I can see what pages they’re looking at, where they’re located, and what keywords brought them in. People are dutifully shopping, but nobody’s buying.


I had to blow the $1,000 that I had reserved for site improvements just to cover the bills. A normal week’s business would’ve patched that right up, but normality is still not restored. It looked like an unexpected $360 golf ball special order was going to save the day (even after paying $190 for the merchandise) until I discovered a $62 authorized return and a $75 unauthorized return waiting at my mail drop, and that $360 windfall was gone before it was even deposited. At this writing, I’ve got $99 in the bank with no pending deposits. I’m getting just enough sales to assure me that there’s nothing technologically wrong. These lulls happen, and all I can do is wait them out. This one’s timing is just especially bad. 


And so cash flow’s now a full-blown emergency. If business returns to normal in August, reduced expenses from July should bring things back into line. And Google came through with a $100 credit for their new “Product Listing” ads, so I’m slowly trying to create a new campaign that won’t compete with my old AdWords campaign.


July numbers follow. The tl;dr version is that the month started strong, died during vacation, and hasn’t come back yet.


July:


Total income: -10.7%
Total COGS: -22.3%
Payroll: +113.2%
Marketing: -19.9%
Net Income (Profit): -6.9%

Year to Date: 


Total income: +3.3%
Total COGS: +3.2%
Payroll: +15.2%
Marketing: +9.8%
Net Income (Profit): -49.3%

Friday, July 6, 2012

If I Could Turn Back Time

I demurred when someone asked a few weeks ago “about things you learned that you didn't expect to learn, mistakes you made, and what you would do differently (or what you did right and wouldn't change!).” Today I’ll take a stab at it.

When Curio City was still on the drawing board back in 2005, I figured it needed to gross $175,000 in annual sales to generate an annual salary of $35,000, which is half of what I earned in my heyday. I figured it would take five years to get there. My bricks-and-mortar store would deliver 75% of the revenue with the website picking up the rest (about $44,000).

The store never came to pass, of course. The website should make something close to $70,000 this year, and if the economy ever turns around, I could hit $100,000 by 2020. That’s a lot of money for an old man selling stuff out of his cellar, but it still leaves me solidly below the poverty line.

What happened?

Most obviously, the Great Recession happened. I thought that Americans would always spend money that they don’t have to buy things they don’t need for people who don’t want them. It seemed like Ronald Reagan’s new Age of Greed would roll on forever. Will those high-flying days ever return or are we back to the more modest lifestyles of the 1970s and earlier? Hard to say. Economists think that we might return to historic norms by 2016, but I don’t expect to see boom times again during my remaining years in harness.

But blaming the economy only goes so far. Americans are still as materialistic as ever, even if they lack the means to indulge themselves like they used to. The rich are richer than ever, the middle class is treading water, and the poor…well, nobody cares about them. Maybe the go-go years are gone, but people are adapting to this new normalcy.

I blame three things for my failure: Marketing, technology, and poverty.

I don’t like self-promotion or have even the slightest interest in it, so it’s no wonder that I suck at marketing. I had thought that I’d be able to farm it out to consultants. But marketing professionals earn big salaries that price them out of my reach. So I’m left to thrash about on my own.

I don’t understand the appeal of social networking at all; my Facebook page is somnolent and I don’t even try to use Twitter. When every other entity in the world is putting itself forward to the point of saturation, such reticence is deadly. My email newsletter is so ineffective that I am tempted to close my Constant Contact account to save $18 a month – the newsletter doesn’t even drive the $180 in sales that would justify that expense. I keep it going mostly because I understand it and I’m fairly good at it (my open/click statistics always beat the industry average).

I was interested in technology back when I used to go out into the world. I even had a short career in software development. But I dropped the tech ball after leaving the workforce. I almost got a smart phone this year out of professional necessity, but my wife decided that she needed one, too, and we can't afford two data plans. The choice was easy since she actually wanted one and I did not, but it probably doomed Curio City to ever-decreasing relevance. The appeal of tablet computers also mystifies me. The incessant parade of new i-Thisses and e-Thats is boring. Technologically, I am stuck in 2005.

That might not matter so much if I could reach enough curmudgeons like myself; we Boomers still command the economy. That’s where poverty comes in. I would like to spend $500 a month on Ess-Eee-Oh for six or more months to dramatically boost my organic search results (unpaid clicks). I need to overhaul my website’s design. And I need to refresh my product line, writing off a lot of old dead items and bringing in some new lines. It would take between $5,000 and $10,000 to accomplish all of that. But I constantly struggle just to cover monthly operating expenses.

What would I do differently if I could start over? I might spend the $28,500 that I invested in Curio City on education instead. I could’ve bought a degree in, say, accounting. It’s not that I yearn to be somebody’s employee again – the “being your own boss” thing has forever spoiled me for wage slavery -- but sometimes I wish that I could just mindlessly punch a clock and earn enough money to survive on. After all, it’s not like Curio City fulfills my boyhood dream of taking things out of big boxes and putting them in little boxes. I don’t make the world a better place, or get much personal fulfillment, or make much money. Yet that’s how I spend my days.

No, that’s a copout. If I had it to do over, I would take one of these two paths:

1. Find a partner whose skills complement my own and who would contribute some startup cash and be a co-owner. That would yield a better capitalized startup, compensate for my personal weaknesses, and force me to work harder when my self-motivation flags. I considered doing that. But I’m a loner and I didn’t want to give up half of my business, I didn’t want anybody second-guessing me, and I didn’t know anybody who would have been interested, anyway. If I could reset the clock, I would try harder to find somebody who fits that bill.

Or:

2. Find a line of business that interests me personally. I enjoy the managerial aspects and creative control of running a business. But I’m neither a consumer nor a capitalist. I chose retail because I’d done it before and because it was easy, not because of any desire to sell things. I didn’t know in 2005 what else I could do, and I still don’t know today. I’m not passionate about anything. So…why not retail? It’s no better or worse than anything else I might do. If I could reset the clock, I would look harder for some type of business that might suit my personality better.

I’m an old man selling stuff out of his cellar with no visible path forward and 15 more years until I can max out my Social Security checks. Yet, rather than give in to despair, I cling to the hope that if I keep plodding along and making those incremental changes that I can understand and afford, I can still kick this thing up to a higher level. After all, the web store is beating my original forecast for it. Curio City has generated more than $60,000 in paychecks and repaid more than $13,000 of my original $28,500 loan. If it's not been a big success, neither is it a failure.

***************************

An interesting “new” scam crossed my desk. Although it’s new to me, it’s so obvious that I can’t believe I never encountered it before. In this active version of domain-name squatting, somebody pays the usual $8 to register a domain name similar to yours (in this case, “curiocitiesonline.com”), then emails you to say that it’s being auctioned off with a minimum bid of $69. What do you want to bet that if I had bid $69, fake competitors would’ve jacked up the price? And if I fell for that once, how long do you suppose it would be before the scammer registered and “auctioned” another variation on my name? 

Very clever, legal, and I’ll wager that the sleazebag (recordio.net) earns a lot more money than I do from my legitimate business. Maybe I should’ve become a scam artist.

**************************

There will be no posts for the next two Fridays due to my annual vacation. You might want to read this one three times.