David Pitlyuk

Craigslist is a great way to make a bit of a side income if you live in a popular area. Craigslist is great because it’s free to post things for sale, and everything on there is local, so it can be usually be picked up or dropped off. I personally know two people that make a good amount of money utilizing Craigslist, and I will divulge what they do in this post.

Make Money Reselling Products

My good friend Jason probably makes around $10,000 a year side-income just following one type of product. He finds deals on this one product and resells them back on Craigslist for anywhere from a $300-$1,000 profit per sale. By following one product, he is an expert in terms of what is a good price and what isn’t. This way he knows almost right away generally how much money he can make on a deal and whether or not it is worth his time.

The main thing to keep in mind is that it’s not as cut and dry as just looking at a post, finding a good price, and buying it, then selling it for more. Jason does a lot of negotiating in order to get the product at the lowest price possible. I’ve seen him buy stuff for $1,000 less then the asking price, and turn around to sell it for $800 more than he paid within a couple weeks. There is some work involved in remembering what has been up for sale for a while, and leveraging a good situation (for example somebody is moving and needs to get rid of it right away). This takes a lot of time to get good at, but I’ve noticed that Jason is much better at it now than when he first started, and his higher profit margins show for it.

If you want to do the same, start searching up some products which you think may have a high chance of reselling for profit and begin your research. Watch what the price is when the product usually gets posted. Watch how quickly it gets sold. E-mail and call some people, try and negotiate pricing down even if you aren’t going to buy just for practice. Get a feel for how people will react. I know there are times when Jason calls somebody to offer a price, and they literally say no angrily, but will call back a few weeks later accepting the price…they obviously had no other offers in that time.

Make Money Providing Services

I had a guy come by a few weeks ago to look at my Dodge Viper since I had it up for sale. The guy owns a pretty successful digital media company near Washington DC, and he was pretty young too. So my curiosity peaked, and I was asking him how he got started. He went to the University of Maryland under the entrepreneur school, and while there he started his company. By the time he had graduated, he decided to just keep it going full time. When that happened, he was desperate to bring on more work because he needed money to keep things going and pay the bills.

I was especially interested in this part because I wanted to know how he brought in new business since I am sort of in the same boat with Tri Megatech. It turns out that he went through the services, gigs, and jobs sections of Craigslist to try and get any work that he was capable of doing. He was sending hundreds of e-mails a week, but it proved to be useful because it built his initial clientele up enough that he is now turning work down. If you were good, you could even setup relationships with other people and outsource work that you can find on Craigslist. As long as you know what you will need to pay to get it done, and what you can get, you can make money by just sending some e-mails out.

Have you used Craigslist or any other site like eBay, eLance, etc to make extra money on the side or even a full-time income? Feel free to post your stories in the comments below.

When buying goods over the internet, it is best to make payment by credit cards. Visa cards are considered by some to be the best out there, but the most important factor to look out for when choosing a credit card or looking at credit card services is to find low interest credit cards.

A new company just launched that allows for a new simple way to monetize videos that are embedded on your site. Prerollr essentially works by overlaying an ad onto a video, and offering the publisher a revenue share. The ads are not video, it’s just a regular ad over the video, and requires the user to click a close button in order to get rid of it. As a publisher you can choose whether you want prerollr to display 100% of the inventory or just 25% of the inventory. Here’s an example of what the ad would look like over a YouTube video:

If you want to see a live example, I’ve implemented prerollr on VideoExperiment.com.  I’ll report back and let you guys know how it does from a revenue perspective.  As of right now, the reporting system doesn’t even get released until tomorrow (at the time of writing this).

Implementing the ads onto your site is easy, just add one line in your <head> area, and that’s it.  Signing up to run the ads takes about 1 minute, just fill out the form and click a verification link in your e-mail.

What do you think about this?  Is it ok with you?  Or is it too intrusive/annoying?  Do you even realize there is a video behind it?  My personal opinion is that the ad is slightly too big, and may make people not realize there is a video behind it.  Either that or maybe make the close button more obvious.  Either way, this is a great new opportunity for vloggers to monetize their sites better.

I’ve previously written about one multi-billion dollar product that makes wireless power a reality. A new one that I’ve found is a device that is made by a company named NeuroSky. The device allows you to control things with your brain by turning brainwaves into commands.

Now, first thought is what applications will it be used for? The company is targeting three things mainly; sleepiness/drowsiness detectors for automotive and industrial markets, gaming consoles, and therapeutic solutions for ADD problems. Check out this video to get an idea of some of things it can be used for:

There is just such a huge market for this product, and surprisingly enough, it sounds like it’s going to be really cheap to implement. They mentioned in the video the component was only $15. You can definitely expect next generation consoles to use some of this technology, especially considering the success of the Nintendo Wii. In fact, according to CNN Money, the CEO of NeuroSky is already in talks with the makers of Dance Dance Revolution.

How many times have you been driving down the highway late at night and started to dose off? I had a friend take my car for a 7 hour one-way trip back and forth to pick up a car. They drove, picked up the car, and drove back. On the way home, he fell asleep, did a couple spins in my car, went into the grass, back onto the road (while still spinning), and managed to stop somehow (with a mud all over the car). In the future, an application can be built by NeuroSky for the car that would have prevented him from doing that and potentially had a much worse situation. Now imagine every car in the future has this, that’s a lot of money to be made, and that’s just one application. Another big market is health. For example as was stated in the video, people in wheelchairs may be able to move the chair by just thinking about it.

Do you agree that this has the possibility to be a multi-billion dollar market?

Traffic

The truth comes out is an interest title for looking back at May, why did I pick that? I chose that title because it’s the first month that there was no huge traffic spikes, it was pretty much all raw traffic. This will allow us to see what the blog really does, which is great. By knowing true numbers, it will allow me to set realistic goals for how I want it to grow over the next few months.

This month I only had 10% of the unique visitors I had last month and about 14% of the number of pageviews. That means I had 2,086 uniques and 3,319 pageviews, compared to 20,000 uniques and 24,000 pageviews last month. It’s a huge traffic loss, but as I mentioned in last months review, over 15,000 of the unique visitors alone came from one traffic source. I’m actually fairly happy with the true numbers, it means I averaged about 68 unique visitors a day with 107 pageviews. I’d like to get this number up and over 100 uniques on average over the course of the next 1-2 months. Of course some huge traffic spike would skew that, so we’ll see how things go.

Last month my new vs. returning rate was only 4.8%, mainly due to spikes in traffic from single sources. This time, I got a true rating, 26% of my visitors are return visitors. I’m pretty impressed with that, and it means I have a decent number of loyal readers.

Monetization

In May, I removed the majority of advertising from the blog except for one AdSense unit, and instead was trying out AuctionAds. Mid-month, I checked my results with AuctionAds, and saw really high click-thru rates, but no revenue. By end of the month, I was still seeing the high CTR’s, and had only made about $2.50. I still believe AuctionAds can work well, but I need higher traffic to gauge whether or not it can be a good revenue source compared to other method.

AdSense impressions were very limited, and only pulled in $2.50 for the entire month. I’ve decided to put AdSense back into the posts for now, and I’ve already made more in by June 3rd then the entire month of May.

I want to reiterate that the place where my blog is right now, monetization is not a top concern. Building traffic and writing great content is the number one priority. As the blog grows, monetization will further grow into more of a concern…but worrying about how much money it is making when your blog is a recent launch is not a good way to make it grow.

RSS Subscribers

RSS subscribers stayed pretty steady in the 60-70 range. I did do a peak normal day on the last day of the month, getting 76 subscribers. This is hopefully a sneak peak into June where the numbers will hopefully at least slightly increase.

Another interesting thing to look at with RSS subscribers is the trendline for overall subscribers from the inception of the blog through the end of May. Using a linear trendline, we can see that the number of RSS subscribers is trending to go up over time:

Search Engine Goodness

Last month I saw a 260% increase in search engine traffic.  This month, even with having only 10% of last months traffic, I still saw a 14.5% growth in search engine traffic.  Here were the top 10 searched keywords:

1. e92 m3
2. total amount of liquid in dram sandals
3. kontera wordpress where
4. virginia mansions
5. infiniti g37
6. powercast ipo
7. 2008 infiniti g37 coupe
8. 2008 infiniti g37
9. redirect 301 “single file”
10. $10 plane ticket

It looks like a lot of my older content is getting the majority of search engine traffic…which makes sense.  Another interesting fact is that Google provides almost 93% of the search traffic:

Popular Pages/Content

Here was the most popular content in May:

1. David Pitlyuk (Homepage)
2. The 45 Best Technology Sector Corporate Web Designs: A-G
3. The 45 Best Tech Sector Corporate Web Designs: H-O
4. A Raunchy Dora The Explorer
5. 2008 Infiniti G37 Coupe
6. 2008 BMW M3 (E92) Production Pictures
7. Hot Import Nights 2007, Washington DC Pictures
8. How I’m Getting Paid To Drive A Dodge Viper For The Summer
9. Mansion Hunting In Northern Virginia Part 2
10. My Home Office…And Tagging You For Yours

A lot of the content is getting recycled from previous months, and still making the top 10.  This is mainly from search engine traffic.  I hope to see some newer content move up the list by next month.   It was nice to see the homepage rank #1 in terms of traffic, it goes to show that people are visiting and reading the latest…especially those that are not subscribed to my RSS feed.

Top Referrals

There are two main statistics we want to look at with top referrals.  First, which source referred traffic, and then which specific sites referred traffic.

Direct traffic is always nice because you know that readers are either specifically typing your name in, or they have your site bookmarked.  This is a nice split in terms of referring sources.  This is also a nice stat to see when the true numbers come out.

Here are the top referrals for websites (not search engines) that referred traffic to my blog:

1. Smashing Magazine
2. CollegeHumor
3. StumbleUpon
4. Digg
5. YoungGoGetter
6. My350Z
7. CSS Globe
8. TNmedia
9. del.ico.us
10. John Chow dot Com

The link from SmashingMagazine has been a great source for “trickle traffic”, bringing in a few uniques a day, but adding up over the course of a month.  I’ve noticed that I’ve been seeing more traffic (although never a lot) from del.ico.us…always cool to see readers are social bookmarking me.

I’m really looking forward to seeing what the next 3 monthly reports will look like.  My blog is starting to get more established, and building a bit of a name for itself.  I hope I continue to see that trend, and see the benefits from all of the hard work.

John Chow made a post in regards to a promotion that Citibank is running where you open a savings account (US only) and in 3 months they’ll give you $100. One person commented that they had talked to the customer service rep and verified that just a $1 deposit will do it. As long as your account is in good standing after 90 days, you will get your $100. There are no fees, and there is no minimum. On top of that the account has a 4.65% interest rate on it.

There was a lot of discussion about whether or not there was a catch. Some believed that banks do this sort of stuff all the time in order to generate new customers, and that $100 is nothing for them. Others said there always has to be a catch. The only thing I potentially saw was this term:

I also authorize you to use these consumer reports to consider me for other programs with Citibank. Upon request, you will inform me if a consumer report has been obtained and will give me the name and address of the agency furnishing the report.

I’m guessing in this instance, they can spam you about other Citibank offers they match you with. On the first page of the application there is a box you can check to say you don’t want them to share any information with their affiliates. I’d recommend checking that.

You can apply here, this is not an affiliate link. I actually tried to sign up for a Citibank affiliate program, but for whatever reason they didn’t accept me. For those of you running blogs that want to promote this, consider signing up through CJ and applying for their program. I believe you can make $20 for everybody you get to sign up.

Here are the terms:

$100 offer is only available for first-time Citibank deposit account customers, and will be paid only once to any individual. Persons who currently have or at any time have had a deposit account at Citibank (or any of its predecessor banks) are not eligible. To receive this offer you must apply for and open a new Ultimate Savings Account by 5/31/2007. $100 will be credited to your Ultimate Savings Account within 90 days from the end of the statement period in which your account was opened. Accounts must be in good standing at the time of the $100 credit.

All accounts are subject to approval. Customer must be a citizen or resident alien of the United States (U.S.) with a valid U.S. taxpayer identification number. The amount of any bonus payment will be reported to the IRS as interest earned in the year credited. Persons under 18 years of age are not eligible. Offer may be modified or withdrawn at any time without notice and is not transferable.

Earlier this month I mentioned that I was going to try and experiment with AuctionAds. So far the results are interesting. My blog doesn’t generate that many impressions, so I’m probably not getting the full effect. I have generated $0 in revenue, but I have noticed that the click through rates are extremely high.

As of this morning I’ve been averaging a 2.76% CTR throughout the site. I setup two different campaigns:

• Post Targeted: These are ads specifically placed and targeted into a post. For example on my post on how I got a Dodge Viper for free, I placed AuctionAds in there that search for the keyword “1994 Dodge Viper”. The ads have been showing various 94 Dodge Vipers for sale.
• Site Targeted: These have been ads that I put below each post that search for the value “make money”. They are more generic to the site itself.

I was surprised to find that the site targeted ads were performing almost as good as the post targeted ads. I’m getting 2.59% on site targeted and 2.95% on post targeted. I have seen a lot higher days on post targeted though where I was seeing as high 6-8+% CTR which are ridiculously high.

While I have not generated any revenue yet, it doesn’t mean I won’t make any money on those users that have clicked. AuctionAds sets a cookie where if a user signs up for eBay or bids and wins anything within 30 days, I will get paid out for it. So we’ll see over time if any revenue is generated.

I still believe that AuctionAds can best perform on a blog or site that is very niche targeted towards specific products.

If you consider running AuctionAds on your site, please think about using my referral, and help a fellow blogger out.

I recently bought a Dodge Viper, and I mentioned that I’d be driving it around for free, or maybe even getting paid to drive it. So how am I doing this? Careful planning, and a lot of searching/watching for the right deal.

I know you’ve all heard that buying a car is the worst investment you can make. Go to the dealer, pick up the latest and greatest 2007, and watch it lose thousands of dollars as soon as you drive off the lot. That doesn’t sound like a very intelligent thing to do, right? But many of us do it anyway, we want that new car feeling, we want a warranty, and we want the latest thing on the road. I’m the same way, I do like having the latest and greatest, and have purchased two brand new cars in the past 6 years. I’ve also learned from my mistakes. Since buying my 2nd brand new car, I’ve purchased 5 vehicles (3 cars, a motorcycle, and a dirtbike), but they have all been used. I’ve extremely minimized my overall ownership costs on all of these vehicles, allowing me to invest more money into things that will make me more money.

So the most obvious thing here is to find a vehicle that you can get a really good deal on, but that also generally depreciates less than other vehicles. My circle of good friends are all into cars, and all have fast cars. Since I sold my twin turbo 350Z, I have been lacking a true sports car, so I wanted to something for the summer…but I wanted to minimize my cost of doing so. A Dodge Viper is a great car to do this with. I purchased a first generation Viper, which is considered a collectors car. I think they have pretty much depreciated to the point (or very close) where as long as the miles are fairly low, the price will not go much lower (some are even saying that they are starting to appreciate). I could probably park the car in my garage, put a few thousand miles a year on it, and sell it years later for a similar price that I paid. I essentially did that with my 350Z, except the difference was that I lost thousands of dollars!

How Do You Find A Good Deal?

To find my Dodge Viper, there were several important factors:

1. You have to have a budget, and stick to it. It’s hard to not go a little bit over what you wanted to spend, but you have to make a hard-line decision on what you can/want to spend.
2. You have to have the funds available and ready to purchase the car at any second. Having the funds without taking a loan will help minimize your total cost by a lot since there will be no interest paid. I’ll have a post later on about how a good friend of mine makes side-income buying and selling dirt bikes…you’ll see how offering what I call a “right-now” action will give you a huge upper hand in price negotiating.
3. You have to be able to negotiate pricing. You can’t be afraid to work numbers with somebody.
4. You have to be able to walk away from a deal if it’s not what you want. If the price is slightly too high, you need to be able to get yourself to wait for the next chance.
5. Be patient. Finding a good deal can be tough, but they are out there! Follow the guidelines, and you will eventually get one.

These can pretty much be relevant to negotiating anything you’re going to buy, not just a car.

The Search Begins

There will be some research required on your end. I watched forums, eBay, Autotrader, Craigslist, and more to get an idea of what a good price on the Viper is. I knew the general ranges of what they sell for, and I also got an idea of what some of the aftermarket parts go for. Why did I do that? Well the Viper I purchased for example had an aftermarket hard top and glass windows…these sell for $5,000 brand new. I should be able to sell it for around $1,500-$2,000 fast, and I can knock that off the total price of the car. In this scenario, it made a huge difference, and was a big factor in why I chose the car that I did.

After knowing the range that the car normally sells for, you can then begin your search. You obviously need to be able to get the car below or near the low range in order to maximize your deal. You have to factor in additional costs such as shipping and taxes/registration. Once you find the deal you want, jump on it as quickly as possible. Don’t give the seller the opportunity to have another buyer come in and offer higher. If the buyer doesn’t already require it, ask to pay a deposit (usually $500-$1,000) so he will remove the car from wherever it is being sold. This will stop other potential buyers from contacting and offering higher than what you did.

When I bought my Viper I was looking at one in Georgia and working on negotiating a deal. In the meantime I continued watching my sources, and found a perfect one come up on eBay. I immediately contacted the buyer and made an offer. He met me slightly more than halfway, and I sent a deposit for the car right away. This was all done within 2 hours of the seller posting the car on eBay! I’m 95% sure he would have gotten his buy it now price (and even had offers for higher), but because I utilized my action items, I got the car for $1,100 less than the buy it now price. On top of that, I can also take another $1,500-$2,000 off the bottom line when I sell the hard top and glass windows. Keep all this in mind, when you are working out a deal, continue to keep looking as a better one may be right underneath your nose.

Good luck, and if you have any questions or comments about finding a good deal, post a comment!

Selling products is all about advertising! People have to know about your products in order to get sales, right? One of our top selling products for ActiveTuning is our custom grounding kits for the Nissan Titan and Pathfinder Armada. Grounding kits better help the grounding system of cars, and in turn, can potentially offer some very nice benefits:

• Increased Horse Power & Torque
• Awesome Looks
• Faster Shifts on Automatics
• Improved Mileage
• Reduced Emissions
• Stronger & Faster Starts
• Smoother Idle
• More Responsive Acceleration
• Reduced Audio Noise
• Improved Electrical Accessory Performance (brighter lights, windows/sunroofs operate faster, better radio reception, etc.)

As an additional positive, many of the 04-06 Titan owners experienced some sort of clicking sound with their trucks. Installing our grounding kit on many of the trucks also got rid of that issue…which helps make it a top seller.

ClubTitan.org is a forum made specifically for Nissan Titan owners. Forum communities are in my opinion the single best way to market an aftermarket car product. Offer good service and a great product, and word of mouth spreads quick. We decided to sponsor ClubTitan for at least a month and see how it affects our Titan grounding kit sales. There are about 80,000 Titan’s sold a year, just a decent piece of that pie is great.

Sponsorship was $50 for a month, and you get a few benefits:

• You get a 468×60 banner in rotation throughout the forum
• You get a 150×85 banner on the homepage
• You have the ability to post in the forums as a sponsor, and can promote your products
• We get our own dedicated forum

Here are the banners I made:

We’re currently working with the site owner to set things up so we can have a few different variations of banners, and see what performs the best.

We decided to also use our sponsorship status to kick things off with a group buy discount on the grounding kit. All we required was 25 people to buy a kit, and we’d drop $10 (20%) off the price.

I’ll be posting an update later on and we’ll see how everything performed. We’ll find out if the sponsorship was worth the cost, and get a better idea of how best to utilize forum community marketing.

I removed most of the AdSense ads as well as all Kontera ads for now. I’m going to experiment with AuctionAds, a network that utilizes targeted search terms with auction sites like eBay. I’ve heard about AuctionAds before, but I didn’t really think about it too much until I read more about it at ProBlogger. Mainly reading the comments and seeing how some people have been really successful with it.

From the sounds of it, it works best on very niche sites. Take a mobile phone review site, where a post can be targeted directly to a product. For example if this was a review for the Palm Treo 700WX, I can have an ad that looks like this:

This can be very effective for a site, which generates good revenue. The site would make money from anybody signing up for eBay as well as if anybody buys anything on eBay as a result of clicking on the ad.

I’ll be keyword targeting a few posts that I feel may be a good fit for a higher CTR. This is more of an experiment for now just to see how it does. I will report further as time goes by.

If you use AuctionAds now, let us know how it has worked out for you (feel free to post anonymously).

Traffic

This was the first full month that my blog has been active. Last month I generated over 10,000 pageviews and over 6,000 unique visitors. This month I had 20,000 unique visitors and almost 24,000 pageviews.

The total number is somewhat deceiving though, as you’ll find out later on how much of that traffic was generated from one site.

My new vs. return visitor rate was only 4.8%, but also because I had a huge spike in traffic from one site. Looking at the last 10 days of the month, I was at about 13.8%, which is much better (but not as high as I’d like). This number will continue to be lower than I want due to the fact that I’m just growing my traffic and readers.

Monetization

As I mentioned in last months review, this blog is not meant to subsidize income just yet. In fact, I removed most of the AdSense ads from the page other than one on each page. I did add Kontera in-text links though.

AdSense brought in a whopping $8.12 on 23,000 impressions with just 16 clicks. That gives me a $0.35 eCPM That also means that each click averaged about $0.50, which isn’t too shabby. As traffic starts to grow and I really try and optimize for ads, I hope to see the total number get much larger.

Kontera brought in $3.51 on 19,186 impressions with 57 clicks giving a $0.18 eCPM. I’m told that Kontera gets better over time, and I have seen the eCPMs go up higher towards the end of the month when there are clicks.

Another thing to note for the lower CTR is the fact that the posts that generated the majority of the traffic were picture-based. This means there is not much Kontera advertising going on, and people will be more likely to skip over text links from Google.

RSS Subscribers

Last month I said that I wanted to have 100 RSS subscribers, well I peaked this month at 257 in one day. It was the day after a huge traffic spike though, but I’d say average numbers are now in the 60-70 range, about 10-30 higher than last month. I’m really hoping these numbers continue to grow.

Search Engine Goodness

There was a massive improvement in search engine results this month. I finally have a Google PageRank, it came up as a 3/10…not bad. In March I had 176 unique visitors as a result of search engine traffic. In April this number increased by 260% with 678 unique visitors. Here were the top 10 keywords:

• invest in powercast
• powercast ipo
• powercast invest stock
• powercast invest
• e92 m3
• stumbleupon
• david pitlyuk
• fast times indoor carting
• virginia mansions
• www.nevblog.com

As you can see, my post on Powercast being the next multi-billion dollar idea got a good amount of search engine love….apparently I’m not the only one that thinks it’s a great idea.

Popular Pages/Content

This was the top 10 most popular content on this blog for the month:

1. A Raunchy Dora The Explorer
2. The 45 Best Tech Sector Corporate Web Designs: H-O
3. The 45 Best Technology Sector Corporate Web Designs: A-G
4. David Pitlyuk (Homepage)
5. Hot Import Nights 2007, Washington DC Pictures
6. The Next Multi-BILLION Dollar Idea
7. 2008 BMW M3 (E92) Production Pictures
8. 2008 Infiniti G37 Coupe
9. Who is David Pitlyuk?
10. Dodge Viper Coupe With Matching Helicopter

We’ll find out why #1 was #1, but note that it had over 15,000 unique visitors to that page. From the pages that didn’t get promotion anywhere, the majority of their traffic came from search engines. The ones with bigger search engine traffic was Hot Import nights 2007, 08′ BMW M3, the next multi-billion dollar idea, and 08′ Infiniti G37 coupe. It looks the car posts have brought a good amount of traffic, I just hope some of that is targeted enough to retain those random visitors.

Top Referrals

Here are the top referrals for websites (not search engines) that referred traffic to my blog:

1. CollegeHumor
2. StumbleUpon
3. Smashing Magazine
4. CSS Globe
5. TN Media
6. Digg
7. ActiveTuning
8. TheWolfWeb
9. TotalFark
10. John Chow dot Com

College Humor brought the majority of my traffic this month. When I found a took a picture of a funny Dora The Explorer toy, I made a post and submitted it to a few sites hoping to get it picked up. CollegeHumor was the only one that picked it up, but that ended up generating over 15,000 unique visitors (although not much of it retained I’m sure). StumbleUpon has brought a good amount of traffic to the Dora pages as well as some of web design stuff. From what I see, a lot of the SU visitors have similar interests as Digg visitors (obviously depending on the categories they choose). CSS Globe, TN Media, Digg, and the TheWolfWeb all linked to a post I made. John Chow visitors are still coming from various links that John had posted to my blog.

All said and done, it wasn’t a bad month! I’m having a good time blogging, and I’m meeting a lot of new people. I’m looking forward to seeing this continue to grow, and only time will tell where things lead.