Making $5,000 in 30 days online, the real life experiment. Day 5.

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photo by: reinbarb

OK, I admit it, I didn’t have time to post day 4.  That’s alright. Nothing too exciting happened on day 4 except some additional research and the beginning of product development. Day 4 earnings still at $0, but we are getting close!

So between yesterday and this morning I have been working on an educational product to sell online. It is a combination of some material I wrote about a year ago, coupled with a spreadsheet to be used with the course, and some instructional videos. The site also has a sign up form where people that visit the site can opt-in for a newsletter and get one of the training videos for free. The product is specifically for real estate agents, since that is the market I know. I chose to create a product that teaches people how to duplicate the success I had in selling multiple homes to investors. I am setting the price at $99, which is far less than many of the courses out there that cover similar subjects. I hope I am not under pricing it, but I want to offer a lot of value for the money. The entire course is available for download, so the cost for me is just time, and use of my knowledge, but no money.

I am in the process of building the sales page for the product. Here is how I am getting it done for free:

I downloaded Kompozer, a free website building program. I then downloaded a free, very professional looking template from templateworld.com.  I don’t get paid to promote them, but check this site out. After trying about 15 sites that claim to have free templates, but then only have templates for a fee, it was nice to find template world. And the designs are actually some of the best I have seen. So I downloaded a template, opened it with Kompozer, and changed the text for my needs. I already have free access to a server, so I will upload the site, and just add a sub-directory to one of my existing domains so I do not spend any money on that. For the checkout, I am debating between using paypal checkout, or setting up an account on Lulu.com. Paypal will charge me less per sale, but Lulu (which charges a 20% commission) will host the product, and handle the whole purchase process. I’ll probably stick with payal, it seems pretty steep to pay a $20 commission for every product I sell.

The website will be live sometime tonight, at which point I will start marketing it. PPC campaigns would be ideal, but again following the rules will mean I have to get a sale first, then I can reinvest that in PPC campaigns. Be sure to check back.

On a different note, I also signed up for an ad network called revtwt.com. Basically you use their service to spam Twitter with ads, and get paid when people click on them. The concept is interesting, but I am worried that my followers will not be tolerant of the ads, and quit following me. I made about $0.28 in a day with it. Probably not worth it. I could see where someone may spam the ads on secondary accounts, but that is not the direction I want to go.

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