sv Bella Rose

Yahoo! Making Money, Having Fun

Cheri, Jonathan, and I moved aboard full time in August of 2005 with visions of leaving the real world in our wake. The real world thought otherwise. We were still unpacking at our New Orleans marina when Hurricane Katrina hit. With the repairs and improvements to Bella Rose, the transition from land to water, and settling into the liveaboard lifestyle while cruising along the Gulf Coast our cruising kitty shrank faster than we anticipated. In order to continue living this wonderful lifestyle we had to figure out a way to increase the cruising kitty or at a minimum slow the outflow as much as possible.

I grew up in a small family business and started several small businesses of my own, so it made sense for me to start my own business again. I have been involved with computers since the 1970s, and my first computer was a 29-pound portable Kaypro IV purchased before they were released to the market in 1983. Around 1988 I joined CompuServe and got my first taste of the Internet. I was instantly hooked. Reflecting on my skills, knowledge, and the limits of working on a boat, an Internet-based business seemed the best option. It’s a natural choice for liveaboards. After all, we have already escaped from the commonsense rules of the rat race (or “normal”) world. And I’d be doing something I enjoy. My goal is to have fun and make money at the same time.

Ways to Make Money

All methods of making money on the Internet are versions of three basic systems: selling your own product or service, selling other’s products and/or services (drop shipping), and affiliate (advertising) programs. This is not a get-rich-quick scheme. You will have to work hard, but making $1,000 or so a month is very doable. You don’t have to be a web site designer. You don’t have to understand HTML or other computer languages. You don’t have to spend much money to start or bug your friends to buy stuff. Anybody can do it. You can be smart or not so smart, educated or not so educated, young or not so young - whoever you might be, you can do this.

Let’s discuss the three ways of making money in a bit of detail and how we generate income.

First, let’s look at affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is where you list or link to other company’s goods or services on your site. Depending on the company, you receive money when people either “click on” or purchase items. Two examples are Amazon and Google AdSense. Many large companies have affiliate programs. Without question, this is the easiest way to get started making money. You can be up and running in minutes. No kidding.

Also, after the system is set up, this is completely passive on your end. People visit your site, click on links you provide to merchants, and the merchants deposit money into your bank account. We all are familiar with the Google ads on the right side of pages we visit. We do not do not use Google AdSense on our sites, but many people generate an income this way. Look at our page at www.svbellarose.com/recommendedreading.htm. This is our Amazon affiliate page. We recommend books we have read. If our visitors click on the links and purchase a book, we receive a small commission. We’re not getting rich with this program, but it does generate income, and it helps our members.

Next, let’s discuss selling your own products and/or services. This concept should be familiar to everyone. It is not unlike any hobby-turned-home business. You create a product and sell it. For example, check out our loose tea web site at www.teasemeteas.com. Here we sell our own label loose teas. We focus on just a few products. We both enjoy drinking tea. Tea has been a part of my life as long as I can remember.

Don’t try to carry thousands of items. Make sure that, if you decide to sell a product, you choose something you enjoy and understand. Selling merchandise might be difficult for someone cruising, but if you are in a marina or move occasionally it might be a good option.

The other half of this method is selling a service or a digital information product. This is arguably the most likely way to make significant money on the internet. Why? You create an information product at little to no cost. You can then sell this service/product over and over. Look at http://www.svbellarose.com/7secretstomovingaboard.htm on our site, where we sell an information product that helps people make the move to living aboard. By sharing what we discovered while making the move aboard, we are motivating and helping others make the move to this wonderful liveaboard lifestyle. Advantages are no employees, low costs, no location requirements, and you get paid over and over.

Last on the list is the drop ship method. At this time we do not drop ship, so I cannot offer first hand knowledge on this method. It is a popular system, however, and appears to be fairly easy to get started in, very similar to the affiliate program we discussed earlier. You set up an e-store/website and sell physical products. Pick anything you might be interested in. Your e-store is open 24 hours a day and seven days a week. When someone purchases a product from your site you collect the money (full retail), then the drop shipper ships the item to the customer, and you pay the vendor the wholesale price. Recently we purchased a new CD/DVD for our laptop computer on eBay. The seller is a drop shipper selling thousands of items each month. The challenges I see with drop shipping lie in finding a reputable company, finding quality products, and dealing with high overhead. If the opportunity presents itself I would consider doing this.

How We Got Started

First, to get our feet wet, Cheri and I started a Yahoo! Group called “Sailing Kids.” This is a site where people can discuss home schooling issues while living on a boat. Then we started a second Yahoo! Group, “Captains and Admirals Cafe.” This is a group for couples and families who are living the dream or at the dreaming and planning stage of becoming liveaboard cruisers. Anyone can start a Yahoo! Group, and they are completely free. You can not pursue any commercial activities there, but it is a fun way to get started.

Next, we started our own free website. Once we had the site up and running and felt comfortable with the service, we upgraded to a premium (pay) site. This allowed us to purchase our own domain name: www.svbellarose.com. Registering a domain name, getting a web hosting account, and pointing your domain to your web hosting account used to be a challenging task. Heck, just saying that sentence is a challenge! Today it is a relatively simple and painless process. There are many companies out there that handle everything for you. When picking your domain name, I strongly suggest you choose the dot-com extension. Try to pick a domain name that means something. Also, try to avoid names that might be misspelled, such as www.eyeloveewe.com. Most people would spell it www.Iloveyou.com. Now all you have to do is create content and upload it to your site. Many web hosting companies have built-in editors. The other option is to purchase a web design application to run on your computer.

Our site www.svbellarose.com is hosted by one of the companies with an editor and many site stats that make it easy to build and monitor. Our website is where we share our stories, our photos and videos, discuss issues, and generate income 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The next step in our plan was to start another premium site where we sell our own loose leaf teas, www.teasemeteas.com. This site is hosted by the same company as www.svbellarose.com.

Getting Paid

You may be wondering how we collect money. In the old days taking payments was a daunting task. Today it is very easy. There are two methods of collecting payments: merchant accounts and third party accounts. I should also mention checks and money orders, but most sellers and buyers today don’t prefer this method because it is too time consuming. We have a PayPal Premier account and use PayPal for all our transactions. It is a safe and secure way to accept payments for goods and services. With a PayPal account you can accept PayPal payments and credit card payments, so it is the best of both worlds. People shopping on the internet are comfortable with PayPal. You build your “shopping cart” buttons on their site and paste the HTML code into your site. It is very easy to do.

Driving Traffic to Your Site

One of the key issues is driving traffic to your site. Now your site is up and running, how do you get people to visit? An easy method is to be active on blogs and forums, such as the living aboard forum at http://www.livingaboard.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi. Include your site in your signature, then every time you send an email or post to a blog or forum, your site gets visibility. You can advertise your site with Google AdWords. You can set up an AdWord account and be up and running in less than an hour. I just looked at our AdWords account. In the month of February we had 318,832 impressions (times ads displayed) at a cost of $8.78. Why? You only pay when someone clicks on your ad.

Future Plans

We plan to expand and add products and services to our sites. As we add products we will continually update and make them better. If something isn’t working well, we will move on to something else. I plan to expand into e-books and e-zines. As our sites grow I plan to automate as much as I can, as cruisers we need our sites to run themselves as much as is possible.

With over 100 million members worldwide, eBay is a great place to sell your products. I have been a member since 1999. Many people get their start on eBay. Most sellers typically start by selling items sitting around the house. This is a great way to learn about selling over the Internet without any real risk. By the time you read this, we will be selling our products, real and digital, on eBay.

So that’s how we keep the cruising kitty building. By incorporating living our life into our working life, we need not defer life until after retiring. So get started – do it today!

And remember to keep it fun!

Rob