NevBlog

Neville's Digital Surrogate Brain

Archives for 2007

House Update

by

A while back I bought a house, and now it’s almost complete and almost time to start figuring out how to pay for it, what to buy for it etc.

I know pretty much nothing about any of this, so it’ll be a great learning experience.

It’s starting to near completion, and was interesting to watch being built!

Just a plot of land…

Structure in place:

Frame fully up:

Starting to look like a house:

From what I understand I just have to prove to Centex homes that I have about 3 months worth of mortgage payments in the bank and have decent credit, and I can get full approval. Seems almost a little TOO easy for taking a $150,000 loan!

As for the interior and exterior design, I did it all myself….and for that reason, I’m very scared. I’m the LAST person I trust with aesthetic design!

The exterior had to follow an algorithm for the neighborhood, so the house had to be a certain model to properly fit the plot dimensions, and I strictly couldn’t have brick since the neighbors on either side already have it. I also had to stick to a certain range of colors for the exterior.

However I did have full control over the interior design, and therefore the first consultation I had was horrible! The lady started asking me what type/color cabinets I wanted and then showed me samples of them. I completely and utterly had no clue what cabinets in a house look like. She then proceeded to ask me what color/style for all the doors, bathrooms, countertops, faucets, appliances, tiles, carpets and the list goes on. It was a rude awakening to how little I knew about designing a house.

I actually cancelled our first appointment halfway through since I clearly knew nothing about this stuff. I should’ve brought my mom!

So after looking inside other similar houses courtesy of my real estate agent, I finally picked out the interior. I’m anxious to see what it turns out like, and I’m sure I’ll be making many, many trips to Home Depot in the following months!

Now to find two roommates…

[ad#411-lender]

My Experiences With Being On Digg

by

This past weekend NevBlog.com was on the Digg.com homepage. Several of my sites have had pages posted on the Digg homepage before, but this experience was definitely the most interactive!

*Digg.com is a social bookmarking site, and articles on the front page often get server-crushing traffic thrown their way.

My most fun experiences with being on Digg were this past one a few days ago, and the time my businesses HouseOfRave.com was on Digg and I made 320 orders in a day.

I briefly posted on this blog how if you search on Google Images the word “Facebook” my full profile comes up as the #1 result. This is partly a result of me owning FacebookProfile.com (which I just sold) and posting screenshots of Facebook. I also wrote how a Lebanese newspaper used this images in their article.

Well this article on Digg brought in thousands of visitors to that Facebook screenshot which includes my full name, old address and current cell phone number. The first day it was up, NevBlog.com unique visitors went from the 2,000 to 4,000 range to about 25,000 for the day. The next day it dropped to around 9,500 uniques. The third day was nearly normal traffic. However this was a medium sized Digg, reaching a peak of 700-something Diggs.

THE PHONE CALLS:
I generally get about one call per week from people Google Imaging the term Facebook and seeing my profile with all my information, but during my stint on Digg, I got about 50 phone calls from curious Diggers seeing if that number was real, in one day! All sorts of interesting zip codes, international codes and free online calls were placed to see if my phone number was real!

DIGG USERS SURPRISINGLY NICE:
Judging by the type of articles and stupid comments you usually see on Digg, you get the impression most users are bored teenagers (which is probably accurate). But of all the calls I got, for the most part it seems Diggers were more concerned for my privacy which was unexpected. Most of the people that called did so to simply notify me I was on Digg and that my phone number was available online. I would quickly explain the situation and that I knew my phone number was there, thank them and the conversation was over.

However I also got a few prank calls. These are most likely 13 year olds with not much to do. However it sounds like something I would do also, so I can’t complain, I thought the prank calls were rather funny (although sometimes the same people kept calling back which got annoying and lead me to believe these people sadly had NOTHING else to do).

DIGG TRAFFIC:
Usually when a site of mine ranks high on Digg it isn’t much of a problem. My experience with being on the front Digg homepage is this:

1st Day – 50,000 to 70,000 extra unique visits.
2nd Day – 15,000 to 30,000 extra unique visits.
3rd Day – 1,000 extra unique visits.
4th Day – Regular traffic.

Even when I browse through Digg, I generally look at the article, read it, then exit. Most likely I’ll never see that website again. This pretty much holds true to the traffic patterns I’ve experienced.

SERVER LOAD:
Digg generally delivers a server-crushing load of traffic to some sites, which is why many sites go down soon as they get on Digg. I have my own dedicated server, so it generally handles the job, but it DOES go down several times during a large Digg. Especially when the Digg involves a large screenshot image plus many other images. NevBlog is not an efficient website to say the least, so every page load of the site is quite a bandwidth hog.

When FacebookProfile.com was on Digg, it hurt my server more than NevBlog because it’s all database driven. The amount of SQL queries racked up quickly, and would overload the services on my server causing Apache outages. This sucks because I also have about 4 websites on my server that get high traffic and use up a lot of processing time, if some of these are not up, I cannot make money. This is why I specifically wanted to host BodyMonkey.com on a separate service, to hedge my losses if something goes wrong with my server.

BEING ON DIGG MAKE YOU MONEY? IT VARIES:
FacebookProfile.com got a lot of extra hits from Digg several times, but the advertising revenue only went up slightly. Digg users are used to quickly skipping through articles, and generally never click ads. I sure don’t.

But get this…right before Halloween 2006, HouseOfRave.com was on the front page of Digg and I got 320 orders in a 24 hour period from it!! That’s two months worth of orders in ONE DAY!! That’s also thousands of dollars in profit from one big Digg.

The Digg article linked the Glowing Hair Gel product on HouseOfRave, and subsequently tons of blogs started writing about that product also. Now if you Google the term “Glowing Hair Gel” I am firmly planted as the #1 spot. Ha, even if you Google the broad term “Hair Gel” in Google I am still #3!

It was a blessing and curse at the same time to get all these orders, because while I had just made several thousand dollars in profit from that one day, I was still manually processing orders at that time. With the method I was using, it took me two solid days of the most mundane work EVER. Basically copy/pasting information from hundreds of orders…over and over and over till each one was filled.

So it seems you can make loads of cash if a PRODUCT or SERVICE gets exposure on Digg, but pay-per-click doesn’t perform as well (at least in my experience).

I’ve actually never Dugg an article myself to get exposure, it just happens organically. If you try too hard to get on Digg, you most likely won’t.

Well anyways, that’s my experience with being on Digg!

NevBlog Advertising

by

Thanks for your interest in advertising on NevBlog.com.
This blog is about my personal financial journey starting from the age of 22 in November 2004. Since then, this blog has been linked and written about in a variety of blogs, websites and major publications such as:

  • Business Week
  • The Wallstreet Journal
  • Yahoo Finance
  • Vedemosti (The Russian Wallstreet Journal)
  • The Financial Times
  • The New York Times.

The blog is about the financial learnings and happenings in the life of me, Neville Medhora. I graduated from University of Texas and have currently never had a real job thanks to starting several small businesses. Since high school I’ve started online web businesses which have grown to be my full time profession. This website is mainly about personal finances, small business experiments, money and lifestyle improvement.  Take a look around the site and see if your advertisement would benefit from being on NevBlog.com.

NevBlog ranks extremely well across a variety of search engines for a very large number of search terms, and is even currently #1 result in Google for the term Financial Blog. NevBlog gets between 2,000 and 4,000 unique visitors per day, and occasional spikes of traffic from large websites like Digg where traffic can go upwards of 30,000 unique visits in a day, and has hundreds of quality backlinks across many search engines.

TYPES OF ADVERTISING:

125×125 BOXES:

Purpose: Meant for exposure to viewers of this blog.  Great for upcoming programs, CPA offers, credit card offers, courses, industry announcements.
Price: $80/month.
Location: Right-side navigation area, above the fold:

TEXT LINKS:

Purpose: These are for companies wanting additional search engine exposure for certain keywords.  These links are all fully recognizable to search engines on every page of NevBlog which is classified as a financial site.  Great for cash, financial, stock, insurance, loan or mortgage related companies.
Price: $80/month
Location: Bottom-right navigation area, below the fold:


PRICING: $80/month per link or advertising box.

To sign up for a link or 125×125 Box, please signup through this PayPal Recurring Payment link:

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_xclick-subscriptions&business=service%40houseofrave%2ecom&item_name=NevBlog%20Monthly%20Text%20Link&no_shipping=1&no_note=1&currency_code=USD&lc=US&bn=PP%2dSubscriptionsBF&charset=UTF%2d8&a3=80%2e00&p3=1&t3=M&src=1&sra=1

Restrictions: Once again, used good judgement here. I won’t display anything I find offensive or innapropriate for the site. I might also reject an offer if the site is extremely scammy or non-reputable.  I do this to protect other advertisers and myself.


LUMP SUM PAYMENT:
If you want to pay in lump sum, please send PayPal payment to: service (at) houseofrave .com

————————————

GOT OTHER IDEAS?

Think you’ve got a unique way of advertising on NevBlog? Run it past me, I’m always down to hear innovative ways to advertise! Perhaps you want to take up several spots of advertising and link them together to be unique, I can work with you on these ideas. There have been some pretty unique and successful campaigns on NevBlog in the past:

THE PIXEL SALE EXPERIMENT:
Checkout the original post.

This involved putting a small grid on the right-hand navigation where advertisers paid $50 for a tiny little square. This involved no text links and just a miniscule little square, but it surprisingly raised a lot of money in a short period of time for such a new site at the time, and got a lot of attention.

INTEREST.COM ADVERTISING BUYOUT:
Checkout the original post.

Interest.com who is owned by BankRate.com (The large company that does loans for Ditech.com and other big lenders) bought out all the advertising space on NevBlog for a 10 month period. I was also featured in their new “Blogs of Interest” section of their webpage. The deal bought them 4 ads total for all different parts of the site: Header, footer, left navigation and right navigation.

CONTACT:
Email: nevmed (at) gmail .com
Phone: 713.301.1546

Selling FacebookProfile.com

by

In May 2006 I started up FacebookProfile.com and it almost immediately started getting good traffic.

Today the traffic is over 2,800+ unique visits a day. In July the total was 73,735 unique visits.

As I’ve become more involved in other ventures, I decided to not let this site stagnate and sell it while it’s still on an upward traffic trend. I’ve placed it on auction at the SitePoint forums here.

I’ve already been offered over $3,000 by people prior to this sale, so I’ve set my minimum bid to which I can get out of the sale to $3,000. Even from the hour or so ago I’ve posted the ad I’ve got several high bids.

With Facebook Apps out and Facebook users coming on board by the tens of thousands per day, I’m sure someone could really take this site to the next level.

With the amount of traffic and high amount of advertising clicks (even though there are only two ads on the site) the site should fetch my asking price. Hopefully the person who buys it knows how to properly place ads and use different systems other than Google, they could really boost profits right away.

Lebanese Newspaper

by

One day a bunch of people from Lebanon tried adding me as a friend on Facebook. One of them notified me my full Facebook profile was published in a national newspaper over there!

If you go to Google Images and type in “Facebook” I am the first image to come up, so they used that image in the newspaper:

I’ve got no clue what that article says, but it’s pretty funny :-)
It reminds me of the article in the Russian Wallstreet Journal.

In case you’re wondering, since I own FacebookProfile.com (Which I’m currently selling) I published some screenshots of my Facebook, coincidentally they’ve reached the top of Google.

What’s interesting is since I published that fully un-edited screenshot of my profile I get about one phone call per week (usually from some bored teenager) who says, “Ummmmm….do you know your phone number is on Google?”

6th Street Downtown Austin Loft

by

For the past few months I’ve been renting out a room in a house of a friend. It’s in the same neighborhood my house is being built, about 5 miles from Downtown. It’s nice, quiet and I can get a lot of work done.

However nice and quiet no longer helps me get work done. When I was in college and needed to study for calculus, nice and quiet was good. Now I do a lot of creative design work and need loud, interesting and stimulating places to do work.

So for the next month I’m living in a 4,000 sq. ft. loft right on 6th Street, the epicenter of Downtown entertainment in Austin. I wrote about this area earlier. This loft is made for SEVEN people, however it’s only me and one other person living here.

Here is a photo I took directly off the roof of the place of 6th Street:

This loft is extremely spacious (4,000 sq. ft. is HUGE), and it has 20 ft. ceilings, and is located right above some of the busiest bars in Austin.

I’ve been living here for a little while, and while it’s definitely fun, there are some pros/cons:

PROS:

  • I can walk everywhere I need to go, or take my scooter if it’s slightly further.
  • Tons of coffee shops, restaurants, bars and theaters right next door.
  • My gym is 4 blocks down.
  • High ceilings make the already large loft look larger and feel more spacious.
  • Location, location, location.
  • PERFECT for entertaining.
  • Rooftop access which offer awesome panoramic views of Downtown.
  • Puts me in an interesting and Central area, perfect for product photos.

CONS:

  • No free parking for at least 12 square blocks except at night & weekends.
  • Homeless people all around during the daytime.
  • 6th Street isn’t the most attractive thing in the day time, its night time appeal is much larger.

I still have my other rented room, so this is like my ‘2nd home’ for the moment.

Since this is directly in the heart of Downtown, there are all sorts of sights and sounds all the time. I enjoy the noise and commotion that happens outside, so I often keep the doors to the place open. There’s a fire station across the street which creates the full Downtown effect with sirens going by every now and then.

This is definitely a place to throw a party since it’s very big and you can’t beat the location. Checkout some of these panoramic pictures I took on the rooftop. I’ve been wanting to try some panoramic photography so this was a good chance. These images are a compilation of about 13 photos each which I then stitched together using Photoshop.

Here are some inside views of the loft:

Here is a panormaic from inside the loft. This doesn’t properly show the scale of this place:

What the pictures don’t show are all of the rooms (7 total) which are all quite large themselves. The building we’re in takes up more than half a city block, and we take up the entire top floor.

I’ll be taking a lot of BodyMonkey photo shoots in this place, and hopefully the surrounding areas will provide for some interesting photo shoot locations. Speaking of Bodymonkey, I’ve got the logo animated and it will look something like this:

Toronto Trip

by

I’ll be in Toronto from June 28th (Thursday) till July 3rd (Tuesday). If you’re in or around the area, hit me up!

Every time I go to Toronto I have a BLAST, and hopefully this time will be no different.

Here is my schedule:
June 28th – Arrive at 11am, not busy the whole day or night.
June 29th – Busy all day, going out at night.
June 30th – Busy all day, going out at night.
July 1st – Busy all day, going out at night.
July 2nd – Busy all day, going out at night.
July 3rd – Not busy all morning or afternoon, leaving at 3pm.

I’m always happy to meet new people over a quick cup of coffee, or meeting up Downtown for the nightlife. Call me if interested!

I’m staying in the Sheraton Parkway:
600 Highway 7 East (at Highways 404 & 7)
Richmond Hill, Ontario L4B 1B2 Canada

Making More Money Than His Job

by

The Bottled Water Experiment (and part 2) were some very interesting experiments in a micro business, and since then I’ve got tons of feedback about them.

However it’s always cool to see someone else take the idea to the next level. Here’s a guy who saw these water experiment posts and tried it out, and is currently making more money selling water than his job!

Checkout this comment on part 2 of the water experiment:

———————————–
I started my own water business after reading this post. I put a twist on it however as I replaced the stationary location with a backpack lined with a trash bag full of ice and bottles, and parked my car in a stationary location with the ice chest and other water to come back and refill. I am MOBILE! I made the shirt that says “Bottled Water $1” and headed to the river on a very hot day. People could not believe that I was doing this, everyone thought the idea was so awesome, and I couldn’t take credit. But I did sell ALL my water. 200 bottles on the first day.

I did this 5 days in the first week, for 4 hours before my shifts as a manager at chick fil a. I found out that I was making more money from selling bottled water than from my real job. So I posted ads on craigslist, offering to pay college students $10 an hour to do my bidding. I got 14 responses, and hired 5 people. Now I have a guy at the river, one at the biggest local park, two on the college campus of VCU and one in the popular downtown business sector. Each person generates about $100 a day for 4 hours of work at ten dollars an hour. thats 20 hours of labor for me to pay so 200 dollars gone, but 300 dollars are mine, minus my costs of getting water from costco, which costs me roughly $100 dollars each day. and I make $200 a day for myself, and all I have to do is go buy water once a day. Thanks nev!
———————————–

I love how he took the concept, put a small spin on it then scaled it to make $200/day. That’s some serious summertime cash (not to mention good experience)!

Inventory Control Tattoo Experiment

by

When I first started House Of Rave I was in high school and going to college soon. I didn’t have the space to store inventory or the money to buy it.

To solve this I used a drop-shipping business model where I sell stuff, but send the order elsewhere to be fulfilled. This worked very well because I could concentrate on the marketing aspects and not worry about inventory.

Managing inventory is very difficult and generally incurs lots of over head costs. I’d rather leave this to the pro’s and focus on what I’m good at. However since I’ve never kept inventory myself, I decided I wanted to give it a try. So I decided to perform an inventory experiment with a cheap, small and convenient product.

Temporary Tattoos.

If you go to Google and search ‘Barbed Wire Tattoo’, HouseOfRave comes up on the first two image results:

The images take you to the barbed wire tattoo page.
Those pictures were taken by me about two years ago when I was doing some product photos. I put a temporary tattoo on my roommates arm and took these photos to show what the product would look like when used. Since then they’ve jumped to the top of the image results for people typing in ‘Barbed Wire Tattoo’ and ‘Barbed Wire Armband’ and other various searches.

The search results vary from time to time, but I get a lot of searches for those keywords coming to HoR. However since I’ve switched suppliers, the new supplier doesn’t carry temporary tattoos, so I was forced to pull those items. However I still wanted to capitalize on the traffic the tattoo pages and images were pulling in. My new supplier offered to carry the product, but this was an optimal product to try something with.

So the Tattoo Inventory Experiment was born. I basically bought a bunch of temporary tattoos from the manufacturer of them and send them out from my house.
Since the tattoos are extremely light and thin, I can keep tons of them without a lot of space. They also sell for over a dollar a piece plus shipping, but cost me only a few cents each.

My ‘warehouse’ is an old shoe box, my ‘storage racks’ are just labeled envelopes, and my ‘shipping department’ is a box of envelopes and some stamps. Basically a mini-business in a box!

So when I get an order which includes a temporary tattoo, I simply write out the customers address on the envelope, insert the tattoo, slap on a stamp and send it from the mailbox at my house.

Getting into the real nitty-gritty numbers of the order costs:

–Cost per tattoo: $0.20
–Cost per envelope: $0.02
–Cost per Stamp: $0.39
–Total Cost for One Tattoo Shipped: $0.61

HoR automatically adds a standard shipping fee to the price of the tattoo, so usually people order other items plus a tattoo. Perhaps I should make it really cheap if someone orders only the tattoos. This way I can entice more buyers who simply want the tattoo and nothing else from the site.

——————–

The next step was uploading all the new tattoos to House Of Rave and create product photos. This went relatively quickly since it’s all the same type of product. Photoshop editing took the longest.

All the final tattoo images can be seen on the temporary tattoo page.

Setting up this whole thing took me about one day. The total cost for everything was $60. So far I’ve already sent out a few tattoos via this method. It’s not the most professional way of sending a product (the tattoos arrive to the customer in a hand-written envelope with no packing slip) but it’s just a small experiment. Of the 200+ tattoos I have in ‘the warehouse’ I only need to sell about 30 or 50 of them to break even.

Managing my ‘warehouse’ in a shoebox is easy, but if I had larger products and THOUSANDS of them, it would be a nightmare!

BodyMonkey Work Schedule

by

So BodyMonkey.com was officially launched on 4-20-2007, and two days later I got my first order. Since then it’s got 3 orders through the web and 2 orders through the phone thanks to the Yahoo Shopping Network.

If you visit the website and click through the sections, it’s easy to tell the site is not “there” yet as you can tell from the lack of images on the products. The products are also not properly SEO’d (Search Engine Optimized) which is a large concern for an online business of this type.

So in an effort to properly restructure the site the first time around, I have to do everything over again. It’s relatively simple work, but VERY time consuming and monotonous.

For each product I must:

  1. Delete the old product entry.
  2. Create a new product ID.
  3. Re-enter the price, description, additional options, images, sub-images and SKU.
  4. Re-index the product in the proper section.

This sounds pretty simple, but there’s always steps along the way that take up more time. Usually I will change the product description on the spot or add images I took with my own camera which usually involves some sort of photo editing and size cropping. I also re-name the products with SEO friendly words.

I want to just work on this all day, but I also do other stuff, so I must dedicate at least an hour or two per day to get this done in reasonable time. There are ways to streamline this process but it still involves lots of very boring work, and there’s no way around that!

To keep myself accountable for the work I must do in the next few months, I created a schedule for this month’s work:

I’ve also placed this schedule in the top-right calendar section of NevBlog so I am constantly reminded of it. Well, cheers to hours of boring work!