Preparing for Tax Season

Over the past few weeks I have been preparing my accounts for tax season.


Having several sources of income ranging from a part-time job to blog income my taxes can become a little complicated.


It did not come as much of a surprise to find my part-time job is becoming less important to my finances.


The last year has seen much of my blog income level out. But a major part of my income has now become my online bookstore on amazon.com.


Blogiing is my least important income. It brings in enough to cover minor bills and pay for small luxury items, here I include things like a coffee at Starbucks.


Next come product designs in my zazzle store. Last year saw lots of orders for items such as greetings cards and T-shirts. Several of those order from Europe.


Overall though the sale of second-hand books has eclipsed all the other forms of income. Income from Bretsuki's Books, my online bookstore at amazon has been recycled to increase my stock. I began with just 17 books and now have approaching 500 books. All income from sales has been used to cover ongoing costs and not taken out to pay a wage but I can now see a time in the not too far future when I will not need to reinvest my ongoing income and be able to take a wage from that business.

The moral of the tale is therefore, if you are looking for real income from the web, look to producing real goods or at least look towards marketplaces such as amazon or ebay where you can sell real goods. That is where there is real cash generation potential.

Fulfilmment by Amazon As a Cash Stream

At the beginning of 2013 I signed with Amazon.com as a seller and opted to go with the Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA) option.

What is FBA? Basically FBA allows you to send a shipment of stock to an Amazon storage facility where it is held for sale along with other products sold by Amazon.

The easiest items to begin selling are books and DVD's. You can start clearing your book shelves and maybe sell books from thrift stores or library book sales. When buying in books look for books in the best possible condition, marks, highlighting and tears mar the condition and hence the price of the book.

Popular novels are also of low value to you, customers can get those for little more than you may pay and with some of the costs you may only make a dollar or two on them.

There are some costs to set up the account, you may choose to sell less than 40 items per month where Amazon.com charge you a 99 cent fee on top of charges which you must take into account in pricing, this along with 15% selling fee upon the sale and a small storage charge which adds up to pennies per month.

The second service, a professional service gives you more options but costs you just under $40.00 per month, plus some other selling fees at a lower rate than with the individual seller plan above.

You send your stock to an Amazon.com fulfillment center in boxes. I opt to use the UPS shipment service provided by Amazon. Recently a box weighing thirty pounds was shipped across country for just $14. I just passed it on to a UPS collection center in town and the package was delivered in six days.

Once the parcel is received by Amazon, it takes between twenty-four and forty-eight hours for the items to list on the Amazon.com website.

Within minutes of an item appearing it can be sold and being prepared for shipment to the Amazon customer.

I sell several items per week, at the moment my best sellers have been college textbooks. Some purchased for as little as $1.00 have sold for over $30.00. Bear in mind Amazon charges take about $7.00 on average for those high seling price items. You can see a good profit.

Payment is passed to your bank account about fourteen days after the sale is complete for individual sellers and ten days for professional sellers accounts.

Why use FBA? I had some books offered as sale by merchant for several months on the Amazon.com website, they did not sell so as I knew I would be away from home for several weeks I moved them to an FBA shipment. I sold several of the very same books within one week by allowing Amazon to ship them.

FBA products are eligible for Amazon prime and supersaver shipping, this means that customers have less concern about when they will receive their items and are more willing to buy from an FBA seller than a fulfilled by merchant seller.

How do you compete with the 1 cent book seller? You don't  the book I sold for over $30, mentioned earlier was a prime example there were several copies of the very same book for sale at 1 cent. The customer still paid the money to me because all the 1 cent sellers were fulfilled by merchant and mine was the only copy available with free two day shipping and even eligible for supersaver shipping if the customer was not an Amazon Prime member.

So maybe this program is  worth considering if you are looking to cash in a side income or paying hobby.

Making Money Online

Making money online is quite easy really. You can post articles on HubPages, Squidoo or your blog and generate advertising revenue. You can become an affiliate marketer  for companies like Amazon, Go Daddy, Host Gator or Zazzle.com. You can design products and sell them to customers through zazzle.com and Cafepress. Or you can sell your items through Amazon , eBay and Bonanza or Etsy.

All these places allow you to sell words or goods. Making money online is pretty easy if you can turn a few ideas into cash. Sell old unwanted clothes and write a line or two of good coherent text. Money will come wandering to your door.

Wandering to your door? Well yes for a while cash does just seem to wander to your door. It comes a penny or a dollar at a time. For weeks, for months and often for years.

I have been online now for several years. I began on mailing lists back in the late 1990's. I began to create work as a hobby. This continued for several years, I only began to make real efforts in 2009 to make any real money. It wasn't until late in 2012 that my income at least matched that of my day job.

That online income has been up and down this year. The early months were tough. My online income fell drastically, the pennies wandered up to my door but the dollars walked right on by. As Zazzle income fell, Amazon and Yahoo! voices stepped up. Now Zazzle income is rising again and it looks like June 2013 could see online income could come to levels to match my day job income again.

Online income at this stage is far too fragile to risk giving up a day job, but so I double my monthly income some months. That;s a nice bonus.

Making some money online is so easy. I'd defy you not to be able to begin generating cash today if you use the right services. Generating consistant cash income is the hard part. I have not quite mastered that just yet. But I will. I will and I will share my findings with you.

California State and Cities Mug by Bretsuki
Create a unique personalize coffee mug from zazzle.com.

Best Income Sites.

I have fingers in many pies. I write several blogs, have some online stores at places like Amazon, Zazzle, eBay and Etsy. I am even looking at another online store site Bonanza. Then my online writing sites come into play. Yahoo! Voices, HubPages, Squidoo and List My 5.

The top earners of all my sites are the online stores.

eBay is at the top, Zazzle.com Cafepress.com then Amazon and Etsy. Bear in mind I have had an Etsy store for only two weeks, so its a baby yet.

eBay of course is not really a residual income source as along with Etsy I have to find or make goods to sell and actively ship them.

Among writing sites my ranking is:

Yahoo! Voices is a far away leader its CPM model and purchase of my articles produces more cash than any other.  Follow this with List My 5, it has a CPC model but pays quite well there were only two months last year (2012)  April and July that I earned no money from my short lists. HubPages is a pretty poor third and Squidoo I have given up on that for any income.

Cash from blogs?

No I mainly use my blogs to direct people to my cash paying sites and don't use AdSense on my blogs at all.

Making Money with amazon.com Affiliate Program

The amazon.com capsules with HubPages are pretty poor sources of income. They do provide some clicks but not many and very few sales.

You can use the HubPages Capsules to show your readers what is available to them on amazon.com but I would not claim to make a great deal of money from the links that the capsules provide.

To take advantage of amazon.com's amazing sales power one needs to have a website or blog(s).

It is on your website or blog where you can, to use a motoring metaphor, open up the throttle and power on down the road.

Amazon has a good affilliate program. It is free to join and easy to maintain.  You receive a commission on any sales your advertisements provide customers for. 

Customers come to your site or blog, read your article and maybe click on an advertisement which takes them to an item on amazon.com. If they buy and the sale completes, the item is not cancelled before it ships you receive a commission.

Commission rates vary on types of sale, your commission level at the time (levels increase as you sell more beginning at about 0.4% ($4 per $100 of sales) Commission rates rise rapidly though.

Commission can be received in a check (minimum of $100, but has a check writing fee to be paid), you can also have a payment made by direct deposit to your bank account or deposit made to your amazon.com account as credit for purchases, these have a payout level of just $10 and no fees are attached.

When you register with amazon.com affilliates program you receive an account and you can add several sub accounts to this in order to maintain an idea which of your sub accounts is doing best I would suggest you create sub-accounts with names that tell you what they represent.

Amazon's method is to just add a series of numbers to your original account which soon becomes confusing when you want to know which account is producing revenue.

You can open up to 100 sub accounts uin the form of aStores on one main amazon.com account.

Amazon give you lots of bells and whistles when it comes to links, from stand alone individual item advertisements to complex omakase ads. Omakase ads take information from a customers computer cookies and amazon.com account to put individualized ads, aimed directly at them so you benefit greatly from this individual approach to advertising.

Making ads is easy. Amazon produce the ad to your desired product and specifications, you click to highlight the HTML already created with your link code and account details. You then click and paste this into an HTML gadget in Blogger or add the HTML Code to your post and you are ready for a customer to click through.

You can then use resources on your amazon affilliate account to see what ads are working best for you. You can track a particular sub-account, daily, weekly, monthly or by quarter year. You can also see how all your sub-accounts are doing with a full main account analysis. These allow you to see what type of ad is working best on your site or blog so you have optimal control at all times.

Amazon Affilliate?

It has been about four months now since Amazon returned to California.

I am now pleased to report my first sale since I re-opened my account. Yes one sale in four months.

Why just one?

Well I did place some Amazon ads on my HubPages hubs again, and I have just begun adding them to my blogs. It was actually a blog Amazon ad which gained the sale.

At just 40  cents it is a start. I won't sneer at it. Sadly I cannot frame those exact four dimes, or a quarter, dime and nickel. But I wish that I could. Like the businessmen of old who kept their first dollar just to remind them where they started.

So my first tip to success with Amazon is have patience.

Again patience is the key with all things online. A year ago I was selling several items a day on Amazon, it was almost steady income, until the day the account was closed in retaliation at California law.  When the law went away Amazon came back but the customers didn't. Now Maybe :) Just maybe :)

Another tip when applying Amazon affiliate adverttising to your hubs or blogs is to try something out. Don't let your page become set in stone. If an ad doesn't work after a few months change the style, Amazon have lots of links and widgets available, learn to use as many as you can. See what they do. Some of the cloud ones do slow down load times quite a bit so beware if your analysis program tells you a lot of your readers are using old operating systems or are in low bandwidth regions. They may click away before your page loads on their screen.

Another famous tip is to use the area at the top right below your header to place your main ad. This is an old idea and has been around since the first banner ads, and D'ya know what? It has been around for that long because it works.  Bear that in mind next time your eyes wander over a webpage.