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.

Online Bookstore Growing

A few months ago my wife and I began an online bookstore.


We survived our first Christmas season very well, and more importantly survived a disasterous November which saw our sales fall dramatically for the period of the government shutdown.


Now we are up to over 400 books in our online store, most of the time. We are constantly sourcing new books from places such as library sales and thrift stores.


At present we can sell just about every book we send in within three months.


So far we have sold hundreds of books and are happy with the results of our new hobby/business.


For latest additions see our Secondhand Bookstore Tab link above.

A Used Bookstore

One of the good things about opening a used bookstore with amazon.com is that you also get a storefront in the amazon marketplace.

We recently opened our used bookstore with amazon and use the fulfillment by amazon service.

This means that most of the books shown in our marketplace store are ready and waiting to be shipped directly from an amazon.com fulfillment center.

We also choose to ship some lower value items directly from our stock.

We have a policy of shipping new items to amazon.com for fulfillment several times per month and so stock at our fulfillment center is constantly varying as new stock arrives and older stock is sold.

At present we stock a range of fiction, some children's titles and also a range of non fiction and college level textbooks. For our latest selection see our storefront.

If you are a member of Amazon Prime, your books can be shipped from the fulfillment center using Free two day shipping.

If you are not a member of Amazon Prime, you can use the Amazon Supersaver shipping  service any item shipped from amazon from our store counts towards the $25 purchase level . You do not have to spend all $25 in our marketplace store, you may buy from anywhere on the amazon.com website and your purchase from us will be considered part of the eligible total.

From mid September 2013 books ordered through our amazon.com marketplace storefront will be available for shipping Internationally.

Take a look at our storefront.

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.

Long Term Effect of the Loss of HubPages RSS Capsules.At the end of 2012 HubPages announced the removal of the RSS capsules from all of its writers pages.

At the time I was a little concerned that such a ove would see a decline in my blog traffic. At that time most of my blog traffic was coming from HubPages and amounted to several hundred views per month over the three blogs that I fed to my HubPages posts.

Now we are about six months after the removal of the RSS feeds and a clear conclusion can be made.

TRAFFIC HAS IMPROVED TO ALL OF MY BLOGS.

Traffic began to rise for my blogs within a few weeks of the end of the RSS capsules. June then saw a quite steep decline in views across the board but in these last few days views are rising rapidly rising again. Views across the three major blogs are now running at two thousand per month and rising.

Whereas previously most of my views came from HubPages, today I can find only one or two views from that source per month, analytics show that most views are organic search  views coming from Google and Yahoo! 90% Google, My Life with Blindness blog has in some instances, depending on keyword search actually made it to number one spot on Google's search page. A fact that I am very proud of.

Such placement was never heard of for me before the end of the RSS feed capsules.

So what seemed to be a terrible disaster at first conception has, for me meant a great improvement in my blog readership.

Freelance Writer Coffee Mug by vallain
Shop for Two image Mugs online at Zazzle.com

The Summer Quiet

Summer is a difficult time for online writers.

Not only do we suffer a seasonal bout of writer's block. It is also nice to get outside for a while and visit new and exciting places.

It is also the same with our readers. They are away from school or the office. Vacationing happily oblivious to our writings for two or three months of the year.

Having written for several years online I have seen this dip every summer. From the second week in May until the first week in September. It is a real phenomenon. Graph your recorded views for three or four years, more if you can and you will see it.

Humans can be very predictable in some things and the summer vacation from viewing our work online is one of those things that just happens.

But what about tablets and mobile views, you are probably asking. Yes you will still get those. But they too get set aside for a time. I don't know anyone who spends too much time surfing the internet on a tablet. Most of my friends just use a tablet or cell phone to get tips on places to eat when out and about. How do you and your friends use your tablets and cell phones?

All in all there are seasonal dips and this summer trough is as long as any.

The readers will come back though as sure as the swallow in the Spring.

eBay Sale

I have a beautiful deep pink baby dress manufactured for the Osh Kosh Begosh label for sale on eBay.

The dress will fit a baby girl up to six months old.

The dress is made of a mixed cotton velour material. Embroidered with a heart and looping line.

Osh Kosh Begosh
Baby Dress

The bidding is at $2.45 a bargain as this dress retails above $15 normally.

The auction for this Osh Kosh Begosh Dress  

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.