Recently I ran into an opportunity by accedent when I was looking for a inexpensive electronic device.  This opportunity will allow me to triple my investment per sale plus save my clients money.  Also there are 2 related affiliate prograns that complement the items which will allow me to earn $16 more for them just to take the free trials.  The only problem is that I need a little less than $3000 to get started since you have to buy 200 at a time.  As I learn more and see if this is a possible idea I will let you know more.

So for now my goal is to bring in $3000 ASAP so that I can get started with this.  This will most likely not be my main business but will be a good way to meet my ultimate goal.

Every now and then we all just need to sit down and relax and enjoy playing a simple game or two.  Well there is now a company that pays you to play their games.  Actually they give you 1 cent and you can compete against others to grow it into more.  It is fun simple and free and the best part is you can cash out when ever.  Plus they have Bonus Boosters were you can spin the wheel each day and get more Moola to play with so if you lose your penny today tomorrow you can start out with up to a 100 more!  Moola.com is a really neat site with a lot of cool games to enjoy.

When I need a break from life, I just enjoy a few quick games,  I have not cashed out or anything but have enjoyed it and have the potential to earn money too.

My favorate to play is rock siccor paper.  If you would like to join Moola or take a closer look you can join here.

Here is what their website has to say about itself:

Welcome to the world’s first Massively Multiplayer Rewards Game (MMRG), an ambitious entertainment project which took more than five years to develop and launch for the world to enjoy. Loosely described, Moola is something like a free super-jackpot game show, which allows anyone to become a millionaire on the internet, rather than watching others do so on TV. Similar to a TV game show, Moola is free and relies on sponsors to enable millions of people to vie for serious amounts of cash and prizes. The method used to facilitate competition is simple yet powerful: Sponsors give small amounts of money to millions of people, and then Moola allows those people to compete against one another so that individuals may win more or less, depending on how well they compete.

After looking at everything I have done, I thought I would lay it all out for comparison and to see how it will benefit my ultimate goal which I will talk about below.

1. Direct Selling - This is going well but requires a lot of time which lately I have not been able to give.  But the majority of my spendable profits have come from this and is instant.  I hand out catalogs to people in parks, etc…  Recently I signed up for the website since it is free if I get 1 customer a campaign to use it to help expand my customer base to friends and family who live away from me.  I have built a customer base who will continue to purchase from me so this will stay.

2. Travel Agent - This is going good and has cost me nothing to get started. It can be an easy way to bring in an extra $200 to $400 a month with little effort.  The main source of my clients are friends and family and referrals from them.  The disadvantage is I know have to wait for the commission to come in after they take their trip.

3. Recycle Crayon Idea - Now this is a fun little idea I get to do and asked a restaurant if they would like to recycle their crayons and they said sure so  now I have a supply of material but now just need to market them.  This is a good start at getting a basic business set up and a good and easy learning experience.

4. Blogging with Ads - I added Ads to my family blog and over the 2 months I have made a little over $10 from it.  Not a big income but still a little extra.  Most likely will keep the ads up since had no complaints but will not rely on it for anything.

5. Affiliate Marketing - I make a few dollars promoting some affiliate programs like Vista Print, Buy.com and Amazon.  This goes back to the blogging you gotta find a niche area and focus on it.  Many times it will not be all that fun and is hard to get readers or visitors, but it just takes some time.  If I can find a nice market I may continue to use this for a side income.

6. Selling on Amazon - Well I have sold everything I have put up there (one item) and it was pretty fast.  The problem is letting go of some books to pop up there.  But this could really turn into something if you know someone with a lot of books they are trying to get rid of or you go to garage sells and buy them for 50 cents to sell online for $5.  Was doing this just for some extra money nothing else.

7. Spa Idea - This idea was to help me gain direct selling clients, I got the product and a basic model for it but never got it off the ground due to being gone every other week.  Hopefully I will get back around to it.

So far the direct selling has brought in the most but has taken the most effort and personal contact (which many do not like to have).  The Travel Agent has brought in a lot more but I do not get it until they take their trips.

Potential new activities: Sell Protection Plans that cover, computer support, id theft, credit repair, law services, and a few more.  There is a company out there that pays about 33% commission on the monthly fee and some overrides if you refer other to their no cost affiliate program.

My ultimate goal is to find some type of service that I can sell (at no cost or very little which can be covered from the efforts above) that has a monthly fee were I can earn a residual income.  For example: web hosting, rentals of some sort, protection plans :o).  With this I can eventually slow my working down and enjoy my past labor.

So I just made a few basic webpages, one with a few Buy.com products on it and one with a Business Card Design and put the links on repeated sites/forums and in this month I made $5.47, $4.72 from a Vista Print purchase of free business cards plus a few upgrades and $0.75 with a product sell on Buy.com.  So Affiliate programs do work :o), it just takes a little bit of time to set up but now I have a permanent link to these 2 pages for future customers, Search Engines to find, and Page rank.  I will not include this commission in the total until I am able to cash out and receive a check.

The affiliate programs I signed up for are Commission Junction and Commission River.  Commission River has some products that will pay out a residual check like for cell phone plans people sign up for as well as a bounty for finding the new client.  Include this with eBay and Amazon and I could create a fully functional affiliate store.  :o)  But that is not the direction I really want to go.  I am just doing these for some extra spending cash to achieve my ultimate goal.

I just thought I would mention that this income stream is bringing in a little.

Today, Fathers Day, we went out to eat at Cracker Barrel where they give the kids crayons all the time and they just end up throwing them away.  So I talked to the manager and she had no problem with me bringing a box for them to put their old crayons (which by the way typically have only been used for about 2 minutes) in a box to recycle them.

Now I got a good supplier of a basic 4 color selection.  With this I can start making some designs and sell them on the street per say.

Also I did some searching and learned a little bit more about how to go about making cool crayons and even made a star.  The problem I ran into is that crayon once it dries is hard to get off of the pan so I think I will need to use either an old pan or see if spraying some “Pam” down will help with that or just mess things up.

One thing I love to do is find great deals online.  Well I had this great idea and am going to give it a shot.  Typically if I find a good deal I email it to all my friends and at least one typically buys the item, in fact a few months ago my sister bought 2 of the items mentioned.

I have signed up for a few affiliate programs like Commission Junction and have applied for a few of my favorite stores like Buy.com.  know when I find a good deal I will add the link to my family blog, or send out an email to my group sharing this amazing deal.  The link in my email will go to a webpage I have created that will have the add on it and they can click on it to go to Buy.com.  It is only 3% to 8% commission but every penny adds up especially if I already do this.  :o)

With that said I just bought an iPod for $25 for my wife and used my own affiliate link so I will be making 75 cents on it.  I will not be counting these commissions in the total until I get an actual check in the mail from it.

This is just like the Amazon associate program.

On a side note a friend called looking for a hotel room.  I will be making an extra $15 or so from this when they get back to me from the 10 minutes of work I did.

I have looked at many different things to do with these old crayons as well as many different ways to obtain them.  I was at a restaurant the other day and the lady told me to take the crayons because they will just throw them away and I almost replied, so will we, and that is when I came up with the idea.

With the direct selling business I am doing I am collecting a lot of decent sized boxes that the product is shipped in.  I will be reusing these boxes for the idea.  I will be going around to restaurants that give crayons to kids and ask if they would be interested in getting involved in a crayon recycling program since they throw so many away a day.  If they say sure I will give them a box with my contact info, when it is close to full I will come and trade out boxes or come once a week and trade out boxes, either way it will be hardly any work on their behalf, all they will need to do is drop the crayons in the box instead of the trash.

Though I live in a small town I think there are enough of these restaurants to provide a decent supply of crayons to be able to make a small profit.  I have been looking around and think I will use some of my children’s play-doe molds to make a few cool shaped coloring tools of one color and a few swirled ones too.  My goal is to resell those and get enough money to start making my own molds.  I guess it is kind of like making candles.  :o)  Who know maybe I will make crayon candles tool  :o)

I almost forgot to mention that I learned a little about how crayons are made and what the non-toxic means.  Here is jsut a little bit of info I found useful:  Crayons melt at 105 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius). The mixture is heated to 190 F (82 C). The liquid is poured into a preheated mold full of hundreds of crayon-shaped holes. Cool water (55 F, 13 C) is used to cool the mold, allowing the crayon to be made in 3 to 9 minutes…. a non-toxic cornstarch and water mixture for the glue that holds the label on.  More can be learned here.

Ok so I emailed my cruise client with a few choices of hotels and booked them for him tonight bringing me in a total commission of $47.32 on top of the cruise commission.  Just this one trip has brought me in $250, which is over half of what I was shooting for this month!

My Pending commission is now at: $443.39

I guess the worst part about being a travel agent is you do the work but then you have to wait for them to take the trip to get paid.  :o) Hopefully I will be having some small hotel reservation commission coming in a check form very soon.

OK so today I was able to see my commission for my direct selling business and it was $5.36.  Oh yeah!  This brings the total of spendable money to $69.29.  With this I bought some more brochures as well as had to pay a little delayed billing fee for a total of $10.85 which brings me back down to $58.44

With Direct selling you must first find a good product to sell at a low price.  Most “opportunities” offer over priced products and low direct commission for the seller.  This typically hinders people from selling anything let alone making any money.  It took me a full year of diligently looking at different direct selling companies before I found this one which is bringing in a little extra money each month with very little work on my part.  Just imagine if I were to get out there and start promoting or pushing my products or even start the spa idea I had.  :o)  oops I guess that is the lazy side of me talking which happens to to all of us we just need to kick it down and step out a little.

Today I got a free travel lead who is looking at going to Cancun, but when I called he did not answer so I emailed him with my contact info and a few questions in hope that he will respond.

Today I just finished booking the cruise with insurance, which was really my first.  I am so glad the guy had patience and was willing to work with me.  This has brought me in an extra $203 exactly in pending commission, but that is not call.  I am about to book him 3 nights of hotel stay in Alaska which costs a pretty penny.  In fact the Motel 6 there costs $125 per night!  So I am betting this will bring in an extra $50 in commission but I will not count it to the total until it is booked.

My focus is on getting one to two more travel clients and selling a few more items before the month ends.

Spendable : $58.44
Pending Commission: $396.03
Over $118 in goods, 50 cruise post cards, and 50 Disney brochures, and a box full of crayons.

Net worth: $592.47 and 362 crayons

So as stated in the last post I was gone on a week long vacation and during this time I had great plans of gaining some direct sells clients as well as possibly a few travel clients.  But to my realization that we had about 20 hours of driving to do over 3 days to get there and 3 days to get back, I did not have time to do any of that and enjoy the vacation.

But on a side note I had someone order from my direct selling website (which if I have one order the site is free for that campaign).  The order was for $26.96.  I currently do not know what the commission will be until tomorrow after the order is completed.  This order was placed by a friend I have not seen in over a year,  I am glad I added them to my email list.

Also while on the vacation my parents were there and my father received a phone call from a friend who was looking at booking a cruise, and since he knew I was studying to be a travel agent he referred him to me.  Now this is where the messup came in.  I thought I could rely on the different hotels we were staying at for reliable Internet access but unfortunately I was wrong.  Most of the places provided super slow Internet connections especially when you got on a secure website so looking up and booking was hard.  I was though able to call and hold 2 cruises and get another held online so that I could quote them to my client.  The one he was really looking at with his wife was going to bring in over $750 in commission!  But I was able to find their second choice cruise at a significantly lower price, because the cruise line was having a 2 day sale.  In fact I saved them over $5000 on their total trip because of this, it that also means it dropped my commission down by $500 to around $200 to $300 when it is all finalized tomorrow morning.

So the moral of the story is do not rely on others for Internet connection while trying to book.  Something that should have taken me 4 hours over 2 days took me about 10 over 5 since I had such horrible and slow connections, most done during the night or while the boys where playing with grandparents.

On a side note, I now have a new lifelong client since I managed to save him $5000 and he will be telling others about me too.  Tomorrow I will post how much  I earned while on vacation.

P.S. I managed to pick up some extra crayons at a few restaurants we stopped at along the way.