Note about prizes

I will be out of town for several days and thus away from my boxes of prizes! If you request a prize that has to be mailed, it will be mailed after Christmas. If you request a prize that is ordered online (Amazon, eBay, Best Buy, Circuit City, PetsMart, ThinkGeek), it can be ordered while I am away.

Happy holidays everyone!

Yay candy!

If you're a relatively large account with the ad networks, Christmas is a good time! I've gotten beautiful cards from several networks, a gift certificate to Restaurant.com from one, and last night received four small boxes of chocolate from another in the mail. I only do business with five networks or so, so my account is relatively large at each, as opposed to spreading the business over several networks.

It's good to be the admin. ;)

Some resolution

I have worked it out with the GPT owner previously written about, and since there is some resolution I have taken down the previous post. Hopefully none of this will happen again - there are already too many people out there trying to pull one over on us GPT owners, there should be honor amongst ourselves.

The elevator speech

An elevator speech is basically the business term for the ten or fifteen second speech you give if you have someone in an elevator with you - they can't get out so they have no choice but to listen to you. =) So I sometimes give elevator speeches about CashDuck to people who have no choice about listening to me, such as the checkout clerks I wrote about before.

I have a couple variations on the elevator speech, here's one:

You know how in Hotmail or whatever sites you use, there's banners at the top that say "Click here and win a motorcycle!" or something like that? Well, every time you click that and fill it out, somebody somewhere gets fifty cents or a dollar. On this site, when you fill that out, you get the fifty cents or a dollar for doing it, and there are lots of them so it adds up.

Sometimes I also say:

Well, my site collects lots of offers together in one place, like surveys and trials that you can sign up for, in one place, and if you sign up for trials or complete surveys you can get paid for doing it, and also earn points to get gift cards and things. It won't make you rich but it's a good way to make extra money on the side.

I tend to get one of two types of reactions: "Um, ok.." with a small smile, clearly they think I am off my nut. Or, they say "Huh, that's interesting" and are thinking to themselves. Most of the time people who fall into the latter group are interested, but they are embarrassed to ask you about it, so I usually just give them one of the mini flyers (I have a stack in my purse) and then they can look at it when they are on their own. People don't want to be seen as greedy and they think that it would sound like they were desperate for money if they were interested in something like this, but hey, everybody needs money!

Oh man..

OK, this is why I have started to hire other people to design banners for me. (Mostly because I ran out of ideas after about four.) I got the cartoonist who draws Something Positive (a webcomic I read a lot) to design me a banner and also purchased a day of advertising on the comic - check it out on Tuesday.

Most of the banner ideas I come up with are kind of cute and silly, but I wanted something funny (and hipper than me) for the banner ad on Something Positive. Here's the options he came up with:






I chose the second one because it makes more sense and kind of mentions what the site is about.. but man, that's funny. =)

I feel like a big shot corporation CEO now ;)

I got a call about an hour ago from someone who said she was from Ask.com - she had been browsing the gifts section (?) and saw an ad that I was running. I recently started doing some advertising and one of the things I'm trying out is pay-per-click advertising (which lists ads on the sides of sites like Ask.com). So it turns out she was calling me to see if I'd be interested in advertising with pay-per-click directly on Ask.com - I still am not entirely sure how she got the phone number. But I asked her to send me a media kit and she seemed happy about that.

Other places I am advertising are Google AdWords, PayPerPost, Project Wonderful, and I will be advertising with KeenSpot (a comics site) once I have an appropriate banner. Partially I want to get new business but I also know that on December 8th (when from 8AM to 8PM EST referrals will cost only 23 feathers) I will need lots of new unreferred people to give away ;)