Making money With Woot, The Daily Steal and Stootsi

The Official Geezer Guide - Your guide to supplementing your retirement income, saving money and protecting and growing your investments.

Volume 1, Issue 4, October 2009

This month's articles:

Off the Cuff

1. Making money With Woot, The Daily Steal and Stootsi
2. eBay Recovers from The Summer Slump
3. New Scams Aimed at Seniors
4. Learn How To Make Extra Money Blogging from Home

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Off the Cuff

Is the economy really recovering? When you look at the economic numbers there is some evidence that it is -but the evidence is slight while the signs on the street don't look so good.

Yes the stock market is up and that is usually a leading indicator, but it may not be this time because it is up for different reasons. The sad fact is that the Federal Reserve has printed so much money that the dollar is falling on world markets as a glut of dollars flows into the system. It is a long-established fact that the stock market goes up when the dollar goes down as stocks are seen as an inflation hedge. Gold and oil are also soaring. These are signs that real inflation is on the horizon.

I don't think we will see inflation that soon -as we are still in a slightly deflationary period -but we are starting to see signs of it. Oil and other commodities such as copper, steel and lumber are heading up. Food will probably be next. Once you see food prices rising that will be a signal that real inflation is here. The last time this happened was during the Carter administration. Inflation hit 16% and interest rates had to be raised to 17% to bring inflation under control.

I would be very-very careful in this stock market environment. Yes this is a good time to be invested.  The Dow, now above 10,000 could go to11 or even 12,000 -but it could also just as easily go back down to the 6000-8000 area.  The best way to play this market is with fairly tight stop loss orders.  I use a trailing 5% stop loss based on the day's closing prices. Every once in a while, I get stopped out of a position I really want to be in, but that is a minor irritation compared to how much I could lose with a sudden meltdown like what happened this time last year. The other place to be is in high quality foreign government bonds. These pay slightly higher rates than US bonds and you benefit when the dollar falls.

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Meanwhile almost all of us today need to make some extra money to supplement our retirements. So we are going to focus more and more on ways that seniors can do this. We have several ideas in this month's issue.

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We also have a new book in the works: The Official Geezer Guide to Selling on eBay. We hope to have this book available before Thanksgiving so you can take advantage of the holiday selling season.  This is the best time of the year to sell on eBay. Last year we did as much sales during November - January as we did in the previous five months. Obviously you want to try and sell items people are looking for related to Christmas shopping, but in truth everything that sells on eBay sells very well during this period because there are just more people shopping online.

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We also have an article about new scams targeting seniors this month. I was almost a victim of one of these earlier this week. We talk about that below.

So let's get started:

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1. Making money With Woot, The Daily Steal and Stootsi

When you read that headline you were probably thinking "What the hell is a Stootsi?"

Those names refer to three websites that feature a daily deal where you can only buy one product per person, but the products are items that are featured at a steeply discounted price.

• Woot is at www.woot.com,
• The Daily Steal is at http://dailysteals.com/Default.aspx
• Stootsi is at http://www.stootsi.com.

Each of these sites features products at a very steep discount to the retail price. For example, yesterday I was on Stootsi and I bought the 7 Season DVD set of the popular kids TY show, Are You Afraid of The Dark. The price was $49.95 plus $6 shipping.  So what's so great about that?

Well -before I purchased it, I popped over to eBay and found that the 7 season set was selling for $269. That is a $213 profit. And I bought two of them. I used my PayPal account for one and my wife's PayPal account for the other.

I passed on Today's deal on Woot. It was a Philips 19" LCD HDTV. They were selling on eBay for about $245 -not a bad profit, but I don't like to mess with shipping large heavy items that may be damaged in shipping. However, I have seen other great deals there before where you could make over $100 on items that are easy to ship. A while ago I found an RCA 2-Line cordless phone set with three extra receivers that Woot was selling for $149 that was selling on eBay for $252.95. Those come in a small easy-to-ship box.

If you want lower cost items, check out the Daily Steal. Yesterday's steal was a new Sakar Portable Car DC to AC 75 Watt Power Inverter for $1.99. These retail for $39.95 and you can easily sell them on eBay for about $25 - $29. And today the Daily Steal was a New Timex Ironman watch for $19.95 that is selling all over eBay for $67.00.

You won't find a great deal on these sites every day, but there isn't a week that goes by that I can't find at least three or four items to buy and resell at a nice profit. I met one eBay seller at last year's eBay Live event who tracks these three sites and several others (he wouldn't tell me the names of them). He claims that he makes over $1000 a week between the five or six sites he works on to find deals and resell them.  The thing that make this so easy is that when you find a deal, you just copy all the description and specifications on the page and you can paste that into a word doc and save it. Then, when your item arrives in the mail in about a week or so, you open up your eBay account and just paste the info into the item description and bang! You are ready to list.

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2. eBay Recovers From the Summer Slump

Reports came out this morning that eBay's sales during the summer period saw the worst year-over-year drop in five years.  I know. We saw our sales on eBay during this period drop almost 50% over the same time in the prior year. But the slump did end.

Although our sales are still not as strong as they were this time last year, they are up quite a big from August/September.  I spoke to some folks at eBay last week and they confirmed that their overall listings and sales are looking much better.

I am looking forward to the holiday selling season as I think that will determine how the rest of the year will go.

One of the products that most grandparents are familiar with are toys.  Toys are a huge seller on eBay all year around -and they really rock during the Christmas season. But what most people don't know is that you don't need a wholesale supplier to source toys. You can actually make money buying toys at retail from discount outlets and reselling them for great profits on eBay -if you know the right toys to buy.

The most well-known expert on selling toys on eBay is a lady by the name of Jennie Hunt.  Each year for the past five years, Jennie has been publishing her Holiday Toy Guide.  This is the place where you can find out what the hot toys will are, where to get them and how and when to sell them on eBay. I have been recommending Jenni's Holiday Toy Guide to my readers every year for the past three years and have never had a complaint from someone who didn't make money from it.  This is very easy to do and a great way for seniors to make some extra money over the holidays.

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3. New Scams Aimed at Seniors

Scams aimed at seniors are not new, but they are always evolving and the scammers get more and more clever every year.  This year there are two new scams running rampant on the internet and one phone scam.

Swine Flu Scam

The first one involves the swine flu (H1N1) virus and treatments for it.  The internet and my email is full of links to sites where they claim to sell treatments -some of them completely phony and some of them the hard to get flu treatment Tamiflu.  But when you order what you usually get is nothing more than a Tylenol pill in a phony package. That is if you are lucky. If you go to some sites, you may actually receive pills that contain dangerous compounds.  So if you get the pig flu, just go to your doctor and stick with the standard treatments.

2008 Stimulus Economic Refund Scams!

If you receive an email, supposedly from the IRS, claiming that you need to click on a link and fill out the necessary information to receive your 2008 Stimulus Economic Refund, don't be fooled. It looks legitimate, but it is not. DO NOT respond or open the link, as it may place a virus onto your computer. The IRS does not initiate contact through email.

Deaf Person Telephone Scam

The telephone scam is very interesting. It is originating overseas in Easter Europe and involves someone impersonating as a deaf person using the TTY service where deaf people call into a service and type their message to an operator who calls you and reads the message to you and you respond and the operator types your response back. I have received legitimate calls like this -but this week I received one of the scam calls. The tip off was that the so-called operator had a strong foreign accent. But I stayed on long enough to see what they wanted and they were very cleverly trying to get me to reveal some information so they could steal my identity. I was just about to hang up, when a real operator came on the line and told me she had disconnected the call as their service (AT&T) had detected the fraudulent call. The operator told me that this scam was going on. They are trying to monitor the calls and stop them, but she admitted they could only interrupt a small percentage.

Medicare Card Scams

Under federal law, the annual fee for Medicare drug discount cards can't be more than $30.  Some companies charge a lower fee or nothing at all for the card. Once a card is purchased, the annual fee can't be refunded.

If you get an uninvited call, email, or knock at your door to sell you a card, it's a scam.

Under the program, companies can advertise their cards by mail, television, radio, and newspapers or other print media. But they are not allowed to call, send emails, or come to your home to sign you up for their cards unless you asked them to.

Don't be fooled by sales materials or emails that look like they're from the government.

Though this is a government-sponsored program, it is private companies, not the government, that offer the cards. Con artists often try to impress people by making their sales materials look like they come from an official government agency.

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4. Learn How To Make Extra Money Blogging from Home

This is the title of my latest book for sale at my other website, www.skipmcgrath.com. We are planning a Geezer Guide version of this book later, but if you don't want to wait you can get it now at this link: http://www.skipmcgrath.com/products/make-money-blogging-home.shtml.

If you have a hobby or interest of something you are knowledgeable about and can write about, then blogging is a great way to have some fun and make some money. The best month I ever had blogging I earned over $7000. That was an exceptional month, but in most months I make around $2000 from my blog.  I am not saying that to brag and I don't claim everyone else can do that -but I am trying to point out that you can make some serious money blogging.

You are probably wondering why people would pay you to blog -well they don't, but you can get paid by advertisers who want to reach the people who read your blog. This happens in three way and all of them are ethical and legitimate.

1. Google AdSense. Google will pay you to put ads on your blogs. You can see an example of this if you go to the Geezer Guide blog and look for the panel that says Ads By Google in the left hand panel. The way it works is that Google looks for the key words in your content and then they place ads that relate to that content. For example if you had a travel blog and you did a post about travel to Spain, they the Google Ads would be for trips to Spain or perhaps for luggage or trip insurance.  The people reading your blog don't have to buy anything for you to make money. All they have to do is click on a ad and Google pays you. The amount can vary anywhere from 5-cents to over a dollar per click depending on how valuable the key word is they are clicking on.
2. Affiliate Marketing - There are thousands of companies including Wal-Mart, Amazon and eBay who will pay you money if someone clicks on a banner in your blog and then ends up buying something. Again if you look at the Geezer Guide Blog, in the right hand panel, you will see an ad for a company called WorldWide Brands. This is a wonderful company that helps online sellers source wholesale products to resell on eBay, Amazon and the web. When you click on that banner and end up buying their service, then they pay me a commission. This can be very lucrative.
3. Selling your own products - If you blog is about some type of product you sell, then you can put links in your blog directly to your online store and make money selling those products.  One way to do this is to have a review site. For example, let's say you sell fishing rods and reels. You write a blog about fishing that gives advice and practical information. Then in the side panel of your blog you put a photo of the product you are selling with a link to purchase that product form you on eBay or your online store.

Those are just three of the ways to make money blogging. I discuss several others in my latest book, How To Make Money Blogging From Home.

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That's it for this month. I know we haven't been doing our newsletter that frequently but this has been a tough economic environment and we have been focusing on what makes money and limiting our expenses which is always good to do when times are tough. But we are going to try and get back on schedule soon.

Skip McGrath
Head Geezer
Official Geezer Guides, Inc.

P.S. If you missed the last issue, check out our newsletter archives.

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