Welcome to 99ers.net

Maybe Not For You?

This is tricky. I’m a bit of  business opportunity junkie. If you’ve already paid a visit to my “about” page I discuss the basis for having set this site up and my thought process being to  share some of my own personal experiences as it relates to online business opportunities.

Once folks started showing up in droves; I began to disseminate that maybe pitching self-employment ideas was a bit of a stretch for people in dire unemployment situations.

Therefore, with oversight from my sister Cindi, we both decided to emphasize a format that provided news, public discussion, and a couple of products to help those still looking for a job.

This page is a sidebar or addendum to those original ideas and I don’t want this to be a distraction to more urgent pursuits of getting benefits or gainful employment.

If  however you have a bent or curiosity towards online business pursuits  or entrepreneurship then this page is for you.  Below are excerpts from an email I sent to my sister just before this site grabbed hold discussing why I continue to pursue  my adventures in online marketing.

Please be advised that I do make reference to products I’ve used and I do provide links to those products. If you decide to buy through those links I will make a commission for the referral. The sales pages for some of these products are very persuasive so don’t get sucked in if you don’t expect to follow through. Also,  even if you do buy, whether here or elsewhere, be prepared to do REAL WORK.  Nobody just hands over the keys to the store and it’s not as easy a picking the lucky numbers on a lottery ticket. Persistence is key and I struggle with this myself everyday.

My original idea was to provide insight into online marketing and the general topic of making money online as seen through the lens of my own personal experience.

Frankly speaking, if you’re here, then you need some money. Or at the very least you need some moral support.

I’m not about to tell you I’m a bonafide online money making guru. I do know a couple of things, though.
This recent email to my sister tells pretty well the discovery process and is part of an ongoing discussion between the two of us:

“Oh boy I can really identify with too many ideas not enough time. I just got back from driving after hitting send for the last email to you.

Here’s the thing…when I first started to fuss with this stuff ’bout 2-3 years ago, I bought some canned “how-to” programs that typically promised I’d be rich in three weeks. Granted, I’ve always been a sucker for that stuff and I’ve positively thrown some good money after bad but…I’m actually learning some freaky stuff from some of these guys and even coming to understand how they are pushing my buttons and getting me to open my wallet.

Some of these guys are positively all show/no go and prescribe to the Billy Mays carnival barker marketing that emphasizes false scarcity and other not so upstanding emotional triggers to get you to convert.

I’ve come to understand some of the business models and how the technology allows almost anyone that is willing to invest the time to build viable properties on the web. One guy I’m an affiliate for gave me some of his learning sources during a burst of emails I had with him. It was really cool kind of insider shop talk that was surprisingly satisfying for me.

I’ve hit more than one brick wall and was so frustrated by the volume of work that I subsequently froze up for several months on a couple different occasions and it really slowed my progress. I just couldn’t deal with it. I’ve spent several thousand dollars over the last 2-3 years and felt guilty about it as well as embarrassed. I felt as silly as Ralph Kramden falling for the latest get rich kitchen gadget (reference from early television for our younger readers).

The marketers that I was learning from were bombarding my email box with offer after offer and picking my bones dry. It really is the Wild West out there which is also exciting, at least for me.

The thing is, I’m just now starting to hit my stride in terms of having the capacity for a comprehensive overview of how all this stuff ties together. Also, my technical skills have improved immensely. I really couldn’t even email 4 years ago. I didn’t understand what Google did. Everything was completely vague and nebulous. All my thinking was brick and mortar, ya know?-So yesterday.

I was very much operating at a deficit on dozens of levels and I still am but I’m beginning to see ways to overcome my shortcomings provided I’m willing to think differently and take action on things that feel uncomfortable because I’m just being a chicken shit.

By hook or crook several things happened that have reinvigorated me and are compelling me to move forward.

Two books I read “Four Hour Work Week” by Tim Ferriss and “The World Is Flat” by Thomas L. Friedman. (Note to our readers; Links to books on Amazon in the side bar to your Left.)

That’s one part of it and I beg you to read them and I’ll ship them to you from Amazon if you will read them. The second book was given to me by my next door neighbor/school principal and for me was pure serendipity given the context of my struggles and aspirations to understand the bigger picture of what the Internet was doing to the world.

It gave me historical context to stand on that I had up to that point completely missed (even though I was alive while it was happening), and it was arguably vital for me to “get it” if I was to continue to move forward because I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

Kids are taking certain functional communication processes for granted like you and I do touch tone phones from 1978. It’s the difference in running on foot to get the doctor verses calling 911…I’m digressing however.

Then I bought a course called “Googlesniper,” and I was able to assimilate all of it without a crash and burn and was then (with greater confidence) able to re-visit some other courses I’d bought that were akin to being dropped in the Amazon jungle in my underwear the first go-around.

I still get tripped up but I understand that it goes with the territory now and I’m less willing to give up because the guy who taught me and produced “Googlesniper” was freaking 18 years old.

Can you imagine? 18 years old!

He was doing 15K a month!

That was it for me. It was the proverbial last straw.

That meant that when I was trying to learn how to do an email four years ago that he was fifteen! (He’s nineteen or twenty now.) The implications made my head spin – and as I thought about it – most prevalent was that if a teenager could be making 15K a month then so could I. (Hell, an extra $1000.00 would be so huge right now.)

He’s even candid enough to say a lot of your sites will fail and that you need to take your time because it won’t happen overnight…sage wisdom from a teenager…shit…and he’s British. (Another guy I’ve learned the most from is from New Zealand: “The World Is Flat.”)

He followed up Googlesniper with a product called “Traffic Ultimatum”, and he now claims to be making $1 million dollars a year.

He markets using his email list in which he will pitch free helpful tips and benefits over time or salt his list with anticipation for his upcoming release and also include links to himself on video (made from motel rooms while surfing in Australia), discussing the ins-and-outs of successful online marketing.

JV partners promote him and are easily affiliated with him by simply getting a “hoplink” through ClickBank. These partners will be paid a commission as high as 75%. All his processes are fully automated and the tedious activities that require regular technical attention to detail he outsources to the Philippines, where a full time 40-hour-a-week sub-contractor runs $200-400 a month with a “Month 13” bonus after the New Year.

Did I mention…I drive a truck.

That’s just one business and marketing model. And yes it’s a lot of work but it gets easier. It took me weeks to get my first website up and now I can get a landing page up in a couple of hours. I threw up www.99ers.net (the term “99ers” gets 30K searches a month and refers to people who are looking to get 99 weeks of unemployment).

I did it one morning before work because of this entire hullabaloo about extending unemployment benefits and thought I might be able to monetize money opportunity stuff to the unemployed but then got to thinking that if you sat on you’re ass for 99 weeks collecting then maybe not—ha!

The Internet is very forgiving. You can learn as you go. It’s not like you bought a food franchise and picked a bad location and will go bankrupt if no one happens by to order a sandwich. And it’s not like you did a big ad buy in print, radio, or TV and will have to pay to let it run to measure results and worry if you wrote bad copy or the weather wiped out a big outdoor promotion and you’re screwed.

If you promote digital products, there are no shipping, inventory, or fulfillment costs. If you’re an affiliate there are no customer service issues or credit card transactions to worry about. Payments are direct to the account of your choice or mailed by check every two weeks. You can live anywhere that has Internet.

It’s practically unlimited for marketing from a creativity stand point. The cost of entry is very low and get less expensive the more you do it. I pay $3.95 a month for hosting one account and $9.95 a month on a second account. I’ve located a domain registrar that is only $7.50yly for a dot com.

If you had a site that made $30.00 a month you’d be in profit. If you had 100 sites that made $30.00 a month selling advertising or digital affiliate products very little further work would be required and that would be an extra $1500.00 a month of nearly automated income. They’d be like little bubble gum machines and you could keep making more of them. If some of them make $200.00 a month then you could build them out further still or put more sites into the same market.

You could make sites that sell Amazon and eBay goods and they handle the shipping and fulfillment.

You can set up sites that sell train whistles or juggling supplies and find wholesalers that do the drop shipping for you…you can flip sites that make money for multiples of their monthly revenue…it goes on and on.

Oh and the freebie for the water site you mentioned is a really good idea. I’d like to add a store so people can buy directly off the sight and I have some inkling how to do it and I’ve got an article spinner to spin the articles I’ve got on ezinearticles.com so I can repopulate them on the site and up my standings in Google, (I’ve had over 8000 views now with a 6% click through rate). My next big project however is an opt-in box for “MuscleBuilderMan Free Motivational Secrets” and a 52-week auto responder series

Damn I need to go to bed!”

Well there you have it; Uncut. I suppose some of that makes no sense but I hope it illustrates the process. I’m sure some of the lingo is out of context and my sister has a marketing background so she’s more versed in it than most.
The general message I wanted to impart is that you can reinvent yourself if you put your mind to it and I know it’s depressing in the short term but I’m no genius—plus I dropped out of college in my 2nd quarter so what the hell?
I’m sure a lot of you reading this have a lot more on the ball than me (as I type 12 words a minute with two fingers.)
Feel free to leave your comments
-Dan, The 99erman

(Note from Cindi, his sister. I did do a punctuation and spelling edit a couple of days after he posted this for you guys. When Dan gets up a head of steam, things like that really don’t matter—why stop for breath [i.e. a period]? Big sis has his back!  ;-p)

Some thoughts from the99ergirl….

Hi, Cindi here, Dan’s sister. The99ergirl. So every few weeks, I’d get a phone call from Dan about his latest Internet discovery. I’d get emails from him with subject lines like, “I just can’t help it,” and “WAKE UP! You guys should be doing this!” My husband has a media background and I have a copy and marketing background, so it’s a natural fit. But we were busy with the whole raising the kids thing, so there was hardly time to do the laundry before we fell into bed at night.

At the same time, I was also running my own small business, called Ninety-Nine Hats (http://www.ninetyninehats.com). I did really well at this, which allowed me to stay close to home while our girls were growing up and to be really involved in their lives. Toward the end there, though, the economy tanked. By this point, I had been doing my own thing for nearly 20 years. Now, what had been fairly easy and pretty lucrative was fairly hard and barely paying. Yikes! You think you’ve got an engine running and then someone tells you that you need a new transmission. (Which, by the way actually happened to our 12- -year-old car for THE SECOND TIME just a few months ago. The luck just keeps rolling in.)

And, in a wonderful stroke of timing, the oldest was entering college. Her savings account, which we had been trying to pump up for years, was cut in half and instead of two years of school paid for, we had one. Better than nothing, and still fortunate, I agree, but damn. It would have been better to stuff the cash under the mattress. And believe me when I tell you we worked our butts off for that missing cash.

Now here we are in 2010 and guess what? Daughter no. 2 starts college in a month. Her account also has been cut in half. She got lots of great scholarship money, but she also chose a private college to the tune of $37K a year (and that’s THIS year).

When we were planning for this, we thought we’d be able to keep up with it by saving massively during their last four years in high school and by continuing while they were in college. Not so. My business started sliding and my husband’s work has gone from 52 people in his department to just one…him. Yea, a job, I get it, but also a job that did not grant a pay raise in four out of the last seven years, which as you might imagine puts you massively underfunded in the cost of living department.

The unhappy truth is that the economy has forced us to actually use some home equity to pay living expenses, and there’s no way we can help our girls with college costs. More debt is out of the question for us, so it is now their problem.

Lots of people have to take on college debt, I know, but we’d always wanted to be able to do this for them and it make us feel like total losers that we can’t help them. The girls are OK with it, by the way. We’re not, though. I’ll bet there are a bunch of you out there who get this.

So OK, here we are. The girls are all but gone, my business is at a slower pace than the proverbial snail, and I HAVE HAD IT! Over the years, I’ve dabbled in Internet money-making schemes, just like Dan, with guilt and embarrassment, but still with a determination that somebody’s doing it, so why not me? And, with no kids around to run around with and for (and unfortunately no work), I’ve got the time. So I plan to do it. Dan, who is in the same situation kid-wise, plans to do it.

We expect to do it.

And the thing that keeps getting us is that all these people with information products about using the Internet to make money appear to be making money by selling a system for re-selling their product. Hello? The fact that I bought into this shit makes me feel like an idiot, and I don’t want to make other people feel like idiots and profit from it, thank you very much. No matter how bad I feel about the whole college thing. The phrase “Flim-Flam Man” keeps popping into my head. When you realize you can’t pitch your new service to your old clients because it would be too embarrassing, something’s wrong.

The thing we hit upon is that we have a lot of experience playing around with this stuff. As Dan said, it’s been like being dropped in the middle of the Amazon with nothing but your underwear and your wits. So we’re hoping to shed a little light on that for the rest of you folks out there. Maybe a little organization. As in, “Step 1, Step 2, Step 3.” At the very least, between the two of us, we have vetted a lot of products and can save you time, trouble, and hard-earned cash.

So what about you? Have you been fooling around with this for as long as we have? Or are you brand new to it? Maybe somewhere in between? Or are you looking for a full time gig? Use this site to share what you’ve learned: your frustrations, your hopes, your dreams. Together, maybe we can actually make something happen.

-Cindi, The 99ergirl