making the most of your time????

Saw this the other day - Friends To Rent - quite an interesting new concept from those wonderful Germans. What would you offer to do with a complete stranger and how much would you charge for it, dodgy activities aside, makes you think about different activities and trying to place some monetary value on you and them...

How much would you charge for what you do normally but have someone else tag along?

Also, saw some adverts in the metro news paper for extras in both standard and not so standard films music video's etc. Again never having done anything like that before would be interesting to give it ago, not sure even what the time commitments would be.

Just found an interesting article from the times online site about being an extra @ http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/money/consumer_affairs/article2109976.ece

Retail run up to christmas

With Christmas coming up shortly, it may well be worth looking at using a retail model this month, with - ok I am just going to make these numbers up! 80% of the yearly retail volumes being made in the holiday season; it would seem wise catch part of this wave for the challenge.

Obviously with a lot of people doing their Xmas shopping online, online markets such as ebay and amazon should have a good level of eye fall at the moment, products aimed at children should do well, and boot fairs always have a few stalls where young families have a clear out, hmmmm.... seems like I am giving people ideas...

I haven't heard much from the other challenge participants - come on all, let me know what you are up to for month 2, or how you are catching up from month 1.

My Zazzle Day

OK, so 33 products later; in just one day:-

My Zazzle Shop

I'm all Zazzled out...

Month 2 may go with a zazzle

I have just created my own zazzle shop - see link and left hand bar - my products, I will make 15% of the proceeds, If I can just create lots of products/content - It might get interesting, If I sell just a couple of products I should be able to make the month 2 target.

I have created a few caps this morning, thinking about more content - what sells, humour? text only, or do you think it has to contain an image? hmmm... lot's to play with here...

DYMC - From £2 to £4 and things to come

So we are now 6 days into month 2 of the challenge and no posts as of yet, have I lost momentum - maybe, no I don't think I have, it just takes quite a bit of effort to post every day, or even every other day.

Also, I think I have been affected by the challenge itself. I noticed some money in an account the other day (more than £200) and I started to think I should be trying to double that - having twice as much as that available to me would be very cool, in or out of the challenge's official timelines and targets. Which is literally a first for me, don't get me wrong I have invested before, saved before and once even created a saving mechanism from my consumerism, but that's probably for another time.

What's interesting is when seeing an amount in account normally I might think about a rough budget I am loosely trying to keep or what I might buy with that, doubling it has never really crossed my mind before, which thinking about now seems strange to me, why haven't I?

Another interesting element of larger amounts, starts to ask the questions -

• Intrinsically who are you? 
• What can you create?
• Can you sell? and in which settings/markets?

Also

• What kind of price points of items should you target (for buying and selling)?
• What other strategies scale into any amounts? Gambling?

I have been looking at targeting items between the target seed price and up to the seed price divided by 6, to try to narrow the search down and keep the buying and selling pair events to an achievable target.

Also I have been thinking about where to find items, a wholesaler like Costco's, setting up as a drop shipping seller? Finding stock from liquidation companies, returned and refurbished goods.

Last day of Stage 1

Today is the final day of stage 1!

If you haven't doubled your £1 seed yet, you still have a full day - get hustling quick! Good Luck!

Please make sure all transactions are recorded, so I can publish a clear view of where we all are individually and as a group.

I will update the overall standings in the spreadsheet and summarise eash participants approach.

Adding SprinklePenny to your blogger.com site

The stanard sprinklepenny instructions are as the below link; they assume you have the ability to upload files to your server, which you don't if you have a www.blogger.com/blogspot.com blog site.

Standard instructions are as follows from http://www.sprinklepenny.com/badges/badge -  you'll need a logon to see these!

OK so you get stuck at step 1, as you can't upload the script, and your probably not sure where the .gif will go.

Stage 1 - update your blogger template

So ignore the image for now, download the sprinklepenny.js file; this has your SP 'publisherId' which is important to you! open this file and copy the contents.

On your blogger account:-

Goto 'Layout' tab

go to















Then select 'Edit HTML'

goto the bottom of the template code (Just above the < / body > tag and add

the code as instructed in step 2 of the standard instructions.

then add a new set of script tags and paste the contents of the .js file within 'script/javascript' tags.

amending the '&' symbols to '& amp ;' (without the spaces) within the 'script' tags, otherwise your template will NOT save correctly.

Stage 1 complete!

Stage 2 - now add the badge

save these changes, then goto, 'Page Elements' tab

Select 'Add a Gadget'

and select 'HTML/JavaScript'

now add the div, as instructed in the standard instructions step 4, but amend the image to the sprinklepenny version, i.e.

http://sprinklepenny.com/images/ajax-loader.gif.


Hopefully now you should be good to go, save and preview your blog again and you should see the sprinklepenny logo

Aggressive acceleration?? Is it the right way to go?

I was having a chat earlier on in the week with one of my work-mates.
About my front loading or ahead of target approach and he mentioned something that has struck a chord with me.

I am perfectly happy for the participants in the challenge to accumulate as fast as they can, much as I was doing before this little chat. But it doesn't make sense for me to do so, when writing this blog, I am doing it in the context of the here and now and if I am ahead of target; by however many targets, it doesn't make for much empathy to the other participants and the current months seed and target amounts and the type of approach required for that stage in the challenge.

I heard a saying once that "a herd of buffalo travel only as fast as the slowest buffalo in the pack", Am I quoting comedy cowboy films, anyway I think it resonates quite well with my current situation.

Also, I could get lazy if too far ahead, like children's story - the hare and the tortoise, my lead could quickly become short lived if I do get lazy at any point.

So, what to do now? I have been thinking about making the challenge more than simply money accumulation/multiplying, and have been thinking about charity, giving away the 'overhang' could bring the two of these things together.

You might think this is a crazy, why throw away any gain you have made? or pointless, the amounts are so small - what's the point? thing to do.

1. It means I can still, and will be even more motivated to aggressively attack each target, but still within the context of the previous months seed amount.
2. In terms of the law of attraction, this action sends out a powerful message to the universe that I truly believe in the abundance of resources and due to this I will be even further rewarded than I would have been if I hadn't given this excess away, purely because of this belief. That would be interesting to test, not sure how I would do it in a controlled way?

It then raises another question, of which charity to support? There are so many good causes to back. Would the amounts be too small to setup a charitable trust? This would be the way to go to support different good causes. I'll have a little investigate about what is involved to set one up!

piece of cake for sale, yesterday I turned 0.94p into £5.20

So yesterday was another big day for my challenge.

I went looking for more shortbread, but it looks as though either none were in stock in my local shop or they have been discontinued? interesting....

So I went back to my plan B and bought 2 sponge cakes for 0.46p each, cut them into 6 slices and marketed them for 50p/a slice, after a few hours with only a few sold I then dropped the price down to 40p a slice.

So I sold 4 pieces at 50p and 8 pieces at 40p. Not as good a return as the shortbread but still very good.

This took my retail project; from the original 27p spent on shortbread to over £8 now. With the two events.

Money, Money, Money.... Money!

Strangely although this wasn't as much of a mark up as the shortbread, I didn't get the feeling as was giving the same level of value for the price... Maybe the 50p was moving too close to local market values; or the product itself wasn't quite as good.

I like win/win/win situations if at all possible, not sure if yesterday was one; even thou I managed to sell all the pieces and make a good profit; not sure if my friends/customers were getting a real 'win'...

Cake Here - All Gone!

The Importance of Time Management

OK so as I was saying in big money little money post; it may be a good idea to to create as many e = buying and selling events as is possible, but maybe you need to look beyond the current months challenge.

I think the key to achieving the larger goals, is to be a 'swot' and front load as much doubling of your money as possible; this creates more e's later on when the target seem further and further away.

Brian Tracy - a great author, in his book Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time: Easy Read Comfort Edition talks about doing the things that need to be done, especially the items that aren't fun or just down right nasty; get them out of the way and move on, sometimes on a daily basis; it's the best way to keep moving forward; and to be in the continual habit of constantly moving forward. The items you are not looking forward to are the ones that are all too easy to procrastinate on...

I have been thinking about the idea of moving the doubling forward; what affectively this does is allows me/us to stay in a comfort zone for longer; within the same context - same type/sizes of products (do more of the same, just more often and as quickly as possible). There is definitely something to be said for doing something well and sticking to it... hmmm...

I need to do another round of shortbread this week! didn't get around to it last week.

Maybe I'll force myself to not do the same thing/product each month to keep learning and looking out for new opportunities as the targets grow