I “launched” the site back in November but didn’t really start getting any content onto it until around the start of the new year.  Currently the site features about 50 posts, mostly all videos of Miley Cyrus either at events, music videos, or her MileyWorld series from YouTube. In addition to the videos, the site features an extensive biography and pictures.

I’ve started advertising the site on Google using Google AdWords and the traffic has slowly picked up. The site is based off of WordPress using the Celebrity Theme and a couple plugins.

I’d love to hear some feedback on the site – layout, content, etc. I’m sure the majority of you all are not Miley Cyrus fans, but I’d like to hear more about the usability of the site and that aspect of things. Feel free to leave some comments, email me or tweet at me.

If you’re ready to take it to the next level, you definitely have to check out Richter Studios out of Chicago, IL.  Their video production services can definitely give you the winning edge against the other competitors.    Your days of PowerPoint presentations and web 1.0 are over once you see the list of services they offer.

Digital Video

The Richter Studios crew definitely has the skills and talent to pay the bills.  They have traveled all over the world, filming on location in 24 states and 7 countries.  With their award winning team, from their actors to their wizardry animators, they can definitely bring out that touch of magic to wow anyone with their video production.

• Corporate
• Training
• Trade Show
• Recruitment
• Marketing Sales
• TV
• Promotional
• Documentary
• World Wide Web

Let your creativity and uniqueness shine through your website.  The days of web 1.0 are soon coming to an end.  It’s time to get caught up with today’s web 2.o technology.  Retain your online visitors with sophisticated web content and an experience that won’t have them waiting for the presentation to load.

• Advance Web Offerings
• Virtual Tours
• Flash Animation
• Streaming Video
• Interactive

With their years of experience, to date, they have helped their clients win new sales totaling one billion dollars.  Help your business stand out with their extra touch to create the ultimate visual orgasm grabbing the attention of your targeted audience.

• Interactive CD’s
• Interactive DVD’s
• USB Flash Drives
• Presentations
• Interactive Training Platforms
• Trade Show Kiosks
• Promotional Media

With their services, in little time, you will have a successful image online or offline.  Don’t take my word for it, check out their impressive portfolio and tell me what you think.

I got a bunch of tweets back at me asking how I went about it, what I am going to have the person doing, where/how I found them, etc. So, I wanted to share some of those details with you all through a couple posts.

First, you really need to be sure that you are in need of a VA to help you or make your business grow. Obviously you’ll want to start making a list of the different tasks that you need someone to take off of your plate. The reasoning for passing along these tasks could be anything from not having the time to wanting to live the 4 hour work week dream. Either way, make a list of tasks that you want to outsource to someone else and start thinking about how an assistant could help you grow your business. If it turns out that this list of items is just a small “to do” list and you could knock out the tasks in a couple hours if you put your mind to it, then there is no need to hire someone. Just lock yourself in your office/room and get to work. As you finish a task, scratch it off the list with a marker so that you can see your progress.

If you do decide that your list of tasks is daunting, time consuming, AND will help your business, then maybe you should consider a VA to help you out. Here are a couple of the tasks that I will be having completed for me:

• Audio transcription – I have a few podcasts and other audio recordings that I’d like to have transcribed into a Word document. This would probably take me hours upon hours to complete. My VA already completed one of the audio files this morning.
• Data Collection/Entry – I am going to start sending out a newsletter to my buyers on eBay. The next task that I’ll be having done is collecting the name, address, email, etc of my buyers into a database so that I can send them a newsletter every couple weeks about new products or specials that I have going on.
• Search Engine Optimization – I hate sitting down and writing keywords or tweaking little things within a site to make it rank better. This will be another task.
• Research – this will probably be the thing that would take the most time and be the most useful to me. I’m going to be looking for research to be done on student entrepreneurs, college entrepreneurship programs, and much more related to the topics at Dorm Room Biz. This will also help you all out with getting more great articles to read!

Now that you have some ideas for what you will want your assistant to take care of for you, you need to think about what you are willing to pay for those tasks to be completed. From doing some simple research through a Google search, I was able to see that an hourly rate would range from about $6-$30 for a VA. Now, I like to watch where my money goes and I knew there was no way in hell I was going to pay someone more than $20/hour to take care of a few tasks for me – I’d rather have them go unfinished than pay that much. So that limited my scope to the $6-$19/hour range. This still gives you a lot of options.

If you do not have too much criteria for who completes the work, then you can easily look to a country proficient in outsourcing such as India and find someone to work for the lower end of the scale, around $6/hour. Yet, I had criteria that needed to be met if I was going to hire someone.

So, here are some of the basic criteria I had:

• Must speak excellent English (preferrably U.S. based). I don’t care if this makes me sound harsh or bad, but I did not want to be bringing someone on who could not understand me and I could not understand them. It just would not work out. I’m willing to pay extra for being able to easily and quickly understand my needs. If I had to repeat myself or continually provide instructions for a task, I might as well do it myself.
• Be readily available via all means: phone, email, Twitter, IM, Skype, any communication means I had, I wanted them to have (or at least a majority of them). Why Twitter you may ask? Well, I want to be able to follow what they are doing and tweeting about – if they are tweeting about the news of TV or what they are reading, I know they are not doing my work and that I should not be expected to pay for tha time.
• Young/Student – I wanted to be able to work with someone who is a young entreperneur like myself. Like minded people easily understand other like minded people. Working with a young professional or student who is a VA will be a great asset to me; especially when it comes to the readers of Dorm Room Biz.

These were just a couple of the many things I looked for.

So you have figured out what you want your virtual assistant to do, what you think you are willing to pay per hour, and what criteria you have for you VA. The next post in the series I will talk about how to find a virtual assistant that fits your needs and criteria, and getting started with them.

Have something to say? I love participation on the site, so come leave a comment about your experiences!

So, right now, I am working on things for two clients. I am looking to wrap them up in the next week to two weeks and get paid. If I can do this, I will be happy! That will also allow for me to start slowly searching for new clients to work with and also try to get referrals from my current clients.

With that all being said, I have been looking up information on outsourcing design work to assistants in India, Canada, and other countries to free up my time with future clients. I have also been recommended the main different services out there that will convert your PSD files to valid code such as HTML, CSS, etc. This may be a good way to go too! I have also been talking with other bloggers and web developers out there such as Ellis Benus who has started using similar services and has had good results.

Besides, this, there is not a whole lot going on at this side of things. I just have not had as much time to focus on this venture as I would like because I know it is the one that can generate the most income for me in the least amount of time. My goal is reach $10,000 worth of income by the new year through web design related tasks (including designing, updating, hosting, etc). To reach this goal would prove the viability of the venture and also the opportunity to get out of the rat race and be on my own.

Over the past few months, I have really been comtemplating what I wanted to do with this business. When I launched Radford Auctions with my partner back in 2007 it was an opportunity for us to learn about starting a business, expanding on something we knew (eBay), and also making money. We started out with the consignment store mentality where we would sell other peoples items for them. We quickly learned that unless we put some money into the advertising of the business and invested in some software, that we would not be able to do it as effectively as we wanted. Instead, we kept with that idea, but made it a second focus of the business. Our first focus became purchasing inventory and reselling on eBay. I quickly scooped up lots of rock climbing equipment and camping equipment that we sold on eBay seperately.

From there, we expanding into offering brand new products that I purchased from the manufacturers. This worked out very well for us! However, our product line was not as expansive as we wanted so we started looking for other options. Now we are dealing with three different manufacturers of outdoor equipment and looking to add a forth in the next month. This has expanded our opportunities greatly! By now selling more products, we have been able to make a significant amount of more money. Our profits on products went from being a couple dollars to $20+ dollars on each auction. With this strategy, we have also been able to increase our overall sales figures per month and are quickly approaching becoming a Power Seller. I need to have sales of $1000 per month, for three months in a row to achieve the status and then maintain that. Now that I am selling a lot of items that range in values of $50 – $150, this should not be too much of a hurdle to jump over and I am looking for to it!

With the increase in product offering, and the more focused related industry/niche, I have been considering changing the name of my eBay store. I currently operate as Radford Auctions and my username is radfordauctions. However, your store name and username do not have to be the same. I have been thinking of changing my store name to TheGearHouse to coincide with my website – www.thegearhouse.com. This would be a great opportunity because then I can cross promote and sell products directly from my website and the eBay store. I have been working on doing this, but I have been a bit hesitant because of using two differnet names. The other reason I am hesitant to make the switch is because I sell a decent amount of stuff that is not outdoor gear related such as coins/stamps and supplies, jewelry, books, clothing, and more.

Some numbers:

• $900+ in sales in the last 30 days
• $2,000+ in sales in he last 90 days
• Top performing categories: camping/hiking/backpacking, rock climbing – ropes, coins and supplies
• 60 successful listings in the last 60 days (includes store format and auction format)

Do you sell on eBay? I’d love to hear your experiences and stories! If you have any questions about eBay and being a seller, feel free to ask!

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I am happy to announce that my web design business, ProfessionalGFX, has secured a new client in the Ellicott City, MD area. This is a great accomplishment for ProfessionalGFX because this is the first time that I have heard from a potential client that they found my website through the search engines. And the other good news is that apparently out of all the companies that he contacted, I was the quickest to respond – and yet it took me two days to get back to him. So, it sounds like to me, even though there are other companies and businesses in the immediate area that are offering the same services as I, I seem to have the upper hand on them just by being able to respond semi quickly.

The scope of services are going to be pretty basic by outfitting the current website with a completely new design, a couple more pages, and some new images. I will also work in some keywords and a few other SEO strategies. My client is in the industrial chemical cleaning business, so most of his clients are from referrals and not finding him directly on the internet. The business is very face to face as far as interaction goes, so displaying basic information about the business, the industry, and his niches will be enough to get someone interested in picking up the phone – rather than displaying a full line of products or having the opportunity to purchase online.

I am waiting to get the contract and down payment from the client and we should be getting started next week. With luck, I will be able to wrap everything up in the middle of June.

This new client will definitely be a boost to my new method of savings that I wrote about the other day!

As we go along with the process more and move towards wrapping it up, I will be posting more about what different tactics are implemented to help his business out.

If you are looking for a low cost and effective web design service in the Ellicott City, MD, Baltimore, MD or Washington D.C. area, feel free to get in touch with me to discuss your project!

Also, I have listed some of the exact same products that are on Show Your Love Shop in my eBay store at some amazingly discounted prices. Be sure to check them out! I have already sold a few of the different items through eBay and this is what is left.

All of these items are also available in bulk wholesale prices, so if you may be interested in them that way, please contact me!

If you visit my store, you will see my current product offering (expanding every day). All of the items listed are good sellers for us and we will continue to offer them for as long as we can.

So, I am curious as to what others are selling on eBay and having success with. I have a friend who is selling football tickets to the Arizona State University games, a friend who is selling car parts, and more. There is such a wide variety of options and opportunities, there are always chances to expand your offerings…and that is what I am looking to do.

If you feel like sharing, I would love to hear what you are selling on eBay.

No, no, no, I didn’t make anywhere near John Chow or other similar bloggers, however, I did make more money then previous months so I just wanted to point it out and where it came from.

For July I earned about $55.26. Not too bad I guess for not really doing a whole lot to monetize the blog, although that will be changing over the next few weeks

ReviewMe – $35.00
PayPal- $10.00
Google AdSense- $10.26
Total: $55.26

The ReviewMe payments can in two waves. The first payment was for the campaign reviews I did on the site, which were $5.00 each. These are a lower payout price then your normal blog review price because they are not directed to any certain blog specifically. They are campaigns where you can pick and choose which reviews you would like to do. This got me $10.00. The second payment from ReivewMe was for the affiliates side of the house. I had 107 people click on my affiliate links to ReivewMe but only one of those signed up. That one person got me $25.00 though, so I am happy with that. If all 107 of them signed up that could have meant $2,500+…I think I would have crapped my pants if that happened. So, sign up this time when you click on my ReviewMe links!

The $10.00 from PayPal was for filling out a PayPal survey. This was a survey they asked me to participate in and in return I would get $10 in my account, free money! So for about 5 minutes of my time, it was pretty painless.

And of course we all know how the $10.26 from AdSense works. I didn’t get a check or anything for it, but I am getting closer to reaching the next $100 magic mark.

Hopefully this will continue to rise in the coming months!

On another note, I also brought in good amounts from my eBay business and my web development business. Web development work this summer totaled around $3,500 (total, yet I had expenses like hiring other designers, programmers, and buying scripts). eBay, however, where most of the money was profit, brought in about another $2,000. If I had to guess, since I am not looking at any numbers in front of me, I probably sold about $1,000 worth of camping equipment (based on retail prices) as well as other items.

Within the next month we are going to be registering and launching a limited liability company that will act as a holding company or parent company for our other business ventures, such as our eBay company and my web development business.

The reasoning for making this move is the added protection that a LLC offers to its founders and creates more seperation between personal and business assets. This will also allow us to set up our bank account and get things rolling properly, yet still on a bootstrappers budget!

So, the question becomes, who else is launching a company this summer? Leave a comment!