Wondering if you should try in-image advertising with Luminate? Here is my review of using Luminate.com to make money on your website!

Want the just of it? I used Luminate for 30 days and with nearly 1 million image views, I made a whopping $0.11. Whew! At this rate, I’ll make the minimum Luminate payout of $25 in…19 YEARS.

I ran Luminate on a highly trafficed celebrity gossip blog, that gets several thousand unique visitors per day. I took the time to manually tag 100 of my photos, since I figured that the “product in the picture” feature would be the biggest earner on a celebrity website, and I installed the following Luminate applications:

- Annotations
- Image Overlay Ads
- Amazon MP3 Music
- Product in the Picture
- Share via E-Mail
- Share via Facebook

While Luminate looks promising with all of it’s fancy javascript and neat-o apps, I had an idea that Luminate would not be paying out much…but $0.11?! Come on. That is just ridiculous. The website that I tested Luminate on makes $XXXX with Adsense and $XXX with InfoLinks per month. Luminate is by far the weakest earner that I have ever used in an attempt to monetize the traffic my websites get.

I used to sell on Ebay, but stopped selling on Ebay over a year ago because of the constant fee hikes that eBay imposes on it’s seller (like eBay doesn’t make enough money). Over the Halloween season, I decided to give eBay another shot and have come to this conclusion: EBAY IS A TOTAL JOKE. It’s not even close to being worth selling on eBay and you can tell that there has been a major decline in quality sellers, since nearly everything on eBay is total crap (shipping straight out of Taiwan) or overpriced (because the sellers have to pass on the cost of doing business on eBay to the buyers).

Say you bought a book for $5 and want to sell it for $10 (standard retail markup is 100%). If you sell that book on eBay for $10, it’s going to cost you $2.25 in fees, plus the $5 it cost for the product, so you profit a whooping $2.75 for a $10 eBay sale. Ebay is taking nearly HALF of your profit!

Say you have a $15 shirt that you want to sell for $30 on eBay. That will cost you $4.54 in fees, leaving you with profit of $10.46 on a $30 sale.

Ebay hides their fees by making them difficult to understand and by making them variable. You can check out the current eBay fees here:

http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/fees.html

But, don’t forget about the Paypal fees too (Paypal is owned by eBay):

https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_display-receiving-fees

Also, eBay has decided that sellers can no longer participate in the feedback aspect of eBay. Sellers can not leave negative or neutral feedback for a buyer, no matter what. But buyers can leave negative or neutral feedback for a seller. Gee that seem fair?

Ebay is lame. I hope they go out of business soon.

I have been in California for almost two weeks now, with a laundry list of stuff that needs to get done while I’m here. One of my top priorities is moving Vicious Enterprises to a larger location. I lucked out on the FIRST day I was in town and found an insane office space right on Garnet in Pacific Beach. It was a little bit more then I wanted to spend ($1900 a month), but the advertising potential of this space is worth $1900 a month alone. Plus, the office is HUGE. Garnet is the busiest street in PB and PB is filled with college students (our target market). I got the new sign up today and the official moving day is Saturday!

I recently set up my business to have “legitimate” employees and instituted payroll. I have had employees for a while, but I’ve been paying them their wages and simply 1099ing them at the end of the year. Basically, I was paying them as contractors, rather then employees, because, well, it’s just easier that way. Since my girls have been working with me for a while now, I figure I better legitimize the whole employee thing, since we are going to be hiring more employees soon.

After going through this process, I totally understand and AGREE with why every big company in the USA is outsourcing overseas.

In order to be able to legally pay someone to work for you, you need to apply for an EIN (Employer Identification Number) with the federal government. Then you need to apply for an EDD (Employment Development Department) account with the state (California in my case). Both the government and the state then send you piles of shit to read and forms to fill out, which you need about a week to read through and a college degree in Human Resources to understand.

Then, of course, comes the taxes. Which is the only real reason why you are required to “register” with the government and the state.

I ran my first payroll last week and paid $1368 in wages to my employees. I then had to turn around and hand an additional $486 in taxes to the government and to the state. So I have to pay almost $1000 a month to pay employees $2800. Does that seem right to you? I get fined (taxed) for creating jobs in the state of California. Great fucking plan, America.

So this brings me to my point: Everyone wants a piece of my pie.

- Just being self employed incurs an additional 15% Self Employment Tax from the government. This is on top of the everyday taxes that everyone pays.

- You have to pay the County Recorder to register a business name.

- You have to pay the city annually for a business license AND they require that you pay them a percentage of sales (WTF?!).

- You have to pay the government and the state in order to employ people.

The list of “taxes” keeps growing as my business grows and it’s really annoying. The business keeps grows but I keep making less money. Nonsensical…

Since quitting my job, I’ve been on an emotional rollercoaster. I’m elated for a while and then racked with “what ifs”. I know everything is going to be fine, but I’m definately a workaholic and I’m addicted to making money. That’s the beauty of what I do, the harder I work the more money I make. So it’s hard to not want to make money/work. I just hope that I’ve tied everything up well enough that I can walk away for a month and reassess what’s up with my crazy life. I just can’t do this any more. I’ve been working 12 – 18 hour days for years now and I just can’t do it anymore. I need to find a balance, but that is easier said then done. Back in the day, I was perfectly happy making $40K a year, working 40 hours a week and surfing 3 times a week. But would that make me happy now that I know what else is out there? I’ve saved up some cash so I will have some time to think.

I can’t wait to go home.

I quit my job today.

That might seem kind of funny since I own a business, but nonetheless, I quit. I was pushed just a little too far by someone that I’d given a golden ticket too, and I’m done. Don’t want to do the job? Then you don’t have a job. Makes sense to me.

I’m tying up all the loose ends and then flying home to Puerto Rico on Friday. I think I’m going to be an unemployed surfer for a few weeks and then regroup with a new game plan.

You know that song “She Works Hard For The Money” by Donna Summer?

“…She works hard for the money
so hard for it honey
she works hard for the money
so you better treat her right…”

Well, that’s how I feel right now. I actually want to run around in a hoody like Rocky did to “Eye of the Tiger”, but I want “She Works Hard for the Money” to be playing in the background…

For the past two weeks I’ve been working until 4am, sleeping on the floor in the office, waking up at 9am and doing it all over again…Whoops, invoice are done printing…back to work…

“…She works hard for the money
so hard for it honey
she works hard for the money
so you better treat her right…”

One of the girls that works for me just made a special request:

“Summer, can you put in the Eazy E CD, I think it will be good for employee moral…“

So, of course, we’re rocking out to Eazy E now. LaLaLingerie.com is soooo gansta today…haha.

I just flew into San Diego from Puerto Rico and I had a two hour layover in the JFK, New York airport. Since I had some time to kill, I grabbed a bite to eat and a couple of magazines. Entrepreneur Magazine caught my eye with their cover story, “Young Millionaires – Secrets from 25 of America’s Best and Brightest”, so I picked it up and was reading it while waiting for my flight.

Some guy walks by and says, “I’m in that magazine”. I didn’t even look up. What a tool.

Any how, back to “Secret’s from 25 of America’s Best and Brightest”. It was interesting to see who Entrepreneur picked, but they certainly were not the “Best and Brightest” entrepreneurs/millionaires that I’ve ever met. It’s funny to me how old school print media tends to overlook “internet millionaires”. I know quite a few and they are ten years younger and ten times richer then the “Young Millionaires” picked by Entrepreneur Magazine. And you would never know they were rich, let alone very rich. Anyhow, the article was a good read and here are some inspiring quotes from the millionaires picked by Entrepreneur Magazine:

“Do something creative, but still in line with your product philosophy, to distinguish yourself to buyers.” – Kelly Flatley and Brendan Synnott of Bear Naked

“Use your youth to your advantage by introducing something new to the market.” – Herman Flores, Myles Kovacs and Haythem Haddad of DUB Publishing

“Raise the standard and you’ll find that you’ll never go out of style.” – Jim Wetzel and Lance Lawson of Jake

“Give your customers a voice, and they just might use it to spread the word about your business.” – Jacob Dehart and Jake Nickell of Threadless.com

“Stay focused and don’t lose focus of why you’re in business.” – Tim Vanderhook, Chris Vanderhook and Russell Vanderhook of Specific Media

“Chat up your new business every chance you get, as you never know where leads will come from.” – Megan Duckett of Sew What? Inc.

“Knowledgeable team members can help you grow your business to new heights.” – Brad Sugars of Action Coach

“No matter how fast your company grows, stay focused on keeping your product quality standards high.” – John Vechey, Brian Fiete and Jason Kapalka of PopCap Games

“Don’t let a good thing pass you by. Seize the right opportunity, and you just might become the market leader.” – Nathan Jones of Xlear

“Just because you havn’t taken the cookie-cutter path to entrepreneurship doesn’t mean you can’t make your business a success.” – Devon Rifkin of The Great American Hanger Company

“Let your passion be the driving force in your business.” – Ryan Black, Ed Nichols and Jeremy Black of Sambazon

“When you fill a hole in the market with a quality product, customers will take notice.” – Amy Silovic of Tibi

“Surround yourself with entrepreneurial-minded employees and you’ll gain a creative, dedicated work force and a constant infusion of innovative ideas.” – Bob Shallenberger and John Cavanagh of Highland Homes

All good advice for aspiring entrepreneurs.

I found quite a few good articles in Entrepreneur Magazine and although I’m not looking for new business inspiration (since I love my job/business), it’s always good to keep your mind open to new things that could spark new ideas.

I got back to San Diego yesterday and I’m going to be here for a while for work. The funny thing is that two people have already asked me, “Is it good to be home?!”. Um, helllllloooooo. I’m not home. My home is in Puerto Rico. And I can’t wait to go home…

Any how, my brother accidentally left the lights of my car on after he dropped me off at the airport (12 days ago), so my battery was VERY dead. We had to let the jumper cables sit on the battery for over 20 minutes before I could even start my car. LUCKLY it finally did turn over. I was worried since the lights had been on for so long that it may have killed it for good, which would have been a bummer since the battery was fairly new (and not cheap).

The office underwent some construction while I was gone and a couple of walls got knocked out, but unfortunately it’s not as big as I was hoping. From my calculations, we’re going to out grow this place in 6 months or less. So, I’m in the market to buy a warehouse/office in San Diego. One more thing to do…just what I need…