This is a business that I really feel good about because I am offering a product that has long term benefits for my customers and the planet.  The worms that are used for composting will continue to thrive in your compost bin or garden for years.  Worms and vermicompost offer great benefits for your backyard garden, flower bed, or compost pile.  They provide plants with nutrient rich soil that allow the plants to thrive, producing more, growing larger and healthier.  Also, vermicomposting offers the added benefit of reducing waste!  Rather than filling landfills with your excess table scraps and organic matter you can turn that waste into a product that will work for you and make the planet a better, cleaner place for your kids.

As a business I am trying to expand and find my niche within the community.  My product offering includes several types of worms: red worms, european nightcrawlers, african nightcrawlers, and canadian nightcrawlers.  We also sell ants and are looking to add a few more insects into our store.  We also sell worm, ant, and insect accessories to help you enjoy your critters.  It is hard to figure out the balance of which products I should stock and which are too cumbersome to maintain.  I think that after a few more months the market will dictate which critters I am able to carry and which I can not.

Unfortunately, my timing in entering the business is not great.  As we are heading into the winter demand for these products usually decreases, as less people garden or fish during the months ahead.  In the meantime I look forward to the Spring and try to continue to build my inventory, networking, and general business prospects.

Currently, this is just a hobby for me; however, it is one that I take very seriously and hope to one day turn into a successful business.  Operating over the internet at Earthworms4Sale.com allows me to keep my overhead low until my business really picks up and I am looking to my local venue for expansion possibilities.

Anyway I just thought I’d share my latest experiences in this new venture.  I look forward to posting an update describing the tremendous efforts and rewards of the coming months.  Until then be sure to check out my new site.

For students, many of whom have never been forced to make a difficult choice in their lives, some hard realities are in the wind including:

• Shrinking college funds at just the time the money is needed. This translates to a greater need for financial aid and grants, sharp curtailment of out-of-state educational choices, and the potential need to work during their university years.
• Tighter requirements for student loan and grant applications, especially those from private lenders. Additionally, with more students needing this money, there will be less of it to go around.
• Setting up a different time table. Completing a college degree could take longer for students who must work and who can therefore not take a full class load.
• More uncertainty in the future. Depending on the state of the economy at the time, graduating students may not be able to find a job, especially if they chose to major in a field that is overly saturated with workers.

There is also the real factor that if these students require more financial aid and grant money, they are going to enter their working lives already saddled with a heavy debt burden that may keep them from taking other major steps in their young adult lives like marrying or acquiring a first home.

These college students will be getting an early taste of what the minimum-wage American worker has been experiencing for years. At the end of July 2008, the minimum wage in the U.S. went from $5.85 to $6.55, an increase of 12 percent. That still means, however, that a full-time minimum wage earner makes only $13,624 a year. The poverty line for a family of three is $17,170 a year.

These are people who depend on credit for the major purchases in their lives. They are used to having to pay off cars and appliances, but they are also the first sector of the economy to be hardest hit by a factor like $4 a gallon gasoline. Do they feed their kids or buy gas to get to work?

For people already living paycheck to paycheck, an inability to get credit means deferring any major purchases, which in turn affects the broader economy as it depresses the state of retail sales. Those figures dropped 1.2 percent in September, the third declining retail month in a row, and the largest drop since August 2005. That’s a sure sign that the American consumer is feeling unprecedented financial pressure.

That pressure, in turn, affects the small businessman who will see a commensurate drop in profits that will change his ability to:

• buy and maintain inventory.
• improve and maintain equipment.
• hire workers and provide benefits to them.
• maintain his present workforce.

In a financial situation like the one currently being faced by Americans, discretionary spending is the first thing to go. Any business that can be defined as a luxury, for instance hiring someone to cut the lawn or clean the pool, will feel the crunch first. With limited lines of credit to weather the storm, many of these businesses will go under.

When the nightly news talks about the new scarcity of the auto lease agreement or warns of the rising number of home foreclosures, it’s easy to imagine those things being a problem for someone else. When you have to tell your child he can’t go to the school of his choice? When you find yourself walking to work because you can’t afford gas? When you have to let your workers go? That’s when the credit crunch gets personal and close to home. Will it happen? It is happening. Will it get worse? That is more difficult to answer, but most analysts agree there is no quick fix for the current situation and people should expect little improvement until some time in 2009 at the earliest.

Well its been about a month and a half now since I purchased my online arcade and things aren’t going quite as planned. Two months ago I had envisioned having a ready made game site that I could have loaded onto the server along with my blog and another website of mine: www.experiencenewthings.com (blog turned game directory). I also thought that after a month or two the site would be full of gamers and have already paid for itself a couple times over. To my chagrin this has not proven to be the case. While things aren’t going bad they just aren’t like I expected.

Cost/Benefit Analysis

Right now the numbers don’t look good, but I am still optimistic that I can turn them around. The expenses significantly outweigh the income that I am currently receiving. While the game script was a one time expense I have yet to recoup that and am currently not making enough on it to pay the $105 annual cost of the domain name and hosting service.

The costs:
Game site script -         $250
Domain Name -             $10
Web Hosting Service - $ 95
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Total Costs:                    $355 (first year)
+$105 (subsequent years)

Last month I made a little over $2.00 in adsense advertising on my game site. This month I am projecting just under $4.00. Yea thats two dollars and four dollars not two hundred or four hundred. One thing that I didn’t count on when adding adsense to this site was how cheap the pay is for the ads that my site attracts. I average less than $0.05 per click and a lot of patrons are not going to click your banners so that means that I need a ton of traffic if I expect to make any real money using adsense. I am considering looking into other means of advertising on my site.

Traffic

So if it takes 20 clicks on my site to earn me 1 dollar and one in two hundred people click on one of my banners, then it would require my site to get 4000 visitors just to earn a dollar. Right now I am averaging 200 visitors a day. Those 200 visitors play an average of 2.5 games each for a daily total of about 500 games played per day. At the end of last month I hit my first milestone 10k games played. This month the sites on schedule to have 25k games played which is a 50% increase from last month to this month.

Currently my game site is still not ranked by google’s page ranking system. This makes it a little hard to exchange links and improve traffic. Also once I am ranked I hope to improve my search engine result status. So I look forward to getting my page ranked as it should help boost traffic. I’m hoping for a high page rank, 3-5 would be awesome.

I am also looking into other methods of boosting traffic. Some possibilities include: directory submissions, link exchanges, and social networking ( word of mouth is great advertising!)

Site Maintenance/ Upgrades

While the game script I bought was pre-made and ready to go from day one (which saved me a lot of time and effort) there is still significant work to make enhancements to the site that will distinguish my site from all the other game sites out there. So far I haven’t gotten around to any of the heavy lifting as far as enhancements go. I have added several new games and continue to add games daily. Major work that I have slated for the near future include redoing the entire theme of the site including background, graphics and logos (possibly music?). And the other major task is rewriting a couple of the methods in the game site script to perform a few extra functions that I think are really important such as sorting the games by top ranked or most played.

Then there is always the constant maintenance of adding games, checking out and fixing user reported errors, responding to user email and requests to exchange links or promotional offerings. All of this stuff takes time, but as I mentioned earlier I am still optimistic that I can really turn my game site into something special.

Future Plans

As I stated above I still have a lot of work cut out for me in regards to building traffic, enhancing the website, and becoming established. At the top of my agenda are the site enhancements including revamping the site theme. I think it is important to get this done before I have a large customer base, people often don’t like change. As soon as that gets done I will dedicate the majority of my time to just increasing traffic. Customers are the driving force for any business, so its important that I get the word out. After that I will re-evaluate how everything is doing and see if I can identify what I am doing well and what needs improvement and work from there.

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