Neobux Experiment: Part 7 - Turnover, profit and income

Status: Profitable

Deposited: $10

Current Balance: $52.99

Profit/Loss: $42.99 profit

Assets: 123 referrals, Golden membership

Since I upgraded to golden membership I’ve had a couple of good weeks on the minijobs.  This has given me enough cash to rent 50 more referrals, putting me into what should be the profitable phase.

So now it’s time to take a look at whether it is actually profitable.  I'm going to look at the first five full days after I got my last bundle of new referrals (so I’m comparing like with like) and see how the numbers stack up.  

I’ll be looking at three key performance indicators: Turnover, profit and income.  These will form part of the heading in future posts.

I’m only looking at the money generated by my rented referrals, so I can see whether this aspect is profitable.  (It’s fairly obvious that personal clicks and mini jobs are 100% profit)

Turnover

Turnover is simply how much money is coming in each day.  I get one cent per click, so this is fairly easy to calculate.

Total income over 5 days: $4.09

Average daily income: $0.818

So my balance is growing by a little over 80 cents a day, which is nice.  This doesn’t mean I have 80 cents a day in my pocket though, some needs to be held back to cover costs.

Profit

Profit is the key point of doing all this.  It’s a measure of how much better off I am each day and is calculated as turnover minus costs.

Costs are variable and based on assumptions about the price of extending my referrals and the cost of membership.  I’m going to look at three scenarios: Best case, worst case and a middle path.

The worst case is that I pay full price for my golden membership ($90) and never extend on a promotion, so I pay the full $1.12 for 240 days.

In this scenario my daily cost is $90/365 + $1.12*no of refs/240 = 82.1 c/day

In the worst case scenario, I’m losing a quarter of a cent a day, so I still need a few more refs to spread the cost of that golden membership.

The best case is that I get free golden membership (from adprize or points) and extend all my referrals on promotion days at $1.09 for 240 days.

In this scenario my daily cost is $0/365 + $1.09*no of refs/240 = 55.9 c/day

This means my profit is 26 cents a day.

The middle path assumes I get my golden membership on a promotion for $75 and extend some referrals on promotion days, so I average $1.11 for a 240 day extension.

In this scenario my daily cost is $75/365 + $1.11*no of refs/240 = 77.4 c/day

This gives me a little over 4 cents a day profit.

Realistically, I’m probably going to hit somewhere between the middle path and best-case.  I’ll always take as much advantage of promotions as I can and I ought occasionally to get a free gold membership.

So there it is, actual profit being made.  Not just theory any more, more coming in than going out.

Income

The final stage is income.  How much of this money is finding its way into my hands?

None.

Right now, I’m reinvesting all my profit, so that the profit can grow.  I have no intention of taking income for quite some time.  In principle, I won’t take anything until I’m renting as many new referrals as often as I’m allowed, then I’ll take whatever remains as income.  In practice, I might lose my bottle and take a few quid here and there before that point.  Only time will tell.

In summary:

Turnover/day: $0.818

Profit/day (worst/mid/best): -$0.003/$0.04/$0.26

Income/day: $0

Tesco Orchard

I have been a member of the Tesco Orchard Panel for quite a while now, and had some really great things to try free of charge including cheese (Rob’s favourite) and flowers (probably not Rob’s favourite)  The latest campaign they have been running is Fresh Flowers.

Rob doesn’t buy me flowers on a regular basis.  He says it is because he likes to surprise me, and if he gets me them all the time they won’t mean anything.  To a certain point I agree, but I do love having fresh flowers around the house.  Unfortunately my favourite flowers are lilies and Rob has severe hayfever which means I can’t have them in the house.

I was brought up around supermarkets.  My parents met as Management trainees at a chain of well- known supermarkets, and when we were little we went to work with my Dad on a regular basis.  Rob still maintains that my use of the phrase “out of code”* is abnormal!  This means that I have an eye for a bargain and we do try to pop into stores at the time products are reduced.  Tesco often have reduced flowers, sometimes down to as little as 50p per bunch which is an amazing bargain.

Tesco has always been one of our favourite stores for flowers.  They are normally quite well stocked, regardless of the size of the store, and it is quite rare that we go there and find that there is nothing we like.  However, for us, it has been the longevity of the flowers that has really attracted us to them.    Even the reduced options I have mentioned above tend to last at least 2 weeks, sometimes longer. 

I was sent a voucher to purchase a full cost bunch of flowers, plus some money off ones which I haven’t yet used.  The £5.00 voucher I spent on a bunch of beautiful lilies for my Mum when we went round there for my birthday celebrations.  We were both pretty impressed with the size of the bunch for the £5.00 that it cost us- we got about 6 large stems, none of which were out.  My only minor criticism, which makes no difference to me, is that none of the bunches had any stems in bloom.  Personally I like this as it means they last longer, but it does mean they look a bit bland so if you are getting them as a gift it might not necessarily work.

Directly after giving them to my Mum I went away for about 2 ½ weeks, providing her with strict instructions to monitor the life span, size of the flowers, and quality of the bloom.  Silence for the whole duration of my trip.  When I returned I anxiously contacted her, thinking she had forgotten and I was going to be left without a picture.  To my surprise I got a response (on the 14^th) saying that they had all bloomed beautifully, the scent was very fresh, fragrant and long-lasting, and that they were only just getting to the point where they needed to be thrown away.  I was shocked.  

As you can see from the picture the colours, size of the heads, and the amount of flowers, is superb, especially for the princely sum of £5.00. 

Mum is now a convert, like us, to Tesco flowers.  It is rare that I will recommend Tesco over my beloved Waitrose but in this case Tesco is a clear winner.  They have got it all; great range, low cost, long lasting, and beautiful to boot.  Thanks Tesco Orchard for giving me the opportunity to try out these flowers free of charge.  Now I just need Rob to use those discount vouchers I still have remaining and purchase some for me.


*Rob's note: Normal people say that food is "out of date".  "Out of code" is jargon that I've only ever heard used by Emma's family.

The Money Shed - the place to go for online earning

I've been dabbling in online earning for about a year now.  A couple of months ago, I discovered a site called The Money Shed.  I signed up and have certainly been glad that I did.

TMS is essentially a forum where people go to discuss online earnings and ways to save money.  They have very active threads on every subject in the sector: Surveys, mystery shopping, PTC, matched betting, blogging, MLMs (the good ones) and so much more.

So far, so Moneysavingexpert.

What sets TMS aside in my opinion, is the community they've built up.  From the enthusiastic amateurs like me to the seasoned pros like Katykicker, who make a full time living from this kind of thing.  Everybody is friendly, welcoming and helpful.

If you're new to online earning and want to know what opportunities are out there, TMS has all the information you need.  If you're already at it and want some help, someone will always steer you in the right direction.  If there's a mistake to be made, someone on the forum has probably already made it and will try to help you avoid it.  The people on TMS keep finding better ways to do things and are happy to share.  If you want to maximise your profit, you need to read these forums.

It's not all just one big love-in though.  Fun and friendly though it is, this is still a serious business and there's potentially a lot of money involved.  This leads to one of my favourite aspects of the TMS community: Conmen and shysters get very short shrift.

New ideas are very much welcomed.  We all appreciate a new income stream here and there, but be prepared to be questioned and to justify yourself.  The people to whom you're trying to sell your new idea are no fools.  They will want to know exactly what's involved and what it will cost and will want to to show proof of your earnings.  If it looks good, someone will try it and report back.  If not...

They all know that get-rich-quick schemes rarely pan out.  If you come on the forum with some variation on the old "Fantastic opportunity to earn £££'s from home.  I'm on track to make £100k a year working only 10 minutes a day and you can too!!!1!", with no further details, you can expect to be greeted with a certain degree of scepticism and suspicion.  Maybe I'll buy into your fantastic new scheme with some of the money that Nigerian Prince has promised to send me...

You will be grilled on your new idea, but in a friendly way.  We have to bear in mind that not everybody who comes along with a dodgy-looking scheme is deliberately trying to con us.  Many of them are victims who have been convinced by some snake oil salesman and are just repeating the same sales pitch.  They need to be helped to see it for what it is before they get in too deep.  The people at TMS will ask the questions that help to expose that.  If you can't answer the questions, then maybe it's not as good an opportunity as you thought.

Between the hints, tips and guides on every aspect of online earning and the solid defence line against the Lyle Lanleys of this world, a TMS account is probably the single most valuable resource you can have in this field.

Big thanks to Jon and the rest of the team for making TMS such a good place to be.  Keep up the good work.

Neobux Experiment: Part 6 - Golden Membership

Status: Profitable
Deposited: $10
Current Balance: $20.65
Profit/Loss: $10.65 profit
Assets: 73 referrals, Golden membership

On 24 March this year, Neobux celebrated its eighth birthday with a promotional discount.  This meant that golden membership cost $75 instead of $90.  Thanks to a good run of mini jobs through March, I had that much in my account, so I took the plunge.

What did $75 buy me?

Golden membership comes with a range of benefits and new features, but I couldn't find a full list of them anywhere before buying.  Now that I've had a chance to look around, here's my summary.

Increased income

The most noticeable benefit is the jump in income.  This comes from three sources:

1. Referral income doubles.  Referral clicks are now worth one cent each, rather than half a cent before.  My 53 referrals were making me about 20-25 cents a day, which immediately become 40-50 cents.  It's really noticeable the way the balance increases now.
2. Personal clicks are worth something now.  As a standard member, you're guaranteed four gold-coloured fixed ads a day, worth 0.1 cents each.  There's usually about 20 other ads available, so your personal clicks get you about 2.5 cents a day (plus the points and adprizes, which are much more useful).  As a gold member, the fixed ads are worth a whole cent each, and you get nine of them a day.  Add in the others and you're looking at around 11 cents a day from personal clicks.
3. Mini job bonuses double.  Standard members get a 15c bonus for every dollar earned, Golden gets 30c.  March was a good month, where I did $60 worth of mini jobs, receiving $9 of bonus, that would have been $18 if I were golden at the time.

So without the mini job income, I'm around 30c a day up, just on the 53 referrals I already had.  That's around $110 a year.  Even at full price, that upgrade is paying for itself.

Add in the mini job bonuses for an extra $110 (assuming I can keep up the March pace, which I probably can't) and we're up to $220 a year extra, a profit of $130 on full price membership or $145 on the promotional price.

So yes, it's worth it.

My referrals are not yet self-sustaining and will require subsidy from personal clicks and mini jobs until I have 115 of them (see previous post), but I'm making good progress towards that number.

Renting referrals

You can now have up to 2,000 referrals (or 2,099 if you're careful how you do it), up from 300 at standard level.

You should now receive better quality referrals, due to a stricter distribution filter.

As a standard member, you were guaranteed only to get referrals who have clicked at least 11 ads in the last 5 days (average 2.2).  Golden members only get people who have clicked 14 in the last 6 days (average 2.33).  So the people you get should be marginally more active.

You can still rent more referrals seven days after the last set, but you are restricted to two one-hour slots, which you chose yourself.  I chose noon and 11pm as the most convenient times for me, but then the clocks changed and now I'm on 1pm and midnight.

Enhanced statistics

A few new graphs appear with the upgrade.

On the statistics page, transfers to rental balance and golden pack balance are added to the group that contains the recycle and extension values.

A new graph showing the number of referrals due for extension over the next 270 days is very useful in helping you to spread out the costs.

On the rented referral page, a new icon has been added to each line which shows the click rate over the last ten days for that referral.  Possibly of use when making recycling decisions, but this would take a lot of effort if you have a large number of referrals.

The summary page now has a smaller version of the direct and rented referral clicks graphs from the statistics page.

Progress and future plans

Since upgrading, I have acquired a further 20 referrals.  At the time that I upgraded, I had enough cash to get another 10 and extend them for 240 days while there was still a discount on ($1.09 each, rather than $1,12).  I got the other 10 a week later and am holding back enough cash to extend them when they come due.

I've added a page to my Neobux spreadsheet to track costs and tell me how much I can spend on new rentals.  It shows for every day over the next year the projected extension and upgrade costs, assumed daily income (based on a conservative 0.6 average) and then calculates the projected balance at the end of each day.  The sheet then tells me how many I can afford to rent based on my current balance, without running out of money when costs come up over the next year.

Currently it's telling me I can get up to another 15 this Friday, so I'll probably end up getting another 10.

My plan it to keep expanding until I'm renting as many as I can as often as I can, then I'll start withdrawing whatever's left.  Might take a while, but I definitely think it's possible.

Join the fun: https://www.neobux.com/?r=rrobson