How I Earned Over $350 Selling Spider Plants

I bought a single 'Spider Plant' a couple of years ago.

I put it into some good potting soil and a large pot, then it began to grow larger and put out runners. These runners carry baby plants on them,  Growing 'Spider Plant' babies.

Mature Baby, note root buds beneath leaves

When a baby Spider Plant matures, you see a crown of leaves and underneath these leaves are small brown stubby root buds. I take a plastic Coke or Pepsi bottle and fill this with water. Cut the baby Spider Plant from the runner and put the root buds into the neck of the coke bottle. I place the Coke bottle on my bathroom counter where it is cool and slightly humid. In about one week the roots will have grown about one inch long into the water.

Fill one of your plastic pots with compost, poke a hole in the compost and drop the roots into the hole making sure the base of the leaves is above the level of the soil. pat down the potting soil around the roots and water the pot gently.

I keep the new baby plant in my bathroom for a couple of weeks, you may occasionally mist the plant with a fine water spray if the leaves look like they are thin and wilting but don't add too much water to the potting compost.

Mature Baby Spider Plants in Bottles of water

Don't Panic If an Ad Gets Old

Sometimes we take on too much work, don't we?

I do. I plan on doing x, y and z but only x and z get done and it can be weeks or months before I get around to y.

This was a situation that I found myself in last week. I have several blogs, some of my more popular blogs had a lot of traffic but the quieter ones, well were getting lost on the do it list.

Suddenly one article on a quiet list got several hundred visits in  one week. An advertisement on that blog which is an automatically updated ad from amazon suddenly seemed popular too.

The ad server had been linked to the blog for over two years and had only two clicks in that time. Suddenly when this post went popular I had several clicks on the advertisement which showed some expensive Digital SLR cameras, in a week three cameras were sold from that link. OK three sales from an ad that was about two years old was not a lot over the length of time, but it was three clicks and sales.

The products in the ad space were the latest items, the ad space had been set up with the amazon wizard to show new products. So the space never got really stale.

So whenever setting up ad space on a blog or website. consider using the ad wizard which will update automatically with new items rather than showing the same item and having to swap out regularly.

Low Cost Borrowing From the Crowd

Over recent years there has been a number of ways to get money from crowd sourcing and micro-investors.

The aim of crowd sourcing is to  gather together people who are willing to lend small amounts of cash to borrowers.

Borrowers can borrow for various reasons; setting up a small business, consolidating credit card debt or borrowingg at low interest rates to fund a car purchase or make home improvements.

I recently found a new source of income from lending with a company called Lending Club a San Francisco based organization which brings together lenders and borrowers to fund loans by issuing notes of a minimum of $25.

To read more go to my Investore Blog and read the article  Lending to Invest

Zazzle Store to Look At

While I was looking around on zazzle.com the other day I came across this great example of what you can do with the store functions.

Take a look at this great store and see what fun you can have creating products.

Cute N Comfy Online Gift Shop

T-Rex Wish I Could Drink This Beer Shirts by cutencomfy
Make your own tee shirts at zazzle.com.

Or Urban Vibes 

Urban Vibes Mug by Urban_Vibes
Create unique custom cups at Zazzle.

What has been Happening?

Over recent months I have been expanding my online businesses.


My online bookstore, Bretsuki's Books, at amazon.com marketplace has been pretty successful.  Turning over sevel hundred books in the first six months of business and the business is still growing.


I have also been continuing to create products for my zazzle.com stores. The biggest of these stores, *, has increased sales over 250% in the last year, March 1, 2013 until March 1, 2014.
My biggest surprise with my zazzle.com stores is the numbers of International sales. a full 60% of my sales in the last seven months have been from Europe, mostly Germany and closely followed by the United Kingdom.


The major seller has been with items using products bearing what you may consider United States icons, the U.S. flag and Uncle Sam have been very popular.

A Used Bookstore

Opening a used bookstore with amazon is very easy.

You can opt to sell your own items or you can choose to use the Fulfilment by Amazon service.

For the most part I use the Fulfilment by Amazon service because customers can use their Amazon Prime accounts to have goods delivered with FREE two Day Shipping and non Amazon Prime customers who spend $25 at the same time as they purchase an item from my store can opt for Free Supersaver shipping.

To get Free Supersaver shipping customers do not need to spend $25 at my storefront. All purchases from my store count towards the $25 total and purchases can be from several amazon store holders or Amazon.com itself.

My stor is also registered with Amazon to sell Internationally, so my sales are not just restricted to the U.S. but can be shipped to the rest of the world too. Raising my customer potential from about 300 million to over 6 Billion people.

Take a look at my storefront.storefront

Scare of the Week

Last week started pretty calmly. It was Labor Day weekend and pretty relaxed. I didn't realize as I prepared a shipment for my amazon store that it was going to cause a lot of worry over the week.

Being Labor Day last Monday, I was not able to send a box of books on that day so it had to wait until TTuesday to ship. All went well as the box containing thirty books with an approximate retail value of $300 moved down through California to Los Angeles with UPS.

UPS is usually very good at the shipping process, it updates its records regularly so I can follow all my shipments which normally take about five business days to travel from my base to my normal amazon.com fulfillment center in Indiana.

Well Thursday morning, I checked the status of my package. It showed an Exception had occurred.

Well if you read UPS's notes on an Exception it is pretty scary, an exception is described as bad weather, destruction of the package and loss of the barcode delivery note.

I went into panic mode. Visualizing my books scattered along the I-5 corridor, being torn to shreds by coyotes for den making material. It was awful. I held off contacting UPS straight away because I though there was a mistake and in a few hours it would change to In Transit again.

Late Friday there was no change to the status and so I called UPS and spoke to a great customer service operator. She took a few moments to track down my package. It had left L.A. Thursday night on it's way to Indiana, the package had however somehow slipped through the automatic updating system on its departure scan, triggering the exception warning.

I remained on tenter hooks all week-end as my package moved across country. It's next check-in scheduled for the shipping center in Illinois. It finally arrived there in the early hours of Monday this week, one day late but at least my scare was over.

Three hundred dollars worth of books now move on towards Indiana and the final destination for this journey and I can breathe again at last.