Cazmanian_minx's MFi3 diary

kassytbag

well done caz keep it up i am totally confident thaqt you will find the other 5k by april
you are a star!!!!!

setmefree2

Catshark you might enjoy this ;-


http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=HYokLWfqbaU

It's the e bay song on You tube :rotfl:

cazmanian_minx

Don't move, don't breathe, don't speak - OH has a mortgage approved in principal, and that's after they've been informed about the nearly-six-year-old default :T We'll know for certain some time next week.

I emailed the university this morning to chase up my £11 and my email crossed in cyberspace with one from them offering me some more work They're very apologetic about the missing money and are chasing it up for me.

I'm also thoroughly enjoying the OU photography course. I've been doing some browsing about selling photos and came across this:
http://www.dphotojournal.com/sell-photos-online/
which has some useful advice - I'd never thought about selling through US stock sites and I think my camera will meet the image requirements. I'm going to have a closer look at some of the sites linked to in the blog over the weekend and go through all my archive CDs to see what I've got that might be suitable.

Ebay has quietened right down thanks to the strike, though I've got a £50 order to go special delivery tomorrow, which is good. Amazon has been less of a success - 2 weeks after taking out the pro merchant subscription and listing loads of CDs, I've sold a grand total of 5 items and as a result am going to get charged £6 tomorrow. Ooops! I've got another 2 weeks of that subscription, so I'll keep it until the end of the period and then cancel so I don't get rebilled.

Caz

weezl74

Caz,

Just a thought, why not have the terms of your invoice as 'on demand' rather than 30 days. My experience has been that people wait as long as you give them generally, and it may as well make a months interest in your account as theirs...

Just a twopennorth! Hope it's of use...

L

catshark88

Setmefree2,

Thank you for the link, great fun and scarily close to the mark!

x

catshark88

Caz,

You might like to have a look at www.ifp3.com It is a site from the US that hosts your pics and gives you shopping cart functionality via PayPal. You set up your own sub site and can use your own web address. Does pretty well all you need it too and only costs about £15 a month for unlimited hosting. You would need to do your own marketing but it may be worth a look. I've used it since March and I'm very pleased with it.

Am having trouble with OU course, every time you have to choose a pic you prefer or a reason to be there, I end up as one of the "0.3% agree with you" lot! Have not been able to do much as organising probate, but hope to catch up this/ next week.

cazmanian_minx

weezl74 - thanks for that, I'll give it a try. The University can only pay me in their monthly expenses run though, and the publishing world is absolutely notorious for being slow payers, I'll be happy if I get the money in 60 days to be honest!

catshark88 - wish I'd seen that about 5 hours earlier, I signed up with EKM this morning! Thank you, anyway!

Despite the strike last week ended up being my best ever week on eBay. In a flush of enthusiasm, I've applied for credit terms with my largest supplier, which will really help the cashflow over Christmas.

I signed up to an e-commerce solution this morning - £49.95 set-up fee plus £19.99 a month (plus VAT) for unlimited products. So far I'm impressed; in less than 5 hours I've got the front page designed, all the categories installed, customised the T&Cs, customised the layout, set up all the payment methods I want to accept and customised the P&P options. All that's left to do is get the shop showing as a subdomain of my own website (all set up, just needs them to tweak something their end so it shows my shop instead of their homepage, should be done by the end of the day) and add in all the products (gulp!). Fortunately OH is away tonight and tomorrow so I can pull a couple of all-nighters and hopefully have it finished quickly.

I've also signed up to submit to one of the stock photo companies I wrote about in an earlier post. Seems I've picked about the toughest one of the lot in terms of getting images accepted, but because of that they pay well and they have a big client base. I've now got to pick my 10 best images and upload them for approval - unless at least 7 out of 10 pass their quality control, I'll be rejected and will have to wait 30 days to try again, so I need to get this right first time. Fortunately they have a very helpful photographers' forum where accepted photographers will critique a potential submission, so I'm going to present my work there for some feedback before I do the upload.

Time to pack up today's orders and then brave the downpour in a dash to the postbox - it hasn't stopped raining here all day.

Caz

cazmanian_minx

I'm multi-tasking today! I've managed to combine 3 jobs into 1 - my OU homework for the week, sorting out a present for OH's brother's birthday and making a bit of extra cash. How? Chocolate brownies! I have the most wonderful chocolate brownie recipe. It's called Best-Ever Brownies and it really lives up to its billing; not surprising when the ingredients include 2 bars of 85% Lindt and 2 half-bars of Green & Blacks and I'm making OH's brother a batch for his birthday.

My OU homework this week is to take six pictures of something, someone or somewhere you love, so I've been running back and forth from the kitchen to the living room with bowls of melted chocolate, chunks of crumbly chocolate and trays of raw brownie mix! Once they've cooled down, I'll take a final picture of the finished item on a white plate. Unfortunately I can't drizzle chocolate sauce over it, otherwise there'd be one missing...wonder if he'd notice....?

And the making money? I'm shooting the pictures in my softbox and in RAW, so they're large enough to turn into isolations and submit to the stock photography site I signed up to.

I chased up the magazine payment this morning and got a very apologetic phone call from the editor - he's reprinting the invoice and taking it up to accounts personally, it seems to have got lost in their internal mail system. He hopes they'll be able to cut me a cheque today - oh, and could I do another job for them by next Wednesday if he couriers the tape today? :T Add that to the university work that's on its way to me in the post and it's looking like it's going to be quite a good month for extras

STOP PRESS!!!!!! Breaking news, OH has just got a phone call saying that the mortgage is APPROVED!!!!! We've bought the house!!!!!!! (Subject to the Scottish Office Of The Public Guardian approving the sale...!)

Caz

esthomizzy

~Congratulations

Pandora123_2

Congratulations on getting the mortgage!

However, did you really think you could get away with that kind of description for the brownies without sharing the recipe?

:A