Successful Blog

8 Ways the Creative You Can Make Money Online

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A Guest Post by
Rachel Carlson

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More Creative Ways to Make Money Online

Let’s face it – money is a huge concern for people these days. According to MSNBC, about 6.5 million people in the U.S. were working two jobs in 2010. The fact that you’re reading this article probably means that you’re looking for your own second job, or at least some supplemental income. Well, the Internet certainly provides many opportunities and advantages when it comes to making money. For example, many people are familiar with tactics such as flipping vintage items on eBay or Craigslist, taking advantage of the “one man’s trash, another man’s treasure” adage. There’s also the very common practice of freelance writing for sites like eHow and WiseGeek.

But there are other, more creative, possibly even fun ways to make money online. Very few of these solutions will provide you with the amount of cash that a second job would, but you’ll also be saving time and money by working at home. Think about it – there’ll be no cost of commuting or going out for lunch every day. And if you’re lucky enough to have something approaching a clear wireless internet 4G connection, you can “work” from anywhere at any time on a laptop or even a smartphone. So stop worrying and start getting creative:

1. Sell Video Game Money

Are you an avid World of Warcraft player? Why not monetize those hours of playing by selling some of your gold for real-world money? There are several sites that will pay you actual cash for your WoW gold; alternatively, you could just contact other players with offers on your own. Also, if you’re not too attached to it, players have been known to sell their accounts for hundreds and even thousands of dollars. Similar things can be done in the game Second Life. Also, if you’re planning on spending time playing Diablo III when it’s released, take advantage of its innovative real money auction house.

2. Sell Stock Photos

Get out the camera – pictures that you take can be contributed to services like iStockPhoto, Stockxpert, Fotolia, Shutterstock, Dreamstime and Clustershot as stock photos that are available for public use. Every time someone downloads one of your pictures for any reason, you get paid. The money results are often miniscule until your picture receives hundreds of downloads, but success isn’t uncommon. According to ABC News, this photo has already earned the photographer over $10,000.

3. Sell Items on Etsy

Etsy is a place where anybody can sell their handmade or vintage items. This includes jewelry, clothing, accessories, housewares, pet supplies, toys, decorations, and many other categories. It has become an extremely popular site for buyers who are looking for unique items. So, do you knit in your spare time? Maybe you have metalsmithing skills that you’re not putting to use. Any unique product that you can hand-craft can be sold on Etsy. And people are buying – $45.8 million of goods were sold on Etsy in August of 2011.

4. Become a ChaCha Guide

Have you used ChaCha? Basically, it’s a service that allows you to call or text with a question that will be almost instantly answered by a knowledgeable guide. Now, this “guide” is usually just looking up the answer on the Internet, but they do have to be pretty creative, as ChaCha has been known to receive some fairly outlandish questions (i.e. “How much wood could a woodchuck chuck?”). So, if you want to increase your Internet search skills while gaining knowledge in just about any subject, consider becoming one of these guides. The pay ranges from around 2 cents to 20 cents per answer, but if you work quickly you could earn a decent amount of spending money.

5. Blogging

Starting and maintaining a blog takes a lot of work, but it’s potentially more profitable than any other suggestion on this list. You’ll first have to decide what your blog will discuss. If you’re just looking to make money, you could focus your blog in a niche industry that allows you to attract advertisers and affiliate relationships, as well as allowing you to make sales yourself. You’ll then have to decide on a blogging platform, a domain name, and a hosting service. You’ll also need to start regularly creating content and keeping your site updated. Performing SEO and link building doesn’t hurt either. After all this, it can still take quite a while for your blog to ever start making any money (it might never), but there are plenty of success stories showing that people can make a lot of money when blogging.

6. eJury

eJury is a site where trial attorneys try to get a feel for public opinion regarding a case. It helps them evaluate their evidence, choose jurors, and make compelling arguments in the court room. Here’s how it works: after registering for eJury, you’ll occasionally be sent an email asking you to examine a mock trial. You’ll have a specific amount of time to complete the questions, after which you’ll be paid $5-$10. Doesn’t seem like much money, but it’s not much work either. Here’s an example of an eJury mock trial.

7. Do Some Freelance “Geeking”

If you’re looking to make money on the Internet, chances are good that you already have some experience with coding, web design, or SEO. If this is the case, why not offer your skills up to small businesses that are trying to make it on the web? Contact small businesses about building web sites, or just offer to help them implement a shopping cart, redesign their site, etc. You’ll need to be able to build trust with clients before you can start, so be sure to have a professional resume and portfolio ready. A site like Warrior Forum can help you find this type of work.

8. Enter Logo Contests

Are you a budding graphic designer? You’re probably already aware of the competition in this field, but it never hurts to submit some of your designs in for contests to get a chance at winning some cash. You’ll be building a portfolio and networking at the same time. So, be sure to check out sites like 99 Designs, which has hosted over 100,000 contests and has awarded over $25 million to designers.

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Author’s Bio:
Rachel Carlson is a writer and student that works from home. While she spends a lot of her time writing, she also helps different companies like Clear Wireless with gaining exposure through various blogs and websites. She has recently started a new Twitter account and is finally going to give it a real shot. She can be followed at @carlson_rachel.

Thanks, Rachel!

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Be irresistible!
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

The Five Questions to Leverage Your Unique Position

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Start with Knowing Where You Are

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Strategy is a about making and leveraging new beginnings from wherever you sitting right now. The very nature of strategy is unique to who or what you are. In other words, it’s not a plan that is go grand it good apply to anyone.

Statements like these that I’ve read on too many corporate strategic powerpoints are not strategies …

  • Become a thought leader in our space.
  • Raise our brand awareness.
  • Leverage our customers to own more market share.

These are broadly written descriptions of possible goals.

A strategy is a practical system to advance achievement. True strategy focused on leveraging opportunity consistently and fluently in the direction of growth.
Strategy is uniquely formed from knowing where we stand and what we own.

Strategy begins by understanding where you stand and bringing all of who and what you are to where you want to go.

Knowing where you’re going is irresistibly attractive. Who’d want to follow you if you don’t know where you’re going to go?

So, to get get from here to there, you need to have a goal — a vision on the horizon that you’re willing to commit your best resources to achieving. You’ll need a team of great people to support you — belief and influence will attract the best people to participate in your mission to reach that vision.

But first, you have to know where you are before you go.

Getting from here to there is impossible if you don’t know where here is.

Your unique position defines how to leverage strategic opportunities that yours alone.

The Five Questions to Leverage Your Unique Position

To build a true strategy a person or business has to begin with where you stand and a clear picture of where you want to go. It’s hard to get there from here, if you haven’t figured out where here is. These five questions will help define your unique strategic position.

  1. What drives you to your mission and your goal? Know why you do what you do. No person, no business accomplishes great things alone. Frodo had his friends. Batman did too. Your mission clarifies your position and the field on which you’re playing. It’s the higher calling that attracts the right team who want to move things forward with you.
  2. What do you already own? The strategic of owning nothing can mean the lower risk of nothing to lose. Do you have a spark, a spirit, a culture, a process, a system, a model, a location, a concept, a team that works for you?
  3. What position on the playing field do you uniquely hold by why of the ground, the talents and the values that are your own? If your back is against the wall, no one can sneak up behind you. Distract, Divide, Decide the rules that work for you. Choose the most natural rule of opposites put it to work for you. If the industry cares about sales, care about follow through. If the industry cares about flash and glitz go minimalist. Make having your back against the wall the new the black — the envied position to choose.
  4. What is your role that serves others better than anyone else can? Be driven to make nothing about you. Nothing beats listening to the people who love you to help them with their dearest quest. Use your position to get to know who loves you and to raise the best of them closer to their goals.
  5. How will you combine these to decide how every competitve offer is irrelevant? What does your team bring that no other team can offer — that no other team could reproduce? What’s the WOW of just interacting with you?

Being good at execution or at picking a direction won’t get us to that winning goal. Understanding the strategic advantages of every position, even the worst one you might imagine, that allow us to make the small adjustments and leverage the advantages that the folks who need the “sure winner,” who can’t risk, can’t see, or can’t move fast enough to leverage. Knowing and constantly reassessing your position is as important as knowing your goal.

Have you found the leverage in your position yet?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Ideas & Infographs: Decisions, Decisions … How Do You React?

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by Mihaela Lica

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Decisions Require Intelligence

When it comes to making big decisions, that can often make or break your business, it can be tempting to just go with your gut instinct, Isn’t it? After all, it’s your business and you know it better than anyone, right? Who’s better qualified to make a decision than you? And then, most of you out there have learned how hard this mentality bites too.

In actual fact, the “gut instinct” approach is fraught with hazards, that is, unless your gut instinct is Homeric – the stuff of legend. Face it, people have tendency to let their imaginations run away with them – we have all these plans and ideas and we can picture everything in our minds working out perfectly, accordingly – even in the most dire situations. Our judgment can so easily become clouded, as we get excited and think too far ahead of ourselves. Consequently, we make rash decisions that usually backfire on us.

So, decision making big or small, requires intelligence. No, not you turning into Albert Einstein, but the kind of business intelligence that can be gleaned ever more effectively in our digital work and playground here.

[Click the image to see the infograph full size.]

Business Intelligence Consumerization

Created By DomoTechnologies, Inc.

Business intelligence is far more accessible now, than ever before. As the above infographic courtesy DOMO (http://www.domo.com/what-we-do/additional-resources/8/82#featured) above shows, business intelligence, in the form of highly visualized and easily accessible data, is quickly becoming a vital resource for internet entrepreneurs. Check this out.

Having access to business intelligence is critical to your success. Unless you have a crystal ball, you simply cannot predict the outcome of those key decisions, no matter how well you might think you know your business and your consumers. The message is loud and clear – don’t act impulsively, get the facts first. That’s what everyone else is doing – so think about competing.

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Author’s Bio:

Mihaela “Mig” Lica founded Pamil Visions in 2005 where she uses her hard won journalistic, SEO and public relations skills toward helping small companies navigate the digital realm with influence and success.

You can find Mig on Twitter as @PamilVisions

Thanks, Mig!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Has a CFD Experience Cost You Business?

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In 2007, I proposed an adventure on my blog. I invited bloggers to submit five bits of information that would promote their blogs:

  1. the name of the blog
  2. the blog url
  3. the tagline
  4. what makes the blog worth visiting
  5. one bit of advice for new bloggers

and I gave them 2 days to submit the information, clearly stating that the deadline was Friday noon Central and pointing out the clock in the sidebar of my blog.

How hard could it be to gather and email me those five bits of information?

Yet …
82% of the entries came in with information missing.

Which led Small Biz Survival Owner, Becky McCray, and I to describe a new syndrome — CFD: Can’t Follow Directions.

Is CFD Hurting Your Business?

In the case of that blog promotion, perhaps no one was hurt by the fact that if enough information was missing, I didn’t bother to hunt down the sender. That the entry wasn’t included might not have made a difference to their potential blog traffic. We’ll never know.

But I can tell you that it happens regularly that when I’m looking for help on a paying project, the presence of CFD makes a huge difference. Let me explain why …

  • CFD means that I can’t trust the work. I’m telling you what I need and how I need it delivered, if the business can’t follow directions, then I’m going to get back something other than I requested.
  • CFD means that things will take more time. When I have to repeat what I need, that second iteration means it takes twice as long to get the work done.
  • CFD means more cost. Guidelines and directions are meant to make the work easier, faster, and less costly. Whether something was missed because it wasn’t read or because it wasn’t understood, it adds up to corrections or adjustments. Corrections and adjustments cost time and money.
  • CFD means missed opportunities. What I might have been doing with the time it took to do things over is a huge hidden impact of CFD.

So I’m hugely biased toward people who listen, read directions, and ask questions if they don’t understand for certain what we’re trying to do together. They get my loyalty and my repeat business.

I run from people who show signs of CFD.
CFD not only hurts your business, but it hurts mine too.

Has a CFD experience cost you business?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

You are not nuts and other important stuff

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about things I don’t say enough to other people.

Someone today reminded me of a note I wrote in my newsletter not long ago.

I’ve been going through the email replies I’ve sent to people who’ve asked for help over the past 5 years. I’m not surprised to find that, although the people seem of every age, size, background, ability and economic class, the problems they bring to me seem to be the same kind — problems of connecting the space between our heads and our hearts, problems of believing in what we know about ourselves.

And I find some lines repeating. So I share them with you for when you might need them.

You are not nuts.
God is in heaven.
Angels are everywhere.
People are made of the same stuff as stars.
We’re not supposed to have the answers.
Love will draw a circle around you.

You don’t need to worry about drowning tonight.
You can sleep.
We’ll still eat tomorrow.
I love you.

Be you.
You are already irresistible.
Keep your head wired to your heart.

Liz's Signature

How I Got from Gratitude to Grace

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about gratitude.

I understand the power of the words, thank you.
I understand them so deeply that as a child I was afraid to say them.
I would watch how some people use them frivolously, I was afraid that people wouldn’t hear how much I meant them.
I was afraid they wouldn’t see in my eyes or hear in my voice that I meant them.
I feel the words, thank you, like a frog hears, deeply from his tiny ears into his lungs.

As I considered Thanksgiving, I thought it’s time I learned more about what powers those words.

I did a search for the etymology of the word, gratitude, and found myself wandering through a world of connections.
Our word gratitude may have from the 15th Century Middle French word, gratitude which means “good will.” If it came from the Latin word gratus which means “thankful, pleasing,” it’s a cousin to the word grace.

Good will.
Thankful.
Pleasing.
Grace.

In some families, grace is a prayer.
In some, it’s a ritual and a tradition.
Some have chosen it to name a child.

But when I saw that word, grace, … it was all of those and more.

Grace …
Immediately my mind heard music, my heart saw this photo, which has been a friend since 2006.

grace

So I went looking for the word, grace, in my own writing.
It appears twice in these ways …

… I wish for my friends to be around me. I wish for the courage to face where I’m going, to know what I know — that I’m unprepared for what I’ll be doing. … Then I breathe. Then I breathe. Then I breathe once more…. I ask permission without words, but through the grace and gentleness of my movement. I ask for faith from sky and angels who are everywhere. I need the wisdom of one who has conquered fear. … Inside the fear is the graceful wisdom I was seeking. —The Rhythm of the Rowing

and

Head and heart together. Head and heart – it took so long to know.
When head and heart come together life is a dance.
Head and heart together . . .
grace. — Head and Heart Together

I wandered back through my life to find a conclusion. I wrote it years ago, but only realized it now.

Thank you is best offered filled with trust — breathing in life without fear.
With grace and gentleness, head and heart come together in gratitude.
That’s how I got from gratitude to grace.

Wishing you your family and friends around you.
May you move in gratitude and grace.

Be irresistible.

Liz's Signature