Be Imaginative and Grown Up

One of the hardest things to do as a teenager is to get a job. Trust me. I have been there and done that. Living in a village I was at a disadvantage already with not many jobs going and a lot of people wanting them. The main thing these days is the issue of the law. Anyway, I won't bore you with it, that is for another post, but shopkeepers and employers can't be bothered with the hassle. if you want a paper round before you have finished compulsory education you have to get a working permit, which requires all sorts of stuff from a shopkeeper. Blah blah blah. However there are still lots of jobs which people will employ people from the age of 13 to do little things for them.

For example you may find a gardener who needs a hand on a Saturday or the milkman or whatever. What I am trying to say is don't be closed minded about what you are going to do. It doesn't pay. Trust me.

The other point I wanted to mention was that you need to persevere with your job. For example helping out with pot washer at you local pub could eventually lead to you being a waiter or waitress or even a bar steward. There is a natural progression with every job which moves through the ranks as you become older and more experienced and more trusted by your employer. Let me explain to you my path through my teenager career if you like:

I started as a Sunday Paperboy, earning just £4 a week. After 2 months I had been moved onto a Monday to Saturday round which was £16. I was progressing slowly and surely. After about 6 months of doing that I was asked to help out on a Saturday morning putting the papers up for the paperboys. This was 2 hours work at £3.50 an hour. Rubbish, I know, but from there I got to know how the shop worked. How to work the tills, how to put out the papers etc etc. I kept asking the boss, not so I annoyed him but so I was persistent and keen, if there was a job going in the shop.

Until one day, at the glamorous age of 17, he offered me a job part-time working behind the counter. So there was £23 from my paper round and early Saturday morning, plus 8 hours a week at £5 and I was making £63 a week from my part time job. Not bad eh?

That was just with a little bit of persistence and good hard work that got me to a stage where I could earn enough money to fund a car and a girlfriend. What I am trying to say is approach any job, no matter how boring it may be to start off with, in a mature and proffesional and also positive manner. Don't be the lad that does 3 Sunday rounds and then doesn't bother turning up again. Follow that path.

Link shortening sites: Potential as a money making scheme?

Everybody on the internet is making money from just about anything that you can do on the internet. One of the popular ways which seems to be very popular is link shortening sites such as adf.ly and other similar sites.


There are many different variations on this subject. Adf.ly is currently the most popular and essentially, you register your link, and then get people to click on it and they show the viewer 5 seconds of adverts and then they can redirect to your actual link. The pay is around $5 for 1000 clicks, which to be honest with you is really not very good. If you think about it, you have to be pretty popular to get 1000 views to something. Obviously if you are linking to an internet app or an indie game or something which you have made yourself, and are giving it away for free, then you are making money off the people downloading your app. This I think is a really good way of creating a win win situation for the creator and the consumer, as the creator gets paid for his work, while to consumer doesn't have to fork out money. The trouble is, the amount of recognition the creator gets for his work is peanuts, and doesn't really make it worth it. You have to feel sorry for the creator.


Another way which I have found is a website called DollarUpload.com, which is really quite good, as it pays you between $0.70 and $0.90 per download, which would be a better way to get paid for your downloads. This amount is just under the cost of a song or an app on the iTunes store for example, which getting paid that for your work is very good. Trouble is with this, is getting the views and hits to make the money worthwhile. You can spend days making an internet app or a song or a video or something similar, but if only 1 or 2 people download it you are only getting $1.50 or so for it, which is not a very good hourly rate. However this could be said for any venture of this nature, if you are creating it to generate money, which kind of evens it out.


The question is: Is it all that?


My answer is unless you have a significant amount of views per day, then no. Say you get about  100 downloads a week on a specific app or song or whatever, that is about $70 on DollorUpload, which does become a little worth it, but how are you going to get 100  downloads a week consistently. Lets face it, if you put something like that on the internet, interest in it will die off after a very short space of time, which means you will loose out very quickly. The whole issue with link sharing websites which offer you bags of gold in return for 1 little link is it isn't the money making scheme it is cracked up to be. By no means am I saying it isn't a good way of getting money, but it only is if you get large amounts of hits, which let's face it, this takes a lot of work and really good idea, which unfortunately every one of the 4 billion people who use the internet every day can't come up with a good idea and get it to make money, because it stops being a good idea unless it stands out from the crowd.


If you do choose to use these services, don't expect goldmines to come rushing through your front door the instant that you create the account. It takes a lot of time and a lot of effort and a lot or perseverance to see any kind of results.