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.

Slicethepie.com: Get Paid for Listening and Reviewing Music

In my endless trawling through the internet for ways o make money, I have found many different claims of get rich quick schemes and many different people offering me services and items which cost to sign up for and don’t really offer that much in return. All they are essentially is somebody else trying to make money off other people trying to make money. Quite a logical and simple idea right?

One thing that has really caught my eye though is this service called slicethepie.com. Basically, you sign up, they ask you a few questions about yourself and your musical tastes and then you get presented with a screen with an mp3 music player and a text box. The instructions are simple, listen to the music, and write a report on it and after 45 seconds you can rate it between 1 and 10 and move on to the next.

It is not a simple as it may seem at first, you have to comment on a variety of musical elements including texture, harmony, melody and lyrics to be able to submit your review, but once you get the hang of using these keywords, it is relatively quick. The automated system which checks your review is also very clever in picking up whether your report accurately reflects your scoring too. This is the bit which I find most intriguing, as it is spot on.

Because of the way the website is designed, you don’t get to see any of the information which your are inputting, like the word count or the amount of keywords, which is good as this makes you add as many as possible. If, like me you have a basic understanding of music, this is really quite easy and also enjoyable, but I suggest you do some background reading on musical elements before you start this endeavour.

I really like the way you are rewarded for you work as well. It states you will earn between $0.05 and $0.20 for each review, depending on how much you write and how well written it is, so these are always good point to bear in mind. I have not yet got it into double figures yet, and get around $0.08 per review, but this is still good. In 30 mins, I racked up about $3, and I did this for a week and got myself about $12 in return. You can only withdraw money of $10 or more, which does mean you have to work for a substantial amount of time unfortunately, however there wards are well worth it.

This is definitely something to consider if you enjoy listening to new music and getting paid for doing just that. I find that it really is inspiring listening to new music and enjoying what people have to offer outside of the mainstream eye, and getting paid a little for it as well. It isn’t really hard graft and the rewards are very pleasing and I think fair for the amount of work that you do.

Setting up a Business on eBay

So you will arrive at this article with some intentions of having stuff to sell on the eBay store. This might be due to a clear out of the attic or garage, or you have a valuable item you would like to get rid of, or you may have arrived here by reading our article on yard sales, and feel you are ready to get stuck into setting up a business on eBay. Whatever, this article will guide you through how to sell on eBay and how to set up a business on eBay, along with other sites that you can use to sell your stuff.

With your items gathered, you will be able to analyse what sells well and what to put on at what prices. Now anything techy sells really well. There are loads of people wanting to pick up a bargain on iPods or cell phones or old TV monitors and even assorted cable spaghetti. Other things which sell well are watches and jewellery, along with toys and games. While these sell best, pretty much anything that you would buy second hand will sell on eBay, because the target audience is so big that the chances of people viewing a certain item each day are high enough for everything to be covered and craved on the eBay store.

While that sounded very nerdy and mathematical, essentially you have a good chance with anything, just a better chance with some things than others. For example, I tried to sell a clarinet reed on eBay just to see what happened, and I didn’t sell. Not a big enough audience wanting clarinet reeds because half the population don’t even know what 1 is, let alone have a use for it!

So with your selection of items sorted, you now have the tedious task of putting everything up. First I would advise that you take a photo of everything you need to sell. A good photo means a good sale essentially, and no photo means no sale. Or there about. So get a clean piece of white or black paper (white is better because it is happier and more inviting) and slope it against a wall on a table or something so you have a nice homemade studio. Now you don’t need a fancy camera for fancy photos, it is all about the light and the background. With background sorted, make sure there is plenty of natural light and place your desired selling object in a reasonably artist manor if you can manage it, and snap away until you get a photo which looks nice. I really enjoy this process and take ages over it, but if it isn’t your thing don’t make it last too long, however this is paramount to your eBay lot’s success.

Next you need to create an eBay account if you haven’t already done so and go to the sell an item under the sell tab. I also advise at this point you set up a PayPal account if you haven’t done this either, as this will help to maximise your sale chances further. The Listing Creation form is very intuitive and just requires a little knowledge around the bidding price area. With the start bidding price, it is free to list if you start at 99 cents or less, however you may want more for your item, so you have to weight up the risks and the value of the item.

The one thing I would say is don’t go to high, but don’t go to low either. Think about how much you would want for it, then how much you would pay for the item if you were going for a bargain and take of about 10%. That is the golden rule really. Also if you have purchased the item previously with the intent of selling on eBay, then you need to make sure you know how much you paid for it in the first place to avoid loosing money.

Another handy tip is to look around and see what the same item is going for on other listings on eBay. Remember people buying on eBay go for a bargain, not to splash out lots or else they would buy the item brand new, so this is important to consider as well. Make sure you are well clued about cost and type of delivery too, or else you could end up losing money by posting it for more than you bargained for.

While this may seem a lot of information to take in at once, they are small things that you need to think about to get that perfect sale. If you are considering buying on eBay as well with the hope of reselling, look out for things which you could split or join together for more money, or collectable items which you know a lot about that are going for a bargain. It might then be worth taking these to a specialist website or dealer for the chance of a better return.

While this article largely covers eBay, there is also the option of selling on Amazon and Play.com which would be more useful for books and CDs and DVDs, as these websites, especially the latter, specialise in these items and therefore getting specialist traffic to them. You just refine your target audience by doing this. Another website to look at is online classified ad directory, Loot.com, but expect more content about these websites at a later stage.

Make a bomb on Web Businesses

Making money is all about making the most of your skills. One way I did this was by making websites. If you know how to code websites from scratch using html and php, or even just have a basic understanding of Dreamweaver, or a similar website package, and an idea which could prove successful, then you could be in with the chance of making money yourself. This may seem a daunting task, but it is the perfect way to create some extra revenue and there are many people out there who would be willing to buy it off you.

All you need is to be able to use a basic program, and a good solid business idea. Easy, right? Although it sounds it, I should warn you of some major pitfalls of this adventure. While it requires outgoing cost to start off with, it is a risky business and needs a good head and a good eye. You need to be able to time your site right as to when to sell it, and know what sites sell well.

When I say it needs no outgoing costs, I am lying a little bit. The user will want to buy the website complete with a domain name and in most cases a web hosting package. This means you need to make sure your domain name for your chosen website is available and ready to go before you put in a whole load of hard work and realise that somebody has already created a business which you are trying to sell to somebody.

People also like to see, if you are going to sell at the higher end of the market, a set of domain names which relate to the name of the site in your possession which they can save so nobody can copy their site. If you don’t understand then an example is Google. They own thousands of other web domains so that nobody can get even close to them. They even own the web domain googlesucks.com!

Next on the list in the internet business purpose. If you try and sell somebody an online store selling cakes and cookies, it will never sell, as somebody would have to make to goods to sell. What I am trying to show you is that the best subject matter for an online business which you are going to sell is always something which is virtual, like a service or a blog, or even something like a program store or a domain store.

The reason why making websites to sell on to other people is such a good money maker is because they sell for lots of money, and this is because people buy the whole package, as I have said before. Now I will explain this in a bit more detail. As you would when you buy a business in real life, an internet business has it’s own corporate identity and it’s own logos and marketing service as well, which would have to be produced to sell with the website.

The other really important thing that surrounds a business is popularity and on the world wide web this is measures in page hits. I would strongly advise, spend a couple of months developing your website and getting it to function as a business before you even attempt to sell it because the thing which will make it sell is an already established customer base, because this means an already established source of income. Everybody knows the hardest thing in the business process is setting it up and people are lazy. The more established it is, the more it will sell for, and the more worth it is for the hard work you have put into it. It is like investing: you have to wait for results. My motto in business, which I have learnt, often the hard way, is that patience is a virtue. And that really is all there is to it.

I have also written an article about making website templates to sell, which is less complicated, but a smaller return than selling web businesses, so please check that out if you like the idea of creating an income from your skills in web design. Thank you for reading and I hope this has been of help. For any further questions please contact me at peachy146@gmail.com.