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.

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.