buy me a beer

or buy me a coffee

This buy me a beer request for donations is appearing with increasing frequency in blogs, especially those that pride themselves on informative content and are not too aggressive in their sites about making money from ads or affiliate ads or selling their own info products.  One should not view this as a donating to charity request.  Rather, it should be interpreted as a gesture of appreciation for the work the blogger has done in putting up this post, as well as maintaining the blog, which, in truth, does take a lot of man-hours. 

It actually is a WordPress plug-in from Ankesh Kothari that instals at the end of every post and on the sidebar.  Well-wishers donate through their PayPal account. 

If the blog owner does not drink he has the option to ask donors to buy coffee.

A lot of people ask why not just ask readers to donate money instead of asking them to buy a beer.  The answer is that if you specify an action for the money, they are far more agreeable to donate than if you just ask them for money itself.

To view directions on installing this plugin, go here.

I have installed the plugin on my site at the end of every post.  So, c’mon man, buy me a coffee!  Better still, buy me 2 coffees!!

Stupid gullible me.  I had attended an internet marketing seminar a year ago.  We were exposed to a lot of internet marketers, each of whom took his turn on the stage, waxing eloquent about his system, how easy it would be for us to join his individual course, how much money we could make on the internet using his system.  Make money online.  Impressive.  The (apparently real) online income figures projected on the screens were very impressive. Each of the presenters would have beaten a used car salesman flat out.  Each painted visions of tons of income coming in from Google Adsense, affiliate marketing, list building, adwords ppc. 

A lot of us were particularly taken in by a super salesman type whose approach to the audience and his subject was magnetizing, to give him credit. His ability to get full audience attention and participation in his presentation was amazing. Even now I don’t know how or what he said that seemed to make so much sense to me.  It sounded so easy.  All we had to do was to make a lump sum payment (a pittance, to hear him say it) to sign up for his system, pay regular monthly subscription fees (it seemed negligible at that time, we were so impressed by the presentation and the figures), do some bare minimum work in choosing some themes for his people to create a website for us monthly, and that was it.  All we had to do was to worry about how to spend the tons of dollars that would pour in once we signed up.  What was specially appealing about his system was his promise of “no need to work at it - just put your money in and sit back and relax”.  Instant massive online income.  Wow.  So a lot of the audience signed up.  You could see the envious looks on the other presenters’ faces when the extremely long queue formed up to sign up for this particular presenter’s system.

So we signed up.

In return for a sum of 3000 dollars, we each got a box of videos and papers to read about internet marketing and how to make money online.  For a monthly sum of 77 dollars, got access to a membership site where we were supposed to listen to some video presentations, and choose some niche for the company to create a website for.  Monthly.

No work needed.

We waited.  Daily we looked at the adsense figures, which were supposed to start multiplying.  NOTHING.

After 3 months a lot of us realised that we had been taken in by marketing hype.  We wrote in to cancel our subscription.  The reply that came from the company left us with a bad taste in the mouth.  Gone was the pleasant and friendly tone.  In its place was a warning that a non-disclosure clause was in effect.  A warning that we could not copy or use any of their methods or systems anywhere (what methods? what systems?).  A warning that if we did not follow the rules, we would get the pants sued off us.

Moral of the story?  Never be taken in by marketing hype.  Is there such a thing as paying your money and see the returns roll in without making any further effort on your part?  No such thing.

Work hard.  Nothing comes free in life.  Make money online?  It is never as easy as it is made out to be.

Have a look at the following youtube video:

Hooray for mobile broadband!  Now we can access the internet anywhere for our work without having to be stuck in MacDonalds, Starbucks or Coffee Bean. Enjoy the video.

Affiliate Marketing
Blogging
Selling your own information/virtual product
E-Bay

How many of you readers can actually stand up and say: “Hey, it was extremely easy!  No sweat!”
Those who can do that are the extremely lucky rare ones.  It is just like striking a lottery.  For most of us who are trying to earn a living from the internet, it is just plain simple hard work.

Initially it is just the grasping of the principles and rules of the internet marketing.  Later it is the setting up of sites, the research involved, getting your site optimised so it shows respectably on search results, and the hard work, work and work getting traffic,  making costly mistakes subscribing to expensive internet marketing programs which claim to teach you how easy it is to make money, giving up on them, joining affiliate programs that can’t sell, and so on.  It is only after a while that you realize that there is no such thing as a magic wand that you can wave that creates a channel of income flowing towards you.  It is only after a long while that you realise that everything depends on you, your effort, your hard work.  The marketing program you joined, no matter what it promised you, only gave you the principles of how to create money from thin air.  You still had to do all the work.  There was no such thing as paying USD5000 and sitting on your butt and watching the money roll in.

However….

However, it does not mean you will not earn.  Earn money you will, and of course it is a combination of luck and hard work that will determine how much you earn.  And it is only when this stream of income comes that can one sit back and say, hey, it was worth all the effort.  Now we can relax and enjoy the residual income that everyone has been talking about.

According to Wikipedia, a paid survey is a type of statistical survey where the participant is rewarded through an incentive program, generally entry into a sweepstakes program or a small cash reward, for completing one or more surveys.

A paid survey is used to collect quantitative information about the participants’ personal and economic habits set against their particular demographic. Incentivized surveys are considered to be more likely to catch a wider and more representative range of respondents compared to unincentivised surveys.

Legitimate surveys are usually unpaid (as with Gallup poll) or incentivized (as with YouGov); surveys where the respondent must pay or purchase products to join a panel are generally scams, as are sites that disappear before paying the participants. Legitimate surveys do not need credit card information from respondents.

Paid surveys are one of the first few methods of generating online money that a person new to internet marketing tends to look at, as they do not involve a considerable degree of skill.  However most paid surveys will conduct a preliminary survey to see if you are qualified to take their surveys i.e. whether you fit into their pre-determined group of respondents. 

If you are on the subscription list of internet marketers, chances are very high that one or more of the products that they will promote to you will be paid surveys.  However one has to be wary, as can be seen by the Wikipedia definition of paid surveys: if the site requires you to pay or purchase something beforehand, it likely will be a scam.  If it does not, the general opinion is that it will take ages filling up survey forms and a lot of effort before one sees any good money coming in.

It is recommended that generally you should be looking at other ways if you intend to make some steady online income.  For example, building a list of subscribers you can market to regularly.

 

Working from the home is an ideal situation.  It saves you time commuting to and from work, it cuts down considerably on overhead expenses such as rental, staff, and utilities such as electricity, phone and internet expenditure. 

The unfortunate problem is discipline.  In order for you to function at home as you normally would in the office, you have to treat your home, or least your homeoffice, as an office.  You need to get up early as you would normally do for the office.  The tendency is for one to wake up pretty late if the office is just  in the next room to your bedroom.  Get your butt up once the alarm clock rings…. get yourself washed and shaved as soon as possible.  Get the energy into you.  Now you’ve got yourself all prepped, go to your homeoffice ( the assumption is that you have a room dedicated for your work, without the usual distractions).  Start working.  Cut out the distractions.  Some major timewasters are listed below:

1.  The phone. Stay off the phone - you can spend hours on the phone with your friends chatting away about totally useless non-income producing topics.  Cut off the conversations to a quick 2 minute chat.  Tell your friends you have a deadline to meet.  This usually helps keep them away.
2.  Stop checking your email -  one of the greatest timewasters.  There is so much info and spam getting sent your way that you can spend valuable time getting entertained by what’s online.
3.  Get the children out of the way -  tell the loving kids that daddy or mommy is working to bring food to the table, to buy them their favorite foods or toys.  Tell the kids not to distract you, and interact with them only during your scheduled breaks.  They can be a big distraction.
4.  Avoid your neighbors.  Ditto.  Too many neighbors assume that if you are at home, you are therefore not working and can discuss the latest football results or can join some neighborhood activity like raising funds for the local school.
5.  Take a break!  One cannot of course do solid work all the way.  The efficiency does reduce over time.  The break must be limited to not more than 15minutes each time, or it will take a mighty effort to restart the engine.

It’s like saying that gravity pulls you up, not down.

Courtney Tuttle says it:  CONTENT IS NOT KING

BACKLINKS ARE KING

You know what?  He is probably right.  It is hard to argue with somebody who is earning tens (hundreds? thousands?) of thousands of dollars compared with our measley cents.

OK.  Time to down my tools.  Time to spend more time looking to link up with other blogs rather than spending hour after hour trying to think up some unique content to post on my blog.

Mentor
Definition:  (noun) A wise and trusted counselor or teacher  (American Heritage Dictionary);
(verb) To serve as a trusted counselor or teacher, especially in occupational settings (AmericanHeritage Dictionary).
Mentors are possibly one of the greatest time-savers invented.  I am quite sure in the course of your blogging career you have encountered problems that have taken you hours or days or even weeks to solve, and upon looking back you would have told yourself that if somebody had told you the answers to your problems much earlier, so much time could have been saved on your part.

Therein lies the value of having a mentor.  A mentor takes years off your learning curve.  Very often we dawdle and waste time over trivial matters that could have been solved by just a simple bit of advice from your mentor. 

Mentors bring with them a huge pool of resources, both in terms of knowledge and past experiences and networks of contacts who can prove useful to you, and you must take advantage of it.  Take advantage of his resources you must, for there are many people who have very good mentors who give very good instruction and hints, and yet these golden nuggets of advice are just ignored.  A pure waste of time and money.  Acquiring knowledge is good.  Utilising this knowledge is much better.

Mentors also offer a good listening ear for your hopes and plans for the future, and can guide you along the path you choose to take.

Look around you.  Very often you will see a lot of good performers out there.  Some of these will perform well, but cannot teach or mentor you.  Choose the ones who can teach you and bring the best out in you.

In the world of blogging there are good bloggers and bad bloggers.  Some of the good ones teach well and can impart to you the skills that you want to learn in a short matter of weeks or months, skills that you would take years of your life to learn by yourself by a process of trial and error.

A very good teacher I can recommend is Yaro Starak, who, although relatively young in years and in blogging, has done very well for himself in his chosen field, and who is willing to impart his knowledge and experience.  If you feel you need a mentor click on this => 

JOIN THE BLOG MASTERMIND MENTORING PROGRAM

Problem. When all the while bloggers would say that one should post regularly and meaningfully in order to create a list of loyal readers, increase traffic and RSS subscribers, now comes a new opinion: Courtney Tuttle did some research and found out that posting itself does very little to increase blog traffic.

So what does bring on traffic?

Some pointers:
- posting good stuff
- linking to popular blogs
- getting listed on search engine result pages
- write articles for directories
- go join some social sites

Good luck.