If you enjoy writing as a form of hobby or indeed use it to promote your business or other activities, you will love Squidoo! I recently discovered it and quickly became addicted. I certainly find it much more rewarding than plain blogging, which can be disappointing if nobody reads your stuff or bothers to comment. Squidoo is far more interactive in a community sense.
According to Wikipedia, Squidoo.com is a community website that began in 2005 and allows users to create pages (called lenses) for subjects that interest. them. Squidoo now has nearly 2 million hand-built lenses. The creators of lenses are called “lensmasters”.
What I particularly like about Squidoo, is that it also allows content creators to earn revenue from referral links to sites like Amazon.com and Ebay, and several others. These advertising links are primarily under the lensmaster’s control. Some Google Adsense links are also added by the Squidoo people and 50% of the revenue shared amongst all lensmasters under a payment tier system based on ranking. Some experienced lensmasters claim to earn significant monthly incomes from Squidoo. Some voluntarily donate part of their earnings to charity.
Squidoo uses the concept of a lens (“shining light on a subject”) as its primary feature. Lenses are much like blog posts, except they're on a single subject chosen by the lensmaster. Squidoo contains lenses on dozens of different topics, including Food and Cooking, Green Living, About Me, How to Do It advice, Photograhy, Travel and Places, all kinds of Small Business Ideas and topics like My Favourite Films, TV shows, Music, Stars and Musicians etc. The list is endless and the possibilities are infinite.
Squidoo is very user-friendly and is notable in that it allows users to create multimedia pages without learning HTML, though some knowledge of this can be useful in adding extra enhancements to the content. The pages often achieve built-in popularity due to their association with thousands of other Squidoo pages, and can rank highly on search engines like Google and Yahoo under the Squidoo influence.
As an encouragement, Squidoo engenders a real sense of community spirit by awarding points to lensmasters for almost every small activity in building their own lenses, and visiting, liking and commenting on other peoples lenses. Voting in polls and taking part in quizzes also earn points. Extra points are suddenly awarded for runs of continuous activity, as are Squid Trophies.
All in all, participating on Squidoo is great fun and potentially very rewarding. I recommend it to both budding and experienced writers.
Thursday 10 November 2011
Sunday 29 November 2009
Turn Your Photography Hobby into a Way to Make Money
These days, in the age of cheap digital cameras, EVERYONE is a photographer!
Remember when only a few years ago you went on holiday with your old point-and-click camera loaded with a 24 exposure film, took a few snapshots such as "me standing by the hotel" or "the kids playing on the beach", and then had to take your film to the chemist to be developed and printed. Those days are well over!!
Now you take your compact, intelligent, digital camera with all its built-in applications and SD memory card, with massive picture storage capacity, and come home with a unique collection of maybe 500/600 photographs, which you can easily upload to your Home PC and instantly send a copy of any picture to any other computer in the world via the Internet. How good is that?
Photography is a worthwhile hobby in itself that is becoming immensely popular. Photographs bring family history alive, they record special events in our lives and create personal memories that last forever.
But, there is another side to photography. They say that "Every picture tells a story" and that "One picture is worth ten thousand words". Advertisers, marketing men, newspaper and magazine people and publishers of all kinds have an insatiable and ever present need for new images to illustrate the messages and words they constantly pump out. That's where you, the hobby photographer come in!
All of these people buy stock photographs by the hundred from agencies, most of whom operate online. There are a few large, long established photographic agencies who only deal with experienced professional photographers, but with the explosion in Internet technology, there are many newer younger agencies working to get established in the business of selling stock images and they need your photographs to build up their online stocks.
All types of photos apart from family snaps are urgently wanted. Scenes of town and country, wildlife, buildings ancient and modern, groups of spectators at public events, sporting moments (unstaged), seasonal and weather pictures, etc, are all eagerly sought. If you took the picture ... it's yours to sell as long as no one's privacy has been violated and in a few obvious cases permission has been obtained.
You can make money from your photographs by uploading them FREE to these agency's websites. Their customers download them in bulk and each time they pick one of your images you get paid. It may normally be only a few pence per picture, but each one can sell over and over and if you have hundreds or even thousands of appealing photographs on offer the money will soon mount up. And if you use several agencies you could soon be earning some serious cash!
Start making a part time living now. Look for photographic agencies advertising online and read their Terms and Conditions. Sign up free and start making money selling some of those thousands of photos 'gathering dust' on your hard disk. Good luck!
Remember when only a few years ago you went on holiday with your old point-and-click camera loaded with a 24 exposure film, took a few snapshots such as "me standing by the hotel" or "the kids playing on the beach", and then had to take your film to the chemist to be developed and printed. Those days are well over!!
Now you take your compact, intelligent, digital camera with all its built-in applications and SD memory card, with massive picture storage capacity, and come home with a unique collection of maybe 500/600 photographs, which you can easily upload to your Home PC and instantly send a copy of any picture to any other computer in the world via the Internet. How good is that?
Photography is a worthwhile hobby in itself that is becoming immensely popular. Photographs bring family history alive, they record special events in our lives and create personal memories that last forever.
But, there is another side to photography. They say that "Every picture tells a story" and that "One picture is worth ten thousand words". Advertisers, marketing men, newspaper and magazine people and publishers of all kinds have an insatiable and ever present need for new images to illustrate the messages and words they constantly pump out. That's where you, the hobby photographer come in!
All of these people buy stock photographs by the hundred from agencies, most of whom operate online. There are a few large, long established photographic agencies who only deal with experienced professional photographers, but with the explosion in Internet technology, there are many newer younger agencies working to get established in the business of selling stock images and they need your photographs to build up their online stocks.
All types of photos apart from family snaps are urgently wanted. Scenes of town and country, wildlife, buildings ancient and modern, groups of spectators at public events, sporting moments (unstaged), seasonal and weather pictures, etc, are all eagerly sought. If you took the picture ... it's yours to sell as long as no one's privacy has been violated and in a few obvious cases permission has been obtained.
You can make money from your photographs by uploading them FREE to these agency's websites. Their customers download them in bulk and each time they pick one of your images you get paid. It may normally be only a few pence per picture, but each one can sell over and over and if you have hundreds or even thousands of appealing photographs on offer the money will soon mount up. And if you use several agencies you could soon be earning some serious cash!
Start making a part time living now. Look for photographic agencies advertising online and read their Terms and Conditions. Sign up free and start making money selling some of those thousands of photos 'gathering dust' on your hard disk. Good luck!
Friday 6 November 2009
Keep Fit, Lose Weight AND Make Money
A friend of mine at the gym has always been a fitness fanatic. She spent hours at the gym exercising, doing aerobics classes, swimming and consequently kept herself in good shape. She is very particular what and how much she eats and made a point of finding out all about nutrition and healthy diets.
She studied a number of books on fitness, exercise, pilates, yoga, dietary health, etc, and became very knowledgeable about many aspects of keeping fit.
She got a job at a gym helping in the café because she got free use of the gym facilities and could use them at any time she was not on duty. This meant she met a lot more of the members socially and found people started asking her how she kept so fit and what they themselves could do to lose more weight, get fitter, etc.
At first she was happy to help all she could and devised a number of fitness programmes for people. Someone said she should charge a fee for doing this and set herself up as a professional lifestyle coach.
She made enquiries about becoming a personal trainer and enrolled on some courses for specialist disciplines. She soon became qualified and began taking on private clients. Her clients pay her £30/£35 per session and she now has more work than she can cope with.
So, she is now earning a living doing something she always loved doing, her fitness hobby, and is happier than ever.
She studied a number of books on fitness, exercise, pilates, yoga, dietary health, etc, and became very knowledgeable about many aspects of keeping fit.
She got a job at a gym helping in the café because she got free use of the gym facilities and could use them at any time she was not on duty. This meant she met a lot more of the members socially and found people started asking her how she kept so fit and what they themselves could do to lose more weight, get fitter, etc.
At first she was happy to help all she could and devised a number of fitness programmes for people. Someone said she should charge a fee for doing this and set herself up as a professional lifestyle coach.
She made enquiries about becoming a personal trainer and enrolled on some courses for specialist disciplines. She soon became qualified and began taking on private clients. Her clients pay her £30/£35 per session and she now has more work than she can cope with.
So, she is now earning a living doing something she always loved doing, her fitness hobby, and is happier than ever.
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