Cash from your Computer

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Squidoo is a place you can share your knowledge through writing articles. These articles are called "Lenses". Make a good lens with good content and keyword it properly you will get traffic from the internet.

So what does that mean for money you ask? For starters, you can add in Affiliate Links to your articles. You can be an Affiliate of many different sites like Amazon and Ebay. If they make a sale from someone who visited through your Affiliate Link, they cut you a piece of the money. Pretty nice.

2nd. There are modules that can help you promote things you sell online. I have Zazzle Shops and an Etsy Shop. That helps me advertise my own product and drive direct traffic from a lens. I can get free advertising to a broad audience or I can target an audience if I wanted to, all from the content of the lens.

The 3rd way is all the ads that Squidoo places around your lens. Squidoo slices a percentage of what they gain from the ads with you. This percentage is based upon a 4 Tier system with your lens rank. Tiers 1 - 3 get monies. Tier 4 gets nothing. You want to be up in Tier 1 for the most money, From what I can tell, Tier 1 gets about $20 - $30 per lens per month (I could be off though). Tier 3 is where most of my lenses are and those can bring about .25 - .30 cents per lens per month. Not much but let me do some math for you. Lets run with .25 cents. Over time you make 200 lenses. If you have 100 in Tier 3 for that month then you make $25. That is not counting any affiliate or direct sales. Not counting any other lenses in any other tiers either. All for just sharing your knowledge. So you can keep building upon that too along with trying to get lenses into higher tiers.

For more information, please visit these lenses

Greekgeek's Squidoo Stats
SmartChica's Squidoo Earnings Lenses

Zazzle.com is a free online multi-mart. They are a P.O.D. (print on demand) service. What I mean by that is they have a variety of items you can have your photos or graphics printed on. From t shirts to baby onesies to dog shirts to iPad cases. Coffee mugs to business cards. If you have photos or graphics to use on products, then you can open your own store and start trying to earn money with them for free. If you get and order from your store, Zazzle give you a commission based on a percentage of mark up that you decide. If you want a 15% mark up... no problem. Do you want 25% mark up, you can do that.

As to what sells the best, it depends on what your image is and how well you market it. Some sellers like postage stamps. Some like business cards. Others like shirts. There is so much variety to print on that you just have to try a product to see if it works for you.

Should you put everything in one store or make multiple stores separated by product or design style? That is completely up to you. I have one store with a variety of items and then I have a few other stores that cater to a specific need such as all business cards or one for iPad and iPhone cases. Honestly I do not see a difference in sales from either method. If i have a product someone likes and they have the spending money, they will buy it. To buy it though, the customer needs to find it. Proper key wording seems to be the key to it.

Do you make things at home? Do you sew, crochet or make jewelry? Handy with a Scroll Saw? Have a hobby making things that could be sold to others? Then here is a site that you can sell your projects. www.Etsy.com

This is a site that cost a little money to use if your a seller. To list an item it cost .20 cents per listing. The listing is good for 4 months unless it sells before then. Not to bad of a hit in the pocket. There is also a percentage they cut after a sale is made. They accumulate the cost over a month then bill you. Still not bad. The problem though is that you are responsible for driving traffic and advertising your items. So lets say you do make Jewelry. That is a heavily saturated section in Etsy. If you are just waiting for a sale to happen, you could be waiting for a long time.

So you start to see that it is more than .20 cents to list now. You can set your own prices on your items.... but what to set your price at? Now you need to learn Business Management, Accounting and Marketing. To set a good price you have a few factors to look at. Cost of materials. Cost to manufacture (make your item including your time). Possible business licenses. Insurance for product liability depending on what you are making. Shipping cost including envelopes, boxes and packing material. Advertising and marketing if you go heavily into it.

All of that is not that overwhelming though. I sell on there so it cannot be that bad. Just read, ask questions and learn from other sellers in their forums first before making the leap. This can also cross into the Squidoo section about to help drive traffic to your store while trying to earn money from that same lens. Nice way to cross things over.

Do you have a good camera and a good eye for Photography? Are you skilled in Computer Illustration? If so, you might be able to make some decent money through Stock or Microstock Photography. I have personally done this since 2009 in Microstock. Now this is not a upload every photo on your hard drive deal. Stock photos are for use in Advertisements, Graphics, Brochures, Blogs.. etc., etc. It takes a different type of photography. A quote I have seen before says "If it looks like it belongs on a wall, it is not stock." This is not shooting for art. You have to change the way you look at photos.

See the photo at the beginning of this lens? The woman holding the money. That is a stock photo I licensed the use of from a Microstock site. It represents an idea. It tells it own story sort of. That is what makes a good stock photo. It has to be useful in order to to be seller. That is what some new submitters have problems realizing. They might have experience in making a pretty picture or snapshots of family or vacations but that is not what is needed. It will be rejected by the Reviewers of each site. One exception could be Alamy since it is not an "Edited" Collection. That means as long as the image is "technically" correct, they will accept it. "Technically" means proper focus, exposure and such. That does not mean it will sell though.

Once you have approved images, they are indexed and up for licensing.Every site is different with how much you make per license and what the minimum payout level is. I am not going to kid you though. You need a bunch of good images. You start getting to be considered serious at around 500 approved images on the microstocks. That bar though is getting raised every day it seems. If you want to try to sell on Alamy, think of it as you start being serious at around 1000 images. This takes some work to it. No free ride in this area. It is a job.

I will cover Stock and Microstock photography more in depth in another lens. As soon as it is finished, I will add the link to it here.

Some sites perform better or faster than others. There are a bunch of them out there too so here are just a few I submit to:

Referral Links:
Contribute to Shutterstock
Register with Dreamstime
Big Stock Photos, Search and Download Now!

Useful Forum: Many Microstock Submitters go here
Microstock Group

Ever wonder if there was a way to make money from these Social sites? Yes there is.There are many different ways to attempt to make money through these social sites. Clickbank products, Pay Per Action sites, Affiliate Marketing and so on. I am going to show you a simple one that is pay per click. This means you put up a company's link, someone clicks on it and you earn the money for it. It helps to have a big friends or followers list for this.

MyLikes.com
MyLikes works with both Facebook and Twitter. Once you sign up, they will give you a list of different companies ad that want to be tweeted or shared. It shows how much you can earn if someone clicks on it. I see anywhere form .04 to .14 cents per ad so far. Some of the offers allow for you to visit first and get paid for that even. You don't have to do anything else but just click it.

Now imagine if you have 2000 Twitter followers and 2000 Facebook friends. That can add up to some pretty good pocket change if even half of them would just click a link. Another good point is that they pay out every Friday to your Paypal account. I personally get $5 - $10 a week from this. I do not have many followers on Twitter though and I have not put links on my Facebook, so I do limit my own self.

Sponsoredtweets.com
There is another site called "Sponsored Tweets" that seems to be the same deal as MyLikes. Sponsored Tweets has a few requirements though. Your Twitter account must be at least 60 days old, have at least 50 followers and 100 status updates. I have about 20 more days to wait until I can start testing it out but from what I have read from others, it is legit and good to use. When I get to test this out a while, I will update the information on the site.

So there you have a few ways to make some money with your computer. These are just a few of the things I am doing myself online. Again I am not getting rich by these methods but with everything in total I can keep myself and my family floating right along. Over time I expect to find even more things to try (both on and offline) and I expect to scale other methods up to make more money. If you want to follow the path of online money making, don't give up. Some ways take time to build up to get residual money regularly. Just keep putting the time into it. Run it like a business because it is your business. Keep searching for more methods to try. Think about other ways to use these tactics and possibly mix them together. Keep your fingers in many different bowls and you should be able to make some money for what you need.

Good luck and may fortune smile on your ventures