Thursday, December 7, 2006

CafePress - your personal online shop in 20 minutes

I mentioned CafePress.com before, now I will write a bit more about it. It's a completely free way of selling personalized cloths, mugs, calendars and many other products. It takes only 20 minutes to create a fully functional shop. Running a basic shop is free, but if we want to enhance it much further, it will cost us about 6.95 USD a month (cheaper if we decide on a longer period). Premium shop offers more products and more options, but a basic shop is enough for a start. They also have the "100% Money Back Guarantee On All Products" policy for 30 days after receiving the product, so that really helps to attract the customers.

Shop for the Perfect Gift
After registering we have to decide, what exactly we want to sell. The choice is pretty wide: cloths, caps, mugs, calendars, framed pictures, clocks, pillows, bags and much more. We can even print a book or record a CD with our own music. Creating the product, for example a t-shirt, we choose a t-shirt, upload an image we want to have printed on it, and we set up a price. Of course, the most difficult part is promoting our product, and making people choose ours, instead of millions of others. Here a bit of imagination and a few good ideas are welcome. Your own website or blog will definitely help, and creating one for free with blogger.com is really easy. CafePress has good online help with many tips, giving ideas on how to promote the products. It's really worth to try and experiment with this site. Even if we won't sell anything, we can learn a lot in practise.

- cafepress -

Wednesday, December 6, 2006

Make money playing video games

I'm not talking about beta-testing, or e-sports where you have to be really good to get something. French portal Prizee.com gives access to several flash games, where for each game you get so called bubz points. After making enough of them, we can exchange them into gifts or cash. The site is available in a few languages, including English.


There's a few types of games we can play, mostly logic games (feeding fish in the pond, directing a bunny through a maze), action games, and scratch cards. All of them look pretty cute, and the difficulty level raises the further we go. Most of the logic games have 10 levels in total. Finishing them all gives us some bonus points, but failing to complete a level usually means starting from the beginning. Each day we can play the games only limited number of times (1 for logic games, 3 for scratch cards), and it takes about 20 minutes to finish them all. There's plenty of gifts to choose from, like laser pens, mouse pads, LCD screens and video game systems.

How does that site make money on this? With real cash we have the option to buy MaxPacks. They allow us to play more of a selected game (15 for logic games, 45 for scratch cards), as well as give access to additional games, like Kaboom, where making bubz points is much easier. The first MaxPack we get for free after 3 days. Frankly, after we start paying for playing, the portal resembles a casino for kids. Most of the games have random elements in them and how many bubz we get depends only on luck. There's also a few games where we can play as much as we want, but we have to pay for it with bubz, hoping to get more than we'll loose. The game Kaboom mentioned before is a slot machine with some action elements.

All in all, this site shouldn't be treated too seriously. If you're looking into making real money, this is definitely not the right choice for it. You can always check it out though. The simple games can be amusing but after a while they will get boring. If you want to test your luck, keep in mind, after you start spending real money on it, you can loose it all. If most people would win there, that site wouldn't exist.

On this occasion I want to write a little about affiliate programs. What is it exactly? Affiliate program lets us get some benefits from promoting products of different companies. For example, previously mentioned site Prizee.com offers us a possibility like that. Joining their program makes us their sponsor and our job is to promote them. They get new clients and that means more cash for them. We get a link from them that we can use to direct people to their site. Now if someone directed from our site registers there and wins a gift, we get the same gift, or the equivalent amount of bubz. What more, which I think is a great idea from Prizee, the person that registers using our link gets twice the amount of go's for each game (2 for logic games, 6 for scratch cards) on the first day. In this situation everyone gets something out of it. Giving bonuses for people following links from the sponsors makes the whole process easier and encourages promoting of their product. I think other sites should follow Prizee in this matter because it's not often we come across bonuses like this. Though even if there's no bonuses for pointing out the person who referred us to the site during registration, doing so can be seen as simple 'thank you' for pointing me there. All the links here define me as the sponsor, so following them you can register and get the mentioned bonus.

- prizee -

Tuesday, December 5, 2006

How to start a business in 30 days

One of the many ways of making money on the Internet is starting your own business. It can be done without leaving your home. "Zero Cash, A Little Talent and 30 Days" is the title of series of interesting articles written by Jennifer Laycock, where she describes her project. It gives you an idea of what you can do within 30 days in your spare time, without investing any of your money, only a little of your talent. The author created a line of her products promoting breast feeding with a touch of good humour. Products are targeted at a specific audience, but as it turns out, a bit of imagination and you can make a profit.

The project started out with brain-storming a few ideas for a t-shirt design and completely free creation of an online shop, with the help of the site CafePress.com. They take care of everything, you just have to choose products and upload an image you want to appear on it. This way you can start selling t-shirts, mugs, calendars, and even books and music Cd's within 20 minutes. The next important part of the project was creating a blog (using free blogger.com), which aims to create awareness and interest in the product. Additionally, the author took advantage of a few of affiliate programs like Google AdSense, Amazon, as well as CafePress itself. After only the first month the project earned over 300 USD, including all the expenses made during the process. The articles are very interesting and you can learn a lot from them about e-marketing. I encourage everyone to check it out, either through the free e-book, or by reading it online.

- e-book - first day - cafepress -

Monday, December 4, 2006

The begining...

Type into Google "making money online", and You'll get around 150.000.000 results. That's a bit much. Many of those sites are just plain scams of people trying to make easy money on naive people. When reading articles about how easy it is to earn big money after spending just 30 minutes or so, keep in mind, it's always much easier to loose money, than to get it. Stop for a minute, and think.


Send just 5$ to the first account You see on the list of 5 account numbers below, then remove the first one, and add yours as the last one

Similar text can be found in many places. Does that work? What if I skipped the first step. Furthermore, is it possible the other 4 accounts could also be mine? Of course, there are plenty of more sophisticated scams out there. Internet is a very thief-friendly environment. Use your head when browsing for information.

There are ways you can make money online, in an hones way, without leaving your home. The Internet is constantly evolving, more and more people have Internet connection. Hardware and software becomes more user-friendly, so wider audience can make use of it now, than few years before. It's still growing. You just have to open up for people's needs, and the cash will start to flow in. Don't count on making a fortune in a month. Nothing comes without at least a little work on your part. Think a bit though, and you can make some money on the side with e-marketing, or start your own e-business in the peace of your home.