Your knowledge can make you money - Here's one idea how.

Do you have a skill or talent?
It's a proven fact that some people will happily pay to learn a useful skill that will help them.

Car repair manuals, do it yourself tutorials, craft and home improvement shows have a huge following and are in themselves a multi million dollar industry.
One guaranteed way to generate income is to teach a skill or talent that is in demand.

An example I came across literally by accident demonstrates how a stay at home mom discovered a niche market and is capitalizing on this.
What she did was simple but effective and with a minimum up front cost and a few days filming with a video camera, and she has established for herself a nice passive income.
Below is the example of her niche.



This is just a free sample to effectively advertise her knowledge.
All her other "how to videos" are safely locked away in a server.

Her customers pay an entry fee (via Paypal) after which they are emailed the URL where they plug in a password that gives them access to the site.
They can then view all the tutorial videos online at their leisure.

This idea is brilliant in a number of ways.

Firstly there is only a small initial cost - basically a video camera, and some editing software (which you can get either with the camera, at low cost or even free such as windows movie editor).
A little time for recording, editing and uploading each video.
A company to host your "pay-per-view" videos (a small monthly fee).
And an account with Paypal (free).

Secondly because her tutorials are online there is no need to produce, package and mail anything.
They are available 27hours a day every day so there is no waiting for her customers.

Thirdly
Because her videos are streamed rather than downloaded and they are safe in a password protected "Vault" they can't be pirated.

It really is a brilliant way to make some extra cash - and if you're good at it there is absolutely no reason why you couldn't build a whole list of tutorials and make a living out of it.


There are a few hosting services available for Pay Per View but I personally believe for the sake of simplicity and value for money you can't go past helloWorld which has now included in their range of excellent tools an easy "Pay-Per-View" feature.
The above link will take you to the homepage of helloWorld


Are you a gardener, play a musical instrument, know something about car repairs, can you fix something, do craft or have other skills?
Stream it online and get paid to share your knowledge.

Getting your visitors to stay - website design for businesses.

All the discussion about short attention spans caused by people raised on video games, fast food and quick-cut-edited music videos is very misleading.

The reality is that genuine web searchers are not randomly flicking from site to site to find some entertaining presentation to keep them happy - they are actually looking for information to meet a need or solve a problem.
The goal of a marketer then is not to speed things up and add lots of bells and whistles to keep the action happening, but rather to slow things down so the visitor has time to hear the marketing message that describes the product or service you are providing and how it will benefit them.

What website visitors won't tolerate are websites that waste their time, and many websites are guilty of doing just that.
A fast loading page is great (but not if it's loaded with nothing more than ads, links and useless information).
Compare this to a site that might take a little longer to load but is full of concise, easy to understand material, useful articles, video testimonials and so on, and you'll have something that will not only capture the attention of your visitor but entice them to return.

It isn't necessarily all about how fast a page loads; it's about delivering an appropriate reward for the wait.

Tip for the day- Meta tags and keywords.

It's a good idea to make sure your website has correct coding (ie the existence of meta tags and keywords) so your site can be effectively indexed by the search engines.
A simple way to check this (and also see what top ranking websites are using) is to use the "View" command on your browser toolbar - click on it and then click again on "source".
You should be able to view in a new window the keywords and terms used (see the example above).