 Check out Toia's Natural Hair Regimen Making money via elance.com is tough if you live in a developed country because the cost of living is so high. Fact: people want to hire someone in the US or the UK because there are no language barriers and they generally expect a better quality finish; however, when they compare our rates to those of much cheaper and equally qualified people in Asia, they can't justify selecting a UK- or US-based person. I stumbled upon a guy who made almost $24k on elance in a month by analyzing it and coming up with a winning formula: Hacking Elance – The Step by Step Guide to How I Made $23,700 in 4 Weeks He's mixed race/black so it can't be said that it wouldn't work for a black person. I am very impressed by the fact that he really took time to analyze the platform and came up with his own winning formula before jumping in. The beauty of using videos to pitch is that people get to:
Any way, I only use elance to hire, if I ever want to make money via the platform I will definitely re-read Daniel DiPiazza's tips in Hacking Elance – The Step by Step Guide to How I Made $23,700 in 4 Weeks
0 Comments
 It's 10.30 p.m. and given the day I have tomorrow I really should be in bed but I just felt I had to write a testimonial for Weebly, AGAIN! Here is my first review, written in early 2012 - two years ago. The web-building service that Weebly provides has developed enormously in the last couple of years. These are my favorite things about weebly: 1. Easy To Use There is ease of use and then there is weebly. Whoever came up with the user interface has a mind like Steve Jobs. Weebly is super intuitive and you can figure out how to use it without using their FAQ pages and without any coding skills whatsoever. When I started using Weebly in 2010 I figured out what to do immediately. 2. Fair Pricing Their pricing is ultra fair. I have been subscribed to Entrepreneur magazine for a few years now and every now and again there's an advert for a new drag and drop web builder. I usually go to the website to see how they compare to Weebly and EVERY SINGLE TIME they are charging more than Weebly but offering less. I get so incensed by it! This brings me to my next favorite feature... 3. Great Variety of features You can do whatever you want to do with Weebly without having to write any code. Changing fonts, colors, headers, the features of the blog side bar is ultra easy. You can change the entire look and theme of your website at the click of a few buttons and I have done that several times myself without any stress. 4. Fast Rate of Development Weebly are developing new features all the time and my business has been growing with them. Importantly, weebly allow customers to suggest new features and they take suggestions seriously. 5. Customization A lot of people ask why I prefer weebly to WordPress. This is the biggest reason: when I visit a WordPress site I usually know it is WordPress. Many of their themes have a similar feel. I have tried to use WordPress in the past and I don't think they are nearly as easy to use as Weebly. Conversely, Weebly is so customizable you can make your site look very different to any other site out there. I run over 10 websites with Weebly and they all look very different. 6. Mobile friendly The mobile version of a Weebly-based site which comes as standard is second-to-none! This applies to both the general webpages, blogs and eCommerce. I think them coming into eCommerce later paid off rather than backfired because they appear to have learnt from the mistakes of all the eCommerce platforms that came before them. That brings me to my next point... 7. eCommerce I have been struggling to decide whether or not to use the recently launched eCommerce feature on Weebly. I have been using sellfy.com for digital goods for over a year now and they are quite good. I also tried DPD and they were quite good too. A friend recommended 3dcart very strongly but I thought they were awful. Even with a First Class degree in Economics from Cambridge I was struggling to use 3dcart. It was not easy. I thought that being so new Weebly’s eCommerce facilities would be far too basic for my needs. I deliberated over it for a couple of weeks and ultimately thought to myself:
The answer was yes to all three questions so I bit the bullet and paid the $469 fee to use the platform for two years. The amount sounds high but if I consider the fact that I am paying $135 to MailChimp monthly, it's not much at all - it's $19.94 a month. When Weebly create an email management system they have a good chance of getting that business too because I don't feel MailChimp's pricing makes sense at all...but that's another story! After two days going through Weebly's eCommerce thoroughly, I don’t regret it. In fact, for suggesting a feature improvement Weebly gave me a couple of extra months for free! That brings me to my final point: 8. Awesome customer service From the start, Weebly have responded to emails in 24 to 48 hours. Although they have grown massively, they still respond promptly. As someone with a small business growing faster than I can believe I know how tough it is to maintain that kind of responsiveness so I really appreciate it. IN SUMMARY... ...If Weebly was a man, I would say we were engaged before and with me buying into the eCommerce platform – we just got married! This is a tool I believe I will be using for life. Weebly makes my life easy. It has simplified my life for coming up to four years now and the day I discovered Weebly is one of the best days of my life – and trust me, I have had a very good life! lol
Want to Build a 6-Figure Beauty Business from the comfort of your sofa? Then my course is designed for YOU! "Beauty" includes a WIDE range of products from the not so obvious non-perishable foods and crafts to the more obvious hair, makeup, fashion, health & fitness. Learn more about The Money Spot Program.  Technology can be extremely distracting. Since the summer I have wanted to focus on a certain project but I just kept never getting round to it. As much as I like to view myself as a highly efficient and competent individual it was high-time to admit that my efficiency was severely lacking and that I needed to refocus. I needed to sit down and think about what my priorities were and how I was going handle them alongside the important but not urgent daily minutiae. This morning, at c.3.30 a.m. I woke up feeling extremely lucid and I devised what I am now calling "BIG Project Time". You can't work on more than one BIG project at a time but you can have a couple of secondary important projects. BIG project time for me occurs four times a week from:
In total, over the course of the week I'll dedicate 24 hours to my big project. All other things such as blog writing, video editing, social networking and marketing cannot be done during BIG project time. I will have only one weekday during which I can work on one of my secondary projects during BIG project time. Whilst I can text my husband during big project time for important domestic issues everyone else is cut off during this time unless, of course, it is an emergency. I had to write a very specific list of what I cannot do during BIG project time. This is the list:
HOMEMADE is a Semifinalist in the $200,000 FOCUS FORWARD Filmmaker Competition and is in the running to become the $100,000 Grand Prize Winner. It could also be named an Audience Favorite if it's among the ten that receives the most votes. If you love it, vote for it. Click on the VOTE button in the top right corner of the video player. Note that voting may not be available on all mobile platforms, and browser cookies must be enabled to vote. Electricity in Malawi is a luxury many cannot afford. Installing a transformer to cater one area can cost up to MK 5,000,000.00 (USD18,000). This is the story of two young men from the village of Nkhatabay, Malawi who through self taught engineering have generated electricity powering more than 50 villages through invention of homeade generators locally designed and made from scrap metals. Director/Producer: Villant Jana Camera: Bwanali Makote Sound: Yamikani Lozi Editor: Villant Jana Music: Firstcom Inventors: Hastings Mkandawire, Jimmy Mzilahowa Location: Nkhatabay, Malawi
 Reading Amazon kindle books on Windows XP, Vista and 7 is easy peasy. Log into your Amazon account and download the software: Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk. This is essentially the "app" for Windows. When you buy kindle books off the Amazon website, you can have them wirelessly delivered to this or any other device that you own. If you download a book to one device it will be in the Archives on the other devices so you can simply reload it to an alternative gadget at no additional cost. Happy days. This is how you can read kindle books on iPhone, iPad or Mac.
 You don't need to own a kindle tablet in order to read kindle books! Here is how you can read kindle books on any apple device: 1. Go to the app store 2. Search "kindle" and you can download the kindle app 3. The app allows you to read any kindle books that you've bought on the Amazon store In the early days, you could buy the books directly through the app but as usual Apple got greedy and wanted a cut of book sales so nowadays you have to buy the books directly from the Amazon website. No worries, you can still do that using your phone. The best bit is that you can have the Amazon kindle app on multiple platforms. I have it on three iThings. When I open any book on one gadget or the other it knows the last point to which the book was opened on another device and asks if I want to go there. Neat, huh? When you buy kindle books off the Amazon website, you can have them wirelessly delivered to this or any other device that you own. If you download a book to one device it will be in the Archives on the other devices so you can simply reload it to an alternative gadget at no additional cost. Happy days. This is how you can read kindle books on Windows XP, Vista or 7.
 Symbol for an RSS feed I discovered RSS feeds quite by accident. I thought an RSS feed was a news strip that flashed recent news updates at the bottom or the top of your computer screen, much like what we now see on TV news channels. Then I got Mac. I was playing around with it when I figured out how the whole RSS thing works: 1. When you see the RSS sign on any website, if you click on it you're given a feed url. 2. You insert this url into a feedreader and every time that blog or news site produces a fresh article you get an update via your feedreader! On Macs the mail app has an in-built feed reader that you can paste urls into. This is fabulous because: a) You don't have to give your email away but you get the news straight to your inbox. b) When you don't want to be subscribed to that feed anymore you can just delete it in one click. c) It's easy, fast and just as cheap as email plus you don't need to fill in forms etc. d) If you have a business listed on LinkedIn, there's a spot there for a feed url so your blogs can be posted straight to your Company's LinkedIn profile with no extra work on your part. I use weebly to build my websites and with them adding/creating RSS feeds is easy peasy. e) If you have a business you'll capture people that prefer RSS to email. So - if you haven't got a feedreader try one of these: I was rather disappointed to discover that the top two newspapers in Malawi don't have an RSS url. This is shocking because you'll hardly every find a news site without this form of news syndication. As a result I was only able to add a feed for Nyasa Times to Chichewa101.com/malawi.
 I’ve been wanting to tackle this issue for quite a while now. If you look at my Facebook "Info” page you will notice that there is one key piece of data missing that everyone else seems to have displayed: my birthday! There’s a special reason for this. In addition to thinking that it’s not very relevant to anything, I also abhor the idea of people saying ‘happy birthday’ to me on my wall. I’m not going to pretend that I have never done this myself but I think it’s firstly, lazy and secondly, so low effort that it means almost nothing to the recipient. When you see birthday messages on your wall from 100s of people do you sit there thinking, “Aren’t I popular, look at me, I’m a person of the people, loved by many…” You really shouldn’t; those message are very low delta. People write them almost on autopilot: rapidly drafted without the writer even thinking that it is YOUR birthday. They probably write exactly the same thing for other people. They might even have a message they just copy and paste from one wall to the next! Furthermore, wishing someone happy birthday on their Facebook wall can’t be used as a means of ‘showing off’ that you remembered their birthday because the fact is, you did not. Facebook alerted you to the event and you took out 15 seconds from your precious day to write on the person’s wall. If I care about and appreciate someone and assuming I haven't forgotten(!), I will make contact with them via the email, text, telephone or the Facebook INBOX. I will let them know what I wish for them on this special day and I’ll find out what they have planned for the day. If I write on your wall and you haven’t also received a message via one of the aforementioned platforms, I am probably not that into you. This probably applies to all the other folk that wrote on your wall. Let’s think about this in a real life context Assume you live in a little village where a birthday-board is put outside people’s doors on their birthdays. Would you just walk past and scream happy birthday across the fence? I assume you wouldn’t. You would probably enter the front lawn (their personal space) for a short while have a quick chat then be on your way. You might even give the birthday guy or gal a small gift – a fresh banana or peach from your land, a handmade card or simply a pleasant wish. The Facebook inbox or email inbox is such an intimate place. If you are going to send someone a personal wish you have to think a little about it. It’s less transient and that is exactly why most people don’t do it. This year, I am going to do something different. I will put my birthday up on Facbook a week before my birthday and simultaneously disable my wall. I would really like to see how many people take that perilous journey to my inbox. Why don’t you try the same, if I get even 10 messages, I would rate that as doing very well and I will respond to each message in turn: a personal message deserves that respect.
 by Bradford Renner I’ve wanted a Mac Computer for the longest time. I perused Apple’s offering for the first time back in 2005 but one thing stopped me: the interface was very unfamiliar territory for me. At the time, the main tools I used were Word Processing (MS Word) and Number Processing (MS Excel). As a young intern at an investment bank my basic skills had been bumped up to a professional level. I was very comfortable in the world of Microsoft. I knew almost every option that was available to me not only using the slow-coach mouse method but also using the more rapid keyboard short cuts. The drop-down menus offered by Microsoft made exploring very easy. Ultimately, I decided that as pretty as I thought that Macs were, they were a step too far for me. In 2007, Microsoft released its new versions of Word and Excel. Gone were the drop-down menus with short cut prompts to lead you along. To use shortcuts, you had to have them already committed to memory from previous experience with the programs, the prompts were gone. I didn’t like the new interface and found it a little harder to use. Come 2010, the upgraded version is even worse than its 2007 cousin. The key issue: usability! Microsoft has changed its platform so drastically that it now makes sense to learn an entirely new operating system. The unfamiliarity that I felt with Macs is now also applicable to the key tools that I like to use on Microsoft computers. Importantly, Mac has now become firmly embedded in people’s minds as the computer of choice for creative types: video and picture editors, music creators and so forth. If you want to be considered serious about your technology you need to have a Mac. For the nth time today, I explored the idea of buying a Mac. I went to London’s flagship Apple store in Covent Garden and I am officially sold. I like to think of myself as a professional user of technology. Mac offer training very cheaply, Microsoft do not. This makes the prospect of plowing into Planet Mac so much less daunting and is definitely a plus. I did enjoy using PCs but like millions of serious techies, I am crossing the bridge to Mac. Microsoft laid the foundation for this decision, they changed their technology without breaking dedicated users in with courses, webinars or any other training. In Economics, demand is defined as want that must be backed up by the ability (money) and willingness to purchase a good. Want and willingness I have, now I just need to take care of ability: donations are welcome!
 Book stack from: funfacts.com.au Read this article first. “The death of publishing is greatly exaggerated. We will still need publishers as long as we read books, just as we still need critics to review those books. It is part of the great filtering process of literature and culture.” Sebastian Shakespeare I think this article misses three key points: Self-published does not mean self-edited I wrote my first novel in 2010. I haven’t yet published it but I wrote it for the sake of writing it. I wanted to produce a thought-provoking, well written story and upon completion I submitted the work to a professional editor who read the work, edited it and gave me an 8-paged critique. Everyone knows that poorly written work won’t sell and you will find that many self-published works have been edited professionally. Self publishers aren’t going the DIY route because they can’t find a publisher I can think of at least three reasons that one might choose to side-step the traditional route. Ease – the publishing industry makes getting your work even read very difficult. This, in part, is because they are inundated with manuscripts. To help them sort through the stuff publishers prefer submissions channelled via an “agent” and this long chain is frankly off putting. Self-publishing requires a little technical know-how and you’re up and away. Many gen-Ys are super confident with technology and will choose the quick and easy way if they can’t be convinced that there is a real benefit in choosing the more treacherous path. Control – the publisher, being the ‘fountain of knowledge’ that she is on themes that are commercially viable and those that are not can exert so much control over a piece of work that you ultimately don’t even recognise it as yours. Or have to make too many compromises. Some people prefer having more control rather than less and self-publishing provides that. Income – a traditional publisher will typically give you 5-10% of profits. Self-publishing can yield up to a 70% share. Publishers might argue that you are getting a smaller piece of a larger pie but why should you be happy with that. If you have done a piece of work you should get most of the reward. Reviewers not publishers or professional literary critics “sort the wheat from the chaff” We live in a world of reviews. I understand that most readers are women especially when it comes to fiction. They base a good portion of what they read on recommendations from friends. Failing that, reviews from every day people help us decide what to read next. If a literary critic rates a book highly but on Amazon the majority of readers rate it 1 out 5, that book won’t do well. The review system adds democracy to the process and is now key in sorting through the immense variety we face in this age of mass consumption. You will frequently see comments like “I wish I had read the reviews before buying this book, it was a total and utter waste of time…” That is the power of reviews. I read reviews before every single purchase now, I seldom bother going to the shops especially when the weather is poor. Every electronic gadget I have (except my digicam) was purchased online. And in the case of the digicam I used online prices to squeeze the price down. No one reads a book because it was published by such and such a publisher People have favourite authors. Once an author is established they will have a dedicated following that will read their output regardless of how it is published. This is why you are finding traditionally published authors going the DIY route. Is publishing dead? No, I don’t think so but they are going to have to change their formulae especially when it comes to the income share. Their magical powers of distribution have been taken by technology so they will have to find relevance in another format. I tweet @GirlBanker
|
Archives
December 2015
Categories
All
By Heather Katsonga-WoodwardI'm always thinking, debating, considering and revising my views - some of those deliberations will be shared right here. |
RSS Feed
Photo from Jerry Bunkers
