When it comes to iPhone apps there are many people out there who have made a killing by coming with something and selling it to the masses for $0.99. Not all of use are technically minded enough to build an application for a smartphone. We may have a good concept in mind but hit a brick wall when it comes to developing it. You can however do what Chris Guthrie has done and look for someone on oDesk and get them to develop the app for you.

If you don’t want to get that far in and are looking for an easy way of making a bit of money with your smartphone, you may want to try out WeReward. It is a mobile platform where you get rewarded for carry out certain tasks and actions. These tasks can be something as simple as taking a picture of yourself at a certain restaurant and sharing the experience on Twitter or Facebook to get rewarded.

Each point is worth a penny and you can cash out your points via PayPal once you have reached 1,000 points ($10). The WeReward site claims to have 15,000,000 businesses on their platform so getting to reach the payout amounts shouldn’t be a problem.

At launch it was only available as an iPhone app but now they have a android app available for download and soon enough they  will have Blackberry app too. All that you need to get started with them is:
- a compatible smartphone
- a Twitter, Facebook or Foursquare account
- a PayPal account

At the moment they are only available in the US but hopefully they will go global in the near future.

One post on NNW that gets a fair amount of traffic from search engines is, Buy Me A Beer? – PayPal Donation Button? which is really an extension of the PayPal donation button. For obvious reasons, countless numbers of site owners use it to get a little extra money but you do have to be careful!

The other day I was reading a post by Rosalind @ Net Profits Today → Thinking about Using a PayPal “Donate” Button on Your Blog? which talked about how a PayPal account can be frozen leading to a loss of all revenue sitting in it because of the word ‘DONATE’.

There are a lot of people out there who are thinking about putting up a donation button and number of sites that have a donation button up but may not be a recognised charity. After reading Rosalind’s post, you will see that it pays to think about how you get readers to make a donation.

I read through other blogs whenever I can and quite a few of them have a Buy Me A Beer (or similar) plugin or a standard PayPal donation button. I see this whole concept of buying someone a beer or basically donating a really small amount of money to them as a show of appreciation for the content on their site. The donation will not necessarily go towards buying an author a beer (may very well do so if they drink) but may go towards costs associated to their site such as hosting or advertising etc. if they have any such costs.

I like this whole idea and you could actually make a bit of money doing so. I have been on a few blogs/sites that publish their earnings with some putting down figures in the hundreds via this method. That is really easy money!

I had a PayPal donation button on my blog but liked the Buy Me A Beer plugin better. I am not that tech savvy and I have been looking around for information on how to add this widget to my blog. All I came up with was a WordPress plugin and nothing for Blogger.

I was reading through Money Online with ProfitSense Blogger and found a post on how to setup this plugin for Blogger – Blogger’s Buy me a Beer – PayPal donation. I was excited when I came across it since I no longer have to go around looking on how to setup the plugin on my blog. What I like about it is that it is so quick and easy to set-up. All you need to do is follow the three simple steps outlined on the post. These steps involve an image, your registered PayPal email address and you changing a tiny bit of code and text to suit your requirements and you are good to go. That simple.

Take note that you can always use another image and/or caption. Some bloggers have it down as buy me a coffee or a cocktail and so on with images that they prefer. You will need to have a PayPal account to recieve the donations. If you dont already have one, go on over to PayPal and sign up for a free account.

Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN) is a contextual based advertising program providing cost per click contextual advertising, similar to Google Adsense. YPN has a unique feature, Ad Targeting which allows you to identify the types of ads that you think your visitors will find appealing and target these specific ads towards them.

It is currently not available for non-US publishers but is expected to available to publishers outside the US once it comes out of Beta (hopefully in the very near future). I am waiting for this to happen so I can try it out myself and cycle it with AdSense.

Here are a couple of points of interest about YPN:

1) Their payments options include PayPal (which is currently not available with AdSense). The minimum required for you as a publisher to receive payment via PayPal is $50. Their other forms of payment require you to have a minimum of $100.

When YPN goes international it will save non-US publishers the trouble of cashing foreign cheques and losing a bit of publisher revenue to associated bank charges.

2) YPN has a Compliance Manager which alerts you when you violate any terms of service. It not only alerts you of a violation but also the specific problem and its location. Your YPN account will be flagged and you are given a chance to resolve any issues before your account is suspended. This is a big point of difference to Adsense who do not offer this feature.

For those of you who can, why not try it out and see how things go. If you do sign up please stop by again and let me know how things are working out.

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Besides trying to make money, it pays to also find ways of cutting down costs. There is no point in making a killing doing whatever it is that you are doing and at the same time spending a lot of money doing it.

If you are someone who makes a lot of phones calls, an option that may work for you in cutting down costs could be a internet telephony service such as Skype. The great thing about Skype is that it is free from Skype-to-Skype. Calls can be made to landlines and mobiles at really good rates. I have been using Skype for a while now and have not yet been disappointed. The sound quality of the calls is good and it has cut down my phone bills by a substantial amount. They also offer a whole bunch of other services such as sms and video calls. If you haven’t already taken a look at Skype, it would pay to do so.


Another great thing about Skype is that it can be linked to your ebay account (if you have one). If you are a seller this makes it even easier for potential bidders to contact you with any queries about your listing(s).

If you are already on ebay buying and selling then chances are you will also have a Paypal account which provides you with a quick and easy way to pay for auctions you have won and for sellers, receiving payments. Paypal can also be used to buy Skype credit and products.

There are other services that you could use but I just love ther way Skype, Paypal and Ebay all tie in together. Try them out for yourselves.
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