Helping you pay the bills
Cloud computing is one of those topics that confuses and confounds people. But it’s a hot topic so there is need to explain the topic in simple terms that pretty much anyone can understand.
Fortunately, the following videos completely demystify cloud computing. Watch and share 🙂
Other interesting videos on cloud computing:
I love Seth Godin, he writes articles that make me really think. Below, I have reproduced one of his articles, in full. It’s just that good.
When you’re just starting out or when your organization is struggling or when the economy isn’t hot, it’s very tempting to take what you can get.
You just graduated from law school and you have a lot of debt and the best job you can get is doing collections work. Should you take it?
Your consulting firm is organized around providing high-value work for large corporations, but the only gigs you can get in the consideration set for are small, struggling companies looking to spend a few hundred dollars a day. Should you take them?
The list goes on and on.
There are two things worth remembering here:
- Like bending a sapling a hundred years before the tree is fully grown and mature, the gigs you take early will almost certainly impact the way your career looks later on. If you want to build a law practice in the music industry, you’ll need to take on musicians as clients, even if the early ones can’t pay enough. If you want to do work for Fortune 500 companies, you’ll need to do work for Fortune 500 companies, sooner better than later.
- The definition of “can get” is essential. Maybe it seems like this gig or that gig is the best you can get because that’s all you’re exposing yourself to. Almost always, the best gig I could get is shorthand for the easiest gig I could get.
Surviving is succeeding, no doubt about it. Doing the work is better than not doing the work. Waiting for perfect is never as smart as making progress. But, and it’s a huge but, you define yourself by the work you do, and perhaps you need to redefine what you’re willing to take and where you’re looking for it.
The lesson that I take from this is, don’t settle for what you have – always, always strive to get what you really want. I’m talking to you if you’re stuck in that job that you’ve been wanting to quit for years; I’m talking to you if you’ve been “planning” to start your own business forever. Do something, start now.
Peoplestring isn’t your average social network. Yes, it is a social network site much like Facebook, but with a surprising twist: you earn money for just using the website.. Interestingly, the makers of peoplestring pledge to share upto 70% of the site’s earnings with its users. They will make periodic payments to members for doing things that we all do anyway: read email, invite friends, surf the net, etc etc. Cool eh?
Read more about peoplestring. I think it is pretty cool – you should try it out.
What about pesatupu.com? This one is interesting. If you visit www.pesatupu.com, you will notice that it looks exactly like peoplestring. Weird? Yes, very weird and possibly criminal. I do not know why the people behind pesatupu have done this – my guess is that it is some sort of subtle ploy. Notice that people string pays its members whenever they invite their friends to use it. I am guessing that when you sign up to peoplestring from pesatupu.com, the makers of pesatupu get paid. Of course, I could be wrong.
Whether I am wrong or not, pesatupu is a sham. Making money is good, but not like this.
Like Chapaa on the Google gravy train. (Click to see larger image)
Sometime recently, we achieved our goal! Like Chapaa is now #5 when you search for “make money in Kenya” 😀 We also rank pretty well for other search terms that we had been targeting.
Why is this important?
Well, when you have a website, your visitors can come from two main ‘places’: you can have people visit you by typing in your url into their browsers, or you can have search engines like Google refer people to you.
By far, search engines send a well established site the bulk of its visitors. It is therefore important to optimise your site such that when people search for certain terms on search engines, they find your site. This is called search engine optimisation (SEO) and it is super important for any website. For example, if you search for “Like Chapaa” on Google, you will find this website.
So, how do you do SEO?
At the basic level, there are two interlinked factors to consider when you think of SEO. These are:
1. Relevance – this is simple to grasp. For instance, If you want people who search for “golf” to find your site, then your site must be about golf. If your site is about oranges then people who search for bananas cannot find you.
2. Authority – this a bit more complex and is interlinked to “relevance”. Let’s say that in the whole world, there exists 10 sites about bananas. Now, when someone searches for “bananas” on Google, she is going to find all ten sites. But, Google will rank the ten sites and list them sequentially. Why does Google do this ranking? No one really knows. However, we do know that Google uses, among other factors, links to rank websites. Look at it like this, if another site, say www.fruits.com writes about bananas and places a link to your website, Google takes this to mean that www.fruits.com has ‘voted’ for and vouched for you to be a website about “fruits”. Now, the more such votes that your website has, the better your rank according to Google and other search engines.
To get Like Chapaa to where it is, we first of all made sure that we talk regularly about making money in Kenya. Then, we used any and all means available to us (some of these are here) to get some authority for our voice, our website.
Guess what? Being on the first page of Google results for several nice keywords has really boosted the number of visitors to Like Chapaa. This Google thing really does work, hehe 🙂
We would be happy to answer any questions that you may have.
Recently on the Young Professionals Group, we had this question from Boni:
Hi Guys
I have had this eager to venture in this thing called online data entry jobs which pay well but u have to register an amount for you to join.
- Now I don’t know who or where to begin searching for them
- If they work or not
Kindly please advice me and probably give sites that have paid.
Here’s my answer:
Hi Boni
How are you? I hope all is well.
In my experience, data entry jobs are among the worst type of online jobs out there. Why? Because they usually involve a whole lot of work. The amount of data to be processed is not anything small, trust me. For example, I once had to input 3600 entries (several columns) into an excel sheet for a mere $30.
The best way, in my view, to make online data entry work for you is to do more than just one gig here and there. Perhaps you can organise some people and then your role becomes that of just getting the jobs and then passing on the work to them. If you get 10 jobs paying $30 each that is $300. You then just make sure you pay your people less than $300. I know several people who do this from their own homes, using their friends and younger siblings for labour.
Better yet, do something else other than data entry. Probably, every other type of job pays better than data entry. Do you have a particular skill or technical training? Yes? Good, you can find hundreds of job with that.
Here are some of the sites that I know actually work:
www.getafreelancer.com
www.guru.com
www.elance.com
www.rentacoder.com
There are thousands of jobs available but the competition for them is fierce. People from India and other parts of Asia have particularly flooded the net looking for jobs.
How can you outcompete them? Well, basically, it involves clever marketing. Put yourself out there in a way that you are seen as not just another freelancer but a serious professional. When looking for work online or elsewhere, it is sometimes very difficult to demonstrate what you can do to potential employers. You don’t really have anything tangible to sell and convincing clients to pay can be hard – they may even resort to asking you to do the work and then “if” it is good they will pay you. How can you change this? Use a portfolio. A portfolio is key in making potential employers feel secure and confident about you.
I hope I have been of help. Please feel free to ask any other questions that you may have.
Additionally, we have written a whole lot on this subject on this site so you will probably get some of your questions answered if stick around. :p
Here are some articles that may be interesting to you:
“The Khan Academy is a remarkable, one-person effort to educate the World. Salman Khan has produced over 900 videos on YouTube with 6 million views-covering everything from basic arithmetic to calculus, chemistry, and physics. Continuing to produce several hundred videos a year, Salman intends to provide instruction in all subjects to anyone, anywhere.
Millions of students around the world lack access to high quality instruction, especially in the sciences and math. The Khan Academy provides it for free in a way that can be accessed on-demand at a student’s own pace.
The videos are directly teaching tens of thousands of students on every continent on a daily basis. Other non-profit groups have even begun distributing off-line versions of the library to rural and under served areas in Asia, Latin America, and Africa.”
Tech Awards
Can you believe that? I stumbled upon an absolute goldmine of a site this time, didn’t I? There are more than 1,000 videos which are remarkably easy to follow and which touch on anything from physics to the US credit crunch. Truly amazing.
Now you don’t have to watch your grades slip off a cliff because of a bad class/teacher. Here’s one testimonial from the site:
“This is my first year in college and until today i was completely lost in math. Half an hour with your presentations taught me more than three months of sitting in my professors class. You seriously saved my grade.”
Why don’t you check it out?
We have looked at an introduction to Robert Kiyosaki’s ideas on welath in Rich Dad, Poor Dad part 1. Today, we’re going to look at the cashflow quadrant where Mr Kiyosaki talks about four different ways on how you can get rich.
Watch the video:
What do you think?