“Every few days, we bring one product from sketch to store”
That’s the promise of a pretty cool crowd sourcing site, called Quirky.
What is it and how does it work?
Quirky is a site that lets people submit ideas for new products to be developed. Presenting an idea costs about $100, so make sure you really think it’s a good idea and take some time to think out the details before submitting. This is essentially your business proposal for venture capital. Of the ideas submitted, the rest of us get to vote for our favorites and contribute to the product idea. Days later, a product is selected and the process begins to develop the product idea into a product.
Product development consists of a few more steps and like the product selection process, site members get to influence the process by suggesting a product name, designing a logo, etc. It all happens pretty quickly, but email reminders help you keep on top of new product stages. Once a product has completed all of its development stages, Quirky begins taking pre-orders. Depending on the product, they’ll accept pre-orders for, on average, from 300-500 units. Once they fill the pre-order, the product goes into full production.
How to make money The best part about this site is the ability to earn some extra money. The idea originator gets a decent perentage of the sales, of course, but then many of the contributors do, too. It may be a good amount or just pennies per sale, but it’s on every sale. I like to think of it in terms of something like the Slinky or the Rubik’s Cube. Had one of those products started on Quirky, several contributors would be laughing all the way to the bank. The example on the right shows actual earnings for some people on a $15 product. Helping out with a product’s development might not make you filthy rich, but it could bring in some nice Christmas money.
A good example
A pretty good example of this was the first product I helped with, Scratch-n-Scroll, which is currently selling nicely.
Scratch-n-Scroll is a standard mousepad with an added writing surface. This mousepad is for all those times you are working at your desk and cant find a pen to jot down that phone number or list item you know you will forget later on.
Simply, write notes to yourself on your mouse pad using just the pressure from your finger or the built in plastic stylus as a “pen.” Cool thing is, just like your childhood toy the magic slate, you can erase the notes at any time simply by flipping up the semi-transparent top sheet.
When I got to it, it was a really good idea among a list of ideas we had to vote on. It was my first pick of those offered, so I was glad to see it chosen for development. Through all the stages, I think the only thing I did was offer some comments about the design and function. My help was noted and I now get a very small amount of money (I think it’s like 1.5 cents) from every sale. If they sell 10,000 of these things, I’ll make about $150, which is pretty good for having just commented on how to improve the design.
Make the most of it
As someone without a ton of free time, I always look at how to get the most benefit from the time I spend on anything new like this. With Quriky, there’s three ways to earn money. The first two we’ve already gone over: submit your idea or help with someone’s idea. The third is to help sell the finished product. When I linked to the above Scratch-n-Scroll, I did so with a unique affiliate link. On this product, I get a 10% commission on any referred sale, and sold one already by just dropping a link on Twitter. If you choose to help with product development, don’t just help with one product. Help with any product that you like enough. If you help with 10 products that are all in production and selling, you can build up a nice residual income. Finally, when I signed up (and I think they’re still doing it), I got $20 in my account just for signing up to help contribute, so at the very least, go sign up.
If you do sign up, leave a comment here and let me know what you think of the site and what products you assisted in.
PayPerPost is dropping a little cash on me for a paid review and they expressed that they want it to be honest, which is good because I’ve got some good things and some bad things to say about their new v4.0 Alpha launch.
A year or two ago, I didn’t like payperpost , but it wasn’t their fault. What I didn’t like was the back-handing that Google was doing to all the bloggers to tried to make a couple bucks for their opinions. Google dropped me from PR5 to PR0 overnight and with the frustration of trying to get my page rank back up came fear that it could vanish just as easily. Because of that, I stayed away from PPP and a couple other sites for a long time. To be fair, I shouldn’t even say I didn’t like PayPerPost, because that’s not really accurate. Regardless, I found myself sans that revenue stream until recently.
I got an Alpha key a few weeks ago so I could check out the new site before it officially launched and it was a nice change from the old PayPerPost I remembered. The first thing I noticed was the new elegant design. It’s simplified and they’ve cut it down to only the necessary goods.
It’s not as great as SocialSpark (another IZEA site), but It looks like it’ll be much better when they come out of alpha and have more opportunities available. It’s hard to tell where it can go from here and how some of the searching and sorting features will work out until there’s more available, but it’s off to a pretty good start. The only thing that really bothers me is the very limited time frame we get to complete an opportunity. Id love to see them open that up to at least a few days. In any case, after a long time away, I’ll likely be logging into PayPerPost every day to check opportunities like I do currently with SocialSpark. Welcome back, old friend.
Like usual, we’re going to start off with some Twitter users you should follow. Remember, all anyone had to do was follow me on Twitter and tweet the following:
@joetech I want that free link in your Bookmark Friday post : http://www.joetech.com/suggests/bmftw
This week, three people asked again and nobody new bothered to, so:
Babasfarmlife (Wiley, Colorado)
Bio: Remodel Victorian Country Stone Farmhouse
Site: http://babasfarmlife.blogspot.com/
Rambleredhead (Indiana)
Bio: Great gay podcast – Interviews with the GLBT community
Site: http://www.rambleredhead.com/
Hilary Dickinson (Suffolk, UK)
Bio: Learning about Internet Marketing with particular interest in helping our young people learn about finance, IM & blogging
Site: http://www.hilarydickinson.com/
Thanks to everyone who retweets my requests for Bookmark Fridays and sends me bookmark suggestions, too. Now on with the bookmarks for the week (and there’s a lot this week):
Fast passports – My project manager is flying into Mexico next week and realized the need for very fast passport processing. Check out these guys!
Twittad – Here’s a “make money on Twitter” idea I like. Would you let someone put a sponsored background on your Twitter profile for a few bucks a week? (affiliate link – If you don’t want me to earn, go right to http://www.twittad.com)
Wall-E case mod – This is one of the better super-customized computer cases out there.
Cyberoptix Tie Lab – A friend of mine makes ties. Scratch that. She makes super hella cool ties that I’m starting to see on TV stars and everywhere else. My favorite is still the medic tie.
Tweenbots – This is a great (and fun) experiment in social interaction and human nature. Just watch.
Glacier W200 wearable computer – How’d you like a computer on your wrist? This is pretty cool, but it’s more for health and military than it is for me and you. Still, pretty cool.
ShirtsMyWay – This is kind of like a CafePress for dress shirts.
Ashton beats CNN – Ashton Kutcher beat CNN to one Million followers. Watch the video as he hit’s 1,000,000. And he’s on with Larry King right now, talking about it.
A couple years ago, I had a client who was throwing a party at the Playboy Mansion as part of a promotion for his site. Selected girls went free and guys had to fork over $5,000 to get in. I was invited to go (free, of course), but I turned the invitation down for various reasons, including conflicting obligations. It seems that I now have another opportunity to go and so do you, but we’ll have to work hard for it.
AzoogleAds just announced that they’re throwing a party at the Playboy Mansion and they’re having a contest to decide who gets to go. The top 25 challengers get an all-expense paid trip for 2 nights to Los Angeles, including hotel accommodations and attendance at the party.
The party is on August 28th, 2009 and the competition runs from February 1, 2009 through April 30, 2009. I was just talking to my friend Ian Fernando about how I plan to kick start my affiliate marketing this month and although I already have plenty of motivation, this doesn’t hurt and the timing is perfect.
We all want to be popular, right? Maybe you just want to make a few bucks from your photos. Whatever your reason, I’ll show you some key ways to get more people to see your photos on Flickr.
Share them There’s over 100 Million blogs, alone, and they’re all looking for pictures for their blogs. If you’re like me, a lot of your photos are just personal, but many are artistic in nature. These are the photos you want others to see. These are the ones looking for publication. Flickr is a great place to get your photo noticed, but if you want someone to publish it in their blog, you’ll want to set your licensing. I use “Attribution Creative Commons” for all of my non-persona because I just want the eyes on my photos at this point. You can just share some if you like, reserving the rights on those images that you want to sell rights to or personal items. This licensing type allows for anyone to use your photos as long as they credit you back in the way you desire. My photos require a link back to the photo’s page. If another blogger happens across one of my shared photos, they will find that they are free to use it with a link back to the photo on Flickr. If the photo is used in print, my name should be mentioned along with the URL to my site. This kind of sharing can lead to a lot of inbound traffic for the rest of your photos.
Send your photos to groups
Flickr has tons and tons of photo groups. A group is just a bunch of people all sharing photos that fit into a specific theme. Michelle and I spent some time in London and Paris for our honeymoon. During our time there, I took nearly 500 photos and about 80% or more of these are non-personal and intended to be artsy. These photos are a perfect candidate for the groups “London” and “Paris”, respectively, of course. All I did was join the two groups. Then I opened my “Honeymoon” set and opened the photos I wanted to add to the London group. In each photo page, I clicked “Send To Group”, selected the group, confirmed, and then closed the photo page. When you have a couple hundred photos to add at once, this can become tedious. Luckily, there’s an easier way to add multiple photos to a single group. Head to the group’s page, and click “Add Photos or Video”. What you get is a page that lets you select a bunch of photos at a time to add. Just navigate to the set to select photos from and start clicking. Most groups impose a daily limit, so choose wisely. When you’re done there, find more groups. Many of my photos were of castles in London, so I found a large group for photos of Castles and added those photos to that group as well. Look at some of your best photos and think about characteristics that might place that photo in certain groups. Find those groups, join them, and add your photos that apply. If done right, you will have thousands of new views on your photos.
Give people what they want
Sure you have your ideal photos that you want to promote, but what if they don’t fit easily into a group, you don’t want to share certain photos for free? The goal here is to get more people looking at your work, for starters. For some of you, your ideal future includes getting paid licensing fees on some of your photos. Either way, you need to give people what they’re looking for on Flickr. There’s a couple easy ways to do this.
First (and easiest), is to just make a list of what’s making news right now. Primarily (in the U.S., anyway) that’s the ongoing presidential election. That means there’s thousands of bloggers out there writing post after post about it. Think about what they’re writing, and shoot photos or create artwork that would fit with their posts. Today, for example, there’s probably 500 articles that remind readers to register to vote. If you thought about that last week and took a good picture of a “Register to vote here” sign, some blogger out there would probably be in your photo stream right now, glad to see that the usage rights fit his situation. You can also shoot photos of stuff that’s always popular, like sports cars, girls in bikinis, cuter-than-cute fuzzy animals, etc.
Another winner is backgrounds. Backgrounds and wallpapers have been popular on the web since long before Flickr and there are sites that would love to have free rights to use them. Create some backgrounds with attribution rights and you’ll soon have sites displaying your work and linking back to your Flickr pages. Last month, I turned my yellow Lamborghini photo into an iPhone background and this site posted it for people to download. This weekend, I created some fairly simple, but nice-looking iPhone wallpapers with just a background and some PhotoShop effects on the Apple Logo. Another site is already displaying and linking to them. I haven’t even jumped into full backgrounds, either. If you’re shooting photos, try for the Eden effect (an image of somewhere I can look at all day while stuck in a cubicle), things people are fanatical about (cats, dogs, sports, cars), or artsy, but not overbearing, patterns.
Either way you decide to go, you’ll have people looking for your photos and passing them on to other people, displaying them on their computers and iPhones, etc. For me, iPhone backgrounds were an obvious choice. They are small, pretty easy to make from most photos, there’s a lot of buzz still for the iPhone, and there’s potentially about ten million people who might want to download them. If you have photos that you want people to pay a small license fee to use, those people are more likely to see your photos when you’re promoting the free stuff.
Tag and Title!
I, myself, sometimes forget, but you should always tag your images and title them properly. An image with a rich title (use keywords) and good tags will have a much better chance of being seen in search results both on and off Flickr. Once you’re in the search results, the thumbnail should earn the click on it’s own, but you have to get the image in front of someone first. Is your image a 1024 by 768 background image of the AZ Cardinals’ new stadium? If so, your tags should include “background” and “Cardinals”, but dig a little deeper, too. Add in “1024×768″, “wallpaper”, “Arizona”, “stadium”, and anything else that someone might search for that would accurately describe your photo.
Use your own images and link back
I really can’t think of a long drawn out way to say this. It’s simple… If you use MySpace, LiveJournal, write a blog, etc., use your images and use the code Flickr gives you under the image. It creates a link right back to the image. This is a gateway to the rest of your images, where someone else might find an image for their blog or a friend on LiveJournal might grab the linking code to share the image, too.
Know your numbers
Suppose you didn’t do anything above (not on purpose, anyway), and just happened to upload a photo that hit the mark. People are commenting on it and adding it as a favorite. If you know where those people are coming from, which photos they like the bes, and why, you have a recipe to recreate success.
Looking back at my own stats, I can see that the most popular thing I’ve uploaded to date was my “Blue Screen of Death” background for the iPhone. It was also the least effort to create, but happened to catch on because you have to view it to read it and it’s funny having the famous Windows mood-killer displayed on a Mac product. In any case, I can also see that it has become the “favorite” of three people, which is more important to me. The fact that someone went the extra step of making it a favorite tells me that they liked it a lot. The fact that three people did so tells me that I should spit out a few more geek humor iPhone backgrounds before I publish this post. Get to know your statistics pages. There’s more than you might think by passively glancing at a page or two. Click every link and take note of which images get the most love.
Don’t be afraid to learn
I’ve said it once and I’ll say it a thousand times. You’re never SO good that you can’t learn from someone else. Look at what other people are doing and get inspired. Find tutorials like this awesome guide on how to get “perfect exposure” out of your images. Soak it all in, try it, ask people for their opinions. After all your marketing, the image really should speak for itself.
Get Higher Ranking in Google
The best part about this site is the ability to earn some extra money. The idea originator gets a decent perentage of the sales, of course, but then many of the contributors do, too. It may be a good amount or just pennies per sale, but it’s on every sale. I like to think of it in terms of something like the Slinky or the Rubik’s Cube. Had one of those products started on Quirky, several contributors would be laughing all the way to the bank. The example on the right shows actual earnings for some people on a $15 product. Helping out with a product’s development might not make you filthy rich, but it could bring in some nice Christmas money.
