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How to Interview the Right Way

/ David Wilson / Leave a comment
Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko from Pexels

There is nothing more tormenting than to watch an interview crash and burn — at least not during the interview.

Unfortunately, many people seeking long-term careers struggle to perform during a job interview. A recent string of interviews convinced me that I should offer some help. I have been doing interviews for a decade now and this is my attempt to give you the best shot at landing your next job.

Remain Calm and Rehearse

To be honest, you are going to get nervous. But try to remain calm. The questions you will be asked are not just to see how you will answer them. Your interviewer will want to see the confidence you have in your answers. It shows experience. But life experiences are never neatly packaged as answers to questions, so you have to rehearse your interview responses. You’ll find that by rehearsing your responses, you will feel more confident and present more confidently.

Rehearse your responses!

How to Rehearse

You will get any number of interview questions thrown at you. The Muse has one of the best list of questions and answers available. Please look over these and prepare responses to each. Here are the three steps I recommend:

  1. Write out your answers in a way that you would speak.
  2. Adjust those answers to be concise.
  3. Practice answering interview questions out loud, preferably with a friend or family member.

Why Rehearse this Way?

Each of these is important. The two reasons you write out your answers in the way you speak are because you need to have your answers written out for review and you need to sound natural when you give those answers — too sterile and your responses will sound insincere.

The reason you want to be concise is that rambling gives your nervousness away. A concise answer, which I will further discuss later, is a confident answer. Lastly, practicing your answers out loud is true practicing. You aren’t going to answer interview questions in your head, so you might as well hear how you sound answering them before your interviewer.

Tell Stories

This is the most important thing I will tell you — tell stories! Here’s what I mean. Imagine you were just asked, “Tell me a time when you had to deal with conflict with a customer and how did you handle it.”

How you answer a question like this reveals if you will win or fail the interview.

An inexperienced interviewee will answer like this:
“Well, there was a customer mad that they had to stand in line too long and I just told them I was sorry for their wait.”

Is that a bad answer? No. Should you answer like this? Absolutely not.

A better answer will go something like this:
“My former job was in retail and sometimes, as I’m sure you’ve experienced, the lines can get backed up. On one particular occasion, a customer waited in line ten minutes before checking out at my register. He was quite expressive that he should not have to wait so long to purchase a few items. I apologized to him, but he kept complaining. So, I asked if he would like to speak with a manager so our store could have his feedback for improvement. He said yes, and I paged to manager to the front to speak with him. The customer left feeling better after getting his frustration off his chest. People want to be heard and valued.”

This is the most important thing I will tell you — tell stories!

I know, I know — I just said to be concise earlier. But go ahead and read this out loud and you’ll see that the answer is only about 35–40 seconds at a natural speed. That’s fine for an interview. Plus the response is packed with information.

Breaking Down the Response

Here are the elements I included in my response:

  1. I related with the interviewer(s) with “as I’m sure you’ve experienced.” Said with a humble smile, this is relatable. Said the wrong way, it might come off as, I know you know ___. So mind your tone.
  2. The story showed that I recognized the problem the customer was experiencing. I knew the customer had a right and legitimacy in his complaining.
  3. I showed that I tried to address the problem first by apologizing. I didn’t push the customer away as “someone else’s problem.” This also shows that I can communicate with customers/clients/patients/etc.
  4. I escalated the issue up the proper chain of command. This reveals I understand boundaries and I can properly communicate within the company.

Not all of your answers need to be like this. Only use stories to describe scenarios that demonstrate how you perform in a workplace. Some questions are simpler, but if you hear the phrase “tell me about a time” in any question, paint me a picture.

Superficial Matters, Matter

Coming prepared to an interview means that you are prepared beyond simply answering questions. You need to consider your arrival time, dress, and follow-up.

As a rule of thumb, always arrive 15 minutes early for an interview. Even if you have to wait until your appointment time, get there early. It shows the hiring team that you want the job. If you are unsure where to go, drive it the day before. Walk into the building! Your interviewer may never see these efforts, but it will save you the embarrassment of getting to an interview late.

How you should dress depends on the type of job you are seeking and the general culture of the workplace. If you are interviewing for a mid to high level position, business or business casual is expected. If you are interviewing for an entry level position, business casual, even if you are just going to wear jeans and a t-shirt on the job. Culturally, dressing nice indicates respect for your interviewers and even yourself.

A thank you card is a simple way for you to stand out.

By follow-up, I mean sending a follow-up thank you card to the office or an email to the interview team. Send it the day after your interview if the hiring decision is in the future. Send it that afternoon if they want a decision by the end of that day. A thank you card is a simple way for you to stand out. Everyone I know has always loved. It tells me that you go above and beyond. However, just remember that follow-up is just icing on the cake. If your interview was horrible, a thank you note will not make up for it. But if there are 3 good candidates and you send my hiring team a thank you note, we will remember that. Even if we don’t hire you, we will tell another hiring team about you. Good people are hard to come by and I want as many as I can in my company.

Go Get Hired

I hope this quick article will help you in landing a great job. Remember, your interview is about learning about you. A good interviewer will be looking deeper than your answers, but I cannot promise you will have a good interviewer. So, be prepared and relatable and smile! You are your best salesperson and I believe in you. Now go out there and interview with confidence!

If you have any questions about interviewing, please let me know in the comments. I would love to help you out!

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Better Blogging Starts with a Single Sentence

/ David Wilson / Leave a comment

Today, I was reading a post made by Will Ellington on Medium about better sentence structure. Here’s the link:

https://willellington.medium.com/how-to-write-a-killer-sentence-14684b6e5226

Better blog posts start with analyzing single sentences. And this should really only take place AFTER you have written your post. That’s right, after.

You should spend at least twice as much time editing your work than you do writing it. I know I’m guilty of not following this rule. Sometimes you just want to finish a post and move on with your day.

Have you ever had that happen to you?

Try writing better sentences and then paragraphs. The next thing you know, you will want to expand to the entire work! And what will the end product be?

A blog that you will be proud of and will actually want to share with others.

Also, better blogs mean better traffic and there’s your sales funnel working organically.

Quality Vs. Quantity Blogging – Now We Know

/ David Wilson / Leave a comment

When I started blogging, one of the hottest topics was which is best: quality or quantity blog posts? I have tested several “web traffic tricks” in order to learn the answer. And the results are in!

But first, let’s take a look at all of the tricks that so-called gurus have claimed will get you better traffic. Because this is exactly how I found my answer to the quality versus quantity question.

Blogging Tricks that Work… Right?

Since you are reading this blog post, my bet is that you are a blogger yourself. Great! And so it goes without saying, you have tried to figure out how you can get more web traffic. Here are some of the tricks I found online, from worse to best.

5. Add Attractive People to the Image

I got on Canva, Pexels and Vecteezy and found pictures of attractive people that were expressing emotions. I started some posts out with these photos and even went back and changed others. I saw zero response from this. It just didn’t seem to work.

4. Add an Abundance of Keywords

Like some of the blog posts I personally found, I tried the whole “just copy and paste a ton of keywords” approach. Basically, you use a free SEO tool and find some of the closes related phrases to what your blog or blogpost is about. Then you paste it into your post. If you want it to look somewhat more natural, you convert each of these into a sentence that may or may not make coherent sense, likely it won’t. This produced zero results.

3. Reposting Old Blog Posts

Another suggestion was to take your old blog posts and remove them, change the picture (or don’t) and repost them to your blog. And the web traffic results were…. Nothing. I barely received any traffic from doing this. What traffic I did receive was likely due to chance and the WordPress Reader app.

2. Linking Other Blogs

Not to be defeated by the other setbacks, I tried a tactic I stumbled upon. A user had linked to my blog post in a list of “Similar on Other Blogs” and it sucked me into seeing who in the world had backlinked to me. Turns out it was just a gimmick to get more traffic.

Well, it kind of worked because I did visit the blog post and I was exposed to 2 or 3 ads. So I tried it out myself. I did not receive any traffic from this that I am aware of (and I kept checking for a few days). So this one is in the air. But it is a nice way to help others out by making backlinks.

1. Reposting Other Blogs

The last tactic is that I simply reposted others’ blog posts. I read a blog post that I thought was legitimate and I shared it. Sometimes I would even find the same image and attach it to the blog post. Other times I would find a better one. When I thought the title wasn’t catchy enough, I edited that as well. And for the times that I felt like being a go-getter, I even added several paragraphs on my opinion of the post or the topic at hand.

The Results

This one produced more traffic, but it was mostly on WordPress in the form of Likes. Here’s what I mean. For the month of October:

That’s the stat for every single post on my blog in October up until today. There’s one golden, labored over post and the rest have barely had any traffic. Now, look at this:

This is the insane amount of Likes that I have received compared to Views and Visitors – it’s nearly double!

So what does this mean?

While quantity will get you a lot of attention on social media WITHOUT notifications, quality will get you traffic. No, I haven’t received a lot of traffic this month, but neither have a lot of others.

And NO, getting likes does not correspond with web traffic. I have only made $0.02 this month so far. Do not let the WordPress app deceive you into thinking you have won this month because you will likely have 500 likes total. You need to realized that WordPress works like a social media platform as well.

What Next?

So the next steps are to test out the lengths of quality posts, as well as removing the poorer quality posts. I’ll be sure to include you all in the next update!

Exposing an AI written Blog Article Called, “Make $12,200 Per Month On YouTube Without Making Videos”

/ David Wilson / Leave a comment

Top Tips for Writing an Effective Landing Page With a touchdown web page, simply place, is the manner in which gets website traffic from anywhere …

Make $12,200 Per Month On YouTube Without Making Videos

So this blog article says absolutely nothing about the topic post and the wording inside of it is absolute gibberish. It reads like a post-modern literary criticism paper.

If it’s not AI, then it is just poorly written. But given that the whole thing is non-cohesive, I thing you can see the difference between a program writing and how a human writes.

I only reblogged to point this out – DO NOT use AI writing software unless you plan to HEAVILY edit it. And even then, it might be too much work.

Issuu Blog | 5 Ways to Make Money Online with Issuu

/ David Wilson / 1 Comment

Issuu isn’t just a digital publishing platform where you can showcase top-notch content. Learn how you can make money online using Issuu.
— Read on issuu.com/blog/5-ways-to-make-money-online-with-issuu

Learn how you can make money selling high quality information and graphic design. This is definitely on my 2022 todo list.

I seriously can’t believe I have been ignorant of this site before. The content looks great and I look forward to a new challenge!

7 Things to Avoid When Starting an Online Business (and Make Money)

/ David Wilson / Leave a comment

Online business is absolutely a brilliant way of earning extra money as a student or a jobber. And you can convert it to your full-time job as well when you feel ready. Although with the recent advancements in technology, anyone can start an online business, everyone can’t gain success. Let me tell you a fact that will valid my previous point. Around 90% of new online business startups fail in their starting 4 months. So, running an online business not an easy task, and making a success from it is not a piece of cake. A business can only succeed when a proper strategy is followed. It is also very important to avoid mistakes. I agree that making mistakes is a great way of learning and exploring new things, but some mistakes can destroy your business. Here in this article, I will be discussing 8 things to avoid when starting an online business.

Click below to continue article on its original page:

8 Things to Avoid When Starting an Online Business

A Bit About the Content

This is a shared post. Please continue reading it on the content owner’s site. The remaining information is intentional garble to test some marketing theories.

But you need to appeal to the emotions of your readers. YOU can win! You WILL win!

Learn how to start online business from home. It’s easy to study how to start online business. Click here to educate yourself as to how to start an online business from home. Not sure how to start your own online business from home? Not to worry! We promise that you can learn how to start a online business. Still unsure? I bet you are asking, “How do you start online business or how do i start an online business from home?

Start an online business from home by first understanding how to start a small online business from home and then create your business from home online. This is for testing only. Ignore this text. And the last paragraph. Now, how to start an online business. First you are starting online business. The question of how to do online business is not hard. You need to feel the drive to learn how to online business. Are such grammatically incorrect sentences like how to start an online buisness and staring online business actually on webpages? Maybe the secret is to intentionally include misspellings and crappy sentences like how to get started online business online business at home run an online business from home starting an online business.

Personally I think starting a online business is hard work but you may discover how to start your own online business in an easy manner. Next, how to start a small business online boils down to SEO hacks. And you are reading this why? I already said it’s a test! So, how can i start a business online? Come on, how to start a internet business from home is a fantastic idea. Stop waiting to ask how can i do online business start an online! You want to start an online business! Get starting business online now!

#winning

This testing is mind-numbing!! how to start a business online start an online business start a business online start a online business start your own online business start business online. Are we done yet? Nope, starting a business online in 2022. How to run an online business is a challenge. But starting your own online business is fun. Learn how to start my own online business before the end of 2021. how can i start a online business start your online business how start your own online business your online business how to have online business start yur own online business started online business start a small online business at home strat an online business starting a internet business from home.

Does Prayer Ever Fail Us? Link Below

Related Sites:

  1. Want to Start Something Online But Unsure Where to Begin?
  2. Free Affiliate Marketing Training
  3. Does Prayer Ever Fail Us?
  4. Do Solo Ads Work?
  5. 5 Tips to Get Your Freelance Business Up and Running
  6. Essentials for the Autumn Season
  7. 10 Best Email Marketing Services for Small Business
https://www.jobvigo.com/5-tips-to-get-your-freelance-business-up-and-running/

Whew, I hope that test works! I’ll post reseults in a week!!

Mint’s “44 Ways to Make Money Online” – An Honest Review (Part 1)

/ David Wilson / Leave a comment

Many people are trying to make money online and look to certain sources for honest information. I spotted the article, “44 Ways to Make Money Online (At Any Age or Skill Level) in 2021” on Mint and couldn’t believe the information it had for each money-making idea. Some of the ideas were legitimate and others were flat wrong.

Let’s take an HONEST look at each of these ways with a more realistic outlook for monetization. Also, there are ZERO affiliate links in this post. This post is all about you. Let me know if you found it helpful in the comments.

1. Online Surveys

MINT CLAIM: You can earn money in your spare time, earning $5.00 – $35.00 per survey.

TRUTH: If you are bored and want to make a tiny bit of money each month, sure, you can do online surveys.

PAY: But online surveys pay very little and only pay in gift cards when you accumulate about $3.00 or through PayPal credit once you reach $20-30. According to a U.S. News article, you can expect between $0.10-$2.00 per survey.

BREAKDOWN: The reality is that most surveys will be under $0.50. And most surveys take around 10-15 minutes each. Taking the 50 cent per survey with only 10 minutes per survey *and needing to reach just $20 to get a cash out*, you can expect to do 40 surveys at 50 cents each for 6 hours and 45 minutes. That’s how long it will take to get paid cash.

HOURLY RATE: $3.00/hour max (Cash)

2. Selling Stock Images

MINT CLAIM: You can earn $0.25-$0.45 per image when you sell your photos to stock sites.

TRUTH: This one is pretty close to the truth. However, it all depends on the site. Some sites require portfolio reviews before allowing you to sell. Others have exclusivity rights that will limit your overall marketplace. Don’t think of selling your images in a dollar amount per photo either – think dollar amount per year for your entire portfolio.

PAY: According to photographer, Alexandre Rotenberg, you should aim for 6,000 photos uploaded over the course of 3 years with the hope of getting about $500/month. This isn’t guaranteed though.

BREAKDOWN: Assuming you are able to upload 5-6 photos per day over the next 3 years (the time length will allow for internet presence), you will reach 6,000 photos uploaded in 3 years. Let’s also assume that you can get 30 great photos in 2 hour sessions. That means those 6,000 photos will take about 400 hours to capture, much less edit. That’s 133.33 hrs/year or 2 hrs and 15 min of straight work each year. To get an hourly rate, lets use Rotenberg’s monthly income. So after you work at this for 3 years, you might make:

HOURLY RATE: $3.13/hour

3. Virtual Assistant

MINT CLAIM: Make $7-$40/hour as a virtual assistant.

TRUTH: A virtual assistant can be part-time or full-time. Some positions are only temporarily online and will need to migrate to in-person positions in the future. However, while researching for this post, I did find some jobs paying $34/hour and even $400/week with only 4-7 hours of time needed per week. However, this isn’t some side hustle or passive income. This is a real-world marketplace competitive job, so you will have some serious competition getting this one.

PAY: The pay for virtual assistants is similar to traditional jobs.

BREAKDOWN: This seems to be a legitimate way to earn a living online. Do you own research and see what opportunities are currently available. I’m even looking into some now!

HOURLY RATE: $15-55/hour depending on work requirements.

4. Money from Reviews

MINT CLAIM: You can earn $5-30/hour by writing reviews.

TRUTH: Where? Honestly, this is just a rehash of the survey information. Some of the survey sites, like LifePoints, do both surveys and reviews. Unless you can find someone to pay you to write reviews directly (which is worse than frowned upon), you are likely only going to make $0.45-$2.00/hour with a limit on the number of reviews/surveys you write, depending on the site. If you want a list of sites to write reviews on, here’s one from 2021.

***ALTERNATIVE: There are two alternative methods for making money off of reviews. The first and oldest method is to create a blog and use affiliate linking and ads to generate income for products you use. A newer version of this is to use affiliate links for the clothes you wear and products you show on YouTube videos, Instagram, and Pinterest. This could lead to higher returns, but affiliate marketing is still a long-term game.

PAY: The pay will be similar to online surveys.

BREAKDOWN: Same.

HOURLY RATE: $3.00/hour on pure speculation.

5. Sell Household Items

MINT CLAIM: Sale unused household items for cash on Amazon or eBay.

TRUTH: Sell those items on Facebook Marketplace if you want them gone fast. If you are going to sell on Amazon or eBay, just look at similar items to see which platform is a better option for you before you list your items. And there are plenty more options that these three sites. BUT remember that this is not a solution for any financial problems. You can only sell so much stuff before your house is bare.

PAY: This will depend on the platform and the item.

BREAKDOWN: Same.

HOURLY RATE: Varies, but hey, maybe you can sell some of those Pokémon cards, right?

6. Rent Your Gadgets Out

MINT CLAIM: Rent out your equipment on Aaron’s, Rent-a-Center, and Flexhopper.

TRUTH: Whoever did the research on this point was either drinking or confused. You CANNOT lease your equipment to any of those three companies. They do lease to own and have been for a long time now, at least the first two.

***ALTERNATIVE: There are apps you can use to rent out your stuff, like StyleLend for clothing or Fat Llama for a variety of items. Fat Llama also helps cover the cost of your items up to $30,000.

PAY: This will depend on the item. Before fees, items on Fat Llama were rented out for anything from $5/day to $450+/day. StyleLend lists prices from $45-$105 per rental, and you get to keep 80% of the rental fee.

BREAKDOWN: You will need to live in a densely populated area for renting “gadgets” out. Fat Llama, for example, is exclusively in big cities. StyleLend requires high end items. You won’t be renting out your Forever21 clothing! Even so, with an average item price of $40/day (and applying a standard 8 hour work day), you end up getting $5/hr. An item rented for $100/day will fetch you $12.50/hr.

HOURLY RATE: below $5 – beyond 12.50/hr

7. Data Entry

MINT CLAIM: Earn $10-$30/hour doing data entry from home.

TRUTH: There is a lot of grey area on this one. Not only will you find pay ranges anywhere from $6/hr to $77k/year, you will also find 3 day inventory jobs that aren’t really at home or jobs that don’t guarantee work hours. Anyone dreaming of getting $77k/year doing online data entry is simply deluded. Mint doesn’t even list any locations online to find these jobs.

PAY: The pay depends upon the company. Seek jobs looking to hire contractors under 1099 brackets. But you could see minimum wage rates.

BREAKDOWN: The Balance Careers offers some legitimate suggestions for remote data entry employers. This does seem to be a good way to earn money while working from home, but just remember that it is pretty much identical to traditional office work.

HOURLY RATE: likely minimum wage

8. Sell Printables

MINT CLAIM: Create and then sell your art on items. On Etsy.

TRUTH: This one hurts a little. I’ll explain. Etsy is a flooded market already and it’s hard to make a breakthrough on it. But if you don’t have an online store, you can still use it in conjunction with your social media reach. But the worse part of Mint’s paragraph on printables is that they don’t mention Redbubble, Society6, or any number of other print-on-demand sites. Udemy has a course I have personally used called “Sell Art Online Masterclass.” It covers more than traditional printables, but the instructor offers some insightful numbers. He said that it took him uploading about 1,000 designs before he saw at least one sale per day. To reach that number in a year, you would need to create nearly 3 designs a day. Needless to say, most people run out of creativity at item 20.

PAY: The pay will be a percentage of the selling amount. When sites issue sales, they may increase your percentage, but it’s still less than a full sale. Lyman Creative Group reports making between $126.16-803.11 in 2020. That’s with multiple item sales across the month.

BREAKDOWN: Assuming you can manage the 3 designs per day and that you can get one t-shirt sale a day…. You are still only looking at about $4.50 per t-shirt after the website takes its cut. If you only sell a sticker, it’s 40 cents. But the upside is that you have the potential to keep earning passive income from your designs over a longer stretch of time. You will be lucky if you only put in 2 hours for each design with another 15 minutes per site when you upload. And that will take several times before you are used to the process. (Don’t despair, we have all been there!)

HOURLY RATE: $0.56/per hour if you sell one shirt per day. If you can reach the $800/month mark, you will make approximately $3.57/hour. Not too bad if you are no longer putting in the work.

9. Sell Unused Clothes

MINT CLAIM: Sell your clothes on Postmark, thredUp, or The RealReal.

TRUTH: These all seem to be legitimate ways to sell items. However, you only have so much to sale, like I said in #5. But if you really need some more cash, this is one possible avenue. But you will need to have the right brands to sell.

PAY: Purely based on items sold. See #5

BREAKDOWN: See #5

HOURLY RATE: See #5

10. Product Tester

MINT CLAIM: Get paid to test out products. “Toluna, Nielsen, Vindale Research, and Pinecone Research are a few platforms that help you find products to test for some extra green.”

TRUTH: Neilson will allow you to become a representative to select panelists. Vindale is another survey site. Toluna is a survey site as well. Care to guess what Pinecone Research is? That’s right, another survey site and the link is incorrect. In fact, almost all online testing is simply survey taking.

***ALTERNATIVE: One alternative, albeit not an easy one, is to connect with a company that will offer you products for influencer videos/social media profiles. An example of this is YouTube’s BrandConnect. You’ll need a substantial following to join.

PAY: See #1 and #4 for surveys and reviews. As for BrandConnect or other direct product testing/demonstrating, the pay will differ per different item AND your degree of social reach.

BREAKDOWN: See #1 and #4.

HOURLY RATE: See #1 and #4 for surveys and reviews. I have read that you can get $100-300 for each influencer post/video/profile.

11. Bake/Meal Prep

MINT CLAIM: Earn $200-400/month making meals and selling them. Example was Snap Kitchen.

TRUTH: You would have better luck running a food truck. There are so many food codes that have to be abided by that it likely wouldn’t be worth doing as a business. Doing something similar to a bake sell might work though.

PAY: I have no idea how they got that number. But say you cooked a meal for $10/meal, then you are looking at 20-40 meals a month. Whereas you could have a bake sale once a month and get about $150.

BREAKDOWN: I’m not sure that this can be broken down with any accuracy.

HOURLY RATE: None to offer. Mint’s number is pure speculation with luck.

12. Transcribe

MINT CLAIM: Get paid to transcribe YouTube videos and other media.

TRUTH: This is a great idea for some side cash, but it will cost you time. You can easily make $5.00 per 15 minute video, scaling up to $30 per 60 minute video. Anyone who has ever gone through the painstaking work of adding captioning to a YouTube video will tell you it’s not fun, but not hard.

PAY: The pay will depend on the number of minutes in the job, the turn around time, and your reputation on freelance sites like Fiverr and Upwork.

BREAKDOWN: $5.00 for a 15 minute transcription seems a common rate. If you could continuously do this for an hour, you would have a $20/hr rate. However, there’s a lot of competition, so you will be lucky to get more than 2-3 jobs a week unless you really push for it. Assuming you got 2 jobs a day or 1 hour job a day, you would get an hourly rate of (compared to a traditional job):

HOURLY RATE: $2.50-3.75/hour

13. Sale From Garden

MINT CLAIM: If you like gardening, get paid for it online.

TRUTH: Making money from home-grown produce has been around, well, forever. However, I would like to point out to those who have never grown a garden that it is labor intensive. It’s therapeutic hard work, you might say. The Real Farm House offers some good general tips on “How to Grow a Garden for Profit.”

PAY: Completely depends on how much you plant, how much you actual harvest, and the amount of time you put into selling. The online aspect seems to be location based too.

BREAKDOWN: The Produce Price Index is a good place to start for a breakdown of average selling points per major location.

HOURLY RATE: Based on speculation alone, anywhere from $10-20/hour within an 8 hour day. Not sure how many days like that though.

14. Rent Out Your Clothes

MINT CLAIM: Rent out your clothes on StyleLend, Loanables, and RentNotBuy.

TRUTH: Well, now Mint does mention StyleLend. I think this should be merged together with #6.

PAY: See #6

BREAKDOWN: See #6

HOURLY RATE: See #6

15. Play Online Games

MINT CLAIM: Earn $10-15/hour playing video games. Listed resources are Cash Crate, Appcent, Applike, and AppNana.

TRUTH: Now that’s a claim. Let’s break it down. Cash Crate is more or less another survey set up, but there may be software opportunities from time to time. Appcent is… confusing and I couldn’t see how any individual could connect with the company. Same with Applike. But AppNana fits the description. And of course there are the other random phone games that let you earn a little money for playing. They usually have a cash out threshold and you have to fight to get to it. The usual ploy is to give you an easy start to get you hooked and then offer less and less rewards to win – almost like one of Xeno’s paradoxes.

PAY: The pay usually comes as coupons, sweepstakes, or gift cards. You rarely reach the threshold for a cash/PayPal payout.

BREAKDOWN: Just play games for fun. Strive to make money on YouTube or Twitch with video games. You will enjoy your time better.

HOURLY RATE: Subtracting the hours of your life wasted trying to get a payout, the rate is likely a negative number (unless you had fun).

Stay tuned for Part 2 and Part 3

The Truth Social Media Marketing Doesn’t Tell You

/ David Wilson / Leave a comment

No disclaimers on this one. No fluff. No links.

This post is for you, the person who just wants to build their brand around a connected community of supporters.

The Lie

The lie within social media marketing is two-fold: that you need an entrepreneur or group’s advice to succeed and that there’s a magic formula to success.

You find conflicting advice on blogs all too often, even on the basics. YouTube channels push their secrets to the algorithm or something like that. There’s ways to “make tons of money with passive income” if you just follow these 5, 10, 31, 148 tips… it’s bull.

The Truth

The truth is that leading tech companies are smarter than simple tricks. I mean, if Google can teach a car to drive itself, the YouTube algorithm can see through your gimmicks. And most of the advice out there, it’s either junk or the throngs you probably already knew or had a feeling about.

The truth is that if you make good content (yes, “good,” not “great”), and you consistently put it out on a given social media channel, you can succeed. And no that’s not a trick “success is how you define it.” It’s a true growth success.

Let me unpack that. Good content may be all you need if that is the best you can do right now. Just don’t give up because it’s hard work sometimes. And consistency on a social media platform is essential too. Consistency in posting and consistency on a given app or website. YouTube wants you to STAY on YouTube. Instagram wants you to do the same. The same goes for Twitch, Facebook, etc. These companies have ad revenue to generate and the only way to do that is to keep eyes on their platform.

Real Tips

So here on some real tips to help you succeed:

1. Make good content.

2. Focus on great audio and lighting your face (if applicable).

3. Build separate communities on individual platforms and don’t cross link too much.

4. Have you own website to link all of your channels together.

5. Make content for your AUDIENCE and not any algorithm.

That’s it. You focus on your audience, your customers, your fans. The rest is secondary.

How to Really Use SEO

How should you really use SEO “hacks,” “tips,” or “tricks?”

You have to think of SEO as suggestions for your lingo. If you are an expert, in any sense, of a given topic, you should already produce a blog or video, etc. that has great quality content. Before, after or during writing, you can use SEO keywords to help add variety to your writing and reduce redundancy. You can also use it for #hashtags and tags on your social media platforms.

Get to it!

Just don’t write or record for any algorithm. Write as if people are going to read something they care about – because that is how you will build a real community that returns to your content and recommends it on their social media.

Now get to it!