All About Make Money From Hom

How do you communicate with your customers? We all know that there's getting to be more and more online activity. How much? According to the Pew Research Center:

The proportion of Americans online on a typical day grew from 36% of the entire adult population in January 2002 to 44% in December 2005. The number of adults who said they logged on at least once a day from home rose from 27% of American adults in January 2002 to 35% in late 2005.

On top of that, Americans don't feel overloaded by the information they're getting on the web. Pew Research stated:

Just 15% said they sometimes felt overwhelmed by the amount of information they had, while 71% said they had all the information they needed and thought it was manageable, and 11% said they were missing information that they wish they had.

It makes me further think about how we communicate with our customers. Some businesses have jumped into the blog world in hopes that their customers will come and engage with them online. That works for some but this strategy doesn't work well for many small businesses because their business just isn't the type to draw attention to itself such that a customer would want to come and read about them in the normal course of the day. Do you want to know what's going on in the world of sandwich making, hair cutting, or pool/spa maintenance? Me either, not so much that I would return again and again to hear it.

The good news is that I would like to hear about special offers my hair cutting place has or new sandwiches my favorite sub place has coming out. And I, like most people, would like to hear about it through email. There continues to be more techie ways to send information out there (like RSS), but email is THE killer application... the most used, it allows you to push your message to your customers when you wish and they pick it up when they wish. It is effective and personal because it comes from you, allowing you to share offers and news. What's more, it allows you to develop a relationship with your customers.

This is all good and true, but knowing this and doing nothing about it will not help you grow your business. Here's my shameless plug for PromoterZ(tm), a system that automates the sending of special offers through email. It doesn't require more time from an already busy small business owner either, in fact it's kind of like having a really cheap employee that talks to your customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It also encourages your customers to send referrals about you to their friends, making it a word of mouth marketing tool. Additionally, it gives you feedback from your customers about the most important thing they can tell you about your business.

PromoterZ(tm) is the internet marketing tool for small business. (End of shameless plug.)

 

In that post I suggested the following tips:

1. Consider your Audience – start with your reader when considering what to promote. Relevancy is key.
2. Genuine Recommendations and personal endorsements always work best – recommendations of things you personally genuinely like are always best.
3. Link to Quality Products – the better the products that you recommend the more your readers will thank you for suggesting it.
4. Contextual Deep Links work Best – in general you’ll have more luck promoting a product from within a post than on a sidebar
5. Consider positioning of links – links/banners that are in parts of your post/blog that where readers look work best (top of posts for example)
6. Traffic levels are Important – the more eyeballs your promotion gets the better
7. Diversify without Clutter – some products work better for some audiences than others – so promoting a variety of products can be good – promoting too many is of course not good.
8. Be Transparent – don’t try to trick people into clicking your links. I’ve changed my stance slightly on this – I used to put (aff) next to any affiliate link but in the end found readers were just annoyed by it or didn’t understand what it meant. Now I use site-wide disclaimers to talk about it.
9. Combine with other Revenue Streams – every blog is different, some will work better than others with affiliate marketing while others will work better with adveritising. However I find on many blogs advertising and affiliate marketing can work well in tandem.
10. Track results – if you don’t have some way of working out how your promotions are converting you could be wasting your time.

As you can see – I’ve changed my opinion a little on the way that I express #8 but apart from that I still subscribe to all of the advice in that post. However I’ve also learned a lot more about affiliate marketing. In fact over the last four years the revenue that I make from affiliate marketing has continued to grow – to the point that it now probably makes up around a third of my online income (it varies from month to month).
So I thought it might be time to build upon the 10 tips above with some more lessons that I’ve learned.

11. Build Your Network Before You Need It

Perhaps the biggest thing that I’ve learned about affiliate marketing is that it works best the bigger and stronger your network is. I mentioned in my first list that ‘traffic levels are important’ – this is true, but connected to it is your ‘network’.
Whether it be loyal blog readers and subscribers, your email list, your Twitter connections, your Facebook friends or some other social network – the better your network the better you’ll do at driving affiliate sales.
It’s not just about size – the size of your network is only part of what I’m talking about here. Also important is the depth of relationship that you have with your network/readers and the amount of trust that they have in you. If you have consistently helped people and been useful to them over a long time they’re probably more likely to respond to your recommendations.
Relevancy/Focus counts – The other key part of your network is how relevant it is and how focused it is upon the topic that you’re doing promotions on. For example – I see some people on Twitter running competitions to build their follower numbers in a way that just brings in any follower that they can. The problem with this is that they end up with a large but unfocused network. I personally would rather have a smaller network who all shared the one interest than a large one who just signed up to get a prize.
Lastly, a network takes time to build – if you think you’ll be doing some affiliate marketing at some point in the future – start building your network now, before you need it. This gives you time to build the depth of relationships, trust and focus of your network before you begin promoting affiliate products.

12. Try different Mediums

I’ve alluded to this above already but one of the things that I’ve noticed over the last few years is promotions work differently on different mediums.
For example: some affiliate promotions seem to convert best in a blog post, others work best when you send an email to a list you’ve been building while others seem to take off on Twitter or other social media sites.
The key is to try different approaches, to have build up your network before you need it (see above) and to track the results for each promotion so you can check what is and isn’t converting.

13. Multiple Promotions of the same Product

I spoke about this at Blog World Expo last year in a session but don’t think I’ve written about it here at ProBlogger. Here’s what I’ve found:
If you write a single blog post promoting an affiliate product you’ll have a certain percentage of readers buy the product (the % varies a lot). If you are able to follow that up with a different type of post a few days later it can reinforce the promotion.
Here’s how I’ve done it on my photography blog:

1. Blog Post 1 – a post announcing a new product, giving some benefits, sharing who the product is relevant for etc.
2. Blog Post 2 – a post a few days later that is an interview with the person behind the product – exploring why they made it, expanding upon what it includes, who it’s for and giving the product context. I’d try to also include some tips or suggestions for readers who don’t buy the product in such an interview so it is a useful post for everyone.
3. Email List – later in the week email out the subscriber list linking to the previous posts and reinforcing the promotion.
4. Tweets/Followups – I would also include a few Tweets about the promotion through the week and would consider a 3rd blog post a week later – perhaps some reader reviews of the product.

The key is to not spam your network but to find interesting and useful ways to draw attention to the product multiple times over a week or two so as to reinforce it and give those who take a little longer to make a decision the opportunity to get the product.

14. Bonuses Work

There are many techniques that internet marketers use to increase sales of their products. I find some a little ‘cheap’ and ‘nasty’ but many do work. Two that I’ve found less offensive and/or manipulative are where you add value to the affiliate promotion by either adding a bonus of your own to the offer and/or getting the person behind the product to offer a bonus or discount just for your readers.
I’ve done this a number of times on my blogs and have found that conversions are significantly higher.

15. It takes Time

A theme that regular readers of ProBlogger will recognize is that making money from blogs (through any method) takes time. While an affiliate program does have the potential to make you a lot of money very quickly – it almost always comes after a lot of work and once you’ve spent a lot of time and effort building out your network.
The early days of building your network may see very little (if any) results. I personally earned very little from affiliate marketing in my first year or two of blogging but as I mentioned above in the last year or two it’s really begun to exponentially increase – partly as a result of getting smarter with my promotions but partly just as my network grew in size and quality.

16. Timing is Important

One of the things I’ve learned over the last week of launching my own product is just how much difference there can be in the rate of sales at different times of the day and week. It would vary depending upon the location of most of a blog’s readers but for me sales have been significantly up during business hours in the USA and on weekdays. No real surprises there.
The lesson translates to promoting products – unless the product has a real focus upon the type of people surfing the web on the weekends or late at night you’ll want to time your promotions to those times of the weeks that your audience is online. Similarly – avoid public holidays – this last week even though we launched the workbook 3 days after Memorial Day in the US I suspect we lost a few sales as some people took the week off.

What Would You Add?

I know that many readers of ProBlogger have experimented a lot with affiliate marketing. What advice would you add? What techniques have you used (or seen used) that work?

Darren recently highlit some of the posts that attract a lot of clicks at Digital Photography School. Many readers were interested to see the kinds of titles that do well here at ProBlogger, so today I thought I’d show you the posts that attracted a lot of traffic on the blog in April.

The top titles

Here are the top seven, in order of their traffic levels:

1. Win 1 of 10 Trips to the Great Barrier Reef in QLD, Australia #QLDBLOG
2. 19 Essential WordPress Plugins for Your Blog
3. 9 Facebook Marketing Tactics That’ll Triple Your Fans
4. 3 Reasons No One Comes Back to Your Blog—And How to Fix It
5. And the Winners Are… #QLDBLOG
6. Attract 100,000 Pageviews in 1 Month Using SlideShare
7. A Systematic Approach to Writing Successful Blog Posts

Why they work

Looking at this list, a few features immediately jump out at me—I wonder if they do for you, too?

• Titles that quantify the post’s benefits work well: Facebook tactics that’ll triple your fans? 100,000 pageviews in one month? 19 Essential plugins? Win one of ten trips? Quantification of benefits is a theme among these titles. I know people say “list posts do well,” but I think the issue—at click—isn’t the list so much as the perceived payoff. And all of these post titles promise a big payoff, up-front. Of course, to be shared, the posts need to deliver on that payoff, and these ones obviously do.
• Natural language speaks volumes: The title 3 Reasons No One Comes Back to Your Blog—And How to Fix It quantifies a benefit, but it also speaks in natural language. It’s a slight exaggeration—you’re probably not getting zero repeat visits to your blog—but it’s one that we’d use in conversation with our blogging friends: “Man, no one comes back to my blog!” The same goes for “tactics that’ll triple your fans.” Bloggers seem reticent to use contractions in titles, but they can work really well—especially in keeping the rhythm of the title swinging along. They also suggest that the post will be written in language that’s approachable and on the level.
• Titles that speak to “you” have cut-through: Three of these titles refer directly to the reader: your blog, your fans. While you’ll want to mix your titles up a bit, bringing the message and the benefits home to your audience by speaking to them directly is a good way to pique readers’ interest. Using “you” and “your” can give titles personal relevance.
• Unique ideas grab attention: We see titles about Facebook marketing and WordPress plugins all the time, and they’re basically essential reading. But some of the other titles in this list communicate unusual ideas, and get attention for that very reason. Get 100,000 pageviewss a month … using SlideShare? That’s going to make a few people stop and sit up. Similarly, systemizing writing is a bit of a foreign concept for many: just how do you systemize what’s seen as an unruly, unpredictable creative task? So topics are important to the success of these posts, too.

How we tweaked them

Finally, I wanted to show you how we’d altered these titles, so you can try similar tweaks on your own post titles.

1. Win 1 of 10 Trips to the Great Barrier Reef in QLD, Australia #QLDBLOG: This post was originally called “Queensland Competition” but Darren updated it before publication! Smart move.
2. 19 Essential WordPress Plugins for Your Blog: The only change I made here was to the ending. The post’s original title was “19 Essential WordPress Plugins for 2012″ but I thought the content would have more longevity without the time-limitation. I also like to use “your” in titles where I can, because I think it gives some titles more cut-through: “Essential plugins for my blog? Really? Alright, I’ll take a look.”
3. 9 Facebook Marketing Tactics That’ll Triple Your Fans: This post was submitted with the title “9 Facebook Marketing Strategies to Triple Your Fans”. I changed “strategies” because, well, they weren’t strategies. I also wanted a stronger sense of causality between the tactics and the results, so I used “that’ll.” Altogether, these changes alliterated well and gave the title a strong natural rhythm, too.
4. 3 Reasons No One Comes Back to Your Blog—And How to Fix It: This post was originally titled, “3 reasons no one comes back even after a huge spike in traffic”. The problem was length, and context. Comes back to where? When I see titles in my Twitter feed or RSS feed reader, keywords jump out. I wanted to get “blog” into this one. Also, since Alex had included “The fix?” headings for each of the reasons he’d identified in the post, the “—and how to fix it” part of the title basically wrote itself.
5. And the Winners Are… #QLDBLOG: Again, Darren wrote this one and, within the context of the blog, there was no need to change it.
6. Attract 100,000 Pageviews in 1 Month Using SlideShare: This one was submitted with the title, “How to get 100,000 views in 1 month using Slideshare” but I wanted to get that big number closer to the start of the title. Also, we have a lot of “how to” posts on ProBlogger, so I try to vary them a bit so the blog doesn’t come across as one big how-to post. Finally, the full word “pageviews” seemed a bit more Google-responsive than “views.”
7. A Systematic Approach to Writing Successful Blog Posts: This post was submitted with the title “How to write a successful blog post,” but on reading it I saw that it presented a system for writing, and I’d just scheduled another post on systematized blogging. I thought this post would be a nice follow-up, so I scheduled it for the same day and gave it a title that tied it to the theme of systematized blogging. As I mentioned above, this title was a bit more of a head-turner, since the whole problem with creative tasks like writing is that they seem so slippery and difficult to manage.

Whether you want to write a persuasive post or a headline that grabs attention, or create a call to action that grows your RSS subscription count by 243%, you first have to understand who your reader is.
So how do you go about finding this out?
You could guess, measure, and repeat until you hit upon a winning formula … but that could take months or years.
The easiest and fastest way to find out what will resonate with your readers is to ask them. And the best to do that is with a survey.

How can surveys help you?

You probably have a good working understanding of who your readers are because of your experience in the field. This will help you create surveys, but it won’t help you get to those breakthrough insights that will turn your posts into reader magnets.
To do that you need to know information like this:

• Demographics: A survey will tell you who’s reading your blog. It can tell you their sex, age, income, and interests.
• Content: A survey will tell you what kinds of content your readers like. Do they like practical articles or more research-based posts? Do they want those to be long or short? What about frequency?
• Products: A survey will also tell you what kinds of products your readers may be interested in.
• Problems: Finally, a survey can tell you what problems that your readers want solved. This is probably the best piece of information you could have when it comes to creating engaging content, right?

Top survey tools

AJ showed how to create a survey that gets insightful answers from your readers earlier today.
Now, let’s look at some in expensive tools that will help you gather this all-important information professionally and securely.

Comments

One of the simplest ways to get feedback from readers is to write a post with survey-like questions, and then ask your readers to respond in the comments.
There are some disadvantages to this approach. For example, because people are free to say anything they want in the comments, it may be hard to get the exact information you want.
Also, with this approach, the survey responses are out in the open, and this may suppress the response since people may be a little timid to share information so publicly.
What I’ve found about using comments for surveys is that this approach is perfect for simple questions like “What was the worst work experience you ever had?” If you want something more specific, then you need to use one of the tools we’ll look at next.

WP-Polls

Using a WordPress plugin like WP-Polls on your blog will give you the option of asking very specific questions that should generate very specific answers over an extended amount of time.
This plugin is embedded on your site as a widget, and actually adds another element of interaction with your readers. Every month, you can change the questions.
The nice thing about WordPress plugins is that they’re simple to install from inside your WP admin control panel.

Google Docs

Google Docs offers a tool that will help you create surveys that you can link readers to (for example, in an email), or actually embed into your blog.
It creates these forms out of HTML, gives you several survey styles, and even gives you a huge selection of themes to choose from:

This is the form that Chris Brogan uses:

On the back end, you can review the collected data in a charts and graphs:

Survey Monkey

Survey Monkey is the most well-known survey tool online, having been around since 2002.
While there are paid plans that won’t bankrupt you, I’ve found that the free online version suits most of my needs. The only drawback to this type of survey is that it will drive your readers away from your site, as they need to go to Survey Monkey to give their answers.
The service gives you a choice of 15 question styles to choose from.
And you can even customize the survey to match your blog color scheme.

KISSinsights

This tool is one my team developed. KISSinsights is a simple tool that takes two minutes to install, and allows you to ask one question of your readers. You can update that question at any time.
What I really like about this survey tool is that we tried to make it as little a distraction from your site as possible: it pops up, but then the user can close it and move on to your site immediately.

WP Survey and Quiz Tool

This robust WordPress tool, WP Survey and Quiz Tool, will let you do more than just create surveys—as the name suggests, you can also use it to create quizzes and polls.
There is no limit to the number of surveys or quizzes you can create, and the tool gives you these features as well:

• Limit answers to one per IP address.
• Send customized notification emails.
• Send notification emails to one email address or a group of WordPress users.
• Create custom contact forms.
• Export your surveys and quizzes.

The drawback to this tool is that your survey is limited to s single post—it’s not available site-wide.

WordPress Simple Survey

The jQuery-based WordPress survey tool Simple Survey will allow you to create basic weighted surveys that route users to a location based upon their survey “score.”
The page doesn’t need to be reloaded as the user progresses through the quiz:
You can have results emailed to you, or you can simply login into your WordPress dashboard to see the results.

SodaHead Polls

SodaHead gives you great options for customizing and publishing polls. In addition, you can:

• add videos and photos
• add questions with more than ten choices
• protect against voting fraud with a Flash-based security code.

The feature that I really like about this tool is what it can do to help your poll go viral through features like one-click sharing to Twitter and Yahoo, and adding your survey to SodaHead’s network to get more exposure.

Polldaddy Polls and Ratings

This fully customizable survey tool for WordPress gives you the ability to post your poll on a single post or as a sidebar widget:

The nice thing about Polldaddy Polls is that it supports 57 different languages, making it a better option for those serving audiences outside of the United States.
Unfortunately if you have the latest WordPress update, 3.3.2, then it may not be compatible with your site.

Survey Me

For the people who don’t code out there, SurveyMe is probably the WordPress plugin you want to use.

This simple install will allow you to role out a poll within minutes.

Maximizing responses

By the way, if you are concerned about how many responses you’ll get to your survey, don’t worry. People love to share their opinions—you’ll probably get as high as a ten percent turnout!
If you are interested in getting an even higher response, I’d recommend you tell your readers that you’re going to share some of the best responses that you get from the survey. With a promise that they might get some exposure on your site, more people will be motivated to leave a response.
If you want an even higher turnout, or if you have a small audience and want to maximize the number of answers you receive, you may want to offer some kind of incentive (for example, everyone who responds will be entered in a drawing for a $50 Apple iTunes gift card).

In every part of the world, ladies dream of weddings. More often than not, they succeed in getting one. Thus, for every nation or country, in every culture, there are weddings.
Weddings have become inevitable events in modern society. But, it is clear and apparent that weddings have become, in a sense, a way of lifestyle. It can be attributed to the Western influence.
Wedding traditions, be it for Americans, Asians, Europeans, Africans or any race, have become universalized. When you say universalized, it means the event has adhered to same customs and traditions.
Thus, we have wedding etiquettes. Wedding etiquettes can vary from one country to another. But the variations are only slight and minimal. Moreover, the ethics and etiquettes in weddings are all but the same.
Because being into weddings or attending weddings have become a way of our modern life, people can get anxiety knowing that there are certain gestures that can be considered not likely during weddings.
If you are a bride or a groom, the anxiety can get really concerning. The couple will have to undergo a hard time—on wedding jitters and on anxiety from wedding customs.
Thus, the best way to help the soon-to-be-wed couple is to educate them about certain wedding etiquettes.
Because learning venues for wedding etiquettes can get so distracting, awkward and embarrassing at the same time, it is advisable that those needing briefings for wedding etiquettes consult the book stands.
The following are several of the highly recommended readings or books for or about wedding etiquettes. To get to know the books better, or to absorb what they have to say, get to the nearest book store or go to your favorite online shopping site to place an order.
Some recommended wedding etiquette books
“The Everything Etiquette Book: A Modern-Day Guide to Good Manners” by Leah Ingram. The author, Leah Ingram is considered as one of society’s etiquette experts. Actually, the book is not exclusive to wedding etiquettes.
The book tackles etiquettes for everyday living. Included in the topics covered are how to deal with annoying neighbors, how to choose and send the perfect gift for every occasion, professionalism at work, camaraderie with colleagues and friends, dealing with unlikely relatives and so on.
Because the book covers everything etiquette, of course, a few pages are allotted to weddings. The wedding etiquettes mentioned in the book are glimpses and shortened or simplified, but they still are effective tips.
“Crane’s Wedding Blue Book” by Steven L. Feinberg. Mr Steven Feinberg’s wedding book is very detailed and covers everything about wedding etiquettes.
The issues tackled start from the preparation—from short listing the guest list, doing the invitation, hiring wedding planners, and so on. The wedding etiquettes covered by the book extend to until after the honeymoon, when the couple should have finished giving out thank you cards to their wedding guests.
The book also gives tips and guidelines on what kind and color of paper to use when printing out invites and than you notes. It also deals with the proper way of handling unlikely, and yes, even wedding crashers.
“The Everything Wedding Etiquette Book: Insights and Advice on Handling Even the Stickiest Wedding Issues” by Emily Ehrenstein and Laura Morin. The book gives out little and practical do’s and don’ts during weddings.
The book takes the issues from the different perspectives of that of the bride, the groom, the parents, the maid of honor, the bride’s maids, the groom’s men, stepmothers, down to the guests.
The book boasts of practical solution to every concern and awkward situations that occur during weddings. The situations discussed can sometimes get cute, amusing and funny, but you can tell that they are timely and truthful. Several sticky situations, for sure, have happened to you.
Everyone who has attended weddings or who are planning to attend or get into one can relate to the book.
The book even gives out solutions and advice on how to handle difficult situations during weddings that include how to ask parents-in-law for financial assistance to cover the reception, including step parents in the ceremony, allowing single guests to tag along dates down to planning seat arrangements for divorced parents and more.
The above mentioned wedding etiquette books can be found at our favorite book stand or can be ordered online. Just read the books by heart so you can get to absorb wedding etiquettes and save your face when situations get really sticky during weddings.

When someone mentions the word geek we immediately think they’re talking about someone who is crazy about technology, gadgets, science, math, games or engineering. As the world has evolved, the term geek is now used to describe people from every walk of life. We now have art geeks, film geeks, sports geeks, coffee geeks and cooking geeks. Anyone who is passionate in a subject, devoted to learning everything about it, and furthering their knowledge in that field, is a geek.
Having devotion to your field and wanting to “recruit” more people to your cause are two other attributes of being a true geek. This used to be hard. You had to wait for expos, events and join groups and forums where you had to persuade people to follow you. Things have now changed. Thanks to “experience platforms”, geeks have an array of ways to do this and make a money on the side.
The “experience economy” is a new economy that has grown rapidly over the past year and allows people to share their passion and make some money out of it. Since you’re already spending all your free time with your passion, why not share it with everyone? For the person attending one of these experiences, it’s like taking a peek into a geek’s life.
Being centralised and technology driven is what makes the experience economy work. If you’re a geek you have two choices, either spend your time doing what you love or promoting and talking about what you love. Although you might be ok doing the latter, in reality you want to spend as much time as possible geeking out. This is why these platforms rock, the audience is ready and waiting. All you have to do is create the experience and then let the good people of the service promote you. Life couldn’t be easier. Now all you have to do is work on what you love and from time to time let others take a peek.
I’ve looked at what platforms are available and here is a list of the most popular sites (in alphabetical order, just to be fair), along with my own geeky view on them.

Blink Collective

Blink Collective started as an idea in August 2011 that was submitted for the Ignite100 Startup Accelerator program. In just a few months, it has gone from idea to product and is now available for geeks to share their passion. With a focus in the UK market, it’s targeting people passionate about food and drinks. Offered on the platform are the usual cooking classes (meh), in contrast to the stuff that really interest us like learning what bugs you can eat (yummm) and knife skills (I’m a bit of a food-geek and I really envy those crazy ninja-like chef cutting skills). If you are a geek chef then this is one of the places to be.

Excursionist

Excursionist is the most commercial offer from this bunch. Experiences hosted by real people are coupled with cool accommodation and travel services to give you the ultimate experience when travelling abroad. Unfortunately hosting events is not open to every geek with an idea. You need to connect with them and get chosen by their curators. I’m sure that any geek that sets their mind to it, can get their experience on the site.

Gidsy

Founded by a coffee geek, a design geek and a tech geek, Gidsy is spreading like wildfire. When I first came across the site it was only offering experiences in Berlin and it has now grown to cover Berlin, London, New York, Amsterdam, Los Angeles and San Francisco. The benefit of Gidsy compared to the above is that it allows you to host any kind of experience.
Wanna learn how to eat fire? There’s an experience for that (A small history lesson, the term geek back in 18th and 19th century was used in the circus. There, circus geeks performed geek shows and did interesting stuff like eating the heads of live chickens). Want to enjoy a really geeky experience? Join a fellow geek for an “Extrasensory Enlightenment” starting at the Science Museum of London.
Becoming a member and adding your own experience is a breeze. With so many categories to choose from I’m pretty sure most geeks will start coming up with ideas for awesome experiences. If only there was a technology and computing category…

Kicktable

As one of the founders (George) put it when we were having coffee: “Kicktable is about helping you explore the city you live in”. It makes complete sense, many geeks love the environment they have chosen to live in and are dedicated to their passion. Instead of always talking about where we want to go and what we want to do when we get there, we can focus on growing the environment around us.
Kicktable takes things a bit further by not focusing on just the economic part. What drives them is the power of connecting people and getting them inspired; helping them share their passions with people who are curious about the world. That translates to helping geeks inspire the curious minds!
The site is growing steadily and already offers geeky experiences like an intro to screen printing and a talk about giants in Georgian England.

Sidetour

We covered Sidetour’s launch last October, a startup that opens a window into someone’s world and provides inspiring and talented hosts with a new storefront-like marketplace, much like Etsy did for artists.
SideTour describes itself as a place to discover and book new experiences offered by interesting and talented people around the world. It’s a way of exploring and experiencing the world shared by people who refuse to accept the routine and prepackaged, who instead want a taste of the original, the authentic, the real. If this is not talking about geeks, I don’t know what is. Their mission and values are completely in line with what being a geek is.
As with the others, creating an experience is very easy and helps you share your passion with the world. Only drawback, it’s only for experiences in New York. If you happen to be in NY though, there are some very geeky experiences available like becoming a beekeeper for a day!

These platforms have created the opportunity for every geek to not just share their passion but also make some money from it. You remember how everyone couldn’t understand why you were so fixated with something (I’ve spent endless hours studying lighting for photography, not photography, but lighting for photography)? Well now is your chance to show them how cool it is and recover some of the money you’ve spent. If your city/country is not listed then push the people on every site to come to your city!