Most of the bloggers (including me) in the last month were discussing the recession in one or another way. I am a bit tired of talking about it – with or without our talks the recession is here and we have to deal with it. So I have decided to select the best posts of November that don’t directly discuss the crisis. Here you go:

Steve Olson is not exactly a PF blogger, but his wife has a post that I want to share with you, because it really contains very useful insights – Want to Start a Small Business on the Internet? The Myths and the Reality.

Trent at The Simple Dollar asks a very good question – Is Debt Necessary For Generating Income?. He has also reviewed the first book by Steve Pavlina, it’s a great review and book to check.

David at MomeyNing is warning about 8 Bad Things You Are Teaching Your Kids About Money.

Pinyo at Moolanomy is giving 7 Ideas To Turbo Charge Your Career Toda.

Money Crashers also talk about job and career – 10 Reasons Why You Are Still At The Job You Hate.

You’ve certainly heard the mantra to pay yourself first. Well, Jamie at Paid Twice is giving Five Concrete Ways To Pay Yourself First.

Gather Little By Little has a cool frugal idea – you can move to a rural area.

The Clever Dude wrote a nice post about Toronto’s Smallest House.

Patrick at Cash Money Life muses about the alternative income importance.

Jim at Blueprint For Financial Prosperity shares 5 things he wish he knew when he graduated. How many are the things you wish you knew?

Each year the mass media is irradiating you with ideas what else to buy on the holidays and how to spend more money (how could you not love the TV). Some websites and blogs give some good advice how to save money instead of spending it, which is generally better. I want to share some ideas how to earn more on the holidays which hopefully is going to be even more useful. Let’s see what you can do:

Photo by
pfala at Flickr

Take Some Extra Work Before The Holidays

Of course you can take extra work at any time, but the time right before holidays can be very rewarding. The simple reason is that most people are not willing to work too much at that time. They are already planning the celebrations and most would happily take a break earlier if there was someone to do their work. If you work in a company you could probably get good extra payment for working more hours right before the holidays. If you work for yourself or directly with clients, you may get more well paid purchases if you are willing to work hard when everyone else is pre-relaxing.

Work Exactly On The Holidays

If you badly need money, here is a harsher action to take – work exactly on Christmas night or New Year. No one wants to do that, even those whose jobs require it. If your business or job is especially important on the holiday, now it’s your time to make some good bucks.

I know it sucks to work when everyone is having fun, but is the timing really that important for you? Most probably not especially if you are a single or a couple with no kids.

Make A Holiday Sale

It’s no secret that the grocery stores make holiday promotions with the aim to sell more stuff. At that time of the year people are less strict to their money and are willing to spend it for items that are presented to them as hot deals. But why would only the stores offer this? Your products and services may also be packaged as hot holiday deal (really – even if you are selling your writing, programming, design or architecture skills). Offer discounts, different packaging, longer free support or anything that can make your stuff look festive.

This method works best if you own a business or sell your service directly on the markets – like a freelance professional for example. It would be unusual to offer a sale to your bosses in a regular company.

Help People Save Money

On the other side of the cake everyone tries to sell more around the holidays. Is that boring you? You are not alone – a lot of people hate the holiday shopping rush and would happily buy something that helps them save money from during it. It can be information, product or service – it doesn’t matter. Just present your stuff as saving money and make sure it actually helps people save – and voila, you will be making good money around the holidays.

Your solution could be a simple blog article on saving money on holidays shopping (that’s not going to make you rich, but may bring you some visitors and advertising income), a budget holiday trip package, a software helping people to organize their spends or why not economical holiday cake. You can do it regardless what business you are in.

Buy Assets

This isn’t an immediate way to make holiday money, but is one of the best long term. Maybe you are not desperate for cash right now or are not very keen on spending your money on holiday shopping, but many other people are. And as you know, the best time for buyers is when sellers are desperate (crisis 2008 and holidays 2008 – what a wonderful combination that could be?). Around the holidays you can buy cheap offline or web based business, property or anything else that makes money slowly over time. If you have the cash now, you are in excellent position to make wealth in the future.

There is nothing new in the idea to make more money on holidays- all those people who own bars and shops are doing it for year. Who knows why most other people assume they only have to spend. There is nothing wrong if you wish to have a break and enjoy, but hope in January you won’t complain that you haven’t had the chance to earn.

Once upon a time there was Joe who made living by selling hairdresser’s furnishing. One day Joe started reading personal finance blogs. Until that day he used to spend a lot of money for eating outside, gas, clothes, movies, popcorn, gadgets and his home. The economy of his country was working fine (well, almost).

Photo by
annia316 at Flickr

But the day he started reading blogs, Joe learned that the way he lived his life was wrong. He learned that he had to save money instead of spending it all. He learned that eating outside was bad, so he started cooking rice and potatoes at home. Because rice and potatoes were the best food. He read that in the blogs. Meat and fruits were not as good because they were expensive. He started wearing his clothes more and buying less new clothes. When he bough any new clothes, they were produced in China, because they were cheaper.

Joe decided not to buy a new house. Instead of that he could live in a van. Vans were cheaper and you could get one without mortgage. Because having a mortgage was bad. He learned that from blogs.

Instead of going to movies Joe stayed at home and played cards. Spending money on movies was not a good investment. He had to save money. He read that in the blogs.

One day a friend of Joe – Sam – lost his job flipping burgers at McDonald’s. His bosses said that more people cook at home, less people eat burgers and there was no more work for Sam. Sam had to limit his expenses as much as he could. One of the many things he had to stop buying was sweets for his children.

Wendy worked in the sweets shop. She was selling home made sweets that she and her sister were making. But not only Sam stopped buying sweets. So did many people who were flipping burgers and also had lost their jobs. The sales went down and down, Wendy and her sister couldn’t pay the rent so they closed their shop. The two sisters had to limit their expenses. One of the many things they stopped doing was to go at the hairdresser’s. So did aunt Barbara – the host of their sweets shop. She had no tenants any longer so she had to limit her expenses too.

Since many other women had to stop doing their hair-style, many hairdresser’s had to close shop. Joe had no more customers to sell his furnishing to. He had to use his saved money to survive. He was very upset, but he read in blogs about the financial crisis and how everything was going bad for everyone.

So it wasn’t his fault. Or was it?

The smart investor buys when the market is down. What are you waiting for? There will be no better time for buying cheap assets than the time of economy crisis. Businesses, real estate, stocks, even human power and ideas is getting cheap. If you have cash now, you are going to be at the winner’s side. But enough talk, I am not writing this post to motivate you. I just want to tell you about the new little free tool available for you.

If you are ready to invest in something, you may want to use the investment calculator that was developed for this site a couple of months ago. The good news is you no longer need to visit the page each time you want to check hypothetical investment profits (Yes, I am going to sacrifice these page views for your convenience *grin*). Now it’s available as Firefox Extension that you can install and run at any time you want. Just go here and install it.

I hope you are using Firefox. If not, you’d better do.

Get The Calculator

Almost everyone can write somehow which makes writing one of the most popular ways of earning alternative income. The main factor determining your probable success is how good you can write how productive you can be. The good news is that you don’t need to be Shakespeare. In fact if you write for alternative income you must not be Shakespeare because most people will not understand your writing. If you want to make money by writing you must be able to write in simple, understandable and engaging style. That’s not as hard as it may look – most people who write blogs can do it. And you most probably can do it too.

Photo by
Olivander at Flickr

What I want to answer here however is not whether you can write, but where and how to make money from your writing. There are many opportunities, some of which are really good earners.

Write Per Hire

Most straightforward way to make money by writing (and by anything else, isn’t it?) is to write for someone and get paid for the job done. That isn’t the best way, but it’s the easiest because it doesn’t require a genius mind to find some writing work. Your options include but are not limited to:

• Paid blogging. That’s a new profession but gains a lot of popularity. Check Problogger’s Job Board and you’ll see many open positions for professional bloggers. No, you don’t need to go into some office and work from 9 to 5 and yes, you will get paid for your writing.
• Getting freelance jobs. You can find a lot of writing projects on sites like Guru, Scriptlance and Elance. For more similar sites check Freelance Switch’s Monster List Of Freelance Sites.
• Writing for experts site. Sites like About.com and EHow.com are looking for expert writers for various topics and offer either a revenue share or fixed rate. The big advantage to write for such site as opposed to writing for your own blog or websites is that they already have huge auditory and good SE ranks. So it’s likely that a guide you write for About.com will make you more money than if you write the same guide on your blog. The experts that are accepted on About.com are paid $925+ monthly.
• Other writing per hire. You can also write for people who publish non fiction books and e-books – it’s common that some will just do the market research and invest some money and will outsource the content research and writing. You can make some money as a writer for newspapers and websites too.

On the writing per hire market supply exceeds demand which makes the prices low. There are cheap writers with decent English who will work for $2 – $3 per hour, so if you want to be paid well you need to find a way to distinguish yourself from the crowd.

With this method depending on your writing quality and talent you can expect to earn between $2 – $3 and $20 – $50 per hour (more if you are very good and productive).

Write your blog

A way to get better payment for writing gigs is to get known for your writing by establishing your own blog. But that’s not all – having a blog of course is also a direct method to earn alternative income. In my opinion it’s one of the worst methods to make money for most people but regardless of that some really talented (or just lucky) bloggers manage to make a lot more than living from it.

If you want to make money by writing your own blog, just good writing skills will not help you enough. You will need to put significant effort in networking with other bloggers, SEO and advertising. You will probably need to write some posts that you don’t enjoy so much – like plenty of lists and controversial stuff – just to get some noise around your blog.

Writing a blog allows you to make money by advertising, PPC ads like Adsense, selling text links or selling affiliate products. Very often the bigger profits from blogging come in indirect way. For example, as suggested in the beginning, your blog could bring you lucrative writing contracts (but that only if you are really good).

For more information on professional blogging better check Problogger.

You can expect to earn from $1 to $100,000 monthly or more – it all depends on how popular your blog will become. Unfortunately the chances to earn $1 are much bigger

Write for your websites

Similar to managing your blog, you could write for your content websites and monetize them with advertising or affiliate marketing (that’s what most people understand as “make money online” anyway). The difference is that static or semi-static websites do not need to be updated constantly like blogs. Your focus will be more on providing useful and accurate information rather than on controversial and “hot” stuff.

Typically content sites are more “niched” and require serious search engine optimization work. The best thing about making static websites is that you can write 10-20 articles on a topic once and then enjoy the passive income for years. That’s at all not as simple as it sounds however – driving traffic and achieving good SEO positions is hard and becomes harder every day as competition grows. If you are planning to earn alternative income by writing mediocre or recycled content, most probably you will be disappointed.

After you create 4-5 static content sites you can expect to earn between $50 and $5,000 monthly depending on how good your writing and SEO work is and how lucrative the niches you have chosen are.

Write to sell

Finally there is more entrepreneur-ish approach to writing for alternative income. Instead of writing per hire for someone or writing for free and trying to earn from advertising like everyone else, you can try to sell your writing as a product. You can write and produce an e-book, paid report or self publish a paper book and sell copies yourself. Such a project requires more than just writing of course – you need to research the market for projects in demand, do the content research unless you are already an expert in the topic (and probably even then) and finally pack and promote the product.

The big advantage of writing to sell method is that you write once and sell many times. Recently this approach often evolves to selling access to information via membership sites. This model can be better than writing a book or e-book because you can start selling access even before you finish the entire product. You can monitor first users’ feedback and improve your site based on it. And the best thing, in terms of making money, is that when selling access you would typically charge a subscription fee rather than one time fee. If you think that means recurring income, you are right.

Everyone can make some money writing. The main question is how much you can make and whether it will justify the effort. The best way to understand that is to go ahead and try.