I spoke to a friend recently who is already selling products from home. They make a little bit of additional cash but, with a smartphone doing nothing now than advertising their business to friends on Facebook, they wanted to know if there was any additional way of getting more “business”.
Twitter was my first suggestion, but there’s a certain “dynamic” who go on Twitter and her client base is mainly mums and dads, or housewives and househusbands.
My next suggestion was maybe to setup a blog. There’s a WordPress app for iPhone and Android and it takes seconds to snap a picture of your products and then write a few words about it. You can perhaps use the app to start a big post, throw some pictures in, then finish it off on a laptop later.
eBay, of course, is another avenue and the mobile app is insanely quick at letting you add products into the correct category. You can also attach a photo straight from your smartphone camera and, every now and then, eBay offer a discount if you use your phone to add a listing.
As the conversation continued, another friend became interested but there was a mistaken belief that a smartphone could easily make you rich. At the end of the day, it takes a lot more than just a clever phone, and whilst he’d already grabbed an offer to visit Mr Green for 100 Free Spins and recommend you play online roulette on your mobile device, there is another way of making a quick buck, and you may have already found these apps in your app store.
They’re quite prolific on Android especially and tend to involve you either watching adverts, playing certain games or downloading certain apps to build up a “credit” which then gets paid out of you’ve got the time to do it. A quick search to “earn cash” results in a positive minefield of applications, but a new one on the block is “Clic Walk“, where you can get paid for accomplishing “missions “. These can range from a simple photo of your local area, a questionnaire about laundry products or just answering a survey and taking a snap of some products in you’re kitchen cupboards.
Again, you build up credit and it’ll get paid to you when you hit a certain level. This particular app launched initially in France and has just started here in the UK. It’ll look for missions in your local area and, when you’ve done a few, you can get paid via PayPal.
There’s also the more recent Google Opinion app which delivers Google Play credit. It won’t pay out a huge amount of money but it could get you your next paid-for app for free.
Either way, no matter what you do and no matter how smart the technology, you’re still going to have to work hard to be successful.