Average Joe vs. the TV/Movie Star

The Stars:

I was checking out my Facebook yesterday (Dec 5^th 2008) and saw a friend (TV Celeb) saying that they were concerned about a show they were going to be doing the next day. Low and behold they received many comments of support, which is not a big deal and is kind of nice. However some of these comments were a little over the top in the way of brown nosing and I am sure some of these are really just sucking up so they can say they talk to a TV Celebrity on Facebook.

The next evening the show was done and over with and guess what, more comments of the same nature.  Granted this person knows a lot of stars (whom seldom seem to comment) and also many average Joe’s that always seem to comment.

The Average Joe:

The average Joe works about 40 hours a week, often takes home a paycheck that is close to or below the poverty level and yet he gets no praise aside from his family. There is no doubt in my mind that the Family factor is an important one and maybe that average Joe does not need to be validated but what if he was as praised as a star is. Would it change his outlook on his job and make him more productive? What if his boss(es) gave him praise and told him he was a great employee and gave him a raise. 

My questions here are, why do we praise people we barely know and ignore the average Joe’s right next to us? Do we think that if we praise the stars they will be our friends and validate our existence?

 Ask yourself these 2 questions.

How far would this star be willing to go to help you out?

How far would an average Joe be willing to go to help you out?

 

My bet would be on the average Joe. This is not to say that the stars are bad people. I just don’t think they would be around to hear you cry. YES I know, there are exceptions to the rule but there is probably some rules to the exception as well.

I wonder if subconsciously we feel that the stars owe us since we buy their movies and watch their shows and feel that we know them. But to them we are just an other face. Sure they love their fans but if I was a star I would too since fans are the ones that pay my bills, buy me a nice house and that BMW or Benz. 

Funny how this topic started out by me checking my Facebook. Maybe I will go back onto this subject later after I have given it more thought. Or maybe not since I am an average Joe and no really reads this crap!!!

Me

And my Online Store

Light Bulbs?

If  a light bulb is off does that make it a "Dark Bulb"? 

If I install a Dark Bulb in a lamp during the day and turn it on does it get dark?

Working Hard to Increase sales

I opened my CP Shop in 2006 with a few basic stores that showed a few sales and mildly took care of it. For about 1 year now I have been working hard on getting the quality and quantity or items up as well as marketing. For the most part I make happy faces, very special ones.

It took a while but I have seen a increase in sales because of it. This post I read on the CafePress forums has given me some insight and new ideas for marketing to use on top of those I have now. One of which is giving out T-shirts to friends that are always in public areas like a computer tech in a college and an other who is in a band that may be touring with Genesis (HOLY CRAP THATS A GOOD ONE). I even created a special private section for marketing with t-shirts that have a definite marketing edge that I purchase myself and give out. These ideas came to me when I really started focusing on my products. 

Like Zap said, Think outside the box. Look around and see who your friends are and what they do. Ask them if they would mind wearing one of your shirts or even if there is a special one they want that you can make for them but add your store link or name on it as well. Have some cool decals made up for your Car or truck if your on the road a lot.


I also have an external site that looks and feels just like my CP store.
MacPhreak
http://macphreak.com
http://cafepress.com/macphreak

Everywhere!

Hello again!  In my struggle to get noticed for my Happy faces I realized that I am  already in many places on the web. Blogspot (here) is one of them, My online store is an other then there is Facebook of course. There is also Twitter and the latest one is Teeblr. These are some of the most visited ones. There are a few that are less profitable but could also be mentioned of course. Spreadshirt is an other that I do make a few sales from. It is a bit more of a pain to use and setup but it does work.

Thing is, any and all of them can and are profitable if you keep adding content and making sure your content is of high quality. Want a million dollars? offer a million dollars worth to the world. In other words, offer a great product or service and the money will come.

Here goes a new post

Haven't posted a new blog in a while and i really should keep it going as it helps me think and come up with new ideas. 

I have made a few more sales in my online T-Shirt shop but also in other online shops that I keep as well. These other shops are not as elaborate as Cafepress but then again, Cafepress is just too easy to setup and use.

I have also started signing up for many many affiliate programs as well as building a site to promote affiliate programs, free stuff, contests and other goodies on. I found this affiliate to be quite interesting  because you can get many things onSale!

By the way, my new site also has information about getting started with affiliate programs.

More to come.

Later

Gonna start bloggin again

back soon, very sonn.

More Money $

Made another sale on Cafepress.

You can too! Come on in and give it a try.

Starting to Pay off No. 3

This would be my latest way to make some money online. it consists of writing articles about whatever subject you find on the site and maybe even some subjects that are not if they are worthwhile enough to create a new category for.

I am talking about a site called Helium. It is essentially a site of probably Thousands of articles about all subjects and when you write an article that is fairly well ranked you actually get some Money from it. Now it may only be pennies (could be much more) per article per month but if you have 100 articles then you can make some decent extra cash every month no? You can request money once you reach $25 or you can wait for a larger sum before you request it. Payment is made via Paypal.

Below is a link to all of my articles of you are interested.
http://www.helium.com/user/show_articles/269596

Starting to Pay off No.2

You may already heard of Google's "Adsense".  If not  it is a simple way to make money off of your site. It can be used in different ways and is placed on your website for people to click on. The first basic way is to have a banner with links that actually use the content of your site to match up it's links along the same subject lines. Have a look here for an example. If you look at the bottom where it says "ads by Google" You will notice that my site generally is about happy faces so the links tend to gravitate towrds that subject. And if you would prefer not to have similar links that may be from your competitors you can block those out. There are  other types of systems with adsense but I find this one to be the most profitable. But please go ahead and use  there other referals and links. Your site may be better suited for them so try. What do you have to lose?
Tomorrow I will talk a bit about Comission Junction

Starting to pay off?

In an effort to make more Money on the net I have found a few likely candidates. One of which I have been working on for  about 2 years now. This one is my t-shirt site for which I now have over 100 designs and for which money is starting to trickle in. Basically you create images and send them to this site, place them on their products and get a comission on the sale. It's actually easy money if you think about it and you set the commission percentage. I usually go with how much work was put into the image to determine how much it should fetch. If your curious have a look here.  But there is also a way to make some more money with this site. If I was to refer someone who opened a store of their own I would make a commission on their sales as well. And if a customer enters the site via my store and buys elsewhere, like in someone elses store, I make some money there too.

See my next post for the other candidates. 
I want to keep them separated so no one gets confused.

Webcam Prices...WTF?

What is up with the price of web cams? Seriously, think about it. There is no reason for them to be so expensive. Compare a web cam to a digital camera. They are essentially the same type of technology but one is of much lesser quality. A web cam generally has between .3 to 1.5 mega pixels and a digital cameras currently range anywhere from 4 to 12mp’s. Web cams are quite simple in design and construction whereas Digital cameras have menus and buttons and screens and high quality lenses and batteries and memory cards and so on. So this being said, how can a Web Cam that has 1.3 mp’s and a USB interface cost about the same as a 5mp Digital camera with all it’s gadgets? IT JUST MAKES SO SENSE TO ME.