Computer & Money

Dave Wells

Making money on Instagram all started
for me back when I was still using the
app for recreational purposes. At the
time, I was following an Instagram page
related to super cars that posted photos
of Ferraris and corvettes.

One day, I noticed that the page I was
following was doing sponsored posts. It
was advertising t-shirts, luxury car
accessories and even high end wallets.
At first I figured that the page was
advertising its own products. But as time
went on, I realized that the luxury car
Instagram page was simply promoting
products for companies. Even BMW
was using this page to promote its new clothing line.

Out of curiosity I began to do my
research, wondering how much these
Instagram users were getting paid to
post. I contacted several pages, asking if
they’d spare me a minute to answer
some questions over Skype.

Eventually, I found a guy named Pat, who agreed to Skype me for ten minutes
or so. He explained to me that he made
$100 every time someone purchased a
sponsored post on his page, which at the
time had 600k followers.

I then asked him how much time he spentrunning his Instagram page. The answer?Only 20 minutes each day.

For the time commitment that was a
fantastic return! And what was even
better was that people with over a
million followers, were making $500
plus per post.

After that Skype call, I instantly jumped
into the Instagram game, learning
everything I possibly could about the
platform. It’s now my main and greatest source of income, making me over six
figures each year.

The best part being that you can run an
Instagram page from anywhere. In a
coffee shop, in a hotel, and it only takes
minutes of your time to post. You don't
need to be a master at creating content,
or even be an entertaining character. All
you need to do is find quality pictures that you can repost.

How I Make Hundreds Per Post
Dave Wells

How to select a great topic

It couldn’t be easier to select a topic for an ebook. People are hungry for information and people are looking to the Internet to feed their hunger. After you’ve read this chapter, you will feel confident enough to choose your own topic, or you can literally pull your ebook topic directly from this book and use it! How’s that for a deal?

Observe what’s going on around you

If you’re smart enough to read this book, you’re smart enough to look around, determine what interests you and those around you. Think of what problems you’ve recently solved, what kinds of problems others have had and solved. Any problem that has been solved in your world could easily be the subject of your next book. People love to read how others have solved a problem that they currently have.

So, brainstorm a list of problems in your life and in the lives of those around you. Your friend Bob lost his job? Your sister’s child had chicken pox? How did they cope or find solutions? While you’re at it, start another list of unsolved problems evident in your corner of the world. Write down problems you wish you had solved. Aha! These are subjects that people will really be interested in! How to lose the last ten pounds. The truth about UFOs. The straightest path to becoming a millionaire. From your personal corner, your step-granddaughter is pregnant at age 14? Your grocery bill is double what it used to be? Your roof leaks? These are problems waiting for ebook solutions!

These unsolved problems would also be great ebook topics. Remember, you don’t have to know the solution, just the topic. You’re going to get someone else to do the research and write the book for you. You will not actually be writing one word.

Spend a few minutes Googling

The Internet is a great way to find out what people are looking for at any given moment. You can search for almost anything. Google™ is a popular search engine you can use, or you can try any of the others like Yahoo!® or Mamma.com. Type in phrases like “top concerns of Americans,” “best-selling nonfiction topics,” or “popular how-to manuals.” Common worries of 2010.

And while you’re on the Internet . . .

Find out the most popular nonfiction books from the New York Times bestseller list, Amazon and a Google search for ebooks. Your findings will tell you exactly what book subject’s people are buying right now. Try this. Go to www.amazon.com. From the tabbed menu running along the top of the Amazon home page, click “Top Sellers.” I did this one day in September 2008 and found a Harry Potter book, several other fiction books and titles such as Natural cures “they” won’t tell you about, How what you wear can change your life, How to profit from the demise of the dollar and The official SAT study guide.

I’ve paraphrased to some degree, but you get the idea. Here’s what I learned just from spending a few minutes on Amazon that day. People are reading good fiction from already-best selling authors (Da Vinci Code, the Harry Potter series, and others). Secondly, Amazon buyers, buying over the Internet, are interested in nonfiction topics such as improving their lives and making more money

For these books, just about any author will do even virtual unknowns or people who went to prison for lying to the American public. And that quick visit only confirmed that the straightest route to ebook profits is in the nonfiction ebook market. This is for a number of reasons. Fiction readers tend to like to curl up in a chair with an actual book. Some of them attend book clubs where the physical books are brought around someone’s How To Make Money Online 19 kitchen table with wine and cheese. Fiction readers tend to purchase from authors they’re already familiar with.

“Fiction is making a story; journalism is finding one. That’s the big difference. When I am writing a book, I am usually dealing with events or ideas that have already arranged themselves in memory. With nonfiction, you need to find your prospective before time has arranged it. The trick is to write about something as if you’ve been thinking about it for 10 years.”

Fiction can be more difficult to write and deliver well. Also, many of the classics in fiction are available as free ebooks. A reader interested in fiction could just download those. So stick with nonfiction unless you’re feeling particularly bold and experimental. Here is some more good news and if you didn’t already know this then you are going to be smiling big. Drum roll please . . . ideas are not copyrighted, therefore any idea you see, hear, or read anywhere anytime, is yours to use for an ebook!

You can create books around the same ideas that are covered in the Amazon best seller list, turn around and create an ebook on the exact same subject! Now, copyright law does protect the way ideas are expressed, so you want to make sure your hired author does not plagiarize or copy book text outright. And you cannot use the title word for word either. But there’s nothing stopping you from creating another book or ebook that covers the same subject with a different voice. It’s all as completely legal and guilt-free as nonfat Haagen Dazs. This is why looking at bestseller list is a great way to get topic ideas.

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In simplest terms, blockchain uses a combination of cryptography and a public ledger to create trust between parties while maintaining privacy             

Understanding the mechanics of how this works is a little bit more difficult, but in order to fully appreciate the genius behind blockchain technology we’ll need to dive into the technical details.

While blockchains can include many more features, the fundamentals of a blockchain are in the technology’s name:

●    The block - A block is a list of transactions from a certain time period. It contains all the information processed on the network within the past few minutes.
●    The chain - Each block is timestamped, placed in chronological order, and linked to the block before it using cryptographic algorithms. These algorithms are difficult for computers to calculate and often take several minutes for the fastest computers in the world to solve. Once solved, the cryptographic chain locks the block into place, making it difficult to change. (We’ll look at this in greater depth in just a minute).

The chain grows longer over time. Once a new block is created, the computers on the network work together to verify the transactions in the block and secure that block’s place in the chain.

In this chapter, we’ll take a look at what’s inside of a block and how one gets created. We’ll then turn to the chain and examine the different ways today’s blockchains are secured. We’ll try to avoid computer code and complicated explanations. The important thing here is getting a basic understanding of how the parts of a blockchain work together.

Distributed Ledgers

The most fundamental part of the blockchain is the ledger. It’s where information about the accounts on the network is stored. The ledger inside the blockchain is what replaces the ledger at a bank or other institution. For a cryptocurrency, this ledger usually consists of account numbers, transactions, and balances. When you submit a transaction to the blockchain, you’re adding information to the ledger about where currency is coming from and going to.

As we’ve already seen, a blockchain ledger is distributed across the network. Every node on the network keeps its own copy of the ledger and updates it when someone submits a new transaction. This “distributed ledger” is how blockchain intends to replace banks and other institutions. Instead of having the bank keep one official copy of the ledger, we’ll have everyone keep their own copy of the ledger and then we’ll verify transactions by consensus.

Each blockchain technology has its own ledger, and the various ledgers work very differently (as we’ll see). However the Bitcoin ledger, the first blockchain ledger, requires three pieces of information to list a transaction:

●    An input - If Amy wants to send Ben a Bitcoin, she needs to tell the network where she got that Bitcoin in the first place. Maybe Amy received the Bitcoin yesterday from Sarah, so the first part of the ledger entry says so
●    An amount - This is how much Amy wants to send to Ben;
●    An output - This is Ben’s Bitcoin address where the Bitcoin should be deposited

Now comes a difficult-to-grasp concept: there is no such thing as a Bitcoin. Of course, there are no physical Bitcoins. You probably already knew that. However, there are also no Bitcoins on a hard drive somewhere.

You can’t point to a physical object, digital file, or piece of code and say, “this is a Bitcoin.” Instead, the entire Bitcoin network is only a series of transaction records. Every transaction in the history of Bitcoin lives in the Bitcoin blockchain’s distributed ledger. If you want to prove that you have 20 Bitcoins, the only way you can do it is by pointing to the transactions where you received those 20 Bitcoins.

Almost all blockchains have this characteristic in common. The transaction history is the currency, there’s no difference between the two. Some new cryptocurrencies are altering the way the ledger is written in order to provide greater anonymity and privacy in transactions. They use certain identity masking techniques to hide the sender and receiver of the transaction while still maintaining a functional distributed ledger. (We’ll look at this in greater depth in the chapters on Dash, Zcash, and Monero.)

The “Double Spend” Problem

Of course, since there is no such thing as a physical cryptocurrency or even a digital file you can point to, we run into a few technical challenges implementing a digital currency. The biggest of these challenges is the double spend problem, where an attacker could send you a token and then send someone else the same token a moment later. Double spend means that tokens could be spent multiple times, increasing inflation and devaluing the cryptocurrency.

When you send a transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain, for instance, you’re merely forwarding a transaction you received from someone else. The double spend problem comes when an attacker tries to send a transaction twice, so it works like this:

✓ The attacker receives Bitcoin from Alice
✓ The attacker’s wallet looks like this: [Alice -> 1BTC -> Attacker] & [Bob -> 1 BTC -> Attacker]
✓ The attacker then spends the money by forwarding a past transaction. For instance, [Alice > Attacker > You]
✓ The double spend problem comes when the attacker simultaneously spends the coin twice. For example: [Alice > Attacker > You, 1 BTC] AND [Alice > Attacker > Someone Else, 1 BTC] right after each other.

When you use a bank, the bank would catch this error and invalidate one of the transactions. However, Bitcoin doesn’t have a central authority. Instead, Bitcoin uses cryptography to make it statistically very difficult to create false transactions.

​First, the attacker could not double spend at the same instant. If he sent two conflicting transactions at the same time, everyone on the network would be able to see both those transactions in the same block. The network would invalidate one.

​The attacker could try double spending one right after the other. However, the network would also reject a transaction that references an already-spent coin.

​The attacker’s only chance is to convince part of the network to accept one of his transactions and convince the other part of the network to accept the other transaction. This splits the network into two streams, called “forks.” Multiple forks of the blockchain can exist on Bitcoin.

The creators of Bitcoin solved this forking challenge, and double spend problem, by making the link between blocks difficult to compute. Since it takes so long to cryptographically create and validate a new block, it’s unlikely two blocks will be created at the same time. Even if two blocks are created simultaneously, the Bitcoin protocol directs participants in the network to follow the longest chain. As soon as a new block is created the network will revert back to a single version of the ledger.

Since multiple forks are theoretically possible, it’s wise to wait for multiple blocks to go by before considering a transaction “confirmed.” Once confirmed, however, that transaction is immutable. It’s nearly impossible to create a fraudulent blockchain fast enough to replace the honest blockchain. Let’s dive into how it works.

The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide about Blockchain Wallet, Mining, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Zcash, Monero, Ripple, Dash, IOTA and Smart Contracts

By Alan T. Norman

1. WHAT ARE SOCIAL NETWORKS?

A new type of website.

Or just a new word. "Community" was the word used to describe The WELL and later GeoCities. "Web2.0" – coined by O'Reilly to launch a conference and the idea that the web was back aIer the Bubble – was used for the first generation of "new" services, like Flickr, del.icio.us and Last.fm. But when Friendster, MySpace and then Facebook and Twitter came along, they were all immediately called "social networks".

The notion of social networks comes from academia. In the 1920s, the idea that the world was "shrinking" due to the ever-increasing connectedness of human beings became popular. The Hungarian Frigyes Karinthy [1] went a step further and said that any two individuals could be connected through at most five acquaintances – hence the famous 6 degrees of separation – starting from their "social network".

2. WHAT ARE SOCIAL MEDIA?

Social media are what social networks start being called the moment investors start thinking about how to recoup the money they invested in these ventures.

Please bear in mind that the term “media” is not neutral.

First, it implies the idea that everything (“content”, as they call it) is created – even if it were created by users, in which case they call it “user-generated content” (UGC) – so that it will be “monetised”, rather than “just for fun”.

Second, it implies the long-held idea that every place is a place where companies are welcome, even if that were not the case. And it implies ads or, in any case, paying for visibility of some kind.

As we shall see, this is exactly where social media are headed: adland.

3. WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING?

According to Wikipedia [2], social media marketing is: "The process of gaining website traffic or attention through social media sites, with efforts aimed at creating content that attracts interest and encourages readers to share it with their friends across their social networks". That would make a lot of sense, wouldn’t it?

Be interesting! Share useful information. Have an original point of view. Don't lie. Admit your faults and your shortcomings. Recognise that there's life beyond whatever your product does. Especially if it's toothpaste or mayonnaise.

Do these things and, if you're lucky, people will talk about you and spread the word. Oh, if only it were that simple! It is, or at least it could be.

But look around, and it’s quite clear that there’s not a lot of that going on.

4. ARE COMPANIES DOING IT RIGHT?

No, they're not.

I see exactly the opposite of what Wikipedia calls social media marketing.

Not companies earning traffic to their websites because they do interesting things that eventually get shared on social media, but rather companies that send their customers away from their websites and over to Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Pinterest and Vimeo and Vine etc.

But obsessively telling people who are visiting your website “We’re on Facebook” or “Follow us on Twitter” must be the dumbest thing of the decade.

They’re already on your website. Why send them away? Does anyone in marketing really think that their big and boring companies will magically look cool and hip on social media?

5. WHY ARE COMPANIES SENDING PEOPLE OVER TO SOCIAL MEDIA?

First, because most companies don’t like their customers, whom they usually call “consumers”, and don’t want them bumming around on their web properties, leaving comments or asking questions on their pixelperfect websites.

Second, because most companies are boring and would have a hard time doing social media marketing as described by Wikipedia, i.e. in being interesting and getting their customers to spread the word about them.

Third, because of the hype cycle: they're told that it’s a new world, that things will never be the same again, that it’s land-grabbing time, and that you need to get in early and make a killing. The same nonsense we heard when the pundits were extolling the wonders of the New Economy, in case you forgot. Which you probably did.