How do some seemingly bland Instagram posts get so many likes, and why to all 'repost' accounts have so many many followers?
The answer is likely to be many and varied, involving gaming the Instagram algorithms, and upping your search engine optimisation, but the primary tool in Instagrams armoury is promoting posts. Unsurprisingly, they make it very easy for you to promote your own posts, so I thought I'd give it a go.
A shortlist of hopes and dreams, things to achieve, and memories to make.
Keeping on top of all the tasks of modern life can be tricky. How many times have you got to the end of another weekend and ever wondered what you achieved in the week? Well, this happened to me all the time, until I started to keep a weekly todo list. The idea is simple:
So, pretty obvious right? However, I’ve found this method really helps me because of a really simple thing: dedicating a whole, new, A4 notepad page to each week. Now, I generally only have a 5 or 6 tasks jotted down for each week, which means there’s a lot space on the page left over, perfect for making notes throughout the week, and it’s this act of making further notes throughout the week, that keeps you coming back to your task list.
A recent trip to Canada provided an excellent opportunity to photograph the beautiful landscapes around Vancouver Island. With outlying islands, dense old growth rainforests, rocky shorelines, and long sandy beaches; Vancouver Island has a treasure trove of photogenic scenes.
Starting from Vancouver city, just getting to the island is a fantastic experience, either take the 15 minute flight, or the 2 hour ferry, both offer great views.
I’ve been busy building a new section of the site dedicated to Calculators!.
Calculators are interesting things, especially when you can quickly change variables and see the result set update.
Calculators will become an important section for growth going forward. The first calculator to be released is a Compound Interest Calculator, illustrating the amazing effects of compounding interest in savings accounts. The calculator gives you access to all the data as the interest rolls up each year, as well as graphing the accumulation curve.
Making calculators as interactive as possible is one of the goals. In addition, all calculators will have a full API for programmatically accessing the result sets, or for creating direct links with starting parameters for the calculator to pre-populate the calculator. For example, Here’s a link to illustrate how £10,000 can become £34,582.51 over 10 years, and if you want to access the data directly, you can use a command line tool like cURL:
curl https://maniacalrobot.co.uk/calculators/compound_interest.json?capital=10000.0&frequency=quarterly&monthly_deposit=100.0&rate=6.0&term=10
Simply appending .json to the path will automatically give you a JSON result set, which you can then use with other programs.
At the beginning of December 2018, I’ve signed up to https://www.prolific.ac, to see if it’s possible to use online surveys as a reliable additional income source.
Prolific specialise in providing a platform for academic research, with typical surveys taking around 10 minutes, and an aim to pay around £8 per hour. Surveys are reserved on a first-come-first-served approach, meaning you need to have the survey's webpage open, or you'll miss out. Most of the time, there won’t be any surveys, with a handful of surveys appearing per day. I wasn’t continuously checking as I have my main job with Salesforce during the day, so I was very much checking Prolific during breaks and evenings. This would have reduced my potential to pick up all available surveys.
So, how much did I make? Over 1 month, I was successfully paid for completing 28 surveys, 2 surveys are pending payment, and 2 surveys failed to complete. Below are the successfully completed surveys that have paid out:
| Reward | Bonus | Time |
|---|---|---|
| £1.00 | £0.00 | 00:10:59 |
| £0.42 | £0.00 | 00:07:09 |
| £0.95 | £0.00 | 00:14:13 |
| £0.20 | £0.00 | 00:02:37 |
| £0.42 | £0.80 | 00:04:11 |
| £0.60 | £0.00 | 00:02:06 |
| £0.13 | £0.00 | 00:01:43 |
| £0.52 | £0.00 | 00:05:46 |
| £1.20 | £0.00 | 00:15:36 |
| £2.00 | £0.00 | 00:06:45 |
| £0.40 | £0.00 | 00:01:43 |
| £0.20 | £0.00 | 00:02:40 |
| £2.10 | £0.00 | 00:26:53 |
| £1.50 | £0.00 | 00:14:59 |
| £1.30 | £0.00 | 00:14:50 |
| £0.70 | £0.00 | 00:13:47 |
| £1.25 | £0.00 | 00:11:05 |
| £1.09 | £0.00 | 00:13:45 |
| £1.00 | £0.00 | 00:06:19 |
| £0.37 | £0.00 | 00:07:53 |
| £1.20 | £0.00 | 00:04:03 |
| £1.10 | £0.00 | 00:12:19 |
| £1.00 | £0.00 | 00:05:44 |
| £0.75 | £0.08 | 00:11:43 |
| £0.50 | £0.00 | 00:05:52 |
| £0.61 | £0.00 | 00:03:20 |
| £0.20 | £0.00 | 00:03:52 |
| £2.10 | £0.00 | 00:15:08 |
Together, over a month, this is a total of 4 hours and 7 minutes of work and paid a total income of £25.69, which works out to just over £6 per hour … not great. However, one thing that surprised me about this experiment was how engaging some of the surveys were. Although there were some pretty boring questions, there were some genuinely interesting questions, likely due to the academic nature of the surveys, but this was a small positive that I was not expecting.
Could I recommend this is a main income source? No, unfortunately from my brief time, I just cannot see how this would make a decent income. From what I can tell, surveys are a numbers game, the only way to make more money is to complete more surveys, which at £6 per hour is too little for the effort. Assuming you could complete surveys all day, a 10 hour day would only pay £60, with costs still to factor in.
Could I recommend this as an additional income source? Although it's only a small amount, Yes. However, you might need to consider any tax implications. Technically you should be paying tax on these earnings, which could decimate your potential for making any income, although the UK government have recently announced that you do not need to declare the first £1000 of non-employment income. Which means you’re unlikely to need to worry about this unless you have multiple non-employment income streams.
As a future experiment, I Might try running multiple survey sites in tandem, to see if better payouts are available.
This is a retrospective post featuring photos from 2018.
Hourly Wage x Hours Worked = Active Income
This simple equation can be used to demonstrate the importance of understanding the value of your own time. As you can see, Active Income is directly affected by either how long you work, or by how much you're paid; increasing each of these will increase your total Active Income.
The first way to increase your Active Income is to increase the number of hours worked. This is probably the easiest to achieve, as your job might allow you to work additional hours, work overtime, or have a second job. However, there is only so many additional hours you can work, firstly, everyone needs time away from work to relax and enjoy, and secondly, it's impossible to work more than 24 hours in a day. because of these 2 constraints, increasing hours worked will only ever yield small improvements in your Active Income.
The second, and better approach is to increase your hourly wage. Unfortunately, many people greatly underestimate the value of their time. The sky is the limit when increasing your hourly wage. However, achieving a higher hourly wage is obviously harder to achieve, as this will require you to learn new skills and be willing to progress your career, or even change your career entirely. A quick method of increasing your hourly wage is to simply change companies. This can be hard, as you may have loyalty to companies, but in this game, you have to look after yourself, and if you feel there are better opportunities at another company you can often negotiate a higher salary and expectations of promotion.
Active Income will always be constrained by these 2 factors. If you're really interested in boosting your total income, you'll need to start making your money work for you. And this is called Passive Income.
This is a retrospective post featuring photos from 2017.