If you have a website and you’re not selling a specific product or service, you are most likely hoping to make money off your content.  Content is super important online.  People use the internet everyday to do research.  However, the task of writting new content every day can be danting and extremely time consumming.  Hence, we have our problem, we need new content, so that our users will keep coming to our website and we can keep making money by having advertisers, but we don’t have enough time to write the content.  There are two different ways to solve this problem.  First you can hire someone to write content.  Pay them $50 an article and hope that the ad revenues will dwarf that $50.  However, if you are frugal and a little more risk adverse, I would recommend user driven content.  So what is user driven content.  It’s basically just letting your users write their own posts.  It couldn’t be easier.  Especially with the new gravity forms.  All you have to do is create a form that allows users to fill out boxes and write posts that will be placed on your website.  Check out my current project for an example of how to use user driven content to feed a website: www.buyingaengagementring.com.

  The internet is a completely new phenomenon.  This is a place where collaboration and competition coexist.  In the 20th century no one would have thought that this day would ever have come.  In the past there were winners and there were losers; there were those who made the sale, and those whose merchandise were not purchased.  Companies didn’t want to share the reason to their success unless they could make money doing it.  People claimed that they were protecting their investments; however greed and fear keep people from collaborating.  Nevertheless, the internet has completely changed this.  Now, with the open source revolution, anyone can view the html or php of a webpage.  Basically, you can see the successful recipe right before you’re about to make cookies.  However instead of leading to thievery this open source revolution has led to immense growth online.

Gravity forms is  one of wordpresses most useful pluggins.  Recently I was looking to find a way for people who were on my website to write posts without getting on the backend of wordpress.  And then I heard about gravity forms.  Gravity forms allow you to create fields, that people can fill in and submit to the website.  These forms, and the fields in the forms, are almost completely custamizable.  They will do whatever you want them to do.  Check out how I used the forms on my website at www.buyingaengagementring.com. I was able to create forms where girls could get on our website and fill out a gravity form to give advice to guys looking for engagement rings.

Kiva is an unique idea.  Somehow they have created a culture where people are willing to loan their money, and be happy if they get it back.  Normally people are expecting atleast a 8% return; however kiva’s users aren’t doing it for the money, they are doing it to help others out.  Kiva is a nonprofit.  in fact, if you say that you are willing to loan $25 dollars to a poor chinese farmer, non of that $25 will go to Kiva.  So what is their ministry and how is it different then compassion international.  Basically, Kiva is all about the entrepreneur.  They know that a personwith a great idea can change a community.  The only problem is, that when a poor farmer in China wants to invent a tool that harvests potatoes, he doesn’t have the money to do it.  And that’s where kiva comes in.  They find people in the U.S. who are willing to loan money to these guys.   

With a small amount of money, you can help others.  So you might be thinking, how can I be sure that I will get my money back?  The answer is that they do not garentee loans.  Nevertheless, over 98% of givers have received their loan back.  ANd what happens when you get your loan back?  Then you get to pick someone else and loan it again.  Enjoy giving!

On of my classmates is now on to bigger and better things.  His name is Blake Imeson and last summer he started www.limecuda.com.  LimeCuda is a  business that creates websites for small businesses.  They do everything.  They will build the website, optamize it, market it, and even host it.  If you are a small business looking for an affordable solution, check out LimeCuda.