5 Bucks a Day

I’ve been playing with ScreenSteps, a product that advertises “a documentation tool for those that don’t like to do documentation”.

To me it’s all of that and a lot more. As soon as I came across this product, I knew I had to have it.

My first playing around yielded this: ==> Earn1KaDay Tutorial produced with ScreenSteps

I showed that to my Earn1KaDay members and one question was how long it took me to become proficient enough to do that. Oh, about 5 or 10 minutes.

Here’s the drill. You decide what you want to talk about. You organize those thoughts into what we call lessons. Then you start typing a lesson. When you get to a point where you want to show an image, you go into screen capture mode. You capture a portion of your screen (you can see all the images I captured in the sample I linked to above). You can highlight things on the screen shots. Then type some more, do another screen shot, until done.

When all the lessons are done, you assemble them into a manual. Then export the manual to either html or PDF (or to a blog post if it’s short enough). In my example, I exported to html, it downloaded to my desktop, I uploaded to my server, and you see it. No fiddling with html or css or anything.

I can see ScreenSteps as being useful in producing eBooks as well, that’s my next plan, to figure out what I want to teach, and use it to do that.

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I’m very happy to have implemented the “Buy Me a Beer” function for the Earn1KaDay membership forum. 

I had figured it out at the 5bucksaday forum before, but I wasn’t happy with that implementation. What I did there was steal the MSN instant messaging slot in the database and changed that to a PayPal address, and just used code in the forum software that would display your MSN IM address. I know, not many people have filled in that parameter anyway, but a few have, so I decided I wanted the beer button to be a separate field in the database.

It took longer than I wanted, not because it was complicated coding, but because there a lot of different modules and templates in the phpBB software, and it took a while to find them all. I think I have now.

OK, the purpose, and the implementation.

The implementation is simple, just go to your forum profile and type in your PayPal address.

What this accomplishes is that it allows any registered member of the forum to send you money, just by clicking on the icon in one of your posts, filling in an amount, a reason, and sending the money.

I think that the members of Earn1KaDay are a pretty helpful and friendly bunch, many times I see people going out of their way to help others. One member wrote an application to do something very special for article marketers recently, and is allowing all our members to use it, from his server, using his bandwidth.

Another example … recently staff member Tim Gorman listed several dozen of his niche topics that are giving him a good return on investment. He’s creating competition for himself, obviously.

Another example … a member was having a problem because Windows Vista did an automatic update and then Firefox wouldn’t work, even after reinstalling it, so someone offered to help troubleshoot the problem for her.

Even with this history of giving without expectation of reimbursement, I feel that this new feature will encourage more people to do even more. We all like to be shown that we’re appreciated, after all, and this will enable members to show other members that we do appreciate them, just by sending them a couple bucks here and there for a job well done.

After all, in a regular job, if someone helped us out, we’d buy him or her a beer or a cup of coffee or lunch, right? The same reasoning applies.

The hacks necessary to get this functionality into phpBB aren’t all that difficult, once the research is done to find all the places that changes need to be made. It probably took me about 24 working hours all told to do the research, changes, and testing. At this point, while it’s fresh in my mind, I’m considering writing it all down, and maybe doing a video of parts of the process. If anyone is interested (the target audience would be anyone who runs a phpBB forum), make a comment, leave your email address with the comment, and I’ll let you know when it’s ready.

It won’t be free, but it will be reasonably priced, I assure you. When I was first looking for this function, I found a script that was selling for $50, and almost pulled the trigger on it, until I read the fine print and found that it really didn’t do a good job at all.

I’m thinking around $27 or $37 for the “how to” manual, but cheaper for Earn1KaDay members.

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I’m excited to announce that the Earn1KaDay IM Summit is finally set.  Actually it was announced a couple weeks ago, but since then I’ve been working on improving what attendees can expect.

You can read on the page linked above about all the speakers, but briefly the featured speakers are Willie Crawford, Tim Gorman, Matt and John Rhodes, Matt Levenhagen, Jaime Mintun, and Brian McElroy.  There are others giving shorter presentations.

Speakers were chosen over a wide range of expertise making this seminar a one stop place to get up to date on some of the key Internet marketing skills and to start 2009 out on the right foot.

Just yesterday I added a bonus for all attendees, which is the Residual Income Formula course, currently being sold for $197.  Every attendee will receive a CD with the full course, plus special additional content which will enable them to set up their first membership site.  The course can be previewed by clicking on the link above.  Beginning November 20th, you can purchase the course separately, but the better deal obviously is to attend the seminar and take it home with you.

One of the highlights of the Earn1KaDay IM Summit will be a Friday evening “meet and greet” session, including an open bar, where attendees and speakers will be able to network with each other, overlooking Disney World in Orlando.  The evening fireworks show will pale in comparison to the explosive opportunities you’ll encounter at the Earn1KaDay seminar.

I’m looking forward to it, and hope to meet you there.  The dates are January 16 to 18, 2009.  Seating is very limited and registration must be made in advance.

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