It won’t make you rich, but spending a few minutes every now and then filling in surveys for YouGov can add a nice bit of cash to your wallet – and they’re a pukka market research organization who won’t spam you or sell your details on to other people.

YouGov have recently added a lot of new features to their website, and you can swap your reward points for entry into their monthly prize draw if you’d like the chance to win a bigger prize. They weren’t recruiting new members for ages, and have only just opened up a new member referral scheme. I’ve been a member for years now (it’s the only survey program I’m still a member of) and if you sign up via my referral link then I get a few extra points, but they don’t come out of your pocket!

If you choose to collect your points for the cash payout, then once you reach a value of £50 they send you a cheque – it’s as simple as that. What could you do with £50?

It’s time for me to explain part of what I do for my day job.

One of the things about working for yourself from home is the different approach you have to take to where your pennies come from. Having done the office desk job routine in a previous life and since setting up a business in 2006, I’ve had a variety of income streams. One of these income streams is affiliate marketing. I’ve got some ideas for some affiliate marketing-related posts in the coming weeks and months, but I wanted to start off by showcasing one particular merchant (that is, a person or company who sells stuff, be it goods or services).

Some of the companies I’ve done work for are not exactly prominent in the ethical sphere. I stop short of promoting all-out evil companies, granted, but I try to do some ethical offsetting by working with folks who I know are deserving, genuine, follow a sustainable business model and care about what they do. The focus of today’s post is Green Shopping – a shopfront for Hyden House Ltd, which includes Permanent Publications, who publish Permaculture magazine, plus a bunch of other reading material.

I met the staff of Permanent Publications when Emma had her first book — The Alternative Kitchen Garden: An A to Z — published with them in 2009. They’re a small and nimble company with a real passion for what they do, and I want them to do well now and in the future.

The Green Shopping website has been recently revamped and given a new coat of pixel paint. I spent some time last summer and autumn assisting with the technical behind-the-scenes nerdy bits of Green Shopping and I was really pleased to see it find its legs and bring sales in. I’ve worked on many web shops and storefronts in my time, and the sad truth is most don’t make much money.

One of the features of the new site is the Green Shopping affiliate scheme — a fairly standard marketing system where just about everyone gets a win:

• You start off with a guilt-free merchant to promote
• Approved affiliates get 5% of referred sales
• Green Shopping increase their sales and can extend their product range
• You have more things to promote from a guilt-free merchant

…and the cycle continues. All you need is an appropriate website or method of promotion to get links out and sell stuff. Perhaps you’re an author and you want to earn a few more % on your book sales. Maybe you’re big on the ol’ Facebook and want to point people to some ethically-sourced, tried-and-tested products reviewed by real people. Maybe you’re looking for an ‘in’ to the curiously engaging world of affiliate marketing.

Sounds good to you? Sign up for the Green Shopping affiliate scheme.

If any of this is sparking brain activity and you’re thinking “I could do so-and-so to sell this-and-that and get the word out on you-know-what”, then you have nothing to lose, really. You don’t have to put any money in to get on the scheme, and you’ll be paid on your results: very simply, the more you refer and sell, the more you get in return.

At a high level, Green Shopping sell books, magazines, DVDs, tools, all manner of outdoor stuff, things for your home and garden, plus a range of solar and wind-up technology.

What you choose to do with the resulting money is entirely up to you, but I can recommend a really good kitchen gardening book written by someone I know. See what I did there? Clever stuff.

A few months ago, Pete and I were invited to a book launch, where (unsurprisingly) we met a couple of authors. We were introduced to one as people who knew a lot about the internet, and she asked the inevitable question – how do I make money from my website?

The lady in question had paid a small amount of money for someone she knows to build her a basic website. It was occasionally updated with news of events she would be at, or new books she had just published, but mostly was just a static site.

Shockingly, it didn’t increase her book sales by a noticeable amount. For some reason, people who don’t spend a lot of time on the internet think it runs on some magical principle, but it doesn’t. It works the same way as most aspects of life – you get out what you put in.

If you only have the budget for a cheap website (and don’t have the skills to improve it yourself) then it is unlikely to do wonders for your brand. There are things websites need to be successful – including engaging content, regularly updated to encourage readers to return for multiple visits. If you want to make money from your website then you need some way of tracking those visits, so you can see what works and what doesn’t. And if you want your website to sell something, then you have to make it easy – either by having your own webshop or by linking to a decent online supplier (for books, Amazon is usually the vendor of choice, but it doesn’t have to be yours).

If you don’t have the time to get really engaged in social networking, then don’t bother starting. There’s only one thing worse than an account that dries up after a couple of weeks, and that’s one that’s used intermittently to fire out ‘information’ – essentially nothing but an infomercial when you have something to promote.

So if you don’t spend a lot of time on the internet, and can’t pay someone to do it for you, don’t expect to make your millions there. Market your wares through one of the other activities that you have time for, and that you enjoy doing.

If you do spend time on the internet then market your website by engaging with the online world. Read blogs on relevant topics and join in the discussions – leave meaningful comments with a link to your site and people will follow them. Leave dross and they won’t. If you’re in to forums then do the same – be part of the conversation. Add something beyond advertisements if you want to feel the internet love.

And learn a little bit about SEO. Perhaps we can get Pete to write about that for Part 2 :)

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This is all good advice if you have a website already, but if you’ve yet to set one up then don’t forget to check out our GoDaddy discounts page!

It seems that the official FarmVille podcast is put on YouTube now, so I can share the podcast itself rather than a link. Don’t get excited, though, it’s not a vidcast!

In the latest podcast there’s some more information about Free Fuel Week (which appears to be nearly over!). Every consecutive day you play the game you get one more free tank of fuel – so 1 tank for day 1, 2 tanks on day 2, etc. If you miss a day, the counter gets reset back to 1 tank. And you have to wait a full 24 hours before you’ll get the next one.

And when you post a free fuel feed to your Wall, up to 5 of your Neighbors can collect it.

The big news this week is the changes to the chicken coops that allow you to feed your Neighbor’s chickens when you fertilize your farm. When you feed the chickens there’s a chance you’ll find some mystery eggs to share with your Neighbors – up to 3 sets of mystery eggs ‘per harvest period’, whatever that means. You also increase the chance that your Neighbor will find mystery eggs in their coop that they can share with you. You’ll also get 1 XP and 4 coins for feeding their chickens.

If your Neighbors have been feeding your chickens, then even if you don’t find any mystery eggs you will get a cash bonus. If you don’t find any mystery eggs then you’ll also get a chance to post a message on your Wall, requesting that more Neighbors come and feed your hungry chickens.

The first day these changes were put in place they caused huge connection issues for many farmers, who couldn’t get to their farms for an entire day. Fortunately these have been straightened out.

There are new Cow Print decorations and buildings, a new flower crop – Morning Glories – that takes 12 hours to mature and is harvested for 123 coins (only available at level 13 and above), and a new Starfruit tree. And there are two new Ribbons. The ‘Fenced In’ ribbon requires you to place fences on your farm (150 for the blue ribbon!) and you gain the ‘Egg-celent Discovery’ ribbons by finding mystery eggs in your chicken coops.

And there’s an update to the storage system – you can now host a barn raising to increase the capacity of your farm. Invite your Neighbors to help you improve your barn or toolshed and they’ll get 100 coins as a reward, and you’ll get a bigger building! Apparently we’ll be able to expand the animal buildings (chicken coops and dairy farms) soon.

There’s a new segment in the podcast for people to submit user questions, via the forum, and according to the Sneak Peek section we should be keeping an eye out for new things to do with our unwanted items, more ploughing/ planting/ friend missions, new buildings and new mystery boxes containing mystery animals.

The City Link man is coming tomorrow, bringing more goodies care of Amazon Prime. This one is a book to go with a TV series that just started yesterday – Grow Your Own Drugs. And now that I’ve mentioned that we’re going to get all kinds of odd people visiting the website… ;)

Anyhoooo… in the current economic climate there are plenty of people who aren’t in the market for having goodies delivered from Amazon or anyone else – but I’ll let you into a little secret: I wasn’t either, last year, and yet the occasional package still arrived – having cost me nothing but a little time.

There are lots of survey sites all over the internet that exchange cold hard cash or reward points for some of your opinions. Some are better than others; YouGov is a good one, although it takes a while to build yourself up to the £50 cash payout and there are plenty more that are open to everyone. Be a bit careful when you sign up – some are scams, but you’re much less likely to fall foul of a survey site (which needs quite a hefty infrastructure) than those awful pay-per-click schemes.

Anyway, if you’re still employed and can answer survey questions about business stuff then have a look at QNA. They pay out good rewards to people in business for participating in their online surveys. I’ve been doing it for some time now, there’s no commitment and it is genuine – I receive Amazon vouchers for each survey that I complete. You should take a look at it, here’s the link to their website, where you can read more about it and register to take their surveys.

Signup for QNA Membership

The company behind it is Vanson Bourne, a well-known market research company in the technology and business-to-business field. I don’t get invited to surveys particularly often, but each time I complete one I get £5/£10 in Amazon vouchers – a nice chunk towards a book or a DVD. The amount you’ll receive is mentioned in the invite email, and once you’ve completed the survey you don’t have long to wait until your reward plops into your inbox as well. And then you’ve got the joy of choosing what you spend it on, and later still the joy of it actually arriving.

A little bit of Amazonia can go a long way when you’re strapped for cash….