Entries Tagged 'Blogs' ↓

Not everyone can make a living doing something they really enjoy. As Seth points out:

Today, there are more ways than ever to share your talents and hobbies in public. And if you’re driven, talented and focused, you may discover that the market loves what you do. That people read your blog or click on your cartoons or listen to your mp3s. But, alas, that doesn’t mean you can monetize it, quit your day job and spend all day writing songs.

That’s the dream, but only some people can live the dream. The rest of us have to do what we love in our spare time and hope that one day we’ll be able to devote more time to it.

But there is always the temptation to create according for the market, to change your style or follow the latest trend. Sometimes that might work, but Seth encourages artists not to “wreck your art if it doesn’t lend itself to paying the bills”.

In fact, his advice is to create without concern for commercial value, arguing that the “twist is that as soon as you focus on your art and leave the money behind, you may just discover that this focus turns out to be the secret of actually breaking through and making money”.

Sounds like good advice to us here at Karmafan. If you create something you value then there’s a very good chance that others will value it, too. And they might just be willing to give you a little something in appreciation of your work.

Seth’s Blog

Aaron Schiff started an interesting experiment the other day at 26econ.com:

What if you could make a micropayment simply by clicking an attractive button. I’m interested to know how much people would tip if it were that easy to do. For the next little while, you’ll see a set of buttons underneath each post. After reading the post, I want you to click the button corresponding to how much you’d tip me for that post. If you think it’s not worth tipping, don’t click any button.

The problems Aaron points out with exclusively using methods such as PayPal to tip (”it costs too much to transfer money securely, and it’s too much trouble for users”) are some of the reasons we decided to go with the top-up idea for people who want to use Karmafan to support more than one artist or site. Allowing a fan or a reader to support what they like without worrying about transaction costs seems like the best way to encourage multiple small acts of patronage.

We’re looking forward to seeing the results from the 26econ.com experiment.

We have released our widget as a Wordpress plugin. A sample is shown on the main page of this blog - just there on the right

The plugin has all the regular features from the widget

1. anonymous one time payments using PayPal or SMS
2. Login to support from your Karmafan account
3. List of fans who have most recently supported the blogger or artist

All you need to do is install the plugin in your wp-content/plugins folder and provide your email address or Karmafan username (if you are already registered) to get the Karmafan widget on your blog.

If you are a new user the plugin auto-magically signs you up and sends you your Karmafan password via email.

Of course the Ajax widget still works for blogger as it did earlier. All you have to do is add a site to your Karmafan account, copy some codes we give you into blogger under Settings -> Template -> Edit HTML section.