T. R. Fowler is making $5000 per week as a freelance blogger. He has 10 clients who each pay him $500 per week to maintain their blogs. Fowler is the first to admit that $500 per week is well above the average rate of pay for a freelance blogging gig; but as he states, “Five hundred dollars for 35 quality written blog posts, each with at least 350 words, is a bargain.” When T.R Fowler first started shopping around for freelance blogging gigs he was appalled by the insulting payments writers were accepting for their work.

“I saw this one ad where some guy was advertising for someone to make 5 three-hundred word posts per day to his blog 7 days per week. He wrote something to the effect of ‘I’ll pay $25 per month and that’s it. Don’t write me making any counter offers.’ It was outrageous, but the most shocking thing for me wasn’t that someone had the nerve to take an attitude like that while offering to pay a writer $25 per month to write 45000 words per month on his behalf . The biggest shock for me were the 30-something writers who responded expressing interest in the job. How desperate can they be? Geez, even if you charge a penny per word  you’re looking at $450 per month for 45000 words.”

Fowler refused to become one of those writers bartering in freelance writing marketplaces with unscrupulous characters looking for the cheapest labor they can find with blatant disregard for the basic tenets of fair trade. He stopped reading want ads and started selling his services, creating ads that immediately filtered out the cheap labor seekers from the respectable business people willing and able to pay fairly.

“The clients are out there,” says Fowler. “It’s a matter of figuring out how to convince them that they’re better off going with you over the guy who’s willing to accept $25 per month to do the job. You have to help them to appreciate that no self-respecting writer will sell himself that short…that any writer who will accept $25 per month to write 5 blog posts per day 7 days per week with at least 350 words per post is not going to be overly concerned with the quality of the work he produces. And he won’t be able to afford the time to make 5 posts per day 7 days per week either because he won’t be able to live on $25 per month. He’ll need to be out working a regular job.”

Of course to be able to demand $500 per week from a client a writer needs to be capable of producing quality work that will enhance the client’s business. Getting the client is one thing, keeping the client is something altogether different. Talent, professionalism, reliability, effectiveness, respect for the client’s property, understanding of the client’s goals and agenda, availability to the client, knowledge of the client’s audience, respect for the client’s audience, these are just some of the requirements needed for a successful venture as a high-earning freelance blogger.

I’ve recently met a web designer who is making $3500 per week on average selling wordpress themes he designs. I’ve tried my hand at designing wordpress themes for sale but my talent is mediocre at best and my themes sell for $20 - $100 when they sell. The gentleman making $3500 per week gets from $250 - $500 for his themes and his themes usually sell.

If you have talent for web design and know how to code wordpress themes, you could be making some extra income selling your designs. Even you don’t have the talent to create $500 themes, if you’re able to design, code and sell multiple themes in a day you could still make a fairly decent income from your designs, even if they sell for $20. You won’t be able to rely on designing wordpress themes as your sole source of income; but you could design and sell themes as an additional source of income and pull from $200 - $1000 extra per month. For $200 per month you just need to sell 10 themes per month at $20 or 5 themes per month at $40.

Of course your themes can’t be poorly designed as no one will buy them even if you’re only selling them for a dollar. Check out wordpress theme galleries and make note of the styles that get rave reviews or that get downloaded most frequently. Try to design similarly styled themes; or you can try to be innovative and go for something new and artistic. The higher the quality of your work the more you can expect to get for the theme as long as you’re selling the theme outright, meaning you’re transferring full rights to the theme to the buyer and will not sell multiple copies. It’s possible to sell multiple copies under the “premium themes” umbrella; but this post is specifically focussed on designing themes and selling full rights to the theme to a single buyer.

As an alternative to selling your theme you can also sell sponsored links in the footer. People buy these types of links to help increase their number of backlinks. It’s a controversial subject but there is still a market for selling sponsored links in your wordpress themes. You can find buyers on sites like Digital Point in their buy sell trade forum.

Selling sponsored links obligates you to make your themes available for free download from as many wordpress themes databases as possible. You can sell up to 4 links at $25 each so that you make $100 per theme you create. If you can create 5 themes per week and sell $100 in links you could generate around $2000 per month extra income from designing wordpress themes. Of course if your themes aren’t likely to get downloaded no one will be interested in buying a sponsored link; so you need to have some talent for creating themes people will want to download.

More on making money selling wordpress themes

Last Friday in West Palm Beach, Florida, a woman intentionally jumped from an overpass on Interstate 95. The woman was struck by a White van and killed. Apparently, when the van hit her, thousands of dollars fell out of her pockets and sprinkled the interstate, and what do you suppose passing drivers did? They stopped and grabbed up the money.

Would you have stopped to collect money from the scene of what must have been a gruesome accident?

Journalist Charles Duhigg wrote a piece back in October of 2003 titled, “The Economics of Suicide - Why trying to kill yourself may be a smart business decision”. I stumbled across the article while researching money and suicide. In the article, Mr. Duhigg references the attempted suicide of Kirk Jones, a Canadian who made world news in 2003 for jumping over the guardrail at Niagara Falls. Duhigg wrote of Jone’s daredevil leap:

When Kirk Jones jumped over the guardrail at Niagara Falls last week traditional explanations for his leap were plentiful….. But when it later came out that Jones had boasted to a friend, “If I go over and I live, I am going to make some money,” it was time to call in the economists.

Jones is now negotiating with tabloids to sell his story for thousands of dollars. His case, however, will complicate a debate that is roiling suicidology, one that pits economists against psychiatrists over a basic question: Is suicide a rational decision?

Here are some interesting snippets from the article which you can read in full on slate.com

…as personal incomes rise, the propensity for suicide falls

Attempting suicide can be a rational choice, but only if there is a high likelihood it will cause the attempter’s life to significantly improve.

After people attempt suicide and fail, their incomes increase by an average of 20.6 percent compared to peers who seriously contemplate suicide but never make an attempt.

“hard-suicide” attempts, in which luck is the only reason the attempts fail, are associated with a 36.3 percent increase in income.

Attempting suicide as a means for increasing your income is pretty risky as you have a better chance of succeeding at your suicide attempt than failing; but if you jumped off a high rise building and survived there’s a good chance someone will be willing to pay you money for your story, especially if you have intangible assets that would make you an unlikely candidate for a suicide attempt. People who have something going for them don’t usually try to commit suicide. If you have a degree from Harvard and try to jump off the Empire State Building in New York City your suicide attempt will be more newsworthy than if you only have a GED. If you look like Brad Pitt or his girlfriend Angelina Jolie it would be easier to sell your story because more people will be interested to find out why someone so attractive would want to commit suicide.

Attempted suicide as a means for making money might not be the wisest option for an ordinary person unless you can come up with a highly innovative way of trying to kill yourself; then maybe the media might be interested in buying your story not because you are worth much to them but because the way you tried to kill yourself makes for entertaining news. Overdosing on medication won’t even get you a mention in your local newspaper. Maybe you can set fire to yourself in a public place. That should bring reporters from CNN, MSNBC, FOX and all the major networks; but you’d probably have to spend some time in a psyche ward and maybe even in jail depending on the law in your local state.

On a serious note, suicide is nothing to make light of. Attempting suicide in the hope of turning the attempt, should it fail, into money is a type of fraud. Don’t do it.

Ever thought about mining coal as a means to make money? Reports claim that coal reserves total more than a trillion tons worldwide and that in the U.S. alone there are around 267 billion tons of recoverable coal which is enough coal to fuel the country’s energy demands for 240 years. The world’s leading coal producers are apparently on fire; and with oil and gas reserves set to be depleted within another four to six decades, there is expected to be a coal boom, or what Washington Post staff writer, Dale Ruskoff, called a second coal rush in his November 2006 piece “In Second Coal Rush, New Mind-Set in the Mines.”

Coal mining is of course hazardous work. In November 2007 an explosion in the Zasyadko coal mine in eastern Ukraine caused a collapse that took the lives at least 90 coal miners. In August 2007 172 miners lost their lives after they were trapped in a flooded mine in eastern China, and that same month, in the US state of Utah, a blast took the lives of 6 miners. Their bodies were never found. In May 2007 at least 35 Siberian coal miners were killed in blast. In January 2006 a coal mine explosion that may have been sparked by lightning took the lives of 12 miners in TALLMANSVILLE, W.Va, United States. These are just a few of the coal mining disasters that have occurred in recent years. Coal miners lose their lives on an almost daily basis, but coal mining pays well and where there’s good pay there will always be men willing to risk their lives by doing dangerous work.

Not willing to put your life on the line or subject your family to a lifetime of heartbreak for a measly $20 per hour? Maybe you prefer the thought of being the executive who owns the coal mining business, of hanging out on the golf course while thousands of men put their lives on the line to keep billions flowing into your bank account? You might be able to find a mining business for sale over at mergernetwork.com.