Everybody is an expert in something. Whether you have a degree in psychology or life experience has just made you as wise as the Oracle at Delphi, there could be something you know that someone out there, or better yet a few people out there, will pay you money to share with them.

The website Kasamba.com makes it possible for people like you to share their expertise with others who are seeking answers to questions you might be able to answer. With categories ranging from shopping and style, professional counseling, religion and spirituality, computers and programming, coaching and personal development, health and medicine, business and finance, each broken down into smaller sub-categories, there’s a wide range of subject areas within which you might be able to fit your particular expert knowledge.

According to research, there are Kasamba experts making 6-figure incomes per year from their Kasamba endeavors alone, charging as much as $20 per minute for sessions. While $20 per minute seems excessive, at that rate just 25 minutes of your time pays $500. On the Kasamba website itself it is claimed:

Many of our experts earn thousands of dollars a month! You can as well, as the amount you earn depends solely on the rate you charge and the amount of time you are online.

Kasamba requires no document-based certification unless you are a health professional, but this does not mean you should run on over and sign up to give advice knowing fully well that you have nothing of real value to offer buyers. Not only will you do the buyer a disservice and contribute to the discrediting of the Kasamba website you will discredit yourself as well.

So before you decide to try Kasamba or any similar website, take some time to consider the areas in which you believe you might have information that could be of value to others; assess your advice-giving skills as honestly as you dare; determine if you will have time to dedicate to spending online just for the purpose of giving advice to others. In your assessment of your advice-giving skills you might ask yourself: “Do people tend to come seeking my advice, or do people generally appear to have no respect for my opinion even in matters where I consider myself competent enough to be called an expert?”

Just knowing a great deal about something doesn’t guarantee you’ll have a way of sharing your knowledge with others that will be helpful to them. Kasamba experts deliver their advice electronically and via telephone, so you need to be able to communicate well over the phone as well as in writing.

If you consider yourself an expert in one of the areas in which Kasamba provides service and you think you’re a good communicator, you have time on your hands and enjoy helping others, you might be able to join Kasamba experts who are making thousands per month sharing their expertise at rates up to $20 per minute.

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

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.

A lady I know named Janine makes $30,000 per year selling fruits and vegetables she grows in her own back yard. She says she was sitting around one day trying to think of ways to make money from home so she could stay home with her boys, when one of her sons said something to his dad that turned on a light bulb in her head.

The son had asked the dad for money to buy a new video game, and the dad replied something to the effect of, “Didn’t I just give you money to buy a new video game two days ago? Money doesn’t grow on trees you know.” At that the son, an 8 year old, replied, “Well, in a way money does grow on trees,” and when asked to explain himself, went on to state that his friend’s dad grows peaches and sells the peaches for money so in a way you could say money grows on trees indirectly.

Janine found herself repeating the thought “money grows on trees” for the rest of that day, and that night she had a dream that she was at the Farmer’s market haggling over the price of some strawberries, insisting the price was way too high and that it was becoming increasingly impossible for people to eat healthily because the price for fresh fruits and vegetables was ridiculously expensive. By the time she woke up the next morning she had decided that she was going to grow fruits and vegetables and sell them for more reasonable prices than they were being sold in the grocery stores and at the local market.

She started small with tomatoes, bell peppers, squash, okra, Cantaloupe and eggplant. She read lots of books and followed expert advice and from her first crop she started making money. She’s now also growing grapes, cherries, plums, nectaries, pumpkins, potatoes, spinach, watermelon, zucchini and cucumbers to name a few and for the last few years has made at least $30,000 in profit from sale of her goods.

So, while money indeed doesn’t literally grow on trees, like Janine’s son pointed out, indirectly money does grow on trees. Maybe you can figure out a way to plant a seed and have it indirectly grow into the millions you desire or at least some extra yearly income.