For my muse businesses, what I found most helpful was to accept credit cards. Credit cards provide a way of getting immediate access to cash at low risk. While cash is always better, credit cards provide the flexibility to accept orders world wide and get direct deposits within 3-4 days of the original charge at transaction fees of just a point or two in percent.

Some companies use Paypal or Google Checkout, but I prefer an actual credit card processing merchant. Some of you use services like Authorize.net or others that provide the payment gateways, but you still need to get the machines and software to make them work. One solution for companies that sell virtual or physical goods is Merchant Warehouse. MerchantWarehouse.com is the best place on the Internet to find the credit card machines you need to accept credit cards, debit transactions and checks. We have the guaranteed lowest prices on credit card machines, credit card software and all other credit card equipment.

I’d like to know what merchant account services and suppliers you use and what feedback you have, if any for those of us looking to make a cash-flow positive muse work in this economy.

This version should allow multiple hide statements in the same post. This is a test of that functionality.

The first line below is going to be hidden for those below User Level 2.

Here’s another hide statement:

This seems to work! Download the new version of the plugin here (altho it might take time for the WordPress Plugin SVN to update):

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/show-user-level-content/

Enjoy, and provide feedback!

Read more about the plug-in here… and don’t forget to donate!

Like many WordPress users, I often have the need to segment my content for different user audiences. While plugins like Post Levels and Disclose Secret are good ways of hiding entire posts from users that don’t meet a certain minimum user level, I couldn’t find a good plugin that did that for parts of a post. I did manage to find a few that would hide parts of a post from unregistered users, but not one that would give you control over which user levels could see that post.

To meet that need, I created the Show User Level Content plugin. This plugin is quite simple. If you want to make a certain part of your content accessible only to users of a specific user level, enclose them with the tag where <level> is the user level. End the section you want to hide with the tag .

will show the encapsulated content to users of level 2 or higher.

I based this plugin on another plugin that simply used the [hide] tag without the <level> modifier, but I can’t remember where I saw the code for that. If you wrote that plugin, let me know, so I can give you credit!

Installation:

Simply copy the attached file to your /wp-content/plugins directory. Go to the Plugins configuration page in WordPress, and activate. That’s it.

Customization:

If you want to customize what text users see when they are unable to view the privileged content, go to the Plugins administration page and you should see a page for “Show User Level Content Configuration”. Click on that link and you will be taken to a page where you can customize the “exception text”. This is the text that will replace the hidden text users can’t see.

Compatibility: I built this on and for WordPress 2.5.1. I’m not sure if it will work on older versions. I’ll try to keep it up to date for future versions.

Download:

Click here to download the Show User Level Content plug-in.

Feedback:

This is just a version 0.1 plugin! I’d love your feedback to help me make this better. If you know of a better plugin than this one to accomplish what I’m doing, please let me know ASAP so I don’t have to continue development

Contribute: Hey folks, I’m doing my best to keep my head above water and allocate my time to the most valuable tasks. Some of the other plugins in this area have died because no one cared enough to let the author know its value. The best way to let me know is to contribute to my Muse fund on the right side of this blog. Check out the Chip-In widget in the right sidebar, and please chip in. $5 goes a long way to help keep things running!

Wow, I am deeply touched by the support by the readers of this blog. Well, onwards and forwards. I have put more thought into the outsourcing process and want to share more of my responsibilities and thoughts around Microsourcing as the approach to outsourcing.

In the meantime, I want to personally thank Billy Catherall for contributing to my Muse Fund. Any amount helps, and it provides the support needed to keep blogging for personal interest. If you’d like to ChipIn to help support this blog (and any amount is appreciated), please click on the ChipIn Widget (the nice-looking red one) on the right sidebar. Thanks!

Thanks, and let’s keep up the good work where Tim leaves off

In the meantime, some of you have suggested ways to improve the worksheet itself. Download the 4HWW Time Tracking Worksheet and make your mods and email them back to me at rexreedrexreed (at) gmail.com and I’ll be sure to check it out. If it makes sense, I’ll tweak my 4HWW spreadsheet and then upload it again for the rest to review — and give you credit, of course!

Update: I neglected to mention that I’ll recognize all the help I can get on my site! I’ll definitely give you credit for helping… I’m not sure that came across above. So, Hilarycat, Jared, Brick, id_bob, Mr. Anonymous, and anyone else — feel free to pitch in and create some more 4HWW value and make the Internet go-round.

I put the merchandise together as a revenue supplement to my muse, but not as a main source of income. And, yes, it is meant to augment the 4HWW book, but certainly, not profit off it directly. If you click on the Amazon.com links and buy the book, OK, then I’m profiting off it directly, but who doesn’t do that?

The shirts and hats are meant to be comical, light hearted self-association with the ideals proposed by 4HWW. But I made careful decisions to avoid any use of intellectual property, trademark, or copyright owned by 4HWW or Tim Ferriss. Yes, I could have them professionally made, but that’s not the point… the point is to show how this is a muse and self-identify.

Well, that’s just my opinion. I want to know yours. Do they really suck? If I made them better, would you buy them anyways? Applying Tim Ferris’ ideals… I won’t ask IF you would buy, I will ask you TO buy. That’s straight from Tim’s words in the Income Autopilot chapter (I can’t find the page right now… if you can, let me know!). If you like something, then buy it… I will take that as a vote in favor. If you don’t offer me $25 and a suggested design. If I like the design, I’ll go forward with it and take your offer. If not, I won’t take your offer. Nothing gained, nothing lost.

But when it comes to the people that run our country, or are trying for it, somehow we throw out the need for honesty in favor of “spin”. What’s spin? Spin is the art of taking something that’s unfavorable and making it seem favorable, or something that’s favorable and making it seem unfavorable, or even worse, taking a fact and making it somehow seem untrue, or a deception and making it seem somehow factually accurate. In the art of spin, there’s no real definition of truth. Spin is the art of turning the black and white into shades of gray. This focus on the relativism of truth brought the concept of “truthiness” to the fore.

What bothers me more than politicos treating deception as truth and vice-versa (which is to be expected in politics) is the issue that the mainstream media is either complicit in truthiness or is somehow unaware of the falseness of the information being conveyed.

Case in point, both the Clinton campaign and the media seem to believe that Hillary won Nevada. While this might be correct by a count of popular votes, it’s not correct by the real measure of “winning”: the delegate count. There is an undisputable fact that Obama won 13 delegates in Nevada to Clinton’s 12. This is undisputed. By this measure, Obama won Nevada. Yet, the media and the spinsters position this as a loss. Check out the figure taken from the front page of cnn.com just prior to the South Carolina primary:

So, Hillary only got a few hundred more votes in a few counties in Nevada, losing the total delegate count, and somehow she won? Wrong. Obama won Nevada by the only count that matters – delegates. Hillary is trying to play it both ways, and in the end, screw over the population. Is this the 2000 election-stealing scenario all over again with the tables reversed? Obama is ahead. Fair and square.

To say Clinton won Nevada would be akin to saying that Gore won the general election in 2000. He didn’t win the election even though he won the popular vote… and by a wider margin than Hillary over Obama in Nevada. Gore didn’t win the general election by the one measure that mattered: electoral college votes. Now, if we want to throw away all these delegate shenanigans and get rid of the electoral college altogether (maybe not such a bad idea), then we can go with straight popular votes. But by the one measure that matters — delegates — Clinton is behind, and has never really been that much ahead of Obama.

I really hope this scourge of truthiness doesn’t infect the world beyond the slimy and inherently disingenuous world of politics. In the world of business, inter-personal relations, and social interaction, we should always strive for truth. Measure things as they are, not as you want them to be, and always be aware of the truth of that measure. In that way, you can never go wrong.

Stay tuned!

Well, it CAN be that simple if you’re blogging just as a past time, but if you want your blog to return value for your time investment, you have to put a bit more into it. Since we’re all about the money-return on time, that’s where I have been.

First, the original blog was hosted on wordpress.com’s servers. While this greatly simplified the install and management tasks, the big downside is that the wordpress.com hosted servers don’t allow you to generate revenue from your blog. Since that’s one of the things I do want from my blog, I needed to move my site to a hosted provider.

After spending a short amount of time picking the right provider, I downloaded the WordPress software and installed it on the host. The I spent a day configuring it to behave like the site I had hosted on wordpress.com. Themes. Widgets. Pages. Importing. Exporting. You know the drill. I should have outsourced that. But glad I learned how to do it.

The money-making part

Next, the revenue part. Having been in the industry a while, I know that there are a few things you can do to generate blog-driven revenue. Google Ads is one (signed up, waiting for approval). Next, I have had some ideas for merchandise and gear related to this blog that I want to sell. The next post will detail all about that. After that, set up the FeedBurner configuration for the newsfeed, get Google Stats set up, and assorted to dos.

Yes, that took way too much time, but I’m now set to make this blog a success. I look forward to carrying you all with me on this journey!