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Archives for November 2018

How To Shop Safely On Black Friday And Cyber Monday

The time we’ve been waiting for all year is finally here: Black Friday and Cyber Monday are upon us. The holidays are the season for spending time with cherished family and friends, but Black Friday is much better because you get to buy new stuff. Friends and family move away, they get busy and can’t see you, but your new stuff will sit in your home with you until it has to be forklifted out to clear a path after you get trapped under a pile of 70% off Google Homes.

But the coming sales aren’t all fun and games. As the holiday shopping season ramps up, cyber criminals are also ramping up their activities. Here’s how you can protect yourself from being a victim of cybercrime this holiday season.

Don’t shop online in public

Seriously: the whole goal of online shopping is so you can sit in your house in your underwear and order as many pairs of Air Jordans as your credit card limit will allow. So why, in 2018, are people still leaving their houses to do this? Pro tip: being inside your house is always safer than not being inside your house. Additionally, sitting in a coffee shop while entering your credit card number will just leave you open to scammers looking over your shoulder, and they will also see that you decided a toaster would be a good gift for your mom. Additionally, using public WiFi to make purchases is not recommended: when possible, use your home WiFi or another trusted network. Also seriously, a toaster?!

Use sites you trust

Now is not the time to try anything fancy: go to the sites you know, and if you want to shop somewhere new and unfamiliar, research the company online to make sure it’s legitimate.

Make sure you use secure sites

You’ll want to use sites that use HTTPS instead of HTTP. Websites that have HTTPS in their URL will encrypt all information sent between your browser and the website. If this is too boring to remember (it is) just look for a little lock right beside the URL in your web address bar. Keep in mind that this is not a guarantee that the website is safe, but this does add an extra layer of security.

Check your bank statements regularly

Check your bank statement online, and check it often to ensure that no suspicious activity has transpired in any of your depleted accounts. Call your bank immediately if you notice something is off. And while it is highly suspicious that you bought an EZ Bake oven for yourself, that’s not the type of suspicious activity you’re looking for.

Do all that boring stuff we always tell you to do

Update your passwords regularly. Don’t use the same password twice. Ensure your computer’s software is up-to-date. Use anti-virus software. Don’t hand out your social security number like it’s Monica’s Christmas candy. Appreciate all Friends references.

Avoid using your credit card when possible

No, that doesn’t mean you should use debit. In fact, please don’t! But apps like Apple Pay are more secure, and many large retailers are now accepting Apple Pay through their apps. Many banks also offer virtual credit cards specifically for online transactions so that your real card number doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. Unless the wrong hands are also your hands, in which case I cannot help you.

Don’t shop on websites using your mobile browser

It’s hard to see if they’re secure. Instead, use the retailer’s app. Yes, this means you must download yet another app as you’re hunched over your desk at work just trying to buy a pair of boots before anyone notices you haven’t sent the invoice you promised Cathy, but Cathy can wait. This is your online safety we’re talking about, Cathy!!

Don’t click on links

Type the website URL directly into your browser’s address bar instead of clicking on links sent to you through email, text, or other messaging apps. Scammers will often send emails or messages that look exactly like a retailer’s marketing materials, but these links will direct you to a fake website or install malware on your device.

Spend all your money!!!

Max out those credit cards and drain your accounts. If you have nothing to steal, scammers cannot steal from you. (This is obviously a joke – it’s important to spend wisely and make sure that you have money left over for food. Do you have money to buy me food? Just kidding. Unless you’re offering.)

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are a great way to temporarily escape from the dreary prison of your life. Just make sure to follow these tips so you can ensure that you are the only one spending your money. Happy shopping!!

Can Creatives Make Money from Their Passion?

Find a job you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.

While this mantra inspires a sense of hope, for most people it’s also a slap in the face because they realize they’ll never get paid for doing something they love.

Making money from a passion is the holy grail for a lot of people – and why wouldn’t it be? Waking up each morning to spend the day doing something you’d do in your spare time anyway is an incredibly attractive prospect.

But then reality sets in.

We’ve all heard the story about the photographer who quits their office job to travel the world hunting for the Nat Geo shot that will change their life. Or the story about the writer who packs up their temporary job in a bar to work on their novel.

At the beginning, the passion levels are high and hopes are fully stacked. But after a couple of months, it’s the same old story. There’s no money coming in, that much-coveted Nat Geo shot hasn’t been found, and nobody has read the novel.

The photographer walks back into their old office with their tail between their legs to beg for their job back, and the writer is once again pulling pints six days a week.

Because getting paid for your passion is hard.

Why?

Because there are other people out there who are willing to do their passion for free.

Photographers take photos and upload them online for no money, writers share their stories on platforms that are totally free, and artists readily give their works to galleries to exhibit in exchange for absolutely nothing.

So when it comes to monetizing a creative passion, it is impossible – but only if you make it that way.

Love Isn’t Enough

If you asked a room full of people why they deserve to make money from their passion, I’m willing to bet the vast majority will say because they love it.

They truly believe that their love for it will bring in the money.

And while that does sometimes work, it’s absolutely not the norm.

In fact, most people suffer from this notion that if they love something hard enough it’ll fall into their lap.

But just because you are so incredibly passionate about something, it doesn’t mean that other people care about it in the same way.

Creatives all around the world forget to join up the dots between doing something they love and doing something other people care about. Without persuading other people to give a damn, you’re going to struggle to get people to part with their hard-earned cash.

But this is just one reason why a lot of people fail at monetizing their passion.

Monetizing Passion in the Wrong Way

Perhaps the biggest reason most people don’t make money doing what they love is because they have no idea how to make money doing what they love.

For creatives in particular, there are so many different ways to monetize what they do that they often fall into the trap of trying to do too many things – and they’re often the wrong things.

Let’s take a look at three of the main ways creatives try – and usually fail – to monetize their passion.

Advertising

Advertising is one of the simplest ways for creatives to earn a few bucks. It’s easy to set up and it works as a kind of passive income that keeps ticking away while they carry on with their craft.

Except that it’s incredibly difficult to earn any kind of decent money by relying on click-throughs from ads.

Take a writer who wants to monetize their words, for example.

They set up a blog and start writing about their favorite films and the latest movie releases in the hopes that at some point they’ll be able to earn some money from their reviews either by selling them to magazines or via the blog itself.

After a month or so they set up advertising on their site so that every time a visitor clicks on an ad, they earn a small amount of money.

The problem with this is it’s not the writer’s passion that’s making them the money, it’s the second-hand power of advertising. The writer isn’t making money directly from their words, instead they’re hoping people come to the site and click on an ad (which actually takes the visitor away from the site and the writer’s words).

Affiliate Sales

Then there’s affiliate sales.

This is when someone sells another person’s or brand’s products for a cut of the sale. So a photographer might share camera equipment on Amazon and, if anyone buys through their unique link, they’ll get a percentage of the sale price.

The problem here is that the photographer is selling someone else’s product or service; they’re not making money from their passion.

Marketplaces

Finally, creatives often upload their work to larger websites that already have big audiences to sell their wares to – think stock photo sites, for example.

When someone uploads a piece of content they’ve created and someone buys it, the site generally takes cut – usually 50% or more – but in return the creative gets access to a readymade audience.

So What’s the Solution? How Can Creatives Monetize Their Passion?

If you’re sticking to the above methods to earn some money from what you make, it might well be impossible to monetize your passion. Not because you don’t love it enough or because you’re failing, but because you’re not doing it the right way for you and your business.

Lots of people will tell you that you need to do this and do that to succeed, but every business is different – especially creative businesses. Slowly but surely, people are wising up to just how valuable the creative industries are and are starting to value the work of artists more and more.

Moving towards the model of selling directly to buyers can help eliminate middlemen and commission fees, but it’s worth trying out several different methods until you find one that works for your business.

What it boils down to is this: yes, it is impossible to monetize your passion if you don’t do it in the right way for you.

Burnout is Real: How Content Creators Can Stay Creative When Money is Involved

Imagine waking up in the morning not foggy-headed from the buzz of your alarm, but wide awake and ready to start the day. You grab a coffee, sit down at your easel, grab your camera, or flip open a fresh page in your notebook and get to work.

For many creatives, this is the dream.

But the harsh reality is that the vast majority won’t ever get to experience making a living from their passion, and will instead spend their lives cramming their creative pursuit into any spare moment they have.

But why is this paradox so true for artists, writers, and makers?

Isn’t there a saying that says if you love something enough the money will follow?

The truth is it’s incredibly hard for creatives to transition from creating for personal pleasure to creating for an audience or clients to a deadline and a budget.

As soon as you bring money into the equation, things get a lot more transactional and the bright sparks of creativity are often quashed under multiple revisions and the limited visions of agencies.

This is where burnout raises its ugly head.

When we start creating for others, we lose the drive that we had when we were creating for ourselves and this can drastically reduce our motivation levels.

In fact, psychological research shows that we are at our most creative when we are drive by intrinsic motivation (a.k.a. motivation that comes from within ourselves), whereas focusing on extrinsic motivation (a.k.a. money and fame) can instantly kill any sense of creativity we had in the first place.

And we’ve all felt pretty drab about a task that doesn’t excite us. When we’re not enamored by a project, it’s almost impossible to do our best work regardless of what reward lies on the other side.

As soon as you take your passion from the desk in your back room to the digital stage of the online world, negative thought patterns like comparisonitis and professional jealousy can consume large chunks of our creativity and lead to real-life burnout.

Why Creatives Experience Burnout When Money is Involved

The online world is an anonymous place where people can be anyone they want to be because they’re hidden away behind the safety of a screen. This is precisely why many online platforms place heavy emphasis on being authentic – and this carries over into the creative world, too.

We’re always told to stay “true to our art” and never sell out. Keep doing what we’re doing and the rewards will follow. Never change for anyone. If you do all that, your creative career will fall into your lap.

That’s a load of old hokey, though.

Making money from anything requires strategic thinking, forward planning, and a helluva lot of perseverance. Trial and error become your two best friends, and that’s before you remember that you have to actually sell something to make money.

For creatives, their passion is pure and authentic in the truest sense.

Even whisper the word marketing or sales and you’re immediately a sell-out or some kind of slick-haired, slimey salesman.

What it boils down to is this: as soon as creatives start selling their passion, whether it’s paintings, photographs, or books, they have to think about marketing and sales. It’s an inevitable part of business.

But thinking about marketing and sales also means studying competitors, comparing other brands, and – god forbid – asking people to buy from you. These things all suck away at creativity, leaving many artists and creators burnt out and feeling like absolute sell outs.

It’s Difficult to Make Money with Art

And then we also have to remember that the creative world is so subjective and at the mercy of buyers, which makes it incredibly difficult to make money with art in the first place.

Sure, there are a number of ways creatives get their business off the ground, like:

  • Selling their art through a stock site
  • Building an audience and selling work directly
  • Working through an agency who take a big fat commission
  • Freelancing for corporate brands

But when success doesn’t come instantly (which, just like with anything, it never does), creatives feel slighted and like they’re not good enough – cue burnout and feelings of inferiority.

How to Get Back on Track After Burnout

If you’re in the depths of burnout and are ready to claw your way out of the slump and try again, we’ve got some tricks up our sleeve for you.

Remember, Creativity is a Muscle

We aren’t born with a swirling mass of creativity inside us. Just like anything, practice makes perfect because creativity is a muscle.

When you’re experiencing burnout you’re not giving your creativity a workout, which leads you deeper and deeper into the spiral.

But just like you wouldn’t go all out at the gym after three months away from it, you shouldn’t try and dive in headfirst with your creativity. Instead, you need to flex that muscle regularly and gently to make it stronger.

When you look at it like this, you can see that burnout is simply an injury that needs nurturing back to health.

Mix Up Your Creative Input

Burnout leads to less output. Fact. And, according to Austin Kleon’s piece Problems of Output Are Problems of Input, that means you simply need to mix up what you’re putting in.

What does that mean?

It means that if you’re a photographer, you tend to consume all the content to do with photography, like how to get better, how to improve your shots, how this photographer made millions with one picture, and so on.

But when you do this, you’re creating a bubble of same-ness which doesn’t stimulate the brain. To really get those creative juices flowing, you need to broaden your horizons and consume content that’s categorically not related to your discipline.

Break Things Up

As creatives, we tend to only see the bigger picture. We have this end vision in mind and we know we want to get there, but we often don’t know how.

This can lead to feelings of paralysis as we struggle to make the first step towards our big goal.

To avoid this, you can break things down into smaller tasks. Still think about that big, heart-soaring vision, but also think about the little steps you can take to get you there and work on one of them every day or every week.

Burnout is Probably (and Unfortunately) Inevitable  

Burnout is often an inevitable part of life for creatives, particularly those who want to be paid for their passion.

But, like with any business, thinking strategically and taking things day by day will help you get over the paralysis and black slump of burnout and thrive in a way that’s contagious.

Do Your Apps Know Too Much About You?

Two years ago something incredible happened.

A simple computer game brought the world together and got gamers out and about into the big wide world. But after the immediate rush of excitement about “catching ‘em all”, users started to realize something a little more sinister about the Pokemon Go app.

As well as letting them throw imaginary Pokeballs in real-life locations, the iOS version of the app was caught accessing almost all of users’ Google account information – everything from emails down to photos.

Two years later, Mark Zuckerberg made a statement about the vague data collection techniques apps were using through Facebook. He was keen to iterate that Facebook does use sound clips from videos recorded directly onto Facebook to serve relevant ads after questions around this became louder and louder.

But his statement wasn’t exhaustive enough in covering what exactly our apps know about us.

This is because of the ambiguous nature of app permissions.

They tend to be oversimplified so as not to overwhelm the user, but below the simple sentences and soothing reassurances they can gather a huge amount of data with every single interaction.

Of course, some data collected is absolutely necessary for the apps to work in the first place. For example, a photo app won’t work if it can’t access your photos, and Uber needs your location information so it can pick you up in the right place – duh.

But once you give apps that need information access to your data, they can start to worm their way under the surface to dig out more and more information about you and your behavior.

Take location access as an example.

Once you give away your location, app makers are then able to use that information to figure out what floor of a high-rise you live on or the places you visit the most.

Why Apps Want Your Data

Data is gold for app makers. With information about their user base, apps can perform all sorts of other actions, like:

  • This is the key activity app makers do with the data they’ve gathered. Knowing everything about you means they can serve up relevant ads and charge advertisers more and more for being so highly targeted.
  • Curated content. This keeps users sticking around for more. If they’re seeing more of what they like, they’re more likely to engage with the content and keep coming back for more.
  • App development. Data can be really useful for knowing what users do and don’t like, which can be used in the future to improve the app or make another app altogether.

A whopping one-third of consumers don’t think advertisers collect data from them.

App Permissions: What Do Your Apps Know About You?

Now you know why your apps might want to scrape together the digital breadcrumbs of you, let’s take a look at what they actually know about you, because it can be easy to jump to conclusions and envision a Big Brother type scenario which often isn’t the case.

Your smartphone is actually packed full of sensors which can decipher your whereabouts, what speed you’re traveling at (including what form of transport you’re traveling on), and which way up you’re using your phone.

But you’re not completely powerless.

This is where app permissions come in, a.k.a. the “barrier” between app makers and the data stored in your phone. When a pop-up shows up on your phone with a permission request, it’s up to you to decide how much data you pour into the hands of the app maker.

However, this is easier said than done, and that’s because very few apps give detailed explanations about what information they’re going to collect and use.

Many app makers do this in the interest of their users; they don’t want to overwhelm them with technical drivel, so they keep it simple. But this means that a lot of users don’t actually know the full extent of what they’ve agreed to.

If you want to know exactly what an app can and can’t see about you, there’s a way.

On an Android device:

  • Open the settings app
  • Go to the Apps & Notifications center
  • Choose an app and click Permissions

On an iOS device:

  • Go to the Settings app
  • Choose an app
  • See the Permissions that are listed

On both kinds of devices, you can usually switch off permissions with a toggle button to pick and choose what data can and can’t be collected (though bear in mind that some apps need certain permissions in order to run).

And, though this is a good starting point to find out what your apps know about you, it doesn’t always give you the full story.

Take the incident with Uber recently, where it was discovered that the app was secretly recording screen activity on iPhones. The company hit back that this was to improve functionality with the Apple Watch app, but it just goes to show that even if you think you know what an app can find out about you, there might be something more sinister going on.

How Are Things Changing When It Comes to Apps and Data?

Phone providers are now cracking down on what app makers can and can’t do when it comes to permissions – particularly location permissions.

When requesting location access, app makers now have to adhere to the “only when using the app” rule, which means they can’t track users when they’re not inside the app.

But while control settings are getting tighter, they’re also getting more and more convoluted. App makers are starting to bundle permission choices together and still aren’t quite there with letting their users know exactly what they’ll be using data for.

Apps that require users to “unlock” a particular permission in order to use the app as it’s supposed to be used are doing so without giving away whether they might share it with marketers and advertisers too.

What it boils down to is this: people have every right to choose what they do and don’t want apps to access, but there’s not much they can do if the app in question needs their location or access to their photos to work as they’re supposed to.

In these instances, it’s up to the user to decide whether they want to continue to use the app or give it up entirely.

And, until app makers get clearer with what they use data for, many users will remain in the dark about what data app companies are collecting about them and what they’re doing with that information.