Five Money Saving SL Shortcuts

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When I made it to Second Life as a funny-haired, doe-eyed avatar with a bare-bones inventory, no friends, no land, no vending tech, no links, and no products, getting products set up and developed was a horrible waste of time with very low rates of return. My avatar doesn’t look much better, but with time invested, the cash flow is finally coming.

So here are five ways I learned to do it…

1. Band and back up your inventory. After a while, your projects will begin to borrow from each other. That shouldn’t be a bad thing by any means! Many of my scripts have the same base plan of attack, especially with notecard reading, which works in anything from a blog reader to a gun kit script. Determine what your key scripting, building and texture assets are, and make them the cornerstones of several projects while keeping the projects themselves rich and varied. And save every change you make! If you have a script in an item that you keep saving back to inventory, be sure to make backups every few changes using Take Copy. Saving a faulty version over your only good inventory item, a slip of the LSL editor, or accidental object destruction of your original (temporary, llDie, etc) can make you miserable and knock you back anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours, depending on how far back you saved your progress.

Also, make sure you know what your key items are named. If you have to dig through 100 items all called Object, each with your key intellectual property in it, you’re in for a world of wasted time.

2. Start a blog or website. Paying the SL online marketplaces may make you residual income, but you’re posting your links on their forums so they can do one thing – serve ads above your threads. Not only that, but they charge you to advertise, and then ding you for the final sale cost! Post regularly, post quality, and don’t ease up, and your blog will get you income too, through several streams of income, not just your products! If you need to learn how to blog right, http://problogger.net will give you huge insights for free, and their book is invaluable. It’s a lot to digest at once, so take your notes and organize the exercises and to-dos from those notes. Once you’re done, you will have a multi-page plan of attack to establish your own Second Life blog space.

3. Outsource, Part II. I have a RL virtual assistant named Nalinka. She’s awesome and with the time she saves me on my job, I’m able to put that time into Second Life. A few hours spent in SL causes a ripple effect over the next year, and believe me, it does pay off. I outsourced a cruddy spreadsheet job ($16) and spent the time doing a sorely needed scripting job for a vehicle builder who got sidelined while SL wasn’t running scripts right. I made L$1000 as thanks (a little over $3.00), set up a demo box and ad for a kit (L$3000 per sale, a little over $10), set up another kit for L$2000, updated another project at three store locations, blogged an entry for a friend who needed to raise money, placed some more ads, and joined a Ning group that could be perfectly served by one of my products. Even if you don’t have $6-$8 an hour to outsource your RL job, you can have people do odious tasks for you in-world for cheaper rates. You’d be surprised what L$1000 to L$1500 can get you from intelligent but ill-used people who are used to running their computers for L$20 an hour to build someone else’s traffic rankings! Not everyone in SL is from the US and you can make mutually beneficial service arrangements.

4. Demo remotely. Do good things for your friends and often they will ask what they can do to help in return, or offer you some sort of space on their land. Don’t push, but if you are offered a chance to promote yourself, don’t be shy and say what would help you best, given what you can work with. Don’t expect it to go on forever unrewarded, but once you get set up, try what you can to keep helping your friends, with effective things that cost little or no time and money. Invite them to your business groups. Put their landmarks in your products (after all, your stuff is on their land, right?). Mention them when other people need their products and services. Show them you have an active role in their welfare without pounding your chest about it and the side benefits will keep accruing.

5. Use network tech. Don’t spend your whole day teleporting from store to store twiddling this and gambling for the asset servers to let you change that. Invest in a good networked vending system that lets you send out your product and product information to everyone everywhere. Bonus points if you can hand out your networked tech like candy for free to affiliate sellers and people who want news, entertainment and variety on their own land. Look for other networked systems, not just vendors, that can get secondary messages out to your stores, locations and friends cheaply. For example, you can announce events and so forth with your blog terminals at each location without clicking “teleport” a single time! Last of all, if you can’t or don’t want to invest in networks, you can always learn to build your own from scratch.

Saving time shouldn’t take time. Instead, just focus on what you need to make more money per hour in SL, and outsource or drop the rest. The longer you obsess over details, the larger the opportunities that pass you by!