350pd?

I had two $350 days in a row! Yowza! If I earned that on a regular basis, I could retire about 20 years ahead of schedule!

Some of it had to do with the stars aligning...all my usual sources of income had very good days, pumping earnings well above average. But a good chunk of it came from an unusual source that bears some attention.

 Let's start with a breakout of the two days earnings, which came to about $700:

• $225 from Demand Studios/eHow
• $ 94 from LinkShare affiliate earnings
• $ 32 from Commission Junction affiliates
• $ 14 from Infolinks in-text ads
• $ 52 from Adsense
• $315 from Uclue

The biggest chunk of my windfall had to do with a site I haven't really said much about. Uclue is a researcher-for-hire Q&A site. People who need to know something -- and need to know it bad -- come to Uclue, post their question, and offer a fee to have the research done. We handle everything from market research to identifying cartoon biplanes, and for the most part, our clients go away very satisfied with the results.

It may seem odd to pay to have questions answered on the freewheeling Internet, where information on just about any topic can be had for no charge. But the things people need to know about don't always show up in a simple Google search. And even if they do, the client may not have the time or inclination to do a search on their own, cull through results, and neatly summarize the information. It can be easier and more efficient to simply hire a researcher to handle all that for him.

You can get a good sense of what Uclue does by looking over some of the questions and answers at the site. My two big ticket items were priced at $200 each, and one of the clients left a generous $40 tip, all of which resulted in my $315 payout after Uclue took its cut of the action. The two questions reflected the typical diversity we come across at Uclue: one was regarding the advantages of professional licensing and the other, cloud computing.  Unfortunately, they were both handled as eyes-only "private" answers, so I can't use them to illustrate the work I did.

Instead, take a look at an older question that is publicly available: Need methodology to Find Forums, Groups and Discussion Boards. This client needed a step by step guide for conducting advanced Internet searches to zero in on who is saying what at online forums and discussion groups. He needed the information badly enough to offer $400 for the answer.

I wish we had a lot more of those $400 challenges. And I wish I could invite other researchers to join us at Uclue. But the fact is, high priced questions are rare, and even more run of the mill questions are hard to come by. People may have questions they desperately need to have answered, but they probably don't know to come to Uclue for exactly the research they need.

I think there is an almost endless market for a paid research service -- everyone needs to know something, now and then, that they're willing to pay to find out. The tough part is making the connection. How does a service like Uclue make itself known, so that -- when you do cross that threshold and are suddenly eagerly willing to pay someone to find out if prostitution is legal in the Virgin Islands or to dig up research on the safety of narrow band UVB phototherapy -- you know to turn to Uclue for an answer.

We haven't really figured out an effective marketing strategy yet that will make Uclue a household name.

As a matter of fact, if you have suggestions, I'm all ears....