Would you like to get more bang for the buck? Sure, we all would. Sometimes getting more bang for the buck is more important than just getting the most bang.

When we talk about bang for the buck, “buck” can refer literally to dollars, but in general it means whatever resources or effort you put into something. “Bang” refers to whatever you get out of it: money, blog subscribers, friends, satisfaction, etc. And return on investment, or ROI, is just a fancy term for “bang for the buck.”

At the heart of The 4-Hour Workweek is the ability to do more with less. Making a full time income in 4 hours a week is better than making double the income in 40 hours a week. While very few people will be able to actually generate a decent income in only 4 hours a week, everyone will have their moments where they get a lot of bang for the buck.

Here are some of the actions I took with this blog that yielded a high return on investment:

- The Automatic Blog Post Rehasher took me a couple of days to create. The concept was pretty easy to come up with, and writing the code wasn’t bad. The main cost was the time it took to mindlessly copy and reformat all the text from the blogs to rehash.

When Naomi Dunford of IttyBiz discovered it, she wrote a post about it, and the traffic started coming in. It got 28 diggs, which isn’t a lot in absolute terms, but relative to the size of my blog it would be equivalent to Zen Habits getting 62,000 diggs. It instantly took me from about 20 subscribers to 44.

- One day the idea for The Zen of Blogging just came to me suddenly, and I wrote it in my head in about an hour. It took me a day to write the first draft. I don’t remember exactly how many hours it took, but it was less time than it’s taken me to write some of my posts. Three more days for editing, and it was done. This ebook later became the biggest factor in taking me from 44 to 205 subscribers.

- Revolution Money Exchange was the best financial return on investment I’ve had so far with this blog. By signing up for this PayPal competitor, I received a $25 signup bonus, received a $10 referral bonus for signing up one person, made $10 for the person who referred me, and made $25 for the person I referred. $35 for me and $35 for other people, for a few minutes of effort.

You might say that $35 isn’t much money, and you’re right…it’s not. But the point is that it’s $35 for such a small effort. As an hourly rate, it’s extremely high. Plus, the money for something like this is scalable with the number of subscribers I have. I think I had 84 subscribers at the time, so let’s assume a 1 in 84 conversion ratio. With 840 subscribers, I would have made $100 in referral bonuses. With 8,400 subscribers, I would have made $1,000 in referral bonuses. Just for a few minutes of effort.

(I just found out that the previous 4/15/08 deadline for receiving the $25 signup bonus has been extended to 5/15/08, so there’s still time if you want to get in on Revolution Money Exchange.)

How can we identify which actions will yield a high return on investment? I wish I knew for sure. We’d be a lot more effective if we could consistently pursue the high-ROI opportunities while ignoring the low-ROI opportunities.

Anything that says what we’re all thinking (e.g., the Automatic Blog Post Rehasher), anything that’s very different from its competitors (e.g., The Zen of Blogging), and anything that offers guaranteed money for little effort (Revolution Money Exchange) has a chance of paying off big. Anything that’s bold, risky, or efficient has a chance. Of course, ideas often don’t work out as we’d hoped. But when a fresh idea comes to you, or something interesting presents itself, if it seems like it could work, it’s usually a good idea to run with it.

Most likely, you’ll have to take a lot of low-ROI actions in order to find a few high-ROI actions. But if you keep your eyes open, you’ll see chances to make it big.

I’d like to hear your thoughts. How can you tell what actions have a good chance of providing you with a high return on investment? Or what are some things you’ve done that resulted in big rewards for little effort?

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