Let’s talk today about ReviewMe

When talking about being paid for your reviews you are going to be recommended ReviewMe and PayPerPost.
They may look similar but there is a huge difference probloggers fail to mention: ReviewMe accept you only when your Alexa rank is high!!!!
Alexa rank is a measure: how many visitors with Alexa toolbar installed, came to your website.
My question is: how many new bloggers ever heard about Alexa rank or Alexa toolbar? If somebody has the toolbar, probably has enough knowledge about pro blogging not to be a novice, and to continue the rationale, it must be a pretty technical guy. What in this world is the technical guy going to do on your humble blog? Nothing.
Hence, you are not going to have these type of visitors coming over, unless you chase their websites and try to convince them to come over, to buy some good Karma if nothing else.

In my opinion, as a newcomer blogger you stand almost no chance in getting the mandatory high rank. With a typical blog, 3-4 months old, you are going to be rejected because you have to have a minimum number of subscribers and traffic.
For Alexa it seems to be 500 unique traffic a day.

My first attempt with ReviewMe happened on September 23, 2007. At that time I had a fresh blog, with just a few entries.
I was reading suggestions about monetizing your writing, and because nobody takes the time to tell you not to bother trying ReviewMe until you build traffic, I filled out all the fields and the answer came back in a few seconds: Try again in a few months
I tried again today, December 31, 2007 and I got the same answer.
This time I was not disappointed because yesterday evening I finally did my homework and researched more thoroughly, therefore by the time I filled out again the application, I knew about the Alexa rank and I knew that I won’t qualify.

And following is Dosh Dosh’s opinion:
“Since moving to my own domain (from Blogspot) in the middle of January 2007, Dosh Dosh has moved from a rank of around 3 million to the current Alexa rank of 21, 709 within two months.

The growth has been consistent and I think most of it was due to the fact that the content on Dosh Dosh is orientated towards webmasters. Another plausible reason is because overall daily traffic for Dosh Dosh has been growing steadily day by day”

You must like this guy for his honest approach. I do.

Trying AdSense again

OK, I must admit that there is a part of me that absolutely hates rejection and failure. Although I try to have a more Buddhist approach to my life, I still find it difficult to just ignore the things that are bugging me. Probably I should make it a New Year resolution.

Although AdSense brought me such much grief, I decided before bad talking about it… more than I have already done it… to give it another try.
Start fresh, with a self-hosted website.

I still find upsetting the advice given to newcomers to try AdSense as the best way to make money.
Mathematically speaking it’s impossible to make money without traffic. And AdSense is all about traffic. Somehow, probloggers fail to mention that small detail. I would be more than happy to be proven wrong.

That being said, if my site would get accepted, which I have serious doubts it would be considering that it’s not on Blogspot, I am going to keep all of my readers accurately informed about how much money I made.
It’s time for somebody to be honest about it. I am just a regular baby boomer with a full time job.
Like lots of other people I have been deceived into believing that it’s not so complicated to make money on the net if you are capable of writing interesting articles.
Unfortunately it’s not that easy.
From my previous experience with AdSense I must admit that I have spent lots of hours writing.
I used to wake up at 5 in the morning and go to bed at midnight just to write articles. Some days I managed to have three entries, not bad for somebody who is not a stay-at-home mom.

There are two teams on the net: the pro and anti AdSense.
The pro team is going to bring eulogies to how wonderful AdSense is and how much money they make. How? Don’t hold your breath getting straight answers.
Even if you go to sites that allegedly tell you how to make money with AdSense, you are not going to find concrete examples. Just generalities, copied from various sources.
You are going to be told about the power words and your whole life will start revolving around finding the high paid words and how to include them as many times as possible into your articles.
The persons getting traffic will be the ones giving the advice.
Just think: If by some miracle you are going to find a niche, are you going to disclose it to the whole blogoshpere? I guess not.

The anti team… well, it’s normally made by guys who got burned by Google algorithm. But it’s always two sides of a coin, right? Their voice should be listened as well.

At this point I don’t have a clear action plan in mind. It’s premature to think of one until I get the answer from Google.
But if again I am going to get rejected I swear it’s going to be my last attempt and at that point I would conclude that AdSense is indeed an obsolete way of making money.

WordPress vs. Blogspot

WordPress or Blogspot? Which one to choose?
It depends on what would you like to do with your blog. If you want to monetize it, probably the best idea is to have your own domain. But let’s say that you want to try your hand at blogging about something. At this point you can very well use the hosting offered by WordPress and Google (Blogspot). It’s free and you benefit of having your blog protected via their antispam programms.
Akismet offered by WordPress comes highly recommended to stop spams.
Until you build traffic to your blog I don’t believe it’s necessary to pay for your domain and your webhosting. Even if it comes pretty cheap these days, it’s still money out of your pocket.

If you have just started thinking about having a blog, maybe my analysis would help you make a decision.
I have used both of them and I could say that I really like WordPress.
Blogspot has a few disadvantages, the biggest one being that you can’t categorize your posts.

If you are like me, meaning just a novice on blogging, you will need an idiot proof platform that it’s easy to use. Let’s take the main elements of blogging and analyze wordpress vs. blogspot:
1. Templates
WordPress is the best, no doubt about it. It offers you a large variety to choose from and it’s almost impossible not to find something you would like.
Score: wordpress 1: blogspot 0
2. Editor
Both of them have good editor to help you with spelling, adding pictures and links
Score: wordpress 1: blogspot 1
3. Organizing posts
Only WordPress offers this important feature. I found working within Blogspot uncomfortable because there is no way you can organize your posts nicely. You can only archive them.
Score: wordpress 1 : blogspot 0
4. Blog stats
That is one of the best features offered by WordPress. You can see how many visitors your blog had, how did they arrive to your site/blog (what search words have they used) and it could help you fine tune your tags or titles in order to make it more findable.
Blogspot shows you your blog activity when you have the adsense code.
Score: worpress 1: blogspot 0
5. Submitting blog to search engines
Blogspot being owned by Google, it will not ping your blog to yahoo for example. WordPress will do it.
WordPress being sort of independent is much more generous with pings.
Score: wordpress 1: blogspot 0
6. Getting your blog accepted for AdSense
This one is a no brainer: Blogspot is the only one that will put you on a fast track to be accepted by AdSense. This is the only big advantage Blogspot will have over WordPress. But because AdSense it’ such a dead way of monetizing your blog, it’s not worth it anymore.
Score: wordpress 0 : blogspot 1
7. Transfer you blog to your domain
If you consider using popular webhosts like HostPapa or GoDaddy, the WordPress editor is one that it’s already given as option. Meaning that when you transfer your successful (hopefully) blog to your own domain hosted by these guys, it should go considerably easier than when moving something from Blogspot.
Score: wordpress 1: blogspot 0

Final score: WordPress: 6 Blogspot: 2

My experience with AdSense

One recommendation you are going to get from almost every blog guru (pro blogger) with regards to monetizing your blog is to get into the AdSense program.

This is the process flow chart, so to speak:
- AdSense belongs to Google
- Google has another program called AdWords. With this program marketers buy words that are most probable to be used by a search engine to direct traffic to their sites. The words will be part of an ad, that a publisher (somebody with a blog or a website) may display through AdSense
- AdSense is a pay per click action
- A visitor to your blog or website who clicks on the ads displayed by Google to match the content of your blog/website, will generate money to you

Simple, right?
Well, there are a few issues and sorry for raining on your parade:

1. To make money you have to have heavy traffic to your blog, meaning that if you blog about what your cat, dog or neighbors did on any given day probably won’t generate it
2. The pay, generally speaking is very low, a few cents
3. You get paid only when you reach minimum $100 and with a normal blog with only 2-3 visitors a day you are most probable to never meet the payout
4. If you are interested in some ad you see on your blog, please make all the effort and DO NOT click on it. If you think you are dying of curiosity, try to do it from a totally different IP provider because otherwise you are going to be penalized big time by Google.
5. What Google won’t tell you is that if people living in your proximity click on ads you may still be penalized and accused of fraudulent activity.
6. I had my account canceled and missed the payout exactly when I reached $100. Bear with me here: if you have ‘fraudulent activity’ -as in family members clicking on ads for example- you should have had it for at least a few months, because this is how long it takes to make the money. How come only when it’s payout Google finally realizes that something is wrong? Does it make any sense? Not to me. In my books AdSense is nothing but a scam, not worth the time spent writing quality content.
7. If some people made money in the past with AdSense, for sure it’s not the case anymore.
8. It does not matter what suggestions you are going to find on the net regarding making money with AdSense, all of them are past tense.
9. Don’t have high expectations because you will be disappointed
10. Don’t sacrifice the time you would spend with your kids to write articles thinking that you are going to get rich with AdSense. You won’t and you are going to wake up one day realizing how stupid you were, you much you neglected your family even if driven by the good intentions of making the extra buck.

Making dieting a fun journey

Is it anything like that?
Diet and fun journey sounds like an oxymoron, going hand in hand with virtual reality.
But can we really make it a fun journey?

I believe we can. Taking an ‘as a matter of fact’ approach is much better than any hard core one.
As a baby boomer, I realized that size matters. And I am referring to food of course. It took me awhile to understand that what was permissible when I was 20 is not anymore. Forgotten are the food with butter along with any culinary abuse.
Now I have to think about making colorful meals, something that will please my eyes, my soul and my stomach. I forgot to mention my liver and the not-so-good-anymore gal bladder.

Why I was mentioning the fun journey? Because every time I tried a strict diet I failed, sooner or later. The more strict the diet, the more frustrated I felt. Soon enough I found myself depressed and craving foods to the verge of obsession.
Recently I have changed the action plan. Now, instead of diet I am using ‘way of eating’. As in ‘I am not on a diet, I changed the way I eat’.
Like many other things in life, changing what you eat in order to be and feel healthier, it’s trial and error.
There is no one size fits all for sure. What works for some people might not work for you.

A clear example: one school of thoughts recommends peanut butter as a wonderful protein source. Guess what? Because of the fat content it triggers horrible migraine in me.
So peanut butter it’s a no-no for me.
Another example: I have read that it’s good for you to eat in the morning toast and butter.
Butter is another food that triggers migraines for me.
Therefore instead of eating as per such and such recommendations and feeling miserable and popping one Tylenol after another, I started changing things one at a time.
As I mentioned before: trial and error. I lost and gained weight based on what I ate, not only how much.

What I found so far as being not good for me are: peanut butter, butter, cereals (made me gain weight) and mayo.
As soon as I manage to organize my thoughts I will come up with a list of foods that helped me loose weight along with simple cooking recipes.
I work full time and I have a four-year old son. I don’t have for sophisticated meals.

Is it any honest way to make money with affiliate marketing?

After unsuccessfully trying for the past three months to find a reliable, honest way, to make money on the net, I want to share my experience with you.
If you go on the blogoshpere you are going to find well-known professional bloggers making good money on the net. And normally you start thinking ‘if they can do it, I can too’.
All of them mention ‘affiliates’ as a source of making money, but none of them will give you the real, detailed information.
It’s all presented in a general manner as in ‘you can monetize your blog with affiliate programs; find the honest ones and go from there’. Duh!! This is exactly the point: the honest ones.
There are not too many, and if all these internet millionaires know who they are, won’t share the information. Why would they do it?
Go to any of the money- making – gurus and read it for yourself.
I did and it’s only a brush of information, just enough to keep you reading their blogs, visit their sites, get their newsletters. In other words, you are the contributor to their wealth.
Why would anybody making thousands of dollars a month tell you how to do it?
Not even that, you are going to realize that there is a close-circuit kind of society. The important information is passed from the gurus to their friends. You are not their friend, regardless how much brown nosing you are going to do.

Example of advices you are going to get:

1. Find an honest, reliable affiliate program.
As in ‘you find it, we are not going to tell you’. They make it sound so freaking easy. It’s not. What they don’t tell you is that there are only a few reliable affiliate programs and that you have to have TRAFFIC to your blog or website in order to be accepted by most of them. And when I say traffic, I mean thousands of hits per day in some cases. I had 12 on my best day L. Some affiliate programs are involved in MLM (multi level marketing) and you have to pay a certain amount of money to get accepted. Is it clear? You have to pay for the right to sell their products. Still interested? Well, imagine that they have the right to change the amount at any time; they can even cancel the program at any time. Just take the time and read the 20 pages disclaimers. How many people have the patience to do it? Not many.
2. Find your niche, open a blog, write good quality material and money will start coming.
Not true either. You are given advice like: ‘check the hot topics on the net (yahoo, msn, etc). Open a blog, write an article or two, and put your adsense code or whatever other pay- per- click program you are promoting, and the money will keep coming’. Here is the reality: if it’s a hot topic, it’s been milked already by the same guys who are having lots of traffic, meaning that your new little blog won’t get exposure on the net. It won’t be on the first five search pages on google or yahoo. Meaning that you are not going to have anybody reading your little post in your little blog. So who is going to click on your adsense?
Maybe it sounds like a rant, maybe it is.
But I am a normal baby boomer, with a full time job, learning how to navigate this new world of internet marketing.
And it’s not easy, you won’t get many free rides and you are going to get burned more often than not.
The truth is that you have to spend hours and hours looking for info, learning how to make your blog and most of all trying to make sense of all the new terms you have never heard before in your life.

I will try to do my best to be a good guide and share whatever experience I am going to gain down the road.

See you later!