Before and after getting approved by PayPerPost

I’ve mentioned before that I went through a few attempts to get approved by PayPerPost.
Finally I succeeded!
As usual, let’s summarize the before and after:

Getting approved
1. Have your own domain.
Why? Because many opportunities (meaning the offers from advertisers who pay you to write about their product or service) exclude from the very beginning lots of popular sites like: blogspot, wordpress.com, myspace, typepad, xanga,etc. Well, it’s true that blogging on myspace will get you many pageviews, which is pretty hard to achieve on your own domain without a proper search optimization engine/method. I still have to figure out how to increase my pageviews.
2. Make sure your blog is at least three months old- before submit it for approval, otherwise it’s just a waste of time
3. You have to have a minimum number of posts, I believe it’s 20, spread evenly as much as possible within those three months
4. Try to have original content.
I have read some approved blogs that were original, it’s true. But they were original boring in my humble opinion and developed with paid posting in mind, pretty much like those more than obnoxious websites/blogs developed for adsense. No quality content, just a reason to insert a sponsored reference. You know what I mean? Like a blogger from Florida advertising ski equipment or somebody living in a condo writing about how to waterproof your basement.

After you get approved:
1. Get over the excitement, roll up your sleeves and start writing. About what? Well, take a look at market opportunities.
2. You log into your account and click on ‘Open opportunities’. While there, please do yourself a favor and click on the tab identified as ‘Qualified opportunities’. Instead of browsing through over 100 opportunities, it boils down to about 5 for a new comer.
3. Before moving ahead and getting all excited, check the color code: if it’s gray- it means that the opportunity is fully reserved; it happens with well paid ones, they vanish fast.
OK, forget about being paid $30 for your post, settle down for $5, start humble.
Take another look and out of those 3 left, check which one might be interesting enough to write something about. Say you found one, click to read a more detailed description and hey, if you see one tack stop right there because it means that you have to have at least one decent review from an advertiser.
That means that probably 2 out of 3 opportunities are still not available to you because you have not written anything yet and you have not been verified.
4. Don’t read about the bloggers making $1000/month because it will discourage you to the point of throwing in the towel. Think that some, if not most of them, are full time bloggers, stay-at-home moms or freelancers, with lots of flexible time to burn off. And most of them are having at least four different blogs. If you are like me, a full time employee juggling a career with taking care of your family, you can’t have that much time to do something else than recharging your batteries.
5. Don’t have high expectations. Start humble. Until you get enough tacks to be able to choose better opportunities, I guess you have to prostitute yourself and write about whatever is available for you to grab.