PayPerPost or an exercise in futility

I swear, today PayPerPost drove me bonkers.
OK, it usually has this effect on my, but today it reached the climax. I was reading the other day about a trick to get a freaking opportunity: refresh very often.
As in, verifying the opportunities once a week- as I do- won’t do the trick.
And some guy offered even more than the informal advice, it gave a step by step guide. Curious?
Well, let say that the first step is a must have one: Firefox.
Switch as fast as you can from IE if you are still using it. Now, while on Firefox download an addon by going there:https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/115.
Next step: set the addon to reload the page every x-freaking seconds and voila!
As in NOTHING!!!!

OK, OK, calm down, take a deep breath, count to ten, chant some mantra (the mantra of compassion preferably, as in compassion for your struggling soul) and take a zen approach to the whole PayPerPost experience.
It’s not working! Not for the idiots like me, who are not able to glue their asses to the chair and stare at the computer screen without blinking, because if you blink, somebody may steal the opportunity from under your nose.
It’s for the same category of stay-at-home moms, with time to burn and neglected kids.
Because nobody, as in NOBODY, can convince me that if you have to stay in front of the computer hours and hours at a time, you will have the time to look after your kids. It’s freaking impossible.

Today I tried the experiment: for three hours I refreshed the opportunity page almost every 2-3 minutes. Well, OK, I admit that I had to work something and for about 10 minutes I have not been able to check the page.
You know what happened? Every time I reloaded the page, the opportunities were already taken!!!!!!!
Something must be freaking wrong, there must be a pirate software, used by some people to steal this opps. Or some inside information regarding when a new opportunity is going to be posted.
Seriously, there is no other explanation. I have seen new opps showing up already in gray (as in reserved) in between 5 seconds span. How is it possible?
Actually it may be an explanation: only one of a kind opportunity. Especially the ones paying $50. Then I can understand that it can be grabbed by whoever has the fastest internet connection. My DSL does not seem to be the fastest one.

I gave up. I have refreshed the page for 30 minutes, every two seconds (I was on the phone and kept clicking on refresh).
Nothing happened.
It sucks big time!

PayPerPost and its Terms of Service

Is there anybody who really reads all the points that make TOS (terms of service)?
I don’t and maybe I should. Nah, it looks that first I get burned, then I find out why.
It happened with AdSense, now it happened again with PayPerPost. You think that I should have learned something, right?

I wrote a post about paintball and actually I was honest about this sport which I considered practicing at some point back in time.
It did not even cross my mind that it would be rejected.
Why it has been? The answer from PPP was that I have violated the TOS that requires to have a non pay-per-post written in the past seven days prior to the sponsored one, and that a post written in the same day as the sponsored one does not matter.

So you are not only confronted with the situation of not being able to get opportunities which are almost always grabbed by the army of the stay-at-home moms, you really have to know the TOS, which so far it boils down to these three important things regarding PPP:

1. Have the disclosure included within your blog
2. Write at least every other day to be on the safe side
3. Have at least one non-sponsored post before writing a sponsored one

Weird. Why is that 7 days rule important I have no freaking idea.
The bad thing is that you are not allowed to resubmit the post, meaning that that opportunity is lost. Nice… NOT!

I admit that having three blogs, it’s pretty hard to have enough drive to write in all of them. I can’t even imagine how could anybody have ten or more. It takes so much time to write something interesting.
Yeah, actually who said that most of these guys with tons of blogs had something interesting there, right?

Anyway, learn from my mistake.

AdSense tips

Curious to know what happened with my AdSense attempt?
The story is here

In the mean time, for enthusiasts, here are some tips regarding AdSense, collected in the past six months. I don’t know how many are still applicable, but it’s worth trying:

1. Open a blog on Blogspot
It’s been said that it accelerates the evaluation process and if you are new in the market you stand a pretty good chance to be approved
2. Having your blog, you have to work pretty hard for the next two weeks and show activity, like at least 4 posts a day.
Try to make them longer than 50 words, because short posts don’t matter.
3. Don’t copy posts from other sources because duplicate content will ensure your rejection.
4. After at least two weeks of diligent work, try to get AdSense. Fill out the required fields, with accurate and real info about yourself, because if you get accepted and you would be successful in getting clicks sooner or later you may get paid and the check is to be sent to the address given in the initial application. Likewise the phone number, because you are going to reach the point when your phone number will be verified so make sure it’s not a bogus one.
5. After you get the AdSense code you can use it in as many sites- that meet Google’s criteria- as you like.
6. Continue writing posts that will get good advertising.
7. Where to get ideas from? I have read many different suggestions, one being to check what are people interested in. Visit Yahoo or MSN pages and you are going to see daily top searches. Based on your findings, write a post and wait for the clicks to come.
8. If you still are confused about developing strategies, go to AdSense specialized forums. It’s not sure people will be offer honest suggestions but you can try.

I am not going to rain on anybody’s parade with a healthy and skeptical analysis of what actually happens.
It remains to be seen how many will succeed in this already supra saturated market.

Updates on my money making scheme

First of all my scheme is a sloppy one, because I don’t really have a strategy on increasing my profit through blogging.
But I owe some updates:

- PayPerPost
I got approved for 2 posts, submitted another one for approval.
It’s the same hassle finding approved opportunities, most of the stuff is either in gray- taken already- or in red- not available to me.
One day I was lucky- sort of- and found 2 opportunities but until I made my mind which one to choose first, one was already gone.
Stupid me. I should have reserved both of them. I guess this is how many payperpost super bloggers (the one listed as making hundreds a month) do.
The rule is that you can’t have two sponsored posts one after another. And now I understand why PPP bloggers have 4 or 5 postings a day.

- AdSense
Still no answer from Google. I guess they are busy thinking their next move considering the bid Microsoft put for Yahoo.
I am not holding my breath with AdSense anyway, because it’s been proved to me that I could not make money with it. It’s more like a personal thing right now.
On top of that, most people consider that it’s a waste of time.

- Commission Junction
I did not put any effort on this venue because I don’t have enough traffic to my blog. And because my self-hosted blog is too eclectic to accommodate affiliate programs. I should have to follow the system: one site- one topic, and based on that to work as an affiliate for Commission Junction. With that, we go back to square one: finding the right niche.

- Amazon
Although it’s better to have an eclectic blog while displaying Amazon tools, it’s still hard to make people buy something even if you share your good experience on some products. I have read that if you want to make money with Amazon, you have to promote expensive items. Like high end electronics or designer watches.

- Amazon Mechanical Turk
This is my newest addition. Very, very low paid, think $0.01 or $0.02 for your opinion. If you are to spend 1 minute to categorize something, it’s not that bad… well, if you compared with how much you make at your daily job, it’s not worth it of course… but if you are to spend 30 minutes to complete the task only to get $0.02, then forget about it.
I still can’t figure out who in his right mind would spend 30 minutes to make $0.02? That boils down to $0.00066 per minute.
By curiosity I verified the offer and very often you have to spend that amount of time to find the requested answer.

Please visit again if you want to check more updates.

Taking paid surveys

I am still waiting to find out if my post would be approved by PayPerPost. Allegedly it takes about 72 hours to get the resolution, but it may be longer.
I took a look at the market opportunities; again, for a new comer without any tack (yet) there are not too many options. Right now the number is … 4!!
Out of 4, two – the nice ones- have been already fully reserved, one requires one tack (the same opportunity like last week) and the other one it’s… well… acceptable.
Just out of curiosity I checked the red offers (the ones that are not available for me) to see what makes them unreachable. Do you want to know?
Some of them require a Google rank of at least 5, others require real rank of at least 9 (what the heck is real rank?)
OK folks, swallow the bitter pill and repeat after me… I won’t quit my day job! until the thought settles down deep in your brain.

Moving on to the topic of ‘Taking surveys’.
Probably you have heard/read about people boasting about how much they make just by filling out surveys.
Reality check: it’s true it’s for North America, but most of the time that means the U.S.A. Fellow Canadians, not for you!!!
So far I got about 3 survey invitations (in 6 months!!).
Today I received the last one.
It read something along this line: 30 minutes survey, estimated pay: $3.
No more bitching about being paid $5 to write a post for PayPerPost, ok?
Never mind the amount, my kid was playing and I thought that I have 30 minutes to do it.
After about 3 minutes I was found undesirable because I said that I did not want to take any new credit cards this year.
So I made $0.25 for my effort.

Conclusion: if you want to make money with surveys, be careful what you answer. If you are honest, well, readdress this issue before enrolling into this kind of activity.
It looks like you have to know what to answer to stay in the game long enough to get the money.
Kind of like you do when you go to a job interview and you are asked why have you applied for the job.

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.

PayPerPost vs. ReviewMe

Let’s say that you have not even started having clear ideas about what to blog about, when you think about monetizing it.
Somehow it may not be as silly as it sounds. Why? Because if you don’t have any preconceived ideas or a specific niche to target, maybe it’s better to know what is on the market in terms of making money on the net, then create and develop a blog accordingly.
For some people, paid reviews are one way to go; others are going to heavily promote affiliate programs.
Let’s start with the easy one: paid reviews.
If you are like me, you are going to use your favorite search engine to get some information and it’s very possible that you are going to find two programs: PayPerPost and ReviewMe
I am not going to elaborate again about ReviewMe. If you want to revisit my post, it’s here

What I am going to do, is to try to make a comparison between PayPerPost and ReviewMe.

What do they have in common:
- Free to join
- Mandatory to disclose that the post is a paid review

What is different:
PayPerPost:
- No minimum traffic requirement. But the blog should be at least 90 days old and have minimum 20 posts distributed evenly over the time
- Low paid reviews; it starts at $5
- Allows the advertisers to set the tone of the review. Advertisers may ask for only positive ones.
- MarketPlace with advertisers’ opportunities. Advertisers list the requirements of the post (minimum number of words, if blog is to be on self-hosted domain, some blog hosting sites are excluded) and how much they want to pay.
- Publisher chooses the opportunity.
ReviewMe:
- Traffic requirement: takes into account Alexa ranking, Technorati ranking and RSS subscribers. I may be wrong, but I believe that Alexa rank of minimum 100,000 is desirable. My site has Alexa rank of….. 5,987,895!!! How lame is that? It makes me sick on my stomach.
- Review is paid at between $40 and $500, depending on the site’s rank
- Review must be at least 200 words
- MarketPlace is for advertisers to choose what publisher they want, the opposite of PayPerPost
- Does not allow setting the tone of the review
- No control over review offers

PayPerPost levels the playing field for almost anybody to join it. ReviewMe is considered kind of elitist.

Final note: Be careful when transferring blogs from one site to another.
I transferred by blog from Blogspot to WordPress and PayPerPost rejected it with the reason that the blog did not belong to me and that I copied and pasted entire posts.
The mistake was mine: I forgot to reload the pictures. I was lazy and happy that everything showed up perfect in my new template, pictures included and I did not double check the code. The pictures listed blogspot as the source.
I made the appropriate changes and resubmitted the blog to PayPerPost for approval, but I am not sure I would get accepted. Apparently PayPerPost uses real life persons for checking the submitted blogs. In such a case, I guess they should have given me the benefit of the doubt and maybe check the blogspot to see that there is the same picture of me in both of them.

Edited to add an important thing:
You have to have a self-hosted blog in order to use PayPerPost, ReviewMe or other affiliate programs. WordPress.com won’t accept sponsored or paid links.

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