Downloading from the net

A few days ago I was talking to a friend and he was surprised when I told him that I don’t know how to download movies from the net.
You could see his eyes popping out of his head. Whatever!
I guess it takes some dedication to find movies you like and some knowledge about how to download the files, before venturing in the cyberspace.
My only experience with downloads was music.
Yesterday evening I wrote a post about QTrax and music downloads. Now I am ready for the next experiment: downloading movies.

Why? Not because I am a penny pintcher, but because I am not pro unions and the writers’ strike starts getting on my nerves.
Alghough I should admit that it did something good: it made us spend more time with each other and even better, I started again reading and truly enjoying books. I used to read a lot, but with the new challenge of having a kid, I just did not have the time to do it.
I don’t want to pretend that I understand the purpose of this strike, especially when so many other people are affected by it, people who make less money than writers to start with.
I remember reading a confession made by a lady, writer for some not very popular shows on TV. She mentioned an income of about $350,000 a year.
Well… let me tell you something: I have a Master’s in Chemical Engineering and my income it’s not even close to that one. How the heck could I be sympathetic?
I am not and as a consequence I am going to learn how to download movies.

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.

How to play the corporate politics: 10 things you should know

I wish I would have all the answers. So far I made a few mistakes and you would think that I have learnt something, or have I?
I am on my second corporate job and slowly I am learning my way around.
On my first job I was Quality Manager for seven years. Everything went down the drain with the arrival of a new plant manager with whom I could not get along.
I am a pretty good-natured person, liked by most people, but somehow I could not find a common ground with this guy.
According to some books, I have been emotionally harassed. He was a bully and I was way too sensitive to cope with his behavior.
Or maybe I have been just unprepared to deal with a bully.
I am not detached enough even now, after two years since my leaving that company, to talk emotionless about what happened. It was bad, really bad. The decision to leave came after I got my first panic attack, when I was convinced I had a real heart attack and that I am going to die leaving my husband and my toddler alone.
The panic attacked was followed by a horrible depression. Finally I left.
My current job:Research and Development Engineer.
I was happy with the change, until I came across corporate politics.
I am not a young chick, I should have known better than that, but I am still caught by surprise when I find out that my colleagues are back-stabbers.

You are going to read lots of advice in the papers, but you know what? Most of them are so far from reality and so far from what you can actually do when you are facing the prospect of losing your job, especially if you are the main bread winner, that it’s not even worth mentioning.

How to play the corporate politics?
Here are my suggestions:
1. Keep your ears open and pay attention to the little things happening around you
2. No matter how friendly your colleagues seem to be, keep your guard up because in today’s dog eat dog world there is no free lunch
3. Be careful what you say; gossip is good when you have to get information, but try to keep your mouth shut on sensitive issues
4. Keep vital information to yourself until the right moment comes to use it. Maybe it does not sound right, but you know what? Everybody else is doing it so it would be stupid not to follow the trend
5. Restrain to criticize or make fun of senior managers in open meetings; they won’t forget it and most of them don’t have a sense of humor
6. Back up your activities with everything you can: paper, emails, whatever could be used when you have to prove your point or defend yourself
7. Keep in mind that you are replaceable!!!! Don’t get too comfortable to the extent of letting your guard down
8. Trust your gut feelings while dealing with people
9. When you have a bully around you, don’t piss him off proving him that he is a mean maggot, because he is going to morph into a man with a mission: to destroy you. You can’t punch his nose, you can not have a rational conversation, so all you have to do it to try to keep calm and think that his life is a miserable one (in most cases) and that at the end of the day you are going back home, to your family who loves you, and he is going back to an empty house with nobody to ask him how was his day
10. Always keep in mind that people have their own agenda and if you are smarter than most of them you are in greater danger of being back stabbed because you are going to be perceived as a potential threat to their position

Final thought: Good Luck to all of us fighting to keep our jobs in a cold corporate world.

The benefits of beta carotene supplements

Being a baby boomer makes you think about all the culinary abuses you subjected your body to when you were a young chick. Now you have to do the damage control.
Most of the time, the women are more concerned about their health, more eager to go to the doctor for the annual mandatory control. It’s not that we like the Pap test of the mammogram. What is to be liked about anyway? Both of them are pretty painful and embarrassing.
But faced with the prospect of developing the silent but deadly breast cancer or cervical cancer, you just go.
With men it’s different. Only a few of them would go voluntarily for the prostate examination.
I digress, what I wanted to mention is that on my baby boomer site I will touch men issues as well.
I have a husband I would like to keep as healthy as possible, and because it’s me doing the research I will share my findings with everybody who would like to do some preventive or corrective actions, regardless man or woman.

Today is about beta carotene supplement and the prevention of memory decline.

One of the disease that are pretty prevalent in North America is Alzheimer’s disease.
Alzheimer’s disease is a progressive, degenerative disease. Symptoms include loss of memory, difficulty with day-to-day tasks, and changes in mood and behavior. People may think these symptoms are part of normal aging but they aren’t.
Statistically speaking, in 2008 it is estimated that:
- 97,000 Canadians will develop Alzheimer’s or a related disease
- 450,000 Canadians over 65 have Alzheimer’s or a related disease

A study, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine pointed to a protective effect against cognitive decline in healthy men who took beta carotene supplements for about 18 years.
The data did not show any positive outcome for men who took beta carotene for only one year.
The findings indicate that beta carotene supplements may be a weapon in warding off memory problems characteristic to Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia.
Not everything is nice and dandy: beta carotene supplements may increase the risk of lung cancer in smokers. There is another reason for quit smoking if you are still a smoker.

Beta carotene is an antioxidant vitamin, meaning that it neutralizes the effect of the free radicals (oxidants) released when the body turns food into energy.
Following the logical thinking: free radicals have an oxidative (damaging) effect on the brain. The oxidative damage may be one of the initiating factors that leads to memory problems.
Beta carotene with its antioxidant effect could be the annihilator of the free radicals.

How much beta carotene?
The men in the group that took beta carotene for long periods of time (18 years) were assigned about 50 milligrams every other day.

Like any other scientific study, there were pros and cons voices.
The cons ones would say that there is no convincing justification to recommend the use of antioxidant dietary supplements to maintain cognitive performance in healthy, normal adults.

Another study (in some Neurology journal) examined the link between dementia and diet.
The risk for developing dementia was found to be lower in people with diets heavy in fish, omega-3 oils, fruits and vegetables.

To take or not to take?
It’s a matter of common sense and of what makes you comfortable.
The information is out there. Put in balance pros and cons, use your own judgment and gut feeling and act accordingly.

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.

New Year resolutions

I am not sure how popular New Year resolutions still are, but for me they are a way or planning my year to come.
Some people find it easier to categorize the resolutions: job, family, new ventures, etc. I guess you have to have a type A personality to be that organized. I am not, so my resolutions reflect pretty much who I am.

Although my intention was to write them down before entering into the New Year, I kept postponing until today. But hey, better late than never, if it’s any saying like this.

Here they are:
1. I am going to find a way to increase my blogs popularity without compromising my ethics
2. I am going to add a category detailing my struggle with infertility and how finally I got my bundle of joy
3. I will exercise more than last year (ouch… last year was pretty lame so anything done this year will be better, so it’s like a mini cheating honestly speaking) and improve my diet
4. I will not let my colleagues get under my skin again!!! This year I will develop the necessary skin and skills to succeed
5. I will make the effort to work on the websites that I plan to turn into sources of revenues
6. I will find time for me, time to do what I need to keep me sane: meditation, reading, watching quality movies

I think this is it so far.

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