Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

Not really a milestone like 1000 or anything like that but it doesn’t seem that long ago that I was struggling to get into triple figures with the posts and now four figures is a milestone that seems to be looming up very fast indeed.

Of course, it was quite different in the days of the first 100 posts as the blog was primarily a means of letting friends & family know what we were getting up to each week. Just one post a week was a hard enough target to meet sometimes yet several times recently I’ve manage 18 posts in a day!

Starting towards the end of the Summer of 2006 that changed somewhat as we moved to ForeignPerspectives.com and the content became much more general as we moved into the Winter of that year.

The latest change has, of course, been our discovery that people will pay us to write stuff which is what’s really taken the number of posts up, particularly since July of this year.

One of the terms of service of PayPerPost is that you must have a non-sponsored post either side of one of the sponsored posts. The non-sponsored post can’t, of course, be sponsored by anyone.

That’s a sensible rule as otherwise their sponsored posts would end up largely in purely advertising blogs which would mean, in due course, that they’d only be taken by commercial outfits. There are already fully commercial blogs of course in that various companies write them but, so far, none that I know of which are purely advertising from the likes of PPP.

However, one problem that we’ve started to run into is that because we’ve a number of other websites they’re rejecting posts where the “normal” post is promoting one of our own sites! Are they sponsored? I don’t think so because we certainly don’t pay ourselves to write them.

Wendy’s even had one or two rejected when she’s written about a college of music as a normal post. That’s definitely not sponsored as nobody paid her for it nor does she have any commercial connection with them.

Still, ’tis nice to see that this is pretty much the only type of rejection that we’ve both been getting lately. It’s a sign that we’re finally getting into the swing of it.

Funnily enough this particular post is tagged “sponsored” because it’s about sponsorship but, honestly, Mr/Ms PPP it wasn’t sponsored!

Most of the time it seems to be Eastern Time, the time on the east coast of America at the moment, at least for us.

However, it is something of a problem as in the 24 hour world of the Internet the time zone used most of the time tends to be in America as that’s where the bulk of the commercial Internet places appear to be. Want web hosting? If you don’t read the small print then chances are your hosting will be somewhere in America which will make quite a difference to the hits that you get if your main customer base is in Europe (the difference can be as much as 10 fold!).

OK, so we might be in a 24/7 world but few offices actually work those hours. Why would they?

Still, it does make quite a difference to us at the moment in that PayPerPost is based in Miami and seems to work roughly 0900 to 1700 Miami time which works out as 1400 to 2300 our time and that’s the timeframe when the paid post opportunities come online. Our original tactic of doing the posts in the morning meant that we effectively got the left-overs from the night before but now that we’ve moved closer to Miami time in our postings, we get a whole lot more money for the same amount of effort.

One thing that I always find fascinating is the differing mix of advertisers on the different paid post websites.

You’d think that they would be broadly similar, but that isn’t the case. On some you’ll get loads of different opportunities available whilst on others there are only ever a handful. In practice, that means that I look most often on the sites with the larger numbers of opportunities as it saves me the hassle of logging in all the time to sites that rarely produce the goods.

The mix is quite different too. As you may have noticed, I take quite a range of topic areas for the paid posts, essentially for two reasons 1) they look interesting and 2) if they pay more I’m gonna consider them. Most of the time, I’m quite lucky and the available posts cover both areas.

Still, ‘yall have gotten quite a mix today with computer games, web hosting, holidays, plastic surgery and car sales! A bumper crop as we were away yesterday and didn’t get any done.

One of the things that’s been happening over the last few months is that the paid posting sites are demanding better standards of spelling and grammar from the bloggers and promising penalties if they don’t get them.

Recently, the advertisers have added some text to the effect that the blogger should check their spelling and grammar and that those with bad spelling will be rejected. Fair enough, except that almost all of those demanding better spelling have spelling mistakes in their own advert (and, in one case, in their mandatory link text!) and impose bad grammar through their poorly though out link text.

Perhaps laughably, it’s not uncommon to find that the link specified doesn’t actually work which shows how little care is put into the advertising from some places!