Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

Malin over at Infektia has been getting a bit innundated by junk comments of late as indeed have I.

Why? Surely they should all be killed by Akismet? Ah, well, yes, but Akismet relies on bloggers reporting spam comments and adds the relevant senders to its database thus stopping future ones. However, the number of spammers is more than likely going up and perhaps bloggers are just deleting the spam rather than reporting it thus Akismet doesn’t learn as well as it used to.

I’ve also noticed another type of spam in the sense that since I started writing paid posts and thereby started writing a whole lot more than I used to, increasing numbers of the posts are being picked up by “spam aggregators” ie aggragation services that simply run a search for, say, “loans” and list the posts from all blogs that come up. In many ways, this is even worse than spam comments as it makes the whole “blog authority” scheme even more worthless than it was becoming courtesy of various large scale mutual linking schemes that are around these days.

Anyway, I guess we need to wait for WordPress to come up with some way of weeding out the spam linkers.

OK, I’m not there yet, but at least it seems to be heading in the right direction.

As we’re edging into the Winter here, it becomes more and more appealing. We’ve obviously a lot less to do during the day and, possibly more importantly, I’m not doing the studying as the Spanish course is finished.

So far, it would appear to be quite a good fit with our normal activities as we’re busy in the Summer when there are relatively few paid post opportunities yet don’t have much to do in the Winter when there seem to be a lot more paid opportunities available.

Even aside from the money aspect, I quite like a lot of the paid posts that come along.

For instance, I’ve written a whole stream of them about various holiday destinations and I love writing about stuff like that. I’ve even started up Whole Earth Guide so I can write more of it!

The finance related ones have been fairly thick on the ground here too as I can usually talk the leg off a table when speaking about finance as many people will attest to!

But now and again you get surprises.

For instance, today, PayPerPost just offered a very nice looking African safari post. At least it looked quite nice at first glance. Let’s face it, who wouldn’t want to go on a safari? Second glance revealed though that they want you to promote a place that guarantees you’ll kill a set number of endangered species.

Now, aside from the moral aspect of that, it’s actually illegal in that PPP is based in America and therefore subject to American laws.

I’m not blaming them on putting it on because I’m sure the whole process is quite automatic and after all it’s Sunday so chances are that they’ve locked the door and left the computers in charge but it just goes to show the range of things that you can get ie you can’t just start typing away with a post before you read what they’re actually wanting you to write about.

As the number of people writing paid posts goes up, the quality of some of the new writing appears to be going down.

One consequence of this is that a number of the sites offering paid posts have started adding quality markings to bloggers or are in the course of implementing schemes to let them do that. Interestingly though, the quality of spelling and grammar that the advertisers use is also going down. In fact, in most cases those saying that they will reject posts with bad spelling or grammar display the very worst examples of both themselves.

That bad spelling and grammar even extends to the links that you are required to use. In a growing number of cases they don’t work yet we have to use the link as specified or the post gets rejected.

Perhaps the worst source of these is PayPerPost although that’s probably a side-effect of them having so many paid posts on offer.

One we’re about to do has the conflicting requirements that they’ll reject posts with spelling mistakes yet the link that I have to use has a spelling mistake in it which in turn is reflected in their website!

ReviewMe is one of those paid post sites that gets heavily promoted by the make money online blogs.

Now, the make money online blogs appear to do incredibly well from the posts that ReviewMe offer them with the likes of John Chow quoting figures into the thousands of dollars per month from them. Now, to be fair, you’d expect his blog to do quite well from any payment scheme in that it gets very substantial traffic each month and therefore is a valuable property to advertisers.

For me though, all I could see were a few posts at $5 back in May and nothing more until last week.

Ordinarily, I don’t do $5 posts and definitely not when they’re looking for 200 words but I figured that perhaps it was a matter of starting from the bottom and working up with them so I wrote a couple in May and then four last week.

Result? They paid out for one of the four, the advertiser pulled out of another one and they rejected the other two.

Why the rejections? Well, they sent me an e-mail saying that I’d “flagrantly broken the rules” and quoted the three rules:

1. The post must say it’s sponsored;
2. The link as specified by the advertiser must be included; and
3. There must be at least 200 words

I tag all my paid posts as sponsored unless the advertiser specifically requests that I don’t. The post that was accepted was identical in this regard to the other three.

I copy and paste the link specified so it was what the advertiser asked for in all four cases. 

I run a wordcount on my posts so all four cleared 200 words.

Actually, the second point was the problem. Three of the four advertisers had specified a link that simply wouldn’t work. The ReviewMe software obviously checks that the link in your post is the one asked for and therefore it’s not possible to correct this yet they rejected me because the link wasn’t “correct”.

I pointed this out to them but have yet to receive a reply.