Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Writing’ Category

When Wendy started off her blog we just used the domain wendyreid.org for it as we already had that registered.

That was back in February but by the Summer she was well into writing paid posts and it seemed like a good idea to a) be using a dotcom domain and b) using one that was related to the blog content too.

Why the dotcom? That’s because a number of the paid post opportunities specify that you have a dotcom and therefore moving to one would increase the number available to her. Also, and related to that, for reasons that are far from clear a dotcom is better than a dotorg in terms of search engine positioning (which is why we’re also in the process of moving Our Inns to Inns4U).

Having the blog name related to the content is just a sensible thing anyway but it also helps for those paid posting sites where the advertiser chooses the blog.

Anyway, we registered Cultured Views and aliased it with the existing wendyreid.org domain so you can access the content by using either domain. Then we started telling the various sites that she’s signed up with.

No problem ’til we did PayPerPost. When we did that, the number of available opportunities dropped like a stone. Although nothing had really changed about the blog, they took the current pagerank of the new domain and used that to filter the opportunities. Naturally, that was PR0 therefore there were next to none available. So we asked them to change it back ’til we managed to transfer the pagerank over.

Ironically, just about the same time as the pagerank transferred over, somebody else in ppp noticed that the blog didn’t match the domain and changed it back. Well, tried to because they didn’t do it properly and Wendy’s not been able to post anything with them for days.

Finally, they replied to her support ticket and the guy said he’d changed everything including the URLs quoted in the past…. to culturedreviews.com. So she still can’t post anything! Perhaps they’ll get it 100% this time around.

Don’t you just hate it when there’s some daft validation check applied to what you want to enter in a form?

Despite many years of crazy assumptions being made by programmers and analysts, they still happen.

France, as always, heads the list though. It’s impossible to enter the date you got your driving license if it was before you were 18 as that’s the earliest you can get it in France. Applying for a job? Well, you’ll need a reference number to do it that you can’t get until after you’ve got a job!

In a similar category there’s the seemingly pathetic software testing that’s done these days. The reason why there haven’t been any posts from PayPerPost here lately is because they’ve updated their software and it’s not currently possible to submit entries to them! I suspect that the advertisers are having problems with them too as whilst it’s normally 200+ opportunities to select from, there’s only about 100 on at the moment.

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.