Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Writing’ Category

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!

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.