Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Writing’ Category

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.

Just as we were assuming that we were back down to lower paid opportunities and not a great selection for that matter either, today happened.

Whilst it’s always possible that a particular paid post outlet could have a run of opportunities, today just about all of them seemed to be full of opportunities whereas only a few days ago they seemed to be drying up.

So much did this take us by surprise that we stuffed ourselves with them today and hit a new personal record of postings of 16 posts in a single day!

A pretty unbelieveable number, eh? Still, no more posts from now ’til Wednesday for me ‘cos I’m off to do the final Spanish exam of my Modern Languages degree.

Although I’ve been plugging away with a series on living in France and you’d think that it would be something French that would be the most popular post on the blog, in fact it’s a post that is solidly in the expat finance field that is by far the most popular.

It’s, of course, our article on opening a bank account in America as a non-resident. Why? Well, for those that are running a small business on the Internet, the preferred way of getting paid is via PayPal which is brilliant for a small business as you get to accept credit card payments with no hassle at all. However, obviously you need to get the money out of PayPal and into a real bank account at some point and that’s where the problems start.

PayPal is basically an American payment scheme and only lets you transfer money out to a fairly limited number of countries. Crucially, that range of countries excludes quite a lot of Asia who are, of course, one of the most active business communities on the Internet.

If PayPal don’t support bank accounts in your country they give you only one other option: transfer money to an American bank account and so opening a bank account in America has become very popular. Unfortunately, the tightening up of security checks after 9/11 means that it’s quite difficult to open an account there or at least the options have closed up somewhat.

What’s happened then is that there has been a massive growth in websites offering to sell you the information for anything from $5 to $1000. Yes, up to one thousand dollars! Since I don’t charge anything for somewhat better information, the post in question has steadily moved up the rankings in google and indeed the corresponding entry in the expat resources section of the Whole Earth Guide has soared right up to the top of google too.

In fact the post has become so popular that I’ll be rolling out a similar guide for other countries which have been requested (Switzerland is next in line, the Channel Islands after that).

I’ve been thinking about the traffic that’s been arriving on this site over the last month or so and it would appear that the people most active in the “blog aggregators” are concentrated in the broad area of financial services for want of a better name for it.

To be fair, that sample of stats suffers from a bias in that I’m obviously only seeing the aggregation services that are picking up various articles on my blogs. However, the majority of my posts most definitely haven’t been in that financial services area yet the incoming links from the aggregators are disproportionately hitting topics in those particular areas.

For sure, there are aggregators out there looking at the travel end of things and whenever I write something about Hawaii and cruises in particular, then I can expect those articles to be picked up.

Anyway, that has me wondering if it would be worthwhile to kick off a blog aimed very specifically at that financial services area? For that matter, I’m also wondering if there’s money to be made with a blog aggregator: if nothing else, having other people doing all the work and having me banking the advertising income has a certain appeal.