Category Archives: Tips for Bloggers

Paid Review Sites – Tips for More Opportunities & Fast Approval of Posts

Posted on by
Reply

Make Money Online through Paid Review sites

Tips on Getting More Opportunities
& Fast Approval of your Paid Posts

Make sure you’ve read PART I of my guide to Paid Review sites:
Introduction to Paid Review Sites – Part 1 of Guide to Paid Review Sites

This was supposed to be Part 3. My bad. Part 3 will be my Tips on how to get your blog approved when you sign up to Paid Review sites. Stay tuned for that!

Before I go ahead with the guides on how to accept or bid for Paid Review tasks, let me share with you some tips on how you can get more opportunities for your blog.

Advertisers prefer to offer paid review tasks to bloggers who have their own domains.

Why? Because the paid posts would look more professional and reliable if it’s on a blog with its own domain.

It’s pretty easy to set up a free Blogger (blogspot) or WordPress blog so there might be people or possible customers who wouldn’t want to read about a certain product or service on a blog with a Blogspot.com or WordPress.com address. There are some companies who create free blogs with Blogspot addresses to spam or get links for their website or blog. If you have your own domain, you would look more reliable as a source of information.

If you’re interested in registering your own domain, I suggest you do so with Moniker. They offer the cheapest domain prices. I’ve got 6 domains registered through them. It might seem kinda complicated to set up your domain with them but I have written a guide on how to do just that over at my other blog – How to Setup Domains in Moniker for Blogger. The guide was specifically written for Blogger users, but the setup process is pretty much the same with other sites.

To search for a domain, use the banner below:

! Free Domains !

CO.CC:Free Domain

You can also sign up for a free CO.CC domain. However, take note that NOT all the domains on co.cc are free. And, only your FIRST YEAR will be free.  To start checking if your preferred co.cc domain is still available, use the form below:

I’ll post a guide on how to setup your free CO.CC domain to point to your blog.

Don’t be too demanding.

If your blog is not that popular, don’t set your paid post price too high. My lowest paid post rate is $5.00 for a 100-word blog post. I’m pretty okay with this since writing paid posts also helps me keep my blog updated for my Adgitize earnings. I just make sure my posts are all interesting and not just some random blog post for the sake of completing my requirement. But, hey, it’s all up to you what you want to do with your paid posts. :) \

Now, if the advertiser is offering you a very low rate compared to the amount you usually get per post, especially when they have a lot of requirements with text links or contents, then, by all means, demand for a higher rate. I’ve done this a couple of times already and the advertisers were all willing to accept my request for higher rate.

If you’re already making money through Linkbucks like me, then, you have to make sure that you add an exception on your Linkbucks script to prevent the advertiser’s website to open with Linkbucks ads with it. Why? Because most Paid Review sites are very strict with how the advertiser’s website is linked to your blog.For instance, Blogsvertise. I got a couple of posts that were declined before because the advertiser’s text links on my blog were automatically converted to Linkbucks links.To add an exception to your Linkbucks script, follow my guide:

Make Money Online through Linkbucks – How to Setup Guide

Be creative with how you use the text links required of you.

You can simply talk about something that happened to you or a friend, something you saw on TV or in a movie, or even like a random rant so you can insert the text links. It’s pretty tricky so you really need to think about how you would incorporate that text link to your blog post without compromising your blog’s quality and your readership.

Make sure you follow the link requirements.

If the advertiser requires you to insert 3 text links, then, you have to follow them. No exceptions. If they want a REVIEW, write an actual review and don’t just insert the required text link (I’m guilty of this LOL).

This is why I love this certain paid post site (I had to remove the name). They only require you to post 1 text link on your Paid Posts. Thus, it makes the whole Paid Post thing easier for you. However, the opportunities are automatically approved and you are required to complete all of them so inserting those text links on your posts can really be tricky. Hehehe. But, still, I love them!

Your paid posts should remain on your blog FOREVER.

If the Paid Review sites found out you were deleting your paid posts after you got paid, your account may be suspended or deleted without notice.

Make sure you follow the word count requirement.

If the advertiser wants you to write a 200-word post about them or with their text link, you MUST follow or your paid post will be rejected.

Read the requirements carefully.
 Otherwise, your account might get suspended.

Not all paid post opportunities were created equal. I mean, some advertisers are more lenient wth their requirements; some are very strict. For paid review sites where you can bid for opportunities, if your blog doesn’t meet any of the requirements, DO NOT BID on the opp. Your account may be suspended or banned if you do this.

For instance, the advertiser only wants PR4+ blogs to bid. If your blog is at PR2, don’t bid on the opportunity. If the advertiser wants blogs about TECHNOLOGY only and yours is a personal blog or about family, don’t bid.

Submit your Paid Posts before the deadline.

If you don’t, you’ll miss on the paid post opportunities. And, for most Paid Review sites, if you continue on missing your deadlines, you’d get fewer opportunities next time around. You’ve got a whole lot of competition in writing Paid Posts, so, make sure you maximize your earnings from them by doing what’s required of you. And, another thing, if they see you’re finishing your paid opportunities early, chances are, you’d get more opps.

Note: This post may be updated in the future as I think of more tips on getting more paid opportunities and fast approval of your paid reviews/posts. So, make sure you check back or bookmark this page for more tips in the future!

Stay tuned for:
Part III – Tips on Getting your Blog Approved
 Part IV – Reviews of my Highly Recommended Paid Review Sites (stay tuned for this!)

Introduction to Paid Review Sites – Part 1 of Guide to Paid Review Sites

Posted on by
Reply

Make Money Online through Paid Review sites

After weeks of waiting, here’s my guide on Paid Review sites. There’ll be separate reviews for each site so keep posted for the next parts of this guide.

paidReviewSites1 I’ve been an active blogger since 2003 over at Cubeblog, which was suddenly closed without formal notice to all the members. I started my new blog over at Blogger – Just Another Pixel – in 2008 in the hopes of starting to make money online with it.

My first venture in making money online with my blog was with Google Adsense. However, I knew it’ll take me a long time to reach the $100 minimum for cashing out (I already withdrew it over a week ago) that I searched for other ways to make money online with my blog.

I found out about Paid Review sites and I did some research on which ones are worth joining. I get decent amount of traffic to my blog daily and a couple of followers when I started with Paid Review sites. To-date, I’ve earned over $300 from 5 Paid Review sites I’ve joined. Some of them, I just joined a month ago. I even have $100 of pending payments from them to-date.

There are a lot of bloggers I know, mostly stay-at-home moms, who use Paid Review sites as their main source of extra income. Well, you can actually do that, too, but your blog should be of high quality and your posts should really be interesting and well-written to attract high-paying advertisers to sign you up for paid review opportunities with them.

On top of my online money makers’ list are Paid Review sites. And I am highly recommending 4 of them to you. Stay tuned for the next parts of this guide to know

Introduction to Paid Review Sites

What are Paid Review sites exactly? How do they work?

Advertising Paid Review sites connect you with advertisers who have their own websites or blogs that feature their products or services they offer, and they wanted to get better Search Engine Results Page (SERP) position to attract more customers to their site. To accomplish this, they need to get more websites or blogs linking to their site so that when someone searches for a certain search string (for example, best anniversary gift ideas, colon cleanse product, etc) on Google or any other search engine, their site can appear on the first few pages of the results. This way, they can beat their competition.

The Paid Review sites I’m featuring on this guide require you to post a text link that would lead anyone who clicks to the advertiser’s website. You must follow the text links required for you to use in your blog post and they should be inserted into a newly published blog post. How to do this, I’ll discuss in the next parts of this guide.

It’s very easy to make money online with Paid Review sites because with a single post, you can earn as much as $5 to even $300, if you’re lucky and if you own a high-quality and high-traffic blog.

The only thing with Paid Review sites is that you need to wait for advertisers to approve your bids OR, depending on the Paid Review site you joined, you’d have to wait for paid post assignments from the admin.

With this guide, I’ll do my best to share with you some things that would help you get started in making money online as a blogger who writes paid reviews. Stay tuned for the next parts of this guide for more details and tips.

thumbs-up Advantages of Paid Reviews/Posts for Bloggers

  • Like what I mentioned earlier, you can earn $5 to $300 for a single blog post.
    You can simply incorporate the required text links to any topic you wanted to post. It can be as short as a 100-word blog post, as long as the required text links are there.Most Paid Review sites are not strict with how you incorporate the text links to your blog post as long as it’s there. There are some advertisers, though, that require you to actually review or talk about their site, services or product.
  • You have control over when you want to publish your paid post/review as long as it’s before the set deadline.
    Unlike with freelance blog article writing jobs, you don’t have to follow the strict rules of the person who hired you, like you have to be logged on a certain time, etc.
  • You can choose which ones to post about. For most Paid Review sites, you have the option to decline a paid review opportunity that was assigned to you or was offered to you by an advertiser. If you think the price is too low, decline it.
  • Paid Reviews or Posts also help you build traffic to your blog, believe it or not.
    trafficHow? Well, first of all, I want to remind you that the advertisers who paid for your post have the money to spend on promoting their site or product. That means that there’s actually a demand for it. So, if someone searches in Google and uses the search string, which is usually the required text link assigned to you, your blog post will be listed on the results. That means there’ll be people visiting your blog to check what you wrote about.
  • In my experience, writing paid posts helped me be a better blogger.
    Sounds cheesy, but, it’s true. I was able to blog about parts of my life or my experiences that I wouldn’t usually write about. And this resulted to more people leaving comments on my posts because there are others who can relate to my story.When I started blogging, I was focused more on getting traffic to my blog by posting about the latest news or buzz on the web. I almost forgot that I was supposed to blog for me, not for others. I still enjoy sharing my knowledge to the world through my tutorials and sharing of my discoveries, but I also enjoy talking about my life in an attempt to inspire other people.Because of the variety of text links and advertisers out there, I got the chance to talk about our garden, my acne-free skin (LOL), and a lot of other topics that I haven’t really thought about blogging.

thumbs-down Disadvantages of Paid Reviews/Posts for Bloggers

Of course, if there are advantages, there are also disadvantages in writing or posting paid reviews on your blog. That’s why you have to be careful and take note of these. I’ll also share some tips based on my experience so you can still maintain your blog readership or for you to minimize the effects of these disadvantages to you and your blog.

  • If most of your visitors are bloggers like you, most probably they are very familiar with Paid Review sites, too. Most of them might even be members of your Paid Review sites. Therefore, they know which of your posts were paid for by advertisers, even when you don’t disclose it. Some of them might be disappointed or turned off by that fact. So, it’s up to you if you want to continue writing paid posts or not and risk losing valuable readers, or if you can work around it.
  • As what I’ve pointed out on the first one, there might be readers of your blog that will be turned off by you writing paid posts. They might think that your paid posts are of less value to them since you’re not being completely honest with your posts.To avoid this, make sure that you only accept Paid Review/Post opps that are related to your blog and that don’t require you to review a product or website that’s not close to what you usually write about.
    However, if you’re writing for a Paid Review site that require you to finish all the assigned paid post opps, then, simply write about anything casual or informal where you can easily insert or include the link to the advertiser’s website. This would prevent you from lying or coming up with a fake story about someone or something just to accomplish what was required of you.disclosurePolicy.orgIn connection with this, you have to make sure that you also include a Disclaimer or Disclosure  statement on your blog where you explain that you accept paid reviews or paid posts opportunities, but that you won’t compromise your integrity by writing about something that you don’t personally believe in or understand. You can use DisclosurePolicy.org‘s services to generate your own Disclosure statement. However, I suggest you write your own or edit it to make it sound like you’re the one who actually wrote it.
  • If you do not control the amount of paid posts you publish, eventually, you would really lose blog readers and traffic, thus, you would end up with fewer or even zero paid opportunities in the future.This is why you have to be careful that the percentage of your paid posts won’t be way higher than your unpaid ones. OR, if you can’t really avoid it, then, make sure that you make your posts valuable or interesting.

At the next part of this guide, I’ll share with you a couple of paid reviews/posts that I’ve published in the past so you can see how I was able to incorporate the required text links to my blog posts without compromising my integrity as a blogger.

If you have questions or clarifications, feel free to post them here.

Stay tuned for:
Part II – Tips for More Opportunities & Fast Approval of Posts
Part III – Tips on Getting your Blog Approved
Part IV – Reviews of my Highly Recommended Paid Review Sites

Domains @ Moniker – Setup Guide

Posted on by
Reply

I have posted a guide on how to setup domain names on Moniker over at my blog Just Another Pixel:

How to Setup Domains in Moniker

So, if you have a blog and you want to own a custom domain like mine – pinayonlinemoneymaker.net – I suggest you register it through Moniker because they offer really cheap rates than GoDaddy. Click on the banner below to visit Moniker and register your domain now.

Then, visit the guide on how to setup your domain, especially if you’re using Blogger.

Be Original! Don’t Copy Contents from Others!

Posted on by
Reply

While I was looking at my live blog traffic from Feedjit, I saw a visitor coming from this website that I never even heard of. So, out of curiosity, I checked out the site. And, voila! Look at what I found:

(Click on the images to zoom in)

That table format with all the details of the PTC sites looks VERY familiar. Right?
Complete List of Trusted Paying Online Money Making Sites
I know that’s the same format. Even the introduction is the same. Wow.
Whoever wrote that content on their site might be my long-lost soulmate ‘coz he/she phrased it the same way I did. Even the images of the logos of the PTC sites, they look all the same as the ones I made for my blog!
Hmm… Everything here seems to be taken from my blog post
Hmmm… deja vu… or is it?
How to Get Referrals for your Money-Making Programs
Wow. Almost 99% of their contents were from my blog!
How to Spot a PTC Scam Site
And this was the ONLY link I got from them after they copied 99% of their contents from this blog:
Yeah, THIS WEBSITE. They didn’t even mention my blog’s name or title. Sheesh!

They were too lazy to even try to make it look like it wasn’t copied from anywhere. They didn’t even bother to check their spelling or grammar. It was too time-consuming for them, I guess, so they decided to just copy my articles and paste it. Then, they post this disclaimer to try to clear themselves for copying my contents.

This is just plain rude. If you found an interesting or informative blog post or article and you want to use it on your blog, the respectful way to do it is write an introduction THEN post a link to the original poster’s article.

This really irritated me, especially when I saw all those small images/thumbnails of the PTC sites’ logos that I made myself. THEY COPIED ALL OF THEM and saved it like theirs. They didn’t just copy my contents, they even used the images like they were theirs. And they said in the disclaimer that they took SOME materials from my blog. No, damn it, you didn’t take SOME. You took 99% of your contents FROM MY BLOG! Sheesh!

There’s a way to find out if there are copies of your articles or blog posts circulating the web without your knowledge. Google has a tool to do just that so DON’T FREAKING COPY OTHERS’ CONTENTS. BE ORIGINAL!

If you REALLY want to use someone else’s images or contents on your blog or website, please have the DECENCY to ask permission from the owners or original posters FIRST before you even post them on your site. And, PLEASE, credit them properly when you’ve already posted them.

Now, going back to this website, I tried to send them a message through their contact form but it wasn’t working. This was supposed to be my message for them:

It’s okay if you only copied portions of my blog articles/posts but almost all of your contents here were taken from my blog.
Copying and pasting from other blogs is plain rude. And your posting a link at your About Us page is not enough, especially when you didn’t even mention my blog’s name/title.
The respectful way in doing this is to write an introduction and just link them back to the original poster’s contents.
Please remove all the contents here that you copied from my blog. You don’t have the permission to copy and paste it just like you did. And you even copied the table format of my PTC sites list. *sigh*
I’ve worked hard to write the articles on my blog and to copy and paste my contents like you did is SO rude I can’t take it.
I am looking forward to your immediate action regarding this.

I received an error when I tried to send it so I resorted to filing an Abuse Report to 110mb.com, which is actually a FREE web hosting service.

I’ll post an update once I get a reply from them.

*sigh* Pirates!

UPDATES:
11/27/2009:
5:31am: It seems that the site has been taken down. Earlier, I had an email exchange with 110mb’s CSR. According to them, the abuser agreed to comply and give me credits on his website. You know what he did? He did not edit the posts but he placed a link at the very bottom of every post that they got from me. And the link said CREDITS AND SOURCE with highlights. If you were visiting their site, you wouldn’t even notice that link or you might even simply ignore it. I know I will.

Anyway, after seeing that and realizing that the CSR seemed to be satisfied with what the abuser was telling them, I finally gave up and sent them one last email. I told them that the abuser claims that they want to guide or help people in making money online BUT all their texts came from MY OWN experience that I wrote about on my blog posts here. They are now making people believe that they were the ones who actually had a good eye on which PTC sites are scams, etc. And, I also told the CSR what the main purpose of that site was. It was filled with Google Adsense ads and we’re not supposed to place Adsense on any blog that talks about programs that pay people to click on ads. That’s against their policies. So, I told them that this abuser was only after getting clicks on their Google Adsense ads.

Not sure if it was the abuser who took down the site or it was 110mb. I know this guy will continue doing this so I’ll be keeping an eye on this.

Oh, and if you haven’t noticed, all the little images of PTC sites’ logos are now with my site’s URL. I’ve gotten numerous people asking me how I did that and I simply offered to give them the images since they were kind enough to ask me. So, if you want to use those images elsewhere but don’t know how to edit them, simply leave your request on this post.

11/25/2009:
9:06pm: Whoa. After just a few minutes of sending my Abuse Report to 110mb.com, Paul from customer service replied to me saying that they already forwarded my report to the abuser. I’ll get back to Paul if the abuser doesn’t do anything to fix this. 110mb.com‘s fast customer service is amazing. I hope that the abuser will take action quickly, too.