Comments for Cash (or Coins)? Yep!

A few years ago, I used to post comments a lot on websites like HuffPo, local newspaper articles, and such. I had no idea that people could get paid to post until I noticed other posters bashing the forums "paid trolls". I even asked a few times how a person could get that job. Got no answers. 

I thought they must be joking... like, get paid for posting comments, really??? Ever since then, I've sometimes noticed comments that seem a little too... oh I dunno, either a little too polished or too enthusiastic or too something... 

So I became more convinced that there really was some paid commenting going on out there in cyberland. But when I searched for how-to, all I found at the time was things like "oh, sponsors will notice you in the forums and they'll contact you" type of advice. 

Then lo and behold, I recently came across a blog post about that very thing. Sure enough, there's places to go that will hire you to post comments in forums and wherever commenting goes I suppose.

Doesn't seem like they pay a whole lot, but it's something that seems easy enough to do for quick and easy extra cash. 

I haven't tried it yet, mainly because I'm focusing on articles and blogging for now. But I'll do a few paid surveys when I need a break now and then. I tend to get tired of surveys after awhile, so I might signup for the paid posting thing next time.  

Anna of the RealWaystoEarnMoneyOnline blog recently posted about her own experience with Postloop and has a list of Paid Forum Posting sites in her directory too. 

Have you ever tried commenting for cash, a.k.a. paid posting in forums? If so, any tips are most welcome! 

Ok, so YAY, I've got A B C down on the alphabet post trail, next up -- D is for... maybe Dollars or Doubts or...

Be a Better Blogger to make more Bucks

Along with my article writing successes mentioned in the previous post, had some fails too that included:

Blogging, or lack thereof 
and since I've seen so many April A-Z Blogging Challenge posts (that I didn't signup for because I just wasn't ready to pressure myself that much just yet), I'm going with the Alphabet Soup style for an unofficial blogging topic/prompt for this month. We'll see if I can stick with it. 

I'd signed up last month with a "paid to blog" site called Social Spark. I'd received an invite from another Yahoo! Contributor, so what the heck. I'm not exactly a proficient blogger just yet, but thought I'd have a looksee. Turns out ya have to have a minimum of 20 blog posts within a 3-month period to be eligible.

So time for me to get busy with the blogging. I've just got to get a routine, or semi-flexible schedule going between blogging and article writing.  

Paid Tweets
I got one whole offer in April from Sponsored Tweets, but it was declined as "not needed". Bummer!! 

Sponsored Tweets is free to register, but also has a monthly pay for self-promo subscription thing that I'm certainly not going to sign up for. But, just this week I got approved for another offer that should be tweeting June 8th at 10:00 AMish. 

It's apparently for just one tweet on that day, but there was a note that it could be up to 3 tweets. Not sure how the auto-tweet an ad thing'll work - so it'll be interesting to see what happens.

So, I'm off to improve my blogging post frequency, get more sponsored tweets, and improve the article writing during May. Ok, so C is for...

A is for April Article Successes - IWSG

So, I'm a day late and a dollar short with my Insecure Writers Support Group (IWSG) blog post that's a 1st Wednesday of the month thing. Blog posts took a back seat last month while I cranked up my Yahoo! Contributor article submissions. Have had a few unexpected successes, so I feel much better now!

Not that I've mastered article writing yet or anything, but I think I'm starting to get the hang of it. There's several things that I struggle with when writing articles:

• I'm a slow writer: 2 - 4 hours to complete an article, sometimes longer
• Boring Beat Topic: for Yahoo! Finance beat, upfront pay is better, but not fun to write  
• AP vs. Chicago Manual style: Switching between article types, News vs. Voices vs. Finance gets confusing

Article Page View Successes:

• A First: political news commentary received 6.5K page views in 24 hrs. YAY! (7.7K total)
• 2nd Place: An older article from March received almost 1K page views in April (2.3K total)
• 3rd Place: Another older article from March got 340 page views (4.4K total)

Accomplishments:

• Earned the Top 500 badge (again) for April
• Got  my Pinterest page going

So April was a pretty great month! There were some fails too, I'll blog about those tomorrow...

1st Wednesday: Insecure Writers Support Group Monthly Blog Hop

Oh my gosh, insecure writer are me! Last week I participated in my 1st organized Blogger Comment Club. There were soooooo many snazzy blogs to comment on, this newbie was humbled...

Yet, along that blogger commenter hop way, I stumbled upon this Insecure Writers Support Group Blog Hop, perfect timing! With limited spare time, the monthly frequency works great. I'm #276 on the list.

Then, just today I get this Congratulations! email from my one and only current publisher, the Yahoo! Contributor Network (YCN) that I've been awarded a Top500 contributor badge for top 500 page views in March. YAY - me, my spirits picked up a whole lot with that (especially since I've had three rejected articles recently)!

Excited, I went to look at my shiny, new Top500 badge on my YCN profile, but... no badge. So I went to the forum to see if any glitches or something had been noted. One person commented about receiving their Top500 badge too, but noted that it'll have to be recalculated after some non-counted page view glitches are corrected next week. That means I could be recalculated out of the Top 500, since the non-counted page views are from a big page view getter - Yahoo! News. Spirits sunk again!

So I don't have much advice for any other Insecure Writers out there, at least not until I'm better at article writing and blogging. I will say that my goal for this month is to read up and study the SEO section of the Yahoo! Style Guide (amazon link it to is floating around somewhere on here) to get my page views up via search engine results.

One thing I noticed from this blog's Google Analytics, the only post that's gotten traffic from search engines is the one very brief post below about Pantyhose - LoL! Like, there's a 100+ page views from "pantyhose runs" "Madonna sheer tights" "Beyonce leggy" searches - just seems totally bizarre!

Photo credit: sxc.hu/cornetta

Facebook Popularity: Narcissism or Proactive Self Marketing??

sxc.hu/raichinger

Popular on Facebook? You’re so Vain According to New Study
A new study connects Facebook activity with narcissism. While some may think "doh" or "that’s news?" -- others counter that egotism on social networking sites is just self-promotion for a reasonable purpose. So what's the diff?

COMMENTARY | ABC News reported a new study... Is being popular and active on Facebook really anti-social, egotism too? Maybe, maybe not… Read More  

Backstory
This was a Wild Card News Topic assignment from the Yahoo! Contributor assignment desk with a small upfront payment and is page view performance bonused. Mark Zuckerberg... not a favorite of mine... but popular search topic... Facebook IPO in a month or two or so... Yahoo! suing Facebook... there's just gotta be some page view magic for this article -- right? 

Well, not yet. One of the things I'm learning is that popular topics also have a lot of search results for my lil ol' article to compete with. The experienced writers say that photos matter -- having a great pic in the article that appears in search results will generate significantly more page views. 

But, a free and allowable pic for this article has been elusive so far. We're only allowed to use free photos from stock.xchange and wikimedia commons and any free-for-public-use online media kits. Even then, we can only use those with standard restrictions. 

If there's any extra special restrictions -- we can't use them. A "photographer must be notified" restriction is ok, the problem is with a bunch-o'-extra restrictions like "share alike" and stuff like that - most often found on the wikimedia site. 

Then there's the Facebook-icons-are-trademarked thing, so can't use those either for the article. We can use only one paid photo site, istockphoto.com, but I'm not going there just yet.

So, I'm trying again to find a free & allowable pic that might fit the article. I'll post each pic here as I find them - first up is the I heart myself button above. 

Let me know what ya think!  
  

Why Obamacare (aka Romneycare) Matters to Me and Should to You

Republicans: Does the Right to Life Include Right to Health Care?
 The Supreme Court needs to be the adult in this Left Wing vs. Right Wing health care reform feud. In a twisted paradox, it's a Right to Choose Healthcare righties vs. the Right to Choose Life lefties political showdown.

COMMENTARY | According to the Associated Press, the fate of the Affordable Health Care Act rests with the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court. The old health care system was not working because of denial of coverage to those with pre-existing... Read More

Backstory
This blog post is an experiment in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) magic. Hey, why not try to get some page view magic from a hot topic for next three days since Obamacare is in the Supreme Court today and for the next two days? 

The article was written for a Wild Card News Topic assignment picked up from the Yahoo! Voices Assignment Desk. I chose to write about Obamacare health care because of the AP article that was published when the Supreme Court case was two weeks ahead, thinkin' it'd be relevant for a few weeks. It did include an upfront payment ($5)  - YAY - and gets page view bonused at  $1.xx per 1K views.   

Even better, it was selected as an Editor's Pick Feature, meaning that it's prominently displayed on the Yahoo! Voices News front page - YAY - again! It started on the day of publication as the largest feature on the top left of the page. It migrated after a day or so to the top right spot, then down to the "More Picks" list. As of this moment, it's 5th down on the list. 

The Featured status is soooooo very helpful with racking up page views. I'm not yet in the six-digits page views like many of the News and Political Featured Contributors are -- more like low four-figures per featured article. This article is almost at 3K page views as of now. I'm hoping the Supreme Court case this week will pick up the pace from searches and such. 

One bummer though: I've had three similar Wild Card News Topic assignments be picked up and published in the regular Yahoo! News also. That's usually generates some great numbers too. But this article didn't go there, (no idea why not), but the Voices Feature selection got about as many page views as the others that did go there. So it worked out, I 'spose...

This past Saturday, I stumbled into Twitter and noticed one of the top trending hashtags was #ILikeObamacare. So I jumped on that trend and had a great time tweeting this article and retweeting all of the other pro-Obamacare tweets that I agreed with. I noticed that anti-Obamacare folks got into the tweetup as well. Those folks really like to post comments and such in articles too - so we'll see how this blog post goes. Hey, feel free to rant or rave in comments - just no personal attacks or irrelevant spam & stuff...

Have a Fear of Public Speaking or Stage Fright?

I Conquered Stage Fright and Fear of Public Speaking in a Most Unusual Way...Art Class
Getting beyond extreme shyness to become a (reluctant) art class model was the best personal and professional growth development thing I've ever done, albeit inadvertently. My stage fright transformed into a calm and comfortable me on stage ever since. 

Great stage presence -- or not, can make or break a promising career. In business careers, making a speech at the office requires overcoming the notorious fear of public speaking. In performaning arts careers, well...ya gotta perform. Conquering my performance paralysis and extreme shyness on stage was no easy feat... until the most unusual day when I went to an art class... Read More

Backstory

Ok, so yeah -- this was an extreme way to confront that "they're all staring at me" freeze-up thing! 

I was a figure drawing model for the local Art League for about a year. The models were rotated weekly, so my turn in the limelight was once every four or five weeks, usually... 

But one time I did have a three-weeks-in-a-row run when they decided to switch to painting instead of drawing. That was tougher because I had to hold the exact same pose during each of the 20 minute sessions for the entire hour and a half workshop. 

The paintings were displayed at several art shows. I was afraid to go to them for a looksee at the final final finished paintings at the art shows, because I thought somebody might recognize me! Like my back, butt, and boobs would be recognizable in a clothed crowd on the streets at an art show!

So the experience most definitely resulted in no more paralyzing "they're all staring at me" freeze and panic during the first moment up front and center. 

And in case you were wondering, nope -- I did not turn into an extroverted exhibitionist. No graduation to topless beaches or nudist camps, then or now!