Yeah, I know I am two days late with this post but I have been lazy to blog! I was preoccupied with categorising my posts, installing plug-ins and changing the templates of three of my Word Press blogs! Yes, that was that I was “busy” with over the long weekend haha!

Did you know that 15th October, 2007 was Blog Action Day? This was supposed to be a day where bloggers from around the world publish a post on the environment. Did you do it? Sad to say, I only found out on 16th October, Malaysian time. I don’t even remember how I got to know of it but I am a chronic random link clicker! Ah… I think it was through Blogger.com!

Every time we talk about the environment, I will think of my friend who was an advocate of the three Rs: Recycle – Reduce – Reuse. He is not with us anymore but I am very sure that if he is still with us, he would have participated actively in something like Blog Action Day.

I purposely made this post hoping that I would remember about this and participate next year.

My friend told me that I am charging too low for my Directs. At $15 per post, I think I am being reasonable. On the other hand, my friend has a Page Rank of 4 and worse Alexa Ranking than me, and yet she told me that she regularly gets offer for $60 per post even on Blogspot blogs.

According to this friend, I am showing advertisers that I am being desperate. In her case, she bids up to $100. She said, if the advertiser wants it, then accept her bid, or counter bid. If not, it is no big loss to her, since she started the day WITHOUT the job, you know what I mean?

Also, she told me that I myself must not show discrepancy between a free hosted blog and a paid domain blog. If I do, so will advertisers. She told me that she bids the same price for all the blogs, free or paid. I think this is a good point to note.

Well, do you think I should up my price?

A few days ago, I change the layout if one of my themes and to make sure that all most posts are in order especially the images are in place, I flipped though all the pages of my blog from the beginning until the most recent post. There are more than seven hundred posts in the blog that is not even nine months old yet but I was surprised that I wrote so many posts in a niche theme.

Frankly, if I were not writing all those sponsored posts, I would not have come up with so many topics to write on. The most I would publish per day would only be two at the maximum unlike right now where I would publish anything from three to ten on a bumper day.

In a way, I am glad that I am pushed this way or I would have let my blog be a post a day kind of blog. Pretty boring, unlike now where I do a lot of research for niche blogging and look at things from a different perspective and come up with interesting posts to blog about.

This week, I have upgraded my WordPress to version 2.3 and I also added a new plug-in. It is called Comment Email Responder. What it does is that when you leave me a comment on my blog and when I reply to your comment, you will automatically receive an email notice from me with my reply.

This is a great feature that I have wanted to install for a long time but I had an error and did not have the time to backtrack to see what was wrong. I finally found it and now it works like a charm.

I know that procrastination is my weakness and there are things that I do at once and there are things that I try to put off a long as possible. Anything that has to do with WordPress falls into the second group of tasks!

Personally, as a blog reader, I would love to be informed when the blog author has replied to my comment. I do not have the time to check and recheck to see if my comment has been replied to so a notice like this is perfect. Let’s see if you like it!

I am sure you know that last weekend, a lot of blogs lost their Google Page Rank. Well, mine did too. So two days ago, I wrote in to one of the marketplaces to let them know that I lost my ranking and to adjust the internal rankings of my blogs. Moreover, my Technorati ranking in their system is also wrong. If you have been reading my blog a few months ago, you will know that I had some issues over there that caused my authority not updated for ages.

I was expecting my internal ranking to fall for one of my blogs but I still have to get it adjusted, shabby as it is, because I did not want to unwittingly give a wrong impression to advertisers.

Surprisingly, I received a reply that all my rankings IMPROVED because Google Page Rank does not play a major role in their internal ranking!

I hope that NOW, more advertisers will accept my bid! It has been 1.5 months of dry spell!

You may notice that I have shifted the balance of my blog. Last month, I was being a law abiding good girl and kept at 50:50 across my blogs, and I mean ALL of them. Guess what? At the end of the month, I realise that I have missed all the opportunities from one particular marketplace which I was having a good month the previous month.

And so, I decided that to hell with following my self-imposed rule so strictly. I will once again blog as and when I want to be they sponsored or not. I will publish them as and when I like. I would still be keeping drafts on my blog for emergencies but I will no longer keep count on the number of drafts sitting pretty in my draft folder.

And what do you know? My bid was once again accepted. I was so happy 😀 Didn’t I say that it takes a little to make me happy? Yes, I am convinced that most sponsors for not mind or do not care if our blogs are full of outgoing links as long as each post is well thought out and well composed and the blog is relevant to their own website.

Once again, I am hoping to get more opportunities from this marketplace, because, really, in this business, you can’t survive on one marketplace alone unless you are a Page Rank 6 but then I don’t see why you should monetize your blog this way if you have a Page Rank 6!

A thought came to me with all the spam comments I am getting. I usually clear my spam folder a few times a day, in fact, each time I log into my Admin panel. I know some people could not care less about checking their spam folder but I do it because I know some legitimate comments are mistakenly considered as spam by Akismet, especially comments by bloggers who network actively.

And so I check it in case there are legitimate comments there and to avoid misunderstanding.

So now my experiment is to see how many spam comments this blog receives within twenty four hours. I know it will be a few hundred but am not sure if it will go up till a thousand within a day. When I deactivated Akismet to upgrade my WordPress database the other day, five spam comments came through just for that period of time that did not even last five minutes. Hah… is that a record or something?

I still do not get how spammers work but the joke about all this is that there are such spam comments that said that if we would like our URL removed from the spam database, to email that spammer. Hah… I can only imagine that should we do that, we would be spammed a million times more. What do you think?