Is there anyone who is still not a member of Smorty yet? If you have yet to sign up, what are you waiting for? Smorty is a marketplace that matches advertisers with bloggers and bloggers get paid to blog about the campaigns created by advertisers.

Blog advertising is a new way to advertise blogs on the internet and more and more companies are jumping on the bandwagon. It is exciting times for bloggers who are now able to blog for money, thanks to companies like Smorty.

Smorty is a very fun company that does not have ultra strict rules to follow. Once our blog is accepted and approved, we are able to accept a campaign, write up a post within 72 hours, submit it for review and then wait for payment!

Payment is made via PayPal within seven days upon approval of our post. Did you know that blogging for money can be very addictive? There’s no denying that it’s fun to blog for money!

Actually, I came to know of this review contest ages ago. Bloggers are supposed to review The Thinking Blog and then submit the post to the contest and the best reviews will receive uniquely designed blog templates for free. All who have participated will also get a free favitar.

However, at the time of writing, the owner, Ilker Yoldas, has gone on vacation so I am not sure if this review contest is still on-going.

Well, I am not going to review The Thinking Blog because I am not that good anyway. I just like to read this blog which looks like a newspaper. And I love the designs that are created, especially when comparing both Before and After designs so that we can see the vast improvement.

While I too would love a new template, I seriously do not have time to change my template. WordPress templates are so leceh, unlike Blogger where the HTML codes are all in one page. Being such a noob, I could easily miss out some important code and then mess up my template. Well, I can’t afford to do that!

Even doing this up, I had to practically BEG people to help me. I really loathe to do that and will avoid doing that a second time.

However, if you are thinking of getting a fresh, one of a kind layout for your blog, hop over to the The Thinking Blog’s Contest Page and see if you can come up with something that could win you a free blog template!

I just returned from reading Candid Quips, a blog by fellow Postie. I love to read Postie blogs because I feel a connection with them. Anyway, of the times that I have visited this blog, I don’t even know the author’s name. He’s “admin”

One thing though, the way he bashed Britney Spears in a few posts make interesting read. But I do pity the lady, you know? She seems to have everything anyone could ask for but she’s not happy so, I don’t know what’s wrong with the world.

If you want to read blogs, do check out Candid Quips. Bookmark it, subscribe to his feed, you know the works! You will be entertained!

Some months back, I was pondering if I should turn my comments off. I read that it’s not a good sight to have ZERO comment on every blog post which is expected for a new blog. Heck even old blogs are like that too, you know?

But then I thought I would rather not since some people may want to contact me and since the day I started posting on this blog until today, I have not implemented the Contact Me form. Another thing which I want to implement is the email alert for commenters but it has been half a year already and I still have not gotten down to it. This is beyond procrastination already. I am aghast at myself!

But recently, spam comments have been getting out of hand. I know, I know, there are anti-spam plug-in and stuff but if I could delay this long for the above two tasks, I could also be dragging implementing anti-spam. I read that we could get the free key to Akismet by registering for a free wordpress.com blog but I would hate to do that for every blog that I am hosting. That would be so selfish. I hope there is a better, free way. There has got to be!

One of the tricks I read is that we could go back and turn of the comment for those particularly notorious posts. Yes, I do notice a handful of them are attracting spam comments like crazy. I wonder why!

After turning off comment for those posts, spam has stopped coming for those posts. Let’s see how this goes. Don’t worry though! These are all old posts which are already archived. You can still comment on new posts, if you want. I won’t bite!

While blog hopping just now, I came across this blog MBHoy.com with the unique tagline “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”. I don’t know what it means but it sure will stick in my mind for a long time to come. Anyway, the blogosphere isn’t that big. I think it was just last week that I came across a blog reviewing MBHoy.com.

Well, in one post, the author, Matt, tells of his experience on how he won a new iPod in a Coca-Cola SMS contest. WON A NEW IPOD!!!! And then he said that he sold it for £215/$430. Can you believe it?? I never sell anything that I have won before because they have sentimental value.

But Matt thinks otherwise. Too bad

Something came up recently that caused me to be so busy I had to stop my networking and blog hopping activities for the time being. I was making good progress going down the Do Follow blogroll but now that my blog hopping exercise has been halted for almost three weeks now, I may have to start from the top once again *sigh*

I wonder if I could finish backlinking from them all before the upcoming Google Page Rank update. Don’t forget, I still have to give some time for Google to spider all the new links.

Oh my God, there are so many things to do and so little time. I told a friend that I only sleep a total of four hours every night and he went like, “WTF?” Last year, I was surviving on 5.5 hours a night. What about next year?

I am always chasing time and trying to pack in as many tasks into a day as possible and building my blogs trying to gain that one or two more Page Rank points that seems so easy for some people to achieve but so difficult for me. Blogging is so much more than writing quality posts

Currently, no matter how busy I am, I just have to MAKE time to do a little more networking. I hope that the Google Page Rank freaking come already and get me out of the suspense!

I have quite a few blogging buddies with Google Page rank of four and above for their blogs while I only have three. Well I started blogging quite late so I need a little more time to build my readership and popularity.

Anyway, these people told me that they will not write any ol’ sponsored post for less than $7 because they think their blogs are too good and anything less than $7 is too cheap a rate.

And then they come and complain that they haven’t written as many sponsored posts as they prefer. I don’t know, if you want to be choosy, then don’t complain because you have to choice to take up the low paying ones.

As for me, I am glad to write any posts at all and HAVE written posts lower than $3 and some times even free. But I should be happy that bloggers with high ranked blogs do not look at the low paying opps. That gives us a chance to earn a decent amount of money.