Last week, PayPerPost announced even more segmentation features. This new roll out will allow advertisers to segment posties according to geographical location and personal characteristics like age, marital status and education level, among others.

I, along with other posties, of course do not see the logic of this new segmentation features. For one, the internet is borderless and just because we are of a certain age or age group does not mean that our readers are too. Just because we are from a certain city does not mean that our readers cannot be from another country.

In fact, most of my blog readers are from the United States and Australia but just because I am in Malaysia, I can already feel that I will be excluded from taking opps that are targeted at Americans.

With already many of the opps off limits to me due to my blog host, we’ll just have to see how many opps there are left for me to take. No doubt, we now are allowed a quota of three opps per blog per day but given the new segmentation features, we will all be hard pressed to max out our quota.

I do indeed feel that it’s getting cold (and colder by the minute) out there.

If you know me or have followed my blogs, you would know that I am so tired from work and life, from taking care of two sick monkeys, that every day just rolls into one that I get lost in the whirlpool.

The other day, I was so blur, I forgot the URL of this blog. Instead of JOURNAL, I somehow typed in JOURNEY and that is even when I have auto complete in the address bar!

You say I blur or not?

And when I could not access my blog on IE, I COPIED & PASTED the URL to FireFox, and of course FireFox could not open the site.

I went to other blogs that are hosted by the same company as mine and they were all working fine. I panicked and thought that someone hacked my blog.

See what a fright I gave myself! Finally I realised the error and with the correct address, managed to access my blog.

*Smacks myself*

Yesterday, I received a total of 38 emails from PayPerPost with the subject: Your Post Has Been Auto Approved. w00t!

Hello,

Congratulations!! Your PayPerPost post, xxxxx, has been automatically approved based on your high quality performance as a PPP Postie!

Please note: We will still do a manual check of posts against the opportunity and PPP criteria as a verification of this approval. Should your post not meet requirements, you may get a rejection notice at a later date.

Final payment is dependent upon your post meeting all criteria set both in the advertiser’s opportunity, and in the PPP ToS. If your post is rejected during manual review, and you are not able to update and resubmit, payment will not be made on this post.

Congrats again on being an outstanding PPP Postie!! And watch for more auto approvals!!

Thank you,

The PayPerPost Team

Wow, since when did I become an outstanding Postie? What did I do to qualify as an “outstaning Postie”? I have no idea. Is it the number of posts that I have chalked up? Is the based on number of rejections over number of approvals?

I have TEN bans, you know? Despite lowering the demerit point from a 5 to a 0.5, it still irks me not knowing who banned me and for what.

Wouldn’t it be fantastic if those 38 emails were payment notices? Hah! I must be dreaming.

I read that every blog needs to be a niche blog before it could be accepted into the PayPerPost system. This is due to the new segmentation roll out where each blog can only select up to five categories. The weird thing is that blogs can only have two categories to be accepted into the system. Uh-uh, somebody failed Math?

Say goodbye to personal blogs. It’s time to select a topic for my blog. Which direction shall I choose?
Available Categories:

* Architecture
    * Autos
    * Business
    * Charity
    * Cooking
    * Design
    * Education
    * Entrepreneurism
    * Finance
    * Games
    * Gossip
    * Health & Fitness
    * Home Improvement
    * Jobs
    * Movies
    * Music
    * Nightlife
    * Parenting
    * Photos
    * Politics
    * Real Estate
    * Recreation
    * Religion
    * Sales & Marketing
    * Science
    * Shopping
    * Sports
    * Technology
    * Television
    * Travel
So many choices, can only select five. Headache.

Well, if you have followed my blog posts closely, you’d know why I am asking this. Many times I come across people who paid a sum of money and expect the world. Yes, money is big, but do you know what you have paid for? Did you read carefully? If you did not, then it is your own fault and nobody else’s.

If you have paid for an apple then an apple you will get, and if I give you an apple AND an orange, then it is a bonus.

But if I only gave you an apple, do you have the right to demand for an orange as well?

Haha hell yeah, what a nerve, I’m still so pissed! GGGrrrr

Blogitive published a blog post two days ago about launching a new way to make more money soon but they require bloggers to have their own domain hosted blogs powered by WordPress. HHmm I wonder what THAT is? Curiosity is killing the cat, man!

I am glad that I opted for WordPress despite its initial unfriendliness. At first, I thought I’d go with Blogger but then my host told me that I can’t publish my blog here as well as in my current Blogger blog. So to keep both blogs live and alive, I had no choice but to go the WordPress way, as you can see.

Thank God for small mercies. Who would want to miss out on a chance like this new Blogitve opportunity?

Now, the question is, does my blog qualify yet or do I have to wait a little longer? Arghh wish I had the time to set this up earlier!

Last week, PayPerPost rolled out a long list of new features to launch the long threatened promised segmentation. One feature was “Posties Rating” which is an average score given by advertisers.

When it was first revealed, I had a total of nine bans. I subsequently received a tenth ban and I actually do know which advertiser banned me. Well, I think I know. Maybe I’ll just remove his post after payment is received? 😀

I do not have issues with the segmentation, since it has been in placed a long time, just that now they are computerizing it and reducing the work load of human reviewers.

However, I do have issues with the ban, since an advertiser can ban us for any reason at all and each ban carries a demerit of five points which will pretty quickly write off our merits.

By placing demerits (5!!) to a ban, it’s like saying, “Hey, I don’t want you to ever write for me again and you can’t write for others as well.”

After chalking up posts for more than three hundred (this is just a wild guess) advertisers, I can live with the ten bans, and this number can only increase.

The point is, posties will never be told what we did to deserve a ban. Do you think this is fair? It is akin to locking someone up in jail without letting him know what crime he committed.

I have read a lot of posts written by fellow posties and I do not feel that I wrote any worse than them. I am not claiming I wrote excellently. With only thirty minutes to research the advertiser’s website and then churn out an average of 200 words, how perfect can a post be?

I have followed all the rules as stipulated in the opportunity description, otherwise the reviewer would not approve them, right?

As I received that many bans, here are my guesses on why I was banned.

1. Advertisers hate my blog title, ** An Anonymous Crap Sheet ** and after changing my blog title in December, 2006, they still could see mycrapsheet in the URL.

There is nothing I can do to about this, so I can expect more bans due to this unless the advertiser has a sense of humour.

I hope that PayPerPost has the option for me to change my blog name in their system.

2. Advertisers hate the layout and colour of my blog, especially the HEART at the header. HHmm they think that a fun theme cannot write about serious matters.

I love my theme and spent two days working on customizing it, so no way am I going to change it. Not in the near future anyway, since I am still not bored with it yet.

3. Advertisers think that I have already written two times for them and want to stop me from writing a third opportunity, so a ban is in order.

But I have never written for the same advertiser within a 30-day period.

4. Advertisers hate free blog hosts, but it’s their own fault for not stipulating which hosts they want excluded from accepting their opportunity. This definitely does not warrant a ban.

5. Advertisers banned me because I have removed their sponsored posts.

Hey, do they even know that they are paying for only 30 days for their posts to go live? Anything longer is a bonus.

Posties are not obligated to keep the sponsored posts longer than 30-days after payment is received.

If they are ignorant about this, then they have only themselves to blame. Why should we be banned?

They can petition to PayPerPost to have the 30-day period extended to a year if they want and not penalize a postie for playing by the rules.

Banning in itself is not bad, but the bad thing is that each ban carries five demerit points and I have been told that there is no cutoff time for an advertiser to rate posties, as long as the postie is still unrated and in the advertiser’s system.

How shady can that be? eBay has a cutoff time of 90 days, which is long enough for a Buyer/Seller to decide if the deal is good or bad. PayPerPost must impose a time frame too.

I have been told that when a postie has received X number of bans, he/she will be booted out from PayPerPost. I don’t know how true this is or do I know what is the value of X. I desperately need PPP staff to verify this claim but no one has come forward till now.

Going by this logic, though, it means that the longer one stays and posts for PayPerPost, the more bans this postie is bound to receive. Does it mean that soon, all the veteran posties will be forced to “retire” from PayPerPost, taking along their high Page Ranked blogs and leaving PayPerPost to only new posties?