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?

Surprisingly, for a low traffic, new blog like this, I receive quite a number of spam comments regularly. Sometimes it’s great to read these comments even though they are spam, just like reading spam email may even be better than surfing a joke site.

A couple of days ago, I received a really funny spam that was left on my post: You Can’t Teach An Old Dog New Tricks

Good day!

Why do dogs eat their poop?
One reason dogs eat their poop is because it just plain taste good.

Another reason is it could be a vitamin deficiency.

One other reason for the poop eating is that it is an instinctual behavior in the wild to eat the poop to keep other predators from tracking their movements.

Some solutions for stopping poop eating are: You can put meat tenderizer on it.

What do you think? Wow, I’ve found the same to be true too! How did you find that?

See you soon!

You see, my post had the word DOG on the title and this spam was also on dogs. However, this spammer was not recorded on my stats tracker. Does it mean that to leave spam comments, a spammer does not even have to access or log in to my blog?

I guess this is the real segmentation rollout on PPP. It happened once before a month ago, but there was a technical error that caused things to go haywire and they rolled back. Is this the real thing?

What lies ahead of us, I do not know. Will it cancel out the small bloggers like me? I hope not. I may be small now, but that does not mean that I will continue to be small next month or next year.

Big or small, we do have value as well. Each company grows with the small guys, and these small guys must not be left out when the company grows. I hope that this will not happen with PPP.

Apart from blog popularity and traffic, bloggers may be disadvantaged for the following too:

1. Geographical location
2. Marital status and with/without children
3. Education level
4. Free/Paid blog host
5. etc

So I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how this segmentation will affect our earnings. Only time will tell.

Related post:
It’s Getting Cold Out There

Years ago, I tuned in to a radio program hosted by Chan Fong on 98.8fm

Chan Fong said that no matter what we do, we need to set goals for ourselves, give a time frame for ourselves to achieve something.

My friend Paul also told me to set goals for myself and work towards them, step by step, one day at a time.

For this blog, I am aiming for a Page Rank 3 in the upcoming Google Page Rank update. ** An Anonymous Journal ** rose to a 3 in a couple of months upon inception but back then, I published one post every day. For this blog, because I am already writing so much, I am trying my best to post on alternate days.

Back then, I did not even know of Page Ranks and stuff so it was a pleasant surprise. This time, I will just post normally and hope that the PR3 will happen naturally without me having to be a cyber 8por, which I am incapable of, anyway!

Oh my goodness. Yesterday, Blogitive announced that one of their bloggers earned $15,000 in 2006. Can you believe it? At the average Blogitive payout of $5 per offer, that converts to a total of 3,000 offers!

Those of us who write for Blogitive know that there aren’t that many advertisers so I can’t really imagine how this blogger can write about the same company, service or website over and over again in different variations.

I am already at a loss for words when I have to write two copies. Of course, I can always reject, but it’s money, baby! I haven’t even written 300 posts in total since I started writing paid posts and I am already feeling like I HAVE NO LIFE. This blogger MUST be a major no lifer.

In all honesty, I cannot believe that it is a one-person work, to write 3,000 offers of at least a hundred words per offer and not forgetting two minimum 50-word interim original posts.

I think that this is the work of a team of people, maybe a family or a group of friends. I may be wrong, though.