Mid-month review (MAY)

The month of May is intended to push the limits of what a PR2 blog can earn in a month.
I am active with four schemes:

• Payperpost
• Creamaid
• Blogsvertise
• Bloggerwave

I have had no 'offers' from Blogsvertise for quite a few weeks, and even then the last offer I completed for them took a month to get approved. Despite plenty of emails reassuring me that there are a lot of new offers coming and the service is improving, my experience is that this source of income has all but dried up. To be fair, they operate a 'grab bag' service where you can try posting for jobs that have not been taken up by other bloggers, unfortunately the opportunity that was offered to me under the 'grab bag' scheme was one I had completed already....

Payperpost has offered the largest amount of posts recently, although the rewards are generally low because this blog does not qualify for the higher earning opportunuties. My experience with Payperpost up to now has been good. Posts take around 5 days to get approved and earnings should arrive in my paypal account 30 days later.

I have recently been introduced to Bloggerwave which appears to model itself closely on payperpost (the login page apart from colours and logo is VERY similar). Currently there are three opportunities available and I have posted for all three, acceptance was prompt ie. within 48 hours, and again payment should be 30 days later. I will report on whether new opportunities become available when I do a summary at the end of this month.

Creamaid works differently to the other services and the more I use it, the more I like it. I have reported before that getting emails and getting in early on opportunities is key and this continues to be true. I have recently completed another $10 opportunity and got in early enough to get referrals again. Having said that, earnings continue to vary from $1 to $10, so you need to pick and choose if you want the higher earnings. There is no negative consequences of not participating in a post, so being picky won't affect the opportunities available to you.

With my strategy of posting every day, I have managed to 'earn' around $70 in half a month, my target is $100 for the month, but there is a limited amount of opportunities available to me, so I will be forced either to do the lower-priced jobs or find another fresh source of opportunities. One draw-back is that the same opp's often appear on different schemes and you can't post the same thing twice, however you can turn this to your advantage as sometimes they pay more through one scheme that they do through another so shop around...

Blogsvertise - investigation

One scheme I have been able to make use of is Blogsvertise. Like Creamaid, they have offered opportunities to younger than 90-day-old blogs, but the number of opportunities seems limited. No doubt if this blog had been older or other criteria had been met, more opportunities would have been forthcoming. I completed a couple of assignments and cash was allocated to me and then paid out a month later. However, the last post that I completed is still awaiting acceptance after three weeks…. The post has not been rejected, yet it remains in limbo and unpaid as yet.
I have received newsletters from Blogsvertise about lots of new opportunities and better payments, but so far I have received no new opportunities whilst this last entry remains ‘unapproved’.
My overall impression of Blogsvertise is that it pays moderately (better than Creamaid if we ignore the unproven Creamaid referral fee scheme), and that the system is easy to use. Unlike Creamaid, but like most of the rest of these schemes, you login to your account with a password and see if there are ‘offers’ waiting for you. You have a few days to accept or reject the offer (if you should feel that you can’t do the task for some reason). Once the task is complete, you submit the URL of your post and wait for your entry to be approved – normally this is done within a day or so…
As far as rewards go, you can see the earnings in my monthly earnings review – March is here… April will be done soon.
To be specific, the Creamaid posts pay one, two or maybe three dollars in the main with varying amounts for referrals. There are exceptions, but this has been my experience so far – you will have to follow future posts to find out if the referrals amount to anything at all, but I have not noticed a huge amount of posts being submitted AFTER mine, so I can have very few if any referrals at all. I learned later that you can have offers emailed to you. To get in right at the beginning of a big campaign would be the best way to get referrals, and the best way to discover new campaigns is to get email notification.
I will have more to say about Creamaid in the fullness of time.

Blogsvertise pay from around four to six dollars in the main, again better rewards have been mentioned, but in my experience, the offers I have received have been in the four to six dollar region.

March 2007 earnings

Well, here it is then, the truth about paid to blog...

My first report has included income from MyLot, this took a long time to accrue, and is NOT a recommended way to make decent amounts of money... I managed to get three jobs from Blogsvertise , but no new jobs for a while now... and one job from Creamaid - I completed two jobs for them, but the latest one has not been accepted as yet - after I had done all the hard work, I think the job got over-subscribed and they may not have needed my offering - this is the down-side of Creamaid... the upside is that they pay more or less instantly, hence I have been able to cash out US$2.00..... All the rest of the payments should get processed on the dates above, so next months 'cashed out' should look a bit healthier. I have some more schemes to check out and am working my way up to the magic 90 days which is a requirement for a couple of different paid to blog opportunities to kick in.

I will keep a running total and post a link to it on the blog for future reference, and I plan to diligently report every month so that visitors can get an idea of earnings. I really hope to make some progress on the earnings front over the next couple of months.

I kicked off Adsense as the adverts it was showing were irrelevent to my site and went with bidvertsiser instead - big news here is that they will pay out at $10 rather than $100, so there is just a chance that I might earn something - I reinstated Adsense as a link bar at the top of the page, but it remains to be seen whether this is a viable way of advertising. I did earn a little from adsense before I removed the 'skyscraper advert', presumably on the odd ocassions when the adverts matched the content...

Blogsvertise - paid to blog

At last! Accepted by a paid-to-blog programme and first one posted… I saw that a fellow-blogger had posted about ‘blogsvertise’. I visited their website at:
http://www.blogsvertise.com and can state that everything was very simple. I registered and submitted my site for assessment. I had a confirmation email, then visited the site a few days later and logged in to discover that my blog was acceptable – first hurdle then. I was not sure what should happen next and thought maybe I would receive instructions vie email. I had no subsequent emails, so I logged back into the site out of curiosity and clicked here and there until I discovered that there was an ‘offer’ sitting there to blog about an insurance company – second hurdle cleared. I submitted about 180 words including three URL links in three paragraphs (see below). I then went to my blogsvertise account and accepted the offer, submitting my blog to see whether my post would be acceptable. I checked back a couple of hours later to see that the ‘offer’ had gone, and when I chose ‘offers accepted ‘ from a menu, the insurance offer popped up, thus showing my post had been successful and I was up and running with my first $5 in the kitty – third hurdle cleared...
I have to say the entire process was very easy once I could see how my account page on the blogsvertise website worked. I haven’t worked out how or when payment will actually take place or how long it will be before I get another ‘offer’, but watch this space….