Become a Rated Freelancer at PeoplePerHour
I received an email introducing a freelancing marketplace call PeoplePerHour.com. As this blog is always in search of money making opportunities for freelancers around the world, I suppose an introduction review of PeoplePerHour.com might be good. My first impression for this freelancing market place is that it’s British base. The money deal is in £ pound sterling and there is a video clip that featured PeoplePerHour on BBC News. That’s fine with me as long as freelancers able to get some projects and earn money with it. There are about 27579 freelancers, 5911 employers and 8984 projects posted. There are also some press news about PeoplePerHour on TechCrunch, The Sunday Time, FT Financial Times and other sites. This much of information really encourage freelancers to sign up and shows their skills. One thing I like about the site is that they have a top rated freelancer page that shows scores and rating of each freelancer.
Payment can be done via PayPal, UK Bank Transfer and international transfer. There are 3 types of accounts that freelancer can sign up - standard, gold and platinum. Standard account is free but the commission percentage is 10% and minimum commission fee is £15. Gold and platinum account requires monthly fees of £7.95/month and £14.95/month but the commission percentage is 5.5% and 4.5%. The minimum commission fee will be £10 for both gold and platinum account. As a start, it will be better for freelancers to get a standard free account. Once you get your name rated and start getting more projects, then only consider upgrading your account.
You can also sign up their affiliate programs to earn extra cash. You’ll received 50p if someone posts looking for a job, £1 if someone posts a project and £8 if a project is assigned to a freelancer. There is couple of problems regarding the affiliate program that I found for those not staying in UK. Payment method does not include PayPal. You can only received payment via check or international wire. The 2nd problem is that the affiliate application requires a £5 fee.
Overall, PeoplePerHour works best for freelancers that stay in UK. Lots of top rated freelancers are all from UK. You still can find some other freelancers from other country but only a few of them. Plus if you include the fees of the payment method, it’s a lot cheaper and easier if you stay in UK. One thing for sure, the affiliate program definitely needs to include the PayPal method. Also it will be best to remove the £5 affiliate window fee.
Tips from Google to Boots your Business during Slowdown with the help of Google Analytics 2nd
In this second part of Google Adsense educational series, Ricardo Prada – user experience researcher at Google is sharing out 3 tips on retaining your visitors. You may check out the post on Speeding up: Retaining your visitors with great user experience. There is also a video clip that comes along with the post. The 3 tips discussed are as below.
1. Design for the tasks that visitors complete on your site.
Tasks come first before layouts. That is true and perhaps the best blog example is Grizzly’s How to Make Money Online For beginners. The blog only focus on the content and there is absolute no layout or any other graphics around. It’s just a simple white background with words on it. Just check out the comments of the blog and you’ll find more then hundreds of people response to each post.
2. Use ads as potential exit paths, not interruptions.
This tip actually makes we struggle a lot in making decisions on where to place my ads. In one hand I like my visitors to have a comfortable view on my blog without the distraction of ads, in the other hand I want to monetize my blog. I suppose the best way is to increase my blog attraction so that people will still stay even if interrupted by the ads. Before my blog reaches that level I think it’s better to clear the path.
3. SEO – only if it makes sense.
Honestly, the only way to tell if the search engine optimizations effective or not is to try it out. Some methods that are effective to other blogs might not be good in your blog. It is best to test it out one by one and monitor the changes. Plus, changes are fast online. The method used today might not be effective tomorrow. We have to be sensitive on the changes to keep up the volume of traffic. Perhaps we can understand this by just witnessing the changes of Google search engine. Throughout the years many plans have been carry out and many ideas have been drop by Google. Just by following up the changes of Google page rank, we know that SEO strategies must change accordingly.
We have to look at all the given tips from both Google side and blogger side in order to gain benefits. We are depending on each other to survive after all.
10 Blogging Rules to follow
Before we start using the rules, we need to make sure that we have a passion to blog. We do not blog for the money or any other thing else, it just simply loves to blog. If you can figure this out then perhaps you may keep on blogging for years. After you have decided that you really love to blog and won’t stop no matter what, then perhaps you need to prepare few rules for yourself to maintain and keep up with blogging.
- Take your time to prepare your post. Never ever rush a post. It’s not just because you’ll make mistakes and misspell some words, but you’ll indirectly express the feeling of rushing a post to your readers. This might make some of your readers disappointed as they are expecting something better from you. Plus, rushing a post might just create a low quality work. If you really have to rush, there is couple of things that you need to even if you rush, research and proofread.
- Check your comments. You need to go through your comments each day. It will be better if you also go through your spam comments as Akismet might throw out some good comments. That is if you have the time and there aren’t receiving too many comments, but for beginners you should take all comments seriously. You don’t have to answer all the comments but you need to reply to those that knock on your door.
- Target your Readers and Google Search Engine. I know it’s hard to focus of both but if you really want good results, that’s the best way to do it. When you’re constructing your post, tuning your post with keywords for Google Search Engine and making sure that your readers understand what you trying to say can be difficult. You just have to proofread your post couple more times. The most easy way is to replace “it, the site, they” with the actually name or phrase. It may sound strange but as long as your readers can understand it, why not.
- Keep your post simple and direct to the point. Your time is just as important as your readers. So keep your story short and direct. Not many readers like to spend 20 minutes just to read your blog. I suppose they have other blogs to catch up with too. Also try keeping your post as simple as possible. Don’t try to show off how good your language is, the point is try to get as many people understand what you trying to say. That’s increasing your scope of readers. Besides you don’t want to confuse your readers or mislead them.
- Do not copy and paste the work of others. If you really have to do it, please consult for permission before taking any action. When trying to post the work of others, don’t just copy and paste directly. At least you need to include your opinion and some of your thoughts. Posting it 100% the same as the original post will get you and the content owner punish by Google due to duplicate content. This is not good either for you or the content owner. At the end of the post it will be better to give a link back to where you obtain the material.
- Reply to those who took the time to contact you. It is advisable not to expose your email as you’ll get spam with thousand of junk mail. Still you need to find a way to let others contact you. The best way is to make a contact form to let others get to you without exposing your email. After getting your email messages, you need to decide whether or not to reply. Some emails might seem junk or spam but it is better to reply a simple reject note.
- Check out other blogs and say hi. People read and learn from your blogs. They leave comments or contact you. We all need to do the same thing too. We need to read and learn from other blogs. Plus write some comments or perhaps contact others too. This goes around and around, thus we call it creating a community. Luckily we have other community sites that help us make this easy. Sites like MyblogLog, BlogCatalog, MySpace, FaceBook, friendster and many more are created to bring bloggers together and closer. Interaction and communication between bloggers can help improve and grow our blogs.
- Learn to give before collect. Learn to give out free before you start collecting fees. You can give out free reviews, free ads space or any other things that you can offer. Don’t expect anything in return at the beginning as mostly the best thing that you can get might just be a backlink. Normally you’ll see the effects only after few months of continue give away. The best way to do this is to prepare a contest or sponsor for other contest. You don’t have to give away expensive stuff, any simple things like 1 month free 125×125 ads is good enough.
- Gather any traffic that you can think of. What a blog needs is traffic. It doesn’t matter what kind of traffic, just bring someone to visit your blog. How good the traffic is merely depends on how you make use of it. You can get a lot of traffic from EntreCards, Google Adwords, search engine or Adgitize. As long as you can bring someone to visit your blog, that’s good enough. The rest is up to your blog to attract people and make them stay and read. That will have to rely on the outlook design of your blog and the content.
- Updating always. Blog is no something that you set it up once and leave it there for others to visit. It’s actually a place for you to interact with your readers. Thus keeping up a regular update or posting is very important. It’s like telling people that I’m still here, you can always expect something from me and I’ll be here to listen to what you have to say. When you’re able to transfer this intention through your blog to your readers, you’ll be expecting lots of return visitors. You can change you posting tempo from time to time but never ever stop posting.
Tips from Google to Boots your Business during Slowdown with the help of Google Analytics
Google is giving out a five week educational series about speeding up your business in a slowdown. I think this is good given the condition of the economic right now, a boots is what we all needed. Basically the tips given will be more on the basics of online publishing, Google AdSense and Google Analytics. It’s more like how you improve your online earning using the combination of these 3 elements. If you check out the Google AdSense post on “Speeding up: the basic and Analytics”, you’ll be able to watch a video clip by Avinash Kaushik – Google’s own Analytics Evangelist explaining the 3 things that you can do with Google Analytics.
- Discover what content and traffic sources keep people coming to your site again and again.
- Figure out which pages to improve on your site.
- Find out where AdSense performs best on your site.
In order to do all the above, you need to link Google AdSense and Analytics accounts.
It’s actually good that Google is providing this free tool for bloggers and website owners. If you construct your blog or website using Google AdSense as your main income, the combination of AdSense and Analytics can be very helpful in providing the details of traffic and visitors activities. This data can give you an idea on what you should improve and the effects of changes you made. In fact this data is benefits for both website owners and Google AdSense. A successful high traffic blog or website that carries lots of AdSense clicks is good news for both the owner and Google. As we are able to track down which Ads is most frequently click at and where the traffic comes from, it should be easy to see a click pattern. This can tell us when our blogs receive the highest clicks. Thus we can adjust out post release right before that peak hour to get the best results.
One thing that I’m really concern about this tool is that how do we confirm the data shown is correct. I would suggest that Google introduce or teach us a way to let us do some self confirmation. We must at least know that we are on the right track before trusting the data and start changing our site. No matter how careful we are, we still make mistakes. I just worry that the mistakes that we done might end up analyzing other people’s blog. Now that I really have to know and make clear before I start changing things on my blog. I suppose helping us blogger checking our own mistakes consider as part of the customer service for Google.
Getting Traffic from Publicity Wheel?
Publicity Wheel is actually not a banner exchange system. You’ll still doing the same thing like uploading your 125×125 image with the link to your blog and placing a widget to your own blog. So how do you get traffic from Publicity Wheel? Currently a new site will be selected and feature on each category once every 5 days. That means if your blog are selected, your 125×125 image and link will be shown through all the site in the category. That’s a lot of traffic if the category has more than 2000 blogs or sites. You’ll get a peak of traffic within 5 days. Sounds good? The question is how to get selected and featured. Site selection is random. In order to increase the possibility of getting selected, you need to increase the amount tickets. Tickets can be earned when visitors click on the widget in your blog or introducing others into Publicity Wheel. You may also purchase the tickets directly. The more tickets you have, the higher changes you’ll get selected and featured. Once featured, your tickets will reset to zero. That means everybody will get their chances. A low traffic blog will still be featured but might take some time.
The question that all of us might ask is “does it really helps in getting traffic to my blog?” In my opinion, looks like the only time that you’ll get traffic is when you’re featured. If there is a lot of website in your category, for sure there will be a lot of traffic. But it also means that you’ll have a lot of competition. Chances of getting selected will be slim. Even if all the websites taking turns to featured, it will take a long time before you get your turn. Take for example 8000 websites and each of them will be feature for 5 days. If every websites takes turn to featured, it will take 40000 days before going for another round. That’s more than 100 years time for each websites to be featured. Not to mention blogs with more traffic will be feature more often than those low traffic blog.
So the best way to make full use of Publicity Wheel is to choose the largest category and pay for the tickets to get featured. For those low traffic blogs, better choose a smaller group of category.
Get Paid to Blog at Blog Distributor
Blog Distributor is another pay to blog service that I found lately. Just like other pay per post sites, you get paid to blog. Before you go on and read the rest of this post, let me just tell you this. Blog Distributor is only for US and Canada bloggers. You must be 18 years old and your blog must be certified by Blog Distributor. I suppose until this point a lot of bloggers have been rejected right in front of the door.
If you’re able to get through the first basic rule, let’s go on and check out the blog requirement. In order to receive assignments from Blog Distributor, your blog must be indexed by Google. There must be at least 20 posts in your blog for the last 90 days. Your blog must be text based in English with proper grammar and no misspelling. Plus your blog must look professional. Which means you need to have a good quality blog in order to get pass the second round of qualification. I suppose this filter out about 50% of what’s left of the first qualification.
After getting ready to receive jobs from Blog Distributor, there are certain rules that you need to alert so that you don’t lose your certified status. First is don’t reserve new jobs if you can’t create the post in time. The rest of the rules are just the same old rules that you can find in any other pay per post sites. There is one rule that I found interesting. I never thought that I’ll see this rule in a pay per post site. That is not to place notes under the job post indicating the posting was paid or a sponsored post. This is definitely good for bloggers as this will avoid being categorized to page rank 0 by Google.
As I continue to search on the payment part, I did not find any info on what type of payment used. Instead I found a double standard on when the payment is done. Under blogging FAQs section, the site states bloggers get paid once per week. But under how it works section, it states bloggers get paid every two weeks. I suppose Blog Distributor is still new and there are lots of things need to be fine tune and correct.
Overall, Blog Distributor only concentrates on US and Canada market. Even when getting bloggers to post for their client, they seem to aim for good quality. I just wonder how many blogs are accepted into their network.
Google AdSense announced more countries go Western Union
7 new countries announced by Google AdSense to go Western Union. These countries are Barbados, Bolivia, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Nepal, Uruguay and Vietnam. That means Google Adsense account users that live in these countries are able to receive their payment through any bank with Western Union service. This is actually great news for Google AdSense account users that stay in these countries. There will be no snail mail which needs 3 weeks or more to reach the Google Account Users. No more worries about the mail might lost or accidentally send to wrong addresses. There will be no dealing with the bank that needs more than a month to clear a check. I still remember clearly those days that I need to wait for so long to get my first payment from Google AdSense. It took me more than 3 month from the day my account reach minimum payment until the day I received the payment. After I’m able to use Western Union to receive my payment, it just took about 1 month before I can spend the money.
I know that this is actually very excited to be able to walk in to a bank and receive your Google AdSense payment, not many people do that I think. Certain things you need to check and make sure before you rush to the bank. First of all you need to make sure that your Google AdSense payee name listed in your account is exactly the same as your government-issued ID. The reason that I bring this up because some of you might get confuse of which comes first, first name or last name. No matter what you need to make sure that the payee name for example “AAA BBB” is written the same as “AAA BBB” in your government-issued ID. If your payee name is written “BBB AAA”, than there is a possibility that you might not get the payment.
So make sure that you check everything before running to the bank for your Google AdSense payment. You don’t want your first Google AdSense payment ends up to be a lesson that you’ll never forget.
Spottt Free Link Exchange Review
I’ve been testing out Spottt Free Link Exchange for more than a month and decided to give a review about it. Overall I did not play around much with Spottt Free Link Exchange. All I did was sign up, upload my 125×125 JPEG image, install Spottt widget into my blog, wait for approval and just let it run. It’s pretty much easy with not much configuration and setting to play with. You are able to include as many blog as you can. Each blog will serve as an individual and you are not allowed to exchange credits between each blog. The widget provided can be added into Wordpress, Blogger and MySpace.
So how does Spottt Free Link Exchange works? Basically you’ll need to earn credits in order for your 125×125 image to be shown at other site. Every page view on your site with Spottt widget on will earn you 4 credits. As your site earn enough credits, it will be use to pay for showing your 125×125 image on other site. Currently you need 5 credits to do that as the earn/spend ratio is 4:5. After few month of testing out Spottt Free Link Exchange, below is a statistic results from one of my blog for the last 30 days.
Credit earned: 7,217 credits
Image shown: 3,619 times on other sites and got 1 click. (0.02763%)
Basically that’s how this free link exchange works. The question is how can we improve this figure? How can we turn this free link exchange service to work more effectively? Base on the information collected, there is couple of things that we can do.
1) Increase the site traffic, any traffic will do as long as it consider as page viewed. This will increase the number of your 125×125 image shown at other site.
2) Remove the Spottt that is not suitable for your site. Just go to “My Spottts” and click on “Sites I trade with”. This section will show all the sites that you could trade traffic with. You just need to check each and every one of the site and remove those consider not suitable. I know it’s a lot of work as there are tons of sites in the list. They just don’t have the feature that allows you to select the site to trade. It’s just elimination but no selection.
Spottt Free Link Exchange might not as effective as it seems but the key is to find a way to make full use of it. Perhaps maybe combination of other free link exchange service and Spottt Free Link exchange might work out. We just have to find the right combination.
