Tricia's Musings

Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto



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Blogsoldiers Relaunches

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Help me win a contest!

I’ve been using Bl0gsoldiers for a few months now. It’s a blog traffic engine where you surf sites to earn credits in order for your site to be rotate through the system so that it can be viewed by other bloggers.

There’s been some exciting news. Bl0gsoldiers has been sold and it’s new owner wants to hear from bl0gsoldier members. He would like to hear suggestions for new features. Are you already a member? If so, please go to the bl0gsoldiers site and tell the new owner, John Bambenek, what you’d like to see.

The new owner is celebrating the relaunch of bl0gsoldiers with a contest and a fantastic deal on credit purchase.

1) 50 referral credits for all new members you refer.
2) 50 bonus credits on surfing 50 sites for new members who join.
3) Surfing Contest for the month of August, the Top 10 surfers will receive up to 500 credits for having the most pages surfed between Aug 15 and Aug 31. Top surfer gets 500, 2nd gets 250, 3rd 150, 4th and 5th get 100, 6th-10th get 50.
4) Membership contest. In ADDITION to the referral bonus, the member with the most sites referred will get 500 credits with the same bonus structure as above.
5) REDUCED PURCHASE PRICE FOR CREDITS! I have reduced the price on purchasing credits for THIS MONTH ONLY! It is now $8 – 1200, $14 – 2500, and $24 – 5000.
6) If you post on your blog about the purchase and relaunch of bl0gsoldiers, you get 50 credits IN ADDITION to any referral credits that post generates. (Please open a support ticket, send me the permalink and your username).

As you can see, this is a win win situation for people who are already members and for any new members that sign up. We all get extra credits! That’s right- if you are thinking of joining bl0gsoldiers you’ll get 50 extra credits for the first 50 sites that you surf.

Disclosure: All the links in this post are my referral links to Bl0gsoldiers and other traffic engines. If you sign up under my membership we both win – so help me out and sign up today.





I’m a loser

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Isn’t that the title of a song? I’m thinking Beatles but I could be wrong. OMG I’m starting to rhyme! Stop it, stop it now!

Now back to my sites sucking. Please see the previous post for more about site suckage.

I really think they must, ’cause I can’t even win a battle of the BL0Gs battle over at BL0GEXPLOSION anymore. Nope total loses all the way around. I haven’t won a battle for close to a week. I don’t mind losing, well not if it’s only about half the time, and it’s a fair fight, but to lose all the time? No, it’s no fun anymore, and that’s sad because I really do like battling.

I don’t understand why I’ve lost some of the battles either. I mean I don’t think my site is the be all and end all of all sites by any means, but I’m losing to sites that haven’t put up a new post for days, or who’s post is perhaps only two lines long. So I have to ask why am I losing to some of these sites when I try to put up a new post almost daily, well, certainly if I plan to battle. It does get boring to see the same post for more than 24 hours if a site is battling a lot.

How are you guys voting in the BOTB’s anyway?

I see people writing that they vote by a sites design. Why? Isn’t it the content that should count the most?

Do you actually spend any time at all reading what the person has written?

If a friend is battling do you always vote for them? No, I’m not getting into any of the past controversies here about people apparently voting in groups. That’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking if you vote for your friend 100% of the time – no matter how good the other site might be?

I’l admit that I will vote for my friends now and then. Sure. But if the site they are battling has a better post, well, the other site will often get my vote. I really try to be fair about things and I hope that others are when my site is battling, but I have to admit that sometimes it just doesn’t feel that way.

When I vote, I vote by content first. If I can’t read the post because the design has problems such as header overlapping part of the post, or text style or colour that is simply too difficult to read, well they’ve likely already lost because I can’t judge the content if I can’t read the post. That’s the only time that a persons choice of template or layout comes into play when i’m voting. Content is king every time.

If the content is old I’m more likely to vote for the person with the newer post unless their content doesn’t interest me. The posts that interest me most are the ones that make me smile, and even better if they make me laugh. I like funny, humorous, and even lightly sarcastic sites.

How do you vote in the BOTB’s?

Well this sucks!

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Or maybe just my two sites do?

Rant about BL0GEXPLOSIONS Rent my BL0G to follow. You’ve been warned.


I think it’s become almost a full time job between deciding on who gets to be my renter of the week on each of my sites, and trying to find a rental space for myself.

Over the weekend both of my sites came up for rent and I ended up having to pick just two new roomies out of the 23 hopefuls who bid on my sites. I hate having to deny people, but all I can say is keep trying and keep working at putting in bids on all the sites that you’d like to rent from, eventually someone will give you a spot.

Now, getting back to putting in bids on sites. I’ve been working hard to get spots for both this site and Odd Planet. I put in bids for each site every single day.

Just for the heck of it I decided to see just how many bids I put in during the month of May. Here’s the breakdown:

denied – 59
expired – 8
deleted – 1
accepted -14
total = 82

52 of those bids were for this site, and 30 of those bids were for Odd Planet. Odd Planet is a harder sell – not as many sites pick up humor sites I guess.

So far this month I’ve already put in 31 bids with only two being accepted.

Now since I put in multiple bids I sometimes get accepted by more than one site in a week. Well this site does, Odd Planet rarely finds a home. I don’t mean to take up multiple spots, it’s just that as you can see from the bidding history that I’ve listed above I’m denied more often than I am accepted so it’s better to place a bid with more than one site at a time to increase your chances of being accepted.

What we really need is more renters so that there would be more spaces for all of us trying to promote our sites.

Actually we need more good renters.

I could have bid on a lot more sites than I’ve listed but I didn’t. If your site is only going to bring me one or two visitors yet take 20 to 200 credits from me why should I rent from you? To give my credits away for nothing? Nope, I’m not even going to bother with placing a bid.

There are a lot of sites out there that don’t end up sending a lot of visitors to their renters site. Sometimes it’s not for lack of trying because they do have the rental space showing prominently on their site, and they do make at least one welcoming post to their new renter. No, sometimes they just don’t get all that much traffic to their own site so their stats aren’t that great. I don’t mind so much if I only get 20 clicks or unique visitors when I paid 40 credits. At least I don’t mind if the renter tried to get some of their visitors to visit me.

But this post really isn’t about what happens when you rent, it really about the sheer work it is to try to secure a rental spot. Never mind how good or bad that promotion goes when you’ve been accepted. That’s yet another rant.

I really think that if more people started creating a rental space this would be easier. I’d also end up denying fewer people because they’d be able to secure a space much much more quickly.

I think I’m going to make my own job of selecting renters a tiny bit easier. If the people that bid on my site have a rental space on their own site then they will be considered eligible for a spot on one of my sites. If you don’t rent to others why should I let you take a spot away from someone who’s going through the same dilemma that I am by having to deny far too many people a spot each week as well.

How do you feel about the “rent my BL0G” business?

Do you have to put a lot of effort into finding sites to bid for, only to be denied repeatedly?

I’m curious. Leave me a comment and tell me what you think of this.

_________________________________________________

My friend, from Pointless Drivel, the famous and most fabulous Mr. Fab himself has been going through his own renting dilemma. If you think I’ve had a hard time choosing go read what he had to say about his own problems.

Oh yes, it’s click and comment Monday isn’t it? If you are a participant please feel free to leave a link to your site below .. but if you leave a link you need to leave me a comment too, and then I politely request that you visit my renter! A great way to participate in click and comment Monday is to visit each sites renter or a site on a persons bl0groll. Leave a comment at each site that you visit. Try to visit at least 5 sites if you are participating.

Thanks!

Bad Rating?

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OMG! Someone gave my site a really bad rating over at BL0GEXPLOSION! All 1’s ??? Come on … only a site that either doesn’t load at all, or that’s full of racial slurs and hate deserves all 1’s. Really.

I don’t care all that much about my rating, but this is so out of whack. I wonder if there is someone going around on BE, like there is at BL0GMAD, giving everyone bad ratings?

It just seems so mean! It also makes me feel very distrustful of people too. Was it someone I battled against yesterday? (The rating occurred last night) Someone that saw my site in the BL0G rocket? Or even someone that I talked to in the SB? I’m trying to be friendly, perhaps make some friends and most of all have some fun, but someone doing something like this really makes me wonder about people.

Want to do me a favor and get my site rating back up to where it should be? BTW where it should be is for you guys to determine, I’m not begging for a high rating, just a fair one. Review my site on BE and tell me what you really think.

Thanks!

Waste of Time?

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I’m starting to wonder if bl0gging is just a waste of my time. I don’t mean bl0gging itself. I enjoy writing. It’s all the other stuff that’s making me feel this way.

I’m spending so much time surfing to earn credits that I’m not getting much else done. What am I earning credits for? So that people can look at my site for 20 to 30 seconds? Are they reading it? Some are, but probably most aren’t.

I’m also spending time looking for places to “buy space” from. In the past three days I’ve put in an amazing 29 bids to buy space on other sites for a week for this site and my other site – Odd Planet. Of those 29 bids, perhaps 22 bids were for this site. I managed to secure 2 spots. Neither of them for Tricia’s Musings.

The whole point of “buying space” on someones site is so that your own bl0g can get a few more visitors. Ones who actually mean to come and visit so that they can see what your site is about. So I spend some time checking on the sites that I bid on.

  • I check their history.
  • Did the other sites that they rented to get any hits?
  • Did the site owner at least mention your site once?
  • How does the amount of credits they are charging to rent their space compare to the amount of visits their renter got?

There is no way that I’m giving someone 50 of my hard earned credits if they have a past history of their renter only getting one or two hits for the whole week. Especially if they didn’t even mention their renters site at least in passing to try to get their visitors to see the site. If I like a site, and it gets at least 5 visitors for every 20 credits they charge to rent space, and has at least a one line mention of their renters site I’ll put a bid in.

So, as you can see, to have put 29 bids on sites in the past three days takes me some time because I really check each site out carefully. Then to not even get one bid accepted for this site, well, that makes me feel like I’m wasting my time.

This also makes me feel like my bl0g isn’t good enough. I know that’s probably not the case. The sites I’m bidding on are getting more than just one bid, and unfortunately Tricia’s Musings just isn’t being chosen. 22 times in a row. Still it does make me wonder if there is something wrong about this blog that I’m just not picking up on yet.

To add to this feeling I’ve had a run of bad luck on the Battle of the Bl0gs lately too. When I first changed this sites theme a week or so ago I started winning battles for the first time. Strange isn’t it? The content didn’t change but look did and suddenly my site was a winner. However my luck changed again. I’ve been putting both my sites in battles the last two or three days and I think I’ve only won twice.

Between losing my bids and battles, and spending a very large chunk of time surfing to earn more and more credits, I’m starting to ask myself just what am I doing.

Is it worth it? Am I getting any regular readers by doing all of this?

Perhaps I’ll just sit on my nice big pile of credits and stop trying to give them away to other sites for a small piece of their bl0g.

Does anyone else feel this way from time to time?

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