Tricia's Musings

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



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She’s venomous but you’ll love her

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How do you know when you’ve chosen a great avatar for your blog? Well, how about when someone tells you that they like your avatar so much that they’d like to get their hair cut like it? LOL

Yep, that would be Venomous Kate. If you haven’t been to Kate’s blog yet what are you waiting for? I just love her writing style.

All of her posts are well written and once you visit her site you can’t read just one post. Before you realize it you’ll find that you’ve read several and laughed or giggled at some line or another in each post.

She’s an amusing, sarcastic, straight forward tell it like it is kind of girl. You’ll love electric venom and I’m sure you’ll love her other blog I think Therefore I blog too.

Oh and if you want to really impress her, bring her a Martini when you drop by as I think that might be one of her favorite drinks.





Quick Blogging – Just Do It!

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John who is affectionately known as Techie in some circles, of the Something for Nothing Blog, came up with a great idea the other day.

He coined a term for a method of blogging that you might already practice at times, or that you might wish you could do more often. He’s called it Quick Blogging, amd I must say, I’m jumping on the Quick Blogging Revolution band wagon.

I think to some degree I already practice Quick Blogging. It’s basically blogging something as soon as you think of it rather than holding on to it and thinking about it.

I’m going to call my post Stephen King on the Hour and Surnames in China my first official quick blogging post, but I’m sure I’ve practiced this form of blogging in the past. Perhaps even as often as once a week. Now I think I’m going to try to make a quick blogging entry at least once a day from now on. Why not.

Basically all you need to do for quick blogging is blog whatever you are thinking about when it comes to you.

Take my Stephen King and China Surnames post. I was watching a television show, enjoying it, and I thought “Gee this is a great show, and that fact about Chinese surnames is really interesting. I’ve got to blog about that.” So I just did it.

Do the two main topics of that post go together? No not really, but at least they were tied together in the guise of the TV show that I was watching. That’s not the point thought. The point is to blog about something as soon as it comes to you.

You know how you’re at work, the bank, shopping or just walking down the street and something either happens that makes you think “I’ve got to remember to blog about this” or you think of something to blog about? Well how often do you end up blogging about it when you finally get in front of your computer? Probably only half the time right?

Well stop that.

If something occurs to you to blog about get to a computer and blog it.

Whether it’s just a few lines or turns out to be a few paragraphs it doesn’t matter. Just get those thoughts out there. Make sure you have a spell checker on your computer or in your browser, and watch your sentence structure and grammar so that your post doesn’t end up looking really bad.

There’s some posts that I spend a lot of time thinking about and going over again and again as I write them up.

There’s other posts that I write in advance and save as drafts, and then go over before I publish them.

Then there’s some that I just write on the fly and post without much thought.

You know what I’ve found? While the posts that I’ve taken a lot of time over get a fairly good response, it’s the posts that I just write quickly, the ones that just pour out of me that tend to get the most response.

So what do you say? Are you ready to give quick blogging a try? It can’t hurt. You can always delete or edit the post if you change your mind about it.

Write it, read it, post it. Just do it!

I’ve hit the 10,000 dollar mark!

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You know what I just realized? Blogging can be extremely lucrative.

Ok, I already knew that, but lately, almost every single day that message has been brought home to me time and time again as I see my earnings and offers increase.

Tuesday, the 13th of June, I became the second blogger on Pay/perp0st to hit the $10,000 mark. That’s right. I’m the second highest earner on Pay/perp0st.

I started with Pay/perp0st on October 10th 2006 and by November 26th I’d made my first $1000. By the end of December I’d made $2009.35. Odd how it turned out to be almost exactly $2000 at the end of the year, isn’t it? So that means that I’ve made a little over $8000 in the last almost five and a half months.

The funny thing is that in the last several months I’ve really slowed down. I go days without doing a Pay/perp0st post at times. The amount paid per blog has increased though so I can write fewer posts and make the same or better money. Win Win if you ask me.

I started doing paid blogging because I’ve been off work since December 4th 2005 due to Crohn’s. I still have a job as an ER nurse, but I’m unable to perform my duties because I’m simply too ill. Heck, these days I can barely get out into my garden!

I was getting sick pay, and then medical unemployment for a while, but the money ran out by July 2006. We tried taking in borders for a few months, but I couldn’t stand it. One of our borders was a real nut who lied to us all the time and we had to watch her like a hawk. The stress of having someone like that in my home did nothing towards helping me get any better.

So last October, as our situation started to become desperate I went searching for another way to make money. Something that wouldn’t be too hard for me to do. I came across Pay/perp0st and decided to try it. Don’t get me wrong – it’s not easy easy work, but it’s certainly easier than a 12 hour ER nursing shift!

I already had several blogs, but I only used two of them for Pay/perp0st at first. It wasn’t until perhaps February that I added a couple of the other blogs to the system. This allows me to spread out the blogging work that I take not only from Pay/perp0st, but from several other companies across the blogs, and also allows me to be sure that the posts I choose to take truly suit the blogs that I put them on. It’s better for me, it’s better for my blogs and most importantly it’s better for my readers.

I do work with pretty much all the companies now. Some more than others of course. I also earn income on my websites and blogs from other forms of advertising as well – Amazon, Google Adsense, Adbrite, Text L1nk Ads, Auction Ads, Glam Network, private work, and a few other sources. I’m considering experimenting with a few other advertisers – some of whom have come to me directly lately.

I guess I’ve been making money with my websites for several years now. Google Adsense and Amazon being the main sources. However it wasn’t until the past year that I got my act together and really started to work at it. This year I really can see that I could make a living off my websites.

When I first started with P in October, and then other companies, I kept a daily tally of how much I was making. I think I’d set a goal to make at least $1000 a month via all my sources of income. Now, I’m so busy that I haven’t had a chance to tally things up for quite a while – although I do still keep track of every cent I make. I’m just not adding it all up.

A few months ago I saw that I was easily able to increase my goal to $3000 per month, but I do believe that I’m making close to $4000 per month at this time. So my new goal is to make at least $5000 per month by the end of the year.

You know what? I think I will make my goal! Especially since I’m only doing half of what I could be doing and I’ve got 6 more domains to develop!

What I find kind of amusing is that in the comment section of one of the recent posts on Michael Arrington’s Blog, Techcrunch, one of the commenters stated that the majority of blogs listed in Pay/perp0st are very small, run by stay at home moms and only get 3 visitors a month. Right!

That’s totally untrue considering that Pay/perp0st’s demographics state that the majority of bloggers in their system are men and I know that there’s quite a variety of blogs, large and small, writing on a vast number of topics within the system.

This blog is the main blog on the Feverishthoughts.com domain. I’ve got 7 blogs on this domain (5 of which will move to the new domains shortly), but by far, this site, and As the Garden Grows gets more than 80% of the traffic that my Feverishthoughts.com Network brings in.

The stats for Feverishthoughts.com for May 2007 state that there were 130,141 unique visitors, and 513,524 page views. Traffic is increasing weekly! My main website, not a blog – a website, on a different domain, had 46,788 unique visitors, and 106,669 page views.

Those stats are nothing to sneeze at, and I know there’s other bloggers using Pay/perp0st and similar services that have similar stats.

Certainly with stats like that on one of my websites, and a few of my blogs (I didn’t list everything), and the sites I’m developing if I don’t make my $5000 per month target by the end of the year I’ll clearly have been doing something wrong!

RSS Feed Subscriber Campaign

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Jimmi from over at JMH Techtronics has started this new RSS Feed Subscriber campaign.

Every blog, no matter what platform it’s on has an RSS feed. Right? As you might realize there are feed readers out there such as Bloglines, Google Feed Reader and many others that people use to read all the sites that they enjoy in one place.

In order to read those RSS feeds in a feed reader a visitor to a site must subscribe to the RSS feed. My rss feed subscription area is located in the lower portion of the right sidebar if you are looking.

Jimmi created this RSS Feed Campaign so that those on the list could get more subscribers to their RSS feeds. When the list is copied and added to, more people end up getting RSS subscribers and thus more readers of this site.

Having subscribers is a great way to get return traffic to your blogs. If readers use their RSS Feed Readers frequently you should get more traffic than you have ever had before.

What can you get out of encouraging others to subscribe to your rss feed? Well, if you monetize your site you might end up getting more money for your advertising as many of the places that allow us to monetize our sites base their payout/price calculations on our Alexa rank, our sites Page rank, our Technorati rank, and our RSS subscribers!

Now I know that many of the people who read my sites monetize their sites in some form or another. Whether it’s through Google Adsense, Adbrite, Yahoo ads, Text Link Ads or other forms of advertising … the more readers and the more traffic you have the better.

Are you with me?

Ok. The most basic thing that all of us want is more readers. No matter how they read our posts it’s great to have readers isn’t it?

If you want more readers and want to raise your standing with some of the sites that help us monetize our blogs join the campaign.

Here’s the rules:

***Start Copying Here***

1. Create a post and link back to the person that put you on the list in the first paragraph with a brief thank you and description of why people want to use the campaign. DO NOT copy their paragraph. Write your own unique one and link to their site.

2. Copy the ENTIRE list of Feeds and create an OPML File to import into your feed readers so that you can subscribe to all of the blogs on the list. You will want to read my post entitled Mass RSS Feed Subscribing with an OPML so you understand how to do it. (You will want to copy this link over to your post so those you add know how to do this too.)

3. Copy the ENTIRE list of Feeds AND blogs and put them into your post like they are here. Move the “My Adds” from the blog that added you into the “Originals” lists for each. This list is unique because I want you to be able to copy the feeds with out having to delete the blogs before making the OPML file so I separated the two links into 2 lists.

4. Add any blogs you want to the list with whatever keywords you want. Then get their RSS Feed and add those to the list of Feeds in your “My Adds” section.

5. Publish your post.

6. Comment on the post that originated the list here so that new additions can be subscribed to as well by the lists before yours.

My Blog Adds:

LifeCruiser
Pointless Drivel
Ramblings of an Undisturbed Mind

Original Blogs:

Whatever I Feel Like
Tricia’s Musings
Ugh!!’s Greymatter Honeypot
A bit of this and a bit of that
Wordpress Plugins
Internet Serious Business
Julie’s Journal
Utterly Geek
jon lee
Pencil Thin
No Average Mom
Marisa’s Dandelion Patch
Scribble on the Wall
The Sovereign Journey
Digital Nomads
msdanielle
Mr. Gary Lee
Windows Tips, Tricks, and Hacks
Get a First Class Degree
SiteLogic Web Development
Geeky Speaky
Little America
As the Garden Grows
Celebrity Scoop
WebStyle
Odd Planet
Guitar Licks
Breath of Life Photography
The Web Files
My World
Celeb News
John Chow

***Stop Copying Here***

If you have any questions about how to do any of this just leave me a comment and I will answer it for you as soon as I can. Remember to come back and comment once you put the list up as well so that I can subscribe to your feed and others can too.

Also, if you want to promote your site and get more readers check out The Do Follow Blogroll, The Technorati Fav List, BumpZee, the Mybloglog Community exchange and Truth Laid Bear.

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