Farewell to EntreCard

I bid fare farewell to EntreCard. The system is broken.

If you are unfamiliar with EntreCard, it is a system where bloggers could advertise on fellow bloggers' blogs. In the very beginning EntreCard worked out well and many blogs that did not have any traffic profited from using the EntreCard system. Unfortuantly the company changed hands. The new owners wanted to generate some cash from the system so they decided to sell regular advertising in the spot where a blog ad would normally be. That did not sit well with many members and they left the system. I stuck around for a bit.

EntreCard then dropped the paid ads. Then they decided to not give out credits for people visiting your blog and other little tricks to get you to purchase their credits so you could advertise your blog on the more popular blogs. They were in their small minded way trying to generate money, at the expense of the bloggers. Instead of charging outside companies to advertise on blogs they were in fact charging the bloggers.

The visitors coming to this blog from EntreCard were dwindling so I decided that I really didn't need it anymore. I removed the widget today and last I heard EntreCard will be bringing back paid ads and if people DON'T want a paid ad on their blog (EntreCard gets the money BTW not the blogger) EntreCard wants to charge $50 to the blogger. Talk about black mail. Charging people not to have something!! WTF.

Good bye EntreCard.

More people riding bicycles

Last year when the price of gasoline shot up to the $4 mark it was expected that more people would be using peddle power to get around. Well, the price of oil came down but people are still saving money by using their bikes. Just yesterday morning I noticed that several people are biking to work even while it is still dark in the morning. Thank goodness they had red led taillights and reflector stripes on their jackets otherwise I would not have seen them.

Have you changed your commuting habits because of last years high gas prices or do you still drive just as much? One alarming statistic is that truck sales are going back up. People mistakenly believe that the price of gas will not go up overnight again, but it will.

Blog growth and higher income

The last several weeks my small collection of blogs have experienced a significant rate of growth. The little blog over at Today use to earn a whole .o5 cents a day back in January when I started it, now 50 blog posts later and it gets .40 cents a day. I have not promoted the blog at all almost all of the traffic is from the search engines. That blog now seems to be thoroughly indexed. All I do is write a 300 word post once or twice a week on there and let the visitors roll on in. In a few more weeks I should be earning close to a $1 a day without me doing anything other than writing. That means I would be getting $30 a month EVERY month because my content would be constantly be read and found by the search engines. That amount may not seem like much but to me it pays a bill each month.

My little blog over there is now listed in the top 100 blogs. I would love to say it is because I am a fantastic writer but the truth is that many people that start out on the blogging site don't keep up their blogs. After a few months they just let them go and abandon them.

If you love to write and have a subject that you are passionate about I highly suggest to try them out. Just click on this link to get started Get paid to BLOG at Today.com

One of my other blogs has had a growth spurt and went from 160 visitors a day to 800+ visitors a day. I was earning about $75 a week from that blog when it had 160 visitors a day and in order to cash in on the increase in visitors I decided to add the All Posters affiliate program to the busiest pages of the blog. I will soon see if I have any commissions from those pages. I also added the poster program to The Playful Pup, my example teaching blog. The Playful Pup also had an unusual spike in traffic over the last 3 days. It had about 200 visitors a day. That blog earns me at least $25 a week now. I don't consider that too bad since I started it last year to show you how to set up and make money from a blog. It only has about 100 posts and I write a blog post about 1-3 times a week on there.

In all I am rather happy with my part time blogging ventures. Everyday brings some new knowledge or method on how to promote or make money from my blogs. All of them started small maybe earn me mere pennies a day at first. Now they have all grown and I am earning dollars a day from each of them. The biggest hurdle you will have to overcome is to keep at it - DON'T GIVE UP ON YOUR BLOGS. The money will come. Even the most successful bloggers did not get that way overnight. Some of them in fact took years before they were even noticed.

Make money and add some value to your website or blog

Here is a great way to add some pizzaz to your blog or website while earning money at the same time. The All Posters Affiliates Program is a great way to make money with your website. Link to All Posters and earn 20% of every purchase made by your site visitors at their website. If the visitor decides to purchase within 10 days of their last visit from your website, you'll still earn commission on the sale! You can link to All Posters from a selection of over hundreds of thousands poster and art print images as well as poster stores and mini stores. They have posters related to just about everything (e.g. movies, music, sports, art, animals) so no matter what the content of your site is, you will find images that are a good fit. It’s easy to sign-up, track your sales, and build links because the site generates all the HTML code for you.


Webmasters Make $$$

I use this program on at 3 of my websites and it brings in a steady income. You can even run a whole website on automatic with this program. They have options to set up a whole dynamic store and you get commissions on all of the sales. Here is what a store might look like. I chose Micheal Jackson as an example. You could chose a dog breed, mountain views or children as a theme. It is a simple as signing up and generating the code for your blog or website.

Going back to college

Cities and counties all over the USA are reporting a surge of people going back to college to learn another career because their old jobs have just dried up. The medical field seems to be one of the only areas that are hiring during this recession. While not many people are going back to college to become a doctor or nurse, some are opting for support roles like medical assistants or radiologist. Unfortunately many colleges that offer a medical assistance program or a certified program for ultra sound techs are reporting the fact they are full with a waiting list.

I know of several people that are computer programmers and IT specialists that are out of work. They are having a hard time. At the same time our local college decided to add a load of computer programmer courses to their schedule and they are booked solid! The people that are taking those classes are not aware that the industry is swamped right now.

It pays to do some research first on available jobs before you start a college program. Is there a demand for your chosen career path? Can you predict that there will be a demand after you complete your education or will there be a glut of other qualified people joining you in the job market?

Twitter is losing it's sparkle for me

I have been on Twitter for just over a year now. Until only recently I used the service sporadically if much at all. In the very beginning I just did not see a purpose to it unless I had a phone I was making entries from it. If I was blogging then Twitter was much too short for what I had to say.

About 3 months ago I started to visit Twitter more often and started to actually communicate with some close friends and fellow Tweeters on there. That went well for about 2 months then the influx of the spammers and the marketers came. People were following me that I have never heard of and some of them I didn't want to know. Most of them I didn't follow back because the only tweets they had were "visit my naughty video", "learn how to whiten your teeth", "which diet pills are the best for you" or my favorite "how to get 10,000 Twitter followers a day".

First up I am not going to visit a naughty video, when in reality those naughty video links are to some product website that has nothing to do with sex and the person is more than likely a man posing online as a sexy women to get your attention. As to the white teeth thing, I'll just brush my teeth thank you. The pills I don't even bother with and the last one about getting 10,000 followers a day I will ask with the famous question - why? I have nothing to sell and I am not about to start so why do I need 10,000 people a day following me when most of them don't even read my tweets?

So back to my original title - yes Twitter is starting to lose it's sparkle for me. Twitter has changed it's TOS a few days ago to try and get rid of spammers and bots but so far I don't see anything happening. I will wait and see if Twitter changes or not. I hope it does but I don't see it.

I can't get the song from the movie Ghost out of my head

Ever since yesterday when Patrick Swayze passed away I can't get that song in the movie Ghost, out of my head. The words "I need your love...I need your love" and "your touch, my darling..." keeps repeating in my head. It was the song that played in the background when he and Demi Moore were molding clay.

I bring that up because I had a few articles that I had to write for a couple of companies and that song kept interrupting my train of thought. How can someone write an article about finding the best diet pills and another article on cleaning your dogs teeth with that song going on in your head? Believe me it was hard but I managed it. I even got them done before the deadline.

Sometimes being a freelance ghost writer for the internet is hard, but most of the time it is dead easy. Now I think I am going to buy the song that has been running me nuts for the last 24 hours.

Twitter is swamped with spammers and marketers

Twitter is a mini blogging or message system that was originally designed to be used as a quick bulletin board to reach your friends or co-workers. It soon reached the attention of some major TV personalities and they started Twittering. I personally attribute the tremendous growth to Ellen DeGeneres and Oprah. If is was not for them I think the great majority of the American public would not be aware of Twitter. With that fame, Twitter also got the attention of marketers and spammers.

It has now gotten to the point that almost everyone on Twitter is trying to sell someone else something. Marketers claiming to be sitting out by the pool on the patio furniture and making a bundle just by Twittering are common. I have not seen any evidence that people can get rich or even have a decent living just just tweeting.

Now I am seeing sponsored tweets on Twitter. Great now we have people typing in links and getting paid a few dollars here and there. The people in charge of Twitter don't like it either and they have recently changed their TOS to get rid of spammers, bots and rude marketers pushing their products or websites on people. Let's all hope that Twitter becomes a better place to use and visit.

Switching houses and dumping others

Here is something I have been hearing about from close friends in California. Because of the rampant foreclosure situation in CA here is what a few people are doing. They are finding themselves close to foreclosure. They still have good credit so they go out an buy another home at rock bottom prices. After they move in to the new home they then let the bank take the other house that they could not afford the payments on.

I have no idea if the banks have been going after these people for any fees or money after they get the house from them but I would like to know the rest of the story.

Staying in shape the frugal way

With health care costs rising like there is no tomorrow we have to take charge of our own bodies and do a bit of preventive care. That means staying in shape. Not everyone has access to a safe place to workout. If you live in the inner city sometimes taking a walk around the block can be dangerous. If you live in a small apartment you often don't have the room to even do a simple workout without knocking something over. So what do you do to stay off of the doctor's exam table?

I have found that many local community colleges offer daily physical education classes that will cost you only the price of admission which is often under $50. Our local community college offers everything from swimming to weightlifting at no cost. That is because the college charges $74 for each credit taken (some states charge less) and many of the physical education classes are 0 credits. The cost of admission at our community college is $30. So for $30 I can take a weightlifing class or conditioning class that meets 3X a week for 90 minutes for 13 weeks. That cost sure does beat the local paid gym.

New fangled gadgets

I think that my head is starting to spin when there are so many new types of cell phones, PDA's, netbooks and other hand held gizmos introduced to the public. Let's face facts here people, when do you constantly have to keep track of every little thing with a cell phone that does everything? If you don't have access to a computer I can understand that, but you probably have a computer too, right?

The need to sell the public on something there is no demand for is an art that Apple computer seems to have refined. Their iPods, iPhones and all the different variations of them was something that the general public does not have a need for but Apple supplied it anyway.

We used to have big screen TV's that took up most of the living room. Then came the flat plasma TV's soon followed by the LCD tvs and now the LED TV's. In the works is a paint that you simply paint on your wall that when energized becomes a TV or monitor screen.

I would love to say that these items are great to have but all I can see is waste. Waste in our landfills, wasted resources to produce something that is not needed, wasted money to buy something that our children or spouses beg us to get for them.

I am not anti-technology by a long shot. I am against making something simply to sell to the public for the sole purpose of making money for which that company has to create a demand for where there was none.