Blog Subway

So what is going on with Chitika these days? What indeed. The Pay Per Click minnows recently got presented with the now defunct Yahoo Ads and all their clients and it looks like the power has gone to their heads. Either that or the two guys and their mom that are running the outfit from their garage can’t keep up with it!

I am not even going to bother with the technical details – I’ll leave that for the people who care about that crap. Here’s how it looks from a layman’s point of view.

I have several websites/blogs that I had been running Chitika ads on quite happily trundling along earning a few bucks here and there. The along comes the email that informs me that things are changing for the better. I remember an email from EPN a while ago that promised that too, except things got worse.

Well, things got worse at Chitike – or more specifically my websites and blogs that were running their ads. All of a sudden most of then were deemed to not have been active and were sent for review. A process that, they said, would take 3-4 weeks. In that time, of course, they could not show ads and not make any coin. Well, a little over 4 weeks later, not only did I NOT get my blogs/websites reviewed, the ones that were still earning a few bucks were suddenly feted “pending further review” and similarly prevented from showing ads and earning any coin. No I don’t make a red cent from Chitika – until they sort out the mess they made.

The lame excuse by the “company” if you want to call it that, was that my sites were not considered of the desired level of quality to display the ads produced by the clients that had come over from Yahoo ads, so they wanted to review them further before allowing the ads to run.

Bullshit, bollocks and crap!

There is nothing wrong with any of those sites in their “pending for review” list either. They are all legit, have goof relevant content and are not overly promotional. They all get a steady flow of traffic – not great but its there.

Want to know what I think? I may be wrong, but as I don’t know for sure, as most people don’t and because I don’t trust what I was reading to be anything close to the truth, I think they are just stalling for time. They can’t review all my sites – hell, they ran out of time – and they are placing everything in some kind of sandbox until they can figure it all out.

Or maybe the got saddled with too many accounts in one go and they can’t cope! Admit it if that’s true – we understand! It happens, we are all human and we sometimes take on more than we can cope with.

Just don’t treat us like a bunch of dumbass slack-jawed yokels who don’t know one end of a pitchfork from the other. The truth sometimes hurts, but we can take it. If you really don’t want my sites, tell me straight – “Your sites totally suck and we don’t want them!” Its better than some lame PC garbage that no one believes and it puts you guys in the same sinking ship mentality as the idiots that are trying to destroy EPN from the inside out.

Welcome back to a blog that caters for the work at home entrepreneur or blogger looking to make a living from their writing and marketing skills. In this post, I want to take a look at the benefits of working from home and how it compares to working at a regular job.

Well, for me, the very thought of ever having to go back to work for a company is unpalatable for a variety of reasons, but I suppose the foremost of those is that once you’ve been your own boss and worked for yourself, it is very difficult to swallow your pride and go back to work for someone else.

So with that thought firmly entrenched in the back of my mind, I set myself on a trail that would lead me to self sufficiency and mean that I would never have to take that backward step in life. So what are the benefits to working at home that make it such an appealing way of life for so many people?

The first thing is, as I have already mentioned, not having to work for someone else, or not having a “boss” who can tell you what to do, how to do it and when.

Some people like the security of working for a company and even accept the ordering about from a boss because they find it easier to have their workload set out for them and to know exactly what it is they have to do, how long it should take them and how they should go about accomplishing that. That’s fine and each to their own.

Others dislike that way of working and it is those that seek out ways to change their circumstances, meaning a way to work for themselves and not to be at the beck and call of a boss, or worse, be an underling to a hierarchy of supervisors, managers, senior managers etc.

Another benefit I enjoy as I work from home is that I never need to commute to an office. That saves on time and travel costs, but to me the time saving is the crucial one. Commuting can often take an hour or more each way, lengthening your effective working day by an additional two to three hours or more. That’s an eighth of your day and over a five day week adds up to an entire waking day! So i could say that by working at home, I gain an extra day every week!

Another benefit is the flexibility of my working hours. If I oversleep, so what? I just make a point of working a little later that day to maintain my weekly hours that I need to effectively produce my income. If I were working for a company, guess how long I’d keep my job if I regularly overslept a day or more each week!

Working at home, for myself also allows me to make full use of my own creativity in the way that I do my work which ultimately results in teh way that my income is derived. For me personally, I spend a good deal of my working day building my portfolio of websites into a position where they generate income without further constant maintenance from me. In other words, the income they generate is passive and will continue to produce a relatively steady flow of cash whether I tend them or not. This is important as it means I can take a day off whenever I want to and the income from those sources will not diminish or alter because of it. Try doing that if you work for a company!

Your boss won’t be too happy if you just take the day off on a whim as the money you generate for the company will stop when you’re absent, especially if you are in manufacturing or production.

So that’s about as much as I want to write on the subject for now. I may carry this on in a future post.

Blog Subway

Welcome back to Blog Subway, where I want to take a cold hard look at one of the ways of how not to make money online. Blogging in the subway doesn’t mean I’m blogging in the, erm actual subway, if anyone is wondering! This is really just an underground look at what’s going on in the world of blogging and where people are using blogs to make money from blogging. So what’s the latest to hit the cyber streets?

Well, it may or may not surprise you to learn that Mr Problogger has created a paid forum where noobs can go and be taught a load of totally useless stuff by more noobs. They can pay $2 for the privilege, too! Ok, $2 is not going to hurt anyone’s paypal account but it will surely make a nice bit of extra income for Mr Rowse, the blog/forum’s owner.

Some of the big guns have already come out blazing about how this is such a bad idea for noobs (although a very good idea for Darren Rowse) and that it’ll just create a whole new bunch of clueless noobs doing everything wrong while they try to make money online using the hopelessly inadequate ramblings of the so-called experts who are running said forum.

On the one hand, its annoying and might even have got a similar derogatory response from yours truly, but upon reflection, the more noobs that learn all the wrong stuff from the likes of problogger, then the lower the competition for me. I’ve actually gotten to the stage where I’m not even going to give out any more information on what you really need to do in order to make money online. Why should I? I’d just be writing a whole load of stuff that you can find on one or two other blogs that tell it like it is and don’t spout the same tired old nonsense that a thousand other blogger spout day in and day out. And for what?

To teach people how to take money out of my own pocket?

You must be joking! There are still many fine ways to make money from the Internet and they still work well and don’t cause anyone to get ripped off or scammed, so I’ll keep my methods to myself and keep you all guessing. Much better, methinks!

So this was an entirely non-useful blog post for anyone wanting to know the right way to earn an income online, except for one saving grace and that is I told you how NOT to go about it.

Blog Subway