Promoting Day Turned Into Dossing Day

I tried to get my Potty Training articles' links posted to as many parenting forums as I could yesterday. As a result, I discovered that most forums don't accept links (at least not from new members), this is considered as spamming, and I spent laborious hours (well at least 2) reading posting guidelines. My links were savagely removed from 1 website but at least I managed to post on the parenting forum I have been using for a year. Conclusion: this is not the best way of promoting my articles.

I ended up reading very interesting information about using inbound and outbound links to improve the ranking of websites, which I need to study in more detail. I also came accross "how to turn $6 to $600". This is like the chain letters I used to get as a kid to write postcards to different people but this one works using PayPal and sending $1 to 6 email addresses. Even though it has been featured on Oprah, I smelled a rat. I need to find out for myself what does Paypal think about this.

I also wrote a review of a dvd I saw recently, at this stage I have 4 of these saved on Word, I am trying to think of the best place to publish them. Maybe I will go for Associated Content when I find out how to increase my article page views.

So, O.K, I didn't make any money yet, but I am learning every day, so it's not all bad!

Busy Day

Last week, I wrote 3 articles on potty training on Associated Content.

Now the hard part is getting people to read them, so today, I will be haunting parenting forums so I can post my links. I will make $1.50 for every 1000 page views, so having 3 articles each specialized in one aspect of potty training, the people who read one are bound to check out the other 2, since it doesn't cost them anything and they will be on the site already. This means that I (only!) need to attract 223 people to earn $1!

Those of you who have young children might be interested in reading these:

How to Successfully Potty Train Your Child

Prepare Yourself and Your Child for the Potty Training Challenge

How to Successfully Potty Train Your Child

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a busy day ahead of me!

Before Joining a Review Website, Read This

I spent the last few days visiting some "get paid to review" websites.

Some of them I liked, some of them I doubted and others I dismissed straight away.

I invested a lot of my precious time in this (not scientific) study, so I decided to write a detailed article on Associated Content about making money writing reviews. You are welcome to read it by clicking on the title below:

A Review of Get Paid to Review Websites.

Spedia

A few weeks ago, I spent a bit of time checking out some "Get paid to surf" websites. I already wrote a post about Agloco, so now I will talk about Spedia.

Sign up is free as well so I joined them. I entered all my details on their website, clicked the link on my confirmation email (you know how it goes) and then I started downloading the toolbar. When I had 99% of the toolbar downloaded, my antivirus programme beeped (yes, it does that) and indicated me that there was a virus threat of some kind so I stopped and tried again 5 or 6 times during the day but still with the same result. I sent an email to the Spedia support department but my email came back with a message from Postmaster (whatever that is) informing me that my message could not be delivered so I gave up.

I tried again a week later and the same thing happened but this time (after running my antivirus programme), I went back on the site and started to explore. The website claims that you can make money not only by surfing, but also by joining their advertisers programmes, reading emails, referring people and playing games.

Most of the programmes to join are only open to U.S. residents. There was one online casino but in order to get Spedia points I would have had to make a deposit and I did not want to do that so I passed and tried the free games.

I started playing Solitaire against other online players and instantly got addicted: I just had to win. I had a bit of fun for about one hour (yeah, I know, I could have used the time better, but this was on a Sunday) but when I went to check how many Spedia points I had got, I was informed that the points system was down and that I should try later. I tried to check this again a few more times during the week but it was still unavailable. Somehow I don't think I will be earning any money with Spedia.

It looks like "get paid to surf" programmes are not all they claim to be. I don't expect any money from them so I will keep up with the writing instead.

Headless Chicken

I need structure. At the moment I am going around like a headless chicken, looking for ways to increase traffic to my blog. I seem to be spending more time signing up on new websites than anything else.

Well, I did write one article yesterday on Helium. I will need to write about this website again but tonight I am just too tired.

I am also working on a potty-training article which is taking a lot out of me. It looks more like a novel so far so I might just split it in two. I need this article to be perfect as I want to make lots of happy Mammies and Daddies but I have a lot of editing to do.

On the positive side, I had some comments on this blog so someone must be reading and this is to say Thank you.

Beware of Fake PayPal Emails

I don't like to be taken advantage of and this almost happened when I opened an email seemingly coming from PayPal. I found it a bit strange at first to get an email from PayPal on my new email address (which I never use with them) but this message looked like a genuine PayPal email, it had the logo and was even signed from someone with a PayPal email ID.


The email in question informed me that they had noticed some suspicious activity on my PayPal account. I was worried that someone may have been using my PayPal account without my authorisation so I clicked on the link provided in the email in order to verify my identity, as I was being advised to. The email also said that if I did not act in the next 72 hours, my PayPal account would be cancelled.


I clicked on the link (which started with https://www.paypal.com/*) and was taken to what looked exactly like the real PayPal website, where I had to enter my user name and password (which is usual when you log in to the PayPal site) but when I went to verify my identity, which was really a form requesting all my details, I did not see the security symbol (which should look like a lock) anywhere on the page.


This detail prompted me to open a new page and type the PayPal website address in my browser. Once on the website I noticed that not only the security symbol was present but also the browser area where you can see the page's URL address is always green in the real PayPal website. After finding the PayPal security center, I forwarded the suspicious email to spoof@paypal.com and they confirmed that this was a phishing email. Fortunately, I had also remembered to change my PayPal password right after I noticed that there was something not right on the fake website.


If you think you have been targeted by a phishing email please report it. There are a lot of websites where you can do this so I won't list them all but you can search Google or Yahoo for "report phishing". If you just want to learn more about phishing email, you can take PayPal's Fight Phishing Challenge at https://www.paypal.com/fightphishing.



*Please do not access PayPal through any email or website link (including this one), if you want to visit PayPal's website, type in http://www.paypal.com/ in your browser.

Suspicious Emails Alert

During the last week, I received 5 suspicious emails:
- the Nigerian scam (or 419 scam), which I have already mentionned,
- the UK Lottery Online Organization informing me that my email address has won $4.6M,
- an email from Matroc Technical Ceramics Company Ltd offering me a job as a representative/payment agent to help them recover money owed to them,
- a "Notification for Cash Aid" email from a so-called Italian Foundation (why would a charity organization offer me $1,000,000.00? Don't they have anything better to do with the money like giving it to some italian orphanage or something?),
- an email from Powerball Online Promotion Programmes telling me that my email address has won £1.5.
All those messages asked me to send an email to some agent whose email address (in some case telephone number) was written on the email.

While I had my doubts about the legitimacy of the offers, I might have been slightly less suspicious if I had only received one email, but 5! My email address must be on some list that is being sold on the net with the title "Prospective Suckers".

I wanted to make sure that I was not passing on any interesting opportunities so I searched the Internet and found the Scamomatic website, which has a great feature: I clicked on the following question: "is that email a scam?" and was asked to copy and paste the suspicious emails in the corresponding fields. I was not surprised to see that these were indeed fraudulent emails. I am very lucky I found this website: not only do they tell you whether an email is genuine or fake, but they also give you a list of things to watch out for when you get an offer by email.

If you receive an email offering them money, please don't get sucked in, visit Scamomatic. There is a phrase that could be their motto: "If it seems too good to be true, it probably isn't!" and I agree with this.