Outlaw Blogger

Paid to blog companies that are not good

2008-12-04T22:35:00.000-08:00

Have you joined one of those paid to blog websites only to find that all their promises of making lots of money by blogging just a bunch of bunk? You are not alone. Sure you can make money posting paid blog posts, I have done it but I am not rich - far from it in fact. I have joined enough of them to let you know what ones to steer clear of. Here are my top 4 that are absolutely the worse:

The top of the list is Bloggerwave. I did one post for them over a year ago and never got paid. Countless emails I have sent but they are never answered. Steer clear of that company.
The next one is Blogitive. I did one post for them several months ago and it never got approved. It is still in a pending state. They don't answer their emails either. They even have a Facebook account that has not had any activity since September 2008.
Smorty is only good if you have a Page Rank of 3 or better on your blog. If it is ranked lower than that you can be assured of no work from them for months on end.
Social Spark use to be OK until a few weeks ago when they decided to change their requirements for blog posts. Now they don't want any other ads on the same page as the sponsored post. That includes side bars. Fat chance of that happening guys.

Wordpress.com are hypocrites

2008-08-12T21:33:00.000-07:00

Oh the hypocrisy of it all. If you have a wordpress.com blog, one of the big no-no's on there is that you cannot advertise anything, even have a link to a commercial site. I know of plenty of bloggers that have had an account suspended for simply having a link to their own website which happened to be a construction or flower business. Wordpress of course does not have time to monitor them all so blog visitors turn them in. Now I understand that since Wordpress owns the site they can do what they want but here is the hypocrisy of it, for a price of $500 a month and a set up fee of $600 you can have all the ads and links you want on your wordpress blog - no questions asked. So Wordpress only wants BIG bucks for them to turn a blind eye to ads and links. I guess so much for us - the poor and near do wells.

Get drowned by Bloggerwave

2008-01-22T00:31:00.000-08:00

Now here is an underhanded company, Bloggerwave. I wonder why they called it that? Probably because they wave good-by to you when they don't pay you to advertise for them. I will never again put a blog post on my blog unless I see money up for for it. I will not do any free advertising for these crooks anymore. Bloggerwave promises $10 for a post about them on your blog. Yes the post get approved and you think you will get paid - think again. It was 3 months that I had one of their stupid "blog for Bloggerwave" posts on one of my blogs. (up-date, now it is 4 months and I took the blog post down, but it still shows up as active at Bloggerwave)I never got the money they never answered their emails I sent to them - CROOKS. I took the post down last week.

On one of the message boards I frequent one of the posters happen to mention that she saw her name on Bloggerwave as one of their top earners. She said she got about $20 out of them and she is listed as earning over $1K. She wants to know with the money is and what did she post to earn it. All she could write is that she was shaking her head because Bloggerwave had to resort to false advertising about how much you could earn with them.

The dirt on Smorty

2008-01-15T08:22:00.000-08:00

For all those considering working with Smorty here is the real dirt on them:

Run by some foreign name guy who can barely type or read English - at least those are the types of emails I get back from them.
Is owned by Ashop Commerce - same guy owns that one too
Located in NY but they have a IL phone number (according to the Ashop site)
Their post approvals are done in Turkey - probably some relative of theirs
They don't know s*** about programing.

Here is a series of emails from them showing an incident I had this week - I have removed MY info but left theirs:

Message to Smorty: I just added a top domain name to my blog. Blog was http://******.blogspot.com is now www.******.com and the blogspot address posts are being redirected to the new domain. I would just like to change the addy of the blog to reflect that change. WW,

Note the blog in question had been approved by Smorty and had 6 posts on it prior to this request. The blog is about 4 months old.

Dear WW,
All new domains need to be submitted as new blogs in the system as they are all indexed and ranked in Google individually, we cannot transfer it in your account. In this case, you will have to sign up with our new domain. Regards,Seb

Dear Smorty,
Since the old blogspot domain is still active (the new domain name is forwarding everything)and your system will not allow me to sign up another blog until I have 12 posts, what do you suggest would be best? Leave it alone or just add it as another blog when I have the 12 posts? I am sure that you have handled this situation before and can guide me. WW,

This is where the lack of understanding the English language backfires on Smorty

Hi WW,
We cannot do anything other than what I just told you. Different domains mean different PR's and different number of index pages and above all, different domain is a different website.You may fin all the answers to your questions about this in our FAQ.Regards,Seb

Did he even understand my request? And he got snotty with me too boot! So I did what I thought they wanted me to do and deleted the old blogspot addy and added the new one - here is my response back to me:

Dear WW,
Unfortunately your blog was declined due to the following reason(s). Google Page Rank 0 Not enough indexed pages Once you fix these errors you can re-enter your blog(s) from your admin panel under the My Account section. Smorty

This is one company that has it's head up it's ass. Do they even understand the concept of the blogger.com redirect through a purchased domain through Google? Please leave your comments I want to hear you stories about Smorty.

Why are the Google ads on the blog

2008-01-15T00:07:00.000-08:00

I write so anti Google, so why did I put Google ads on the blog? Simple to test out a theory. If I write about a company that Google hates, would a Google ad show up in the blog from that company? Sometimes it has, try it and see.

The 2 faced Google God

2008-01-14T23:58:00.000-08:00

Hey Google I got a bone to pick with you. You claim you want to put a stop to "paid" links in blog posts but you will take money from those companies that are the "middlemen" for those paid blog posts e.g. Pay Per Post and Smorty and run ads for them. I have seen those Google ads for Pay Per Post, so what gives, you 2 faced son of a b**** Google God? I think it is not so much as you don't like paid posts as much as it is competition for your own ads. I bet what you are really doing is kicking yourself for not thinking about doing paid blog posts yourself.

Google, PageRank and all that bull

2008-01-14T23:38:00.000-08:00

Google has laid down the law. If you have "paid" blog posts on your blog your PageRank will get smacked down to 0 or less - gone. Why did they do this? Is their system some holier than thou, bend down to the mighty Google God? If Google was in the real flesh and blood world it would be guilty of persecuting people by association. If I want to put a link to a website on my blog that I like, don't like or just out of thin air put the link there - that is solely my business and not any of the Google God's business. Why does Google even have to assign a PageRank to anything? I guess they can't figure out that if people go to a site in droves that the site might be popular? I have a blog at wordpress that has a PR of 7 but no one visits it. I am lucky if it gets 5 visits a week. On the other hand I have a blog at wordpress that is about 4 months old that has no rank but has over 500 visitors a day. Now as an advertiser which site would you put your ad or paid post on? A no brainer, right? Not according to the Google God, the PR7 site is "better" cuz we say so!

Go ahead Google God - get a life and quit taking bloggers livelihoods away from them.