I signed up for PayPerPost!

Now what is PayPerPost? It is a place where you can write posts on your blogs and earn some cash doing what you love best, blogging! Their website describes their value proposition as follows:

"Get paid for blogging. Write about web sites, products, services, and companies and earn cash for providing your opinion and valuable feedback to advertisers. Disclosure required."

What is payperpost?
What payperpost does is that that match up advertisers with bloggers to generate interest about the advertisers' products or services using the viral marketing element that blogs and bloggers provide. It is a form of ads on blogs. You can see it as word-of-mouth type of advertising except that the mouth is more the blogger, the computer and the blog site that allows you to monetise your favourite activity: BLOGGING! :-)

I have signed up with PPP since June 2007 so I have been with the program for about one month. Initially, I was a little bit sceptical on when I would see my first paid post as while there were a number of paid blogging opportunities on payperpost, a number of them had pre-requisites which as a newbie postie, I didn't qualify. However, there were also a number of paid post opportunities that were open to newbies as well. I tried one of them and guess what? I snagged my first USD 7.50 for that post. It was not all smooth sailing, one of my other posts got rejected as I didn't use the requisite key words and appropriate labels as requested by the advertiser.

Due to personal commitments, I didn't check out payperpost opportunities for about 2 weeks and then one day I received an email saying that there was a PPP direct opportunity. That meant an advertiser wanted me to blog about something and would pay me USD 5.00 for doing it! I managed to login and wrote a post reviewing the website www.debthelp.com. That took me the whole of about 30 minutes. After the post was done, I was surprised to find that after a couple of days, payperpost credited my paypal account with USD 5.00! That was very quick and efficient on their part!

What I love about PayPerPost
What I love best about PayPerPost is that they pay relatively fast once the post has been approved. The approval part for my initial posts were a bit longer but for my recent post it took about 3 days. In my 1 month plus experience with PayPerPost, I have made USD 5.00 + USD 7.50 (with USD 5.00 already paid into my paypal today!).

I will use this money to buy myself a nice cappucino to reward myself for a job well done! :-)

While I have not made any new friends through PayPerPost, I have learned more about writing for a specific purpose and to sharpen my skills in reviewing and commenting about a website or topic. The opportunity to practice writing and evaluating some content helps me to write even better for my other blog posts as well!

If your interest is piqued and you like to write blogs, why do pay PayPerPost a visit? You might find that they can help you monetise your blog and reward you for what you already love to do: write blogs!

Does AdSense Work? A Singaporean Perspective

Many of you have heard of AdSense. Some of you who like myself have started trying it out recently. And some of you are even AdSense experts making decent pocket money running AdSense advertisements in your blog, website or portal.

Is AdSense for real?
The burning question that I had when I was in your shoes on 27 March 2007 when I first started my AdSense journey was... Is this for real?

Like many sceptical Singaporeans, I thought will an idea like AdSense work in our context? Isn't it more US-centric and hence most of the value will be created there and not here? These and many doubts filled my mind as I hesitantly dabbled in the world of AdSense. As expected, because I was only "playing" with it and not seriously thinking about how to run a proper blog, my results were mediocre to say the least.

A slow start in AdSense
I had an AdSense account since 27 March 2007 but didn't really go into placing Ads and more importantly creating focussed content on my blogs until sometime in mid-May 2007. Hence, my early results were not surprisingly, dismal. Average single digit number of page impressions and a click-through-rate (CTR) of 0.00% which translates into earning of ... a......grand ..... total of...

Zero, nil, nada, kosong and 零蛋!


I began to read up about how AdSense works and what it takes to generate traffic to my blog. What I learnt was to engage the internet community, to participate in relevant forums, to post quality content about things I know and to develop a niche where I am comfortable blogging whether AdSense earnings comes (or not!). Lo and behold, my results starting to become better as I blogged on specific topics I understood, for example, treasury bills. I also blogged about my approach to financial freedom and discussed topics that were generated because, you, readers asked questions about how to invest in this type of instrument or that type of instrument.

Turning the corner
My efforts were starting to bear fruit. Prior to the increased intensity and depth to which I wrote my blog posts, my results were only a meagre USD 6.41 as at 31 May 2007 as seen below:


But it climbed up steadily as what I wrote appears to have resonated with my audience, my page impressions started to go up to 100, 150 and hit a high of 274 at one stage! Consumer behaviour is such that typical click-through rates are closer to 1% to 5% for the "average" website and I was quite happy to see that as at 15 June 2007, it has grown to the current USD 48.99 for the period of 1 June to 15 June 2007. I would like to thank all readers who have found value in my blog in learning and sharing together about how we can grow save money, invest wisely and grow together on our journey towards realistic financial freedom.

Google AdSense allows you to request for cash-out only when you reach USD 100. Hence, I am still working hard to deliver useful content in this and other of my blogs so that more people can join this learning journey together towards total financial freedom. ;-)

What I continue to learn from my AdSense journey
I learnt from my AdSense journey that it boils down to human behaviour and you need to generate genuine human traffic so that the relevant ads when delivered to the targetted group of potential interested visitors will translate into a click to the advertiser's webpage. In order to do that, there are no shortcuts except to write useful content, have a clean design and to invest in writing about things you love or or passionate about. Like many of you, I am passionate about financial freedom but I am realistic enough to understand that there is no short-cuts to success. My blogging regime takes me past 1 am most nights and can be very tiring physically. But mentally I am all charged up and enthused because I believe in what I write and I write what I believe in.

For those of you who may have that hidden talent, that pet topic, that immense experience in a field or domain that many others do not possess. If you are able to write, an articulate your thoughts and have sufficient IT skills to set up a blogger / wordpress blog or your own website, consider trying out AdSense. It might just earn you enough to pay off your broadband connection and perhaps help you add to your retirement fund! ;-)

Be well and prosper, and you may prosper in five cents and ten cents with AdSense.

Advertlets.com : An Asian Review Me! and Payperpost?

I have been blogging furiously for the last 3 weeks and have been exploring the various ways of monetising my blogs partly as an experiment to see how far I can take this activity that I already enjoy doing! I am still experimenting with Review Me! which pays bloggers for reviews on certain products or services by advertisers and also Payperpost where you are bid for opportunities to write posts on your blogs for a fee typically ranging from USD 5.00 to USD 25 and up to USD 250 or more.

As part of my experiment, I came across a blog of a Singaporean blogger through myweblogs and saw that that lady blogger has an Advertlet advertisement and I followed the link to get to www.Advertlets.com. This is when I saw that Advertlets.com has a business model that is quite close to Review Me! and Payperpost except that it was localised to the Malaysian and Singapore blogosphere.

Why I signed up with Advertlets
I took the plunge and signed up with Advertlets because I thought the business model could work since it had already been tried out in the US. While globalisation has broadened the definition of one's market from local to the whole world, not everything can be transplanted across borders without some content localisation. Think about it, not all advertising campaigns that work are universal in their appeal. Even Visa advertisements use the China 110m hurdle champion to help sell their cards and to tie in with the Beijing Olympics 2008. I believe that it is now an exciting time to be involved in a relatively new business paradigm of delivering advertising content using the viral marketing effects of blogs as blogs are the closest thing to a one-to-one word of mouth advertising but yet having the potential for its messages to reach from one blogger to many -- think of the reach that Mr. Brown's podcasts has on Singapore! Simply amazing!

What I Hope to Get From Advertlets
Globalisation also means global competition and my experience with Review Me! and Payperpost shows that it is very difficult to monetise blogs without a lot of effort. Even with lots of effort, it is not that straightforward. For example, my blogs were deemed unworthy of Review Me! due to my relative lack of page rank value by Google nor any mention by Alexa. Hence, I can only participate as an affiliate instead of being a blogger that could be tied up with an advertiser to deliver content about their product or service. While I realise that Advertlet has to also take into consideration reach of blogs and a blog with an audience of 1 would not bring much value to their advertisers, there should be room for the smaller blogs who write with an intensity, quality and passion that will give them the potential to reach out to a much wider audience with sufficient time for them to grow through social networking and connections with other bloggers in the local blogosphere.

Suggestions On How Advertlets Can Improve Further
The concept of a blog advertising network is still new in the region and the value-add that Advertlets can bring to this business model is content localisation. To some extent, it is a numbers game, i.e. the more high quality bloggers who are influential, have reach and are able to articulate views and opinions that resonate with the target demographics, the better Advertlets can sell advertisements to potential clients. The term "Think global but execute local" is perhaps helpful in allowing us to remember that the success (or failure) of any venture depends on executing it. Advertlets can leverage on its first-mover advantage by providing delivering multi-lingual ads and also segmenting its blogger publisher community into niches that will appeal to the advertisers. For more bloggers to come on board, the real test would be, "Show me the money". ;-)



Try Advertlets out now
The true test of any pudding is in the eating. Do try out advertlet if you are already an avid blogger and just love to write. Who knows, you may be the next Mr.brown or Xiaxue. ;-)