Stuff and Nonsense

A post made of scraps of stuff.

Knewsroom my favourite place to write for money has had to drop their article reward rates from $150 to $25 after some less than scrupulous people were taking advantage of the article investment system. Combined with the new editorial standards, the drop will ensure better quality stories are published. I guess the Knewsroom team is living and learning the fact that in an ideal world there are still people willing to be shits to get their hands on money. I do hope there will be no pay out for the gamers.

For writers out there that want to whip up a quick 500 word story for $25 OR for non-writers who want to share in the advertising revenue generated by the stories the writers write click here to join..

Things are starting to hot up in Thirty Day Challenge world. If you are following me on Twitter or FriendFeed or where ever you will probably see me evangelising a little about my favourite time of the year, challenge time. Old faces are returning and the new faces are as excited and energetic as last year, and this is only pre-season!

If you have no idea what I am talking about, or are here after a search about the Thirty Day Challenge, here is my view of the whole thing.

An Australian and an English guy take total newbies through the process of how to make their first $1 on the internet - for free.

Simple.

You learn and practice the process as you go along, and by the end of the month hopefully you have made $1, or learned enough so next attempt you will make that $1, or learned enough to know that it is hard work making money on the internet and won’t get sucked in by “gurus” promising quick wealth using an “easy” system.

If you want to give it a go click here to sign up….you really have nothing to lose but some time and newbishness.

*Fingers crossed* that my name gets pulled out of the hat on Friday for one of five iPhones on offer over at UpStart blogger, who have just changed back to their original blog design.

Then I Go And Do The Complete Opposite

Yeah, yeah on Friday I was all about resting and looking after myself by staying in bed and reading a book. That hasn’t happened and here comes the justification.

Remember my post about a couple of ways I was willing to swap my time for a free MacBook Pro. One of those being an entry into the Marketing Pilgrim’s Search Engine Scholarship competition. Come Friday night I knew I was way too fatigued to get my head together to write something of any value so I wrote it off as an “oh well next time” kind of thing.

I woke up Saturday morning feeling pretty fresh and was checking out my Google Reader when lo and behold I see the post that Andy Beal had extended the deadline. Now to me that means two things, one there has not been many entries or not many of any note, and two I had the whole weekend to give it a crack.

Up went the motivation levels and I quickly scribbled down a diagram about what I was to write about. About two hours effort later (shockingly inadequate but all I am going to spend) I have submitted it. I really wanted to to be proof read by someone else before doing so, but Twitter is up and down like a bride’s nightie at the moment and on impulse I pressed send. Then I saw a typo in the text…. *sighs*

When it is published on the Marketing Pilgrim site I would like everyone to have a look and be genuine in your feedback and social love. I have not really put myself up as any kind of font of knowledge in this area before and have relied heavily on how I would like to see articles written.

Anyway each attempt is one step up the ladder in experience, and even if you think it is total crap I will learn from it.

Hot on the heels of that piece of work I submitted another two articles to Knewsroom and saw them published. That is another $300 in the kitty. If I keep this up I will have enough for a fully kitted out Macbook Pro in just over a week….still have to see the cash yet.

So here it is Sunday afternoon and I am writing a couple more Knewsroom articles and only then will I put some time into my eBook. I have the feeling that every day I don’t get it published is a bunch of sales down the drain, but maybe that is just my incurable optimism. The revised day for publication will now be more like next Friday.

A Good Day

Quick snippets of news from my day that really are relevant I swear!

Snippet 1: Knewsroom got their back end in gear and busted out the totals for work produced in the first couple of days. My 3 published articles and various investments made me US$468. For the amount of time I invested this was a bountiful return! Hurrah for Knewsroom

Snippet 2: The SpyBiz article about my being a Geek Girl Blogger was published today. I realised after the fact that there are bits from my geeky past that I forgot to add in, like meeting my (now ex) husband on a BBS back in 1985, or writing game reviews for AtomicMPC . or my PC building and modding, or my game playing (cannot wait for Spore to be released!)…but I think you get the picture, I am a Geek and and Girl…and I blog.

Snippet 3: I may be a bit quiet for the next two days in my usual haunts such as twitter as I am trying very hard to write something decent for MarketingPilgrim’s SEO Scholarship. Erm yes I have left it till the last moment and am despairing that i will even get it finished in time to get it in….just need to figure out what to write about

A lazy post i know, apologies!

What The Hell Was I Worried About?

This week has so far been a whole heap of “signs” from the universe that I am being silly worrying about product creation. Sure those sign are just my Reticular Activating System (RAS) kicking in and showing me what I want/need to see, but boy does it feel good.

First off was a rash of launches by marketers that lead to a bunch of free stuff being offered as sweeteners to sign up. As discussed in this previous blog post I do not like paying for crap and have been fearful of producing crap myself. So I took the time and read/researched and ripped into some of this free information, and you know what? I can do that!

Next off, seemingly unrelated, by highly relevant to me, was vindication of my writing/analytical skills by my PPC ad campaign Project Super Nova.  After running for 3 days UK vs USA, I decided to test which country was actually buying. Turns out it was the USA. The USA also had a preference of one ad over another. The current figures for that ad are20.89% CTR at position 1.2 @ 33c. I am limiting to a measly $10 a day, but the PPC has certainly bought traffic AND sales up!

Thirdly I have been selected by @SpyJournal as a Geek Girl blogger to interview for a feature on …female geek bloggers. Very flattering and allowed me some reflection time on why I do the things I do.  One of them being that I love to get my “stuff” out there.  Time to get one of my products finished.

Lastly I have been having a fair bit of success on Knewsroom writing articles. I wish I had more time to improve the quality, as $150 a published item is nothing to sneeze at. This has been great fun (but also a time sucker) and got me in the mood to keep going with the product.

Plan is to have it up and on sale by this weekend. I am quite excited!

The other projects are pottering along, guru.com is sending me quotes daily on one of them which also will need to be picked up in earnest next week.

Stay tuned

Kreating The Knews

I am a sucker for new things that are based on a great idea. I believe that Knewsroom has the potential to have a bit of an impact on the way news is imparted on the internet. In its infancy though, the balance of material linked to is fairly and squarely not original content, which is a real shame.

But I jump ahead.

What is this Kluster thing that is running Knewsroom?

Well, the best way of learning what they are is by looking at their history page. This is the cutting edge up so close and in stop motion photography so you can see the skin peeling apart and the blood vessels rupturing. All sounds very dramatic, but this could be the start of something BIG (as they say in the classics).

Flick over then to the Theater page and watch the movies for a bit of fun.

So these guys have been to TED and have a cool web presence and utterly rock their world. I like them and their attitude,and hope that their journey has a better ending than Pippa Bacca’s who also set out to change the world with grand ideals.

Back to the Knewsroom; which appears to have spawned while things are quiet in the design part of the site. Lots of pent up creative people with nothing to do is so much potential energy going to waste, and so a community driven “news you want to read about” is evolving.

Now it is pretty clear that the original idea will need some work, as I mentioned above the links to pre-written stories on other news sites seems to me, to defeat the entire process. Why read tomorrow about something that you could have read today. There needs to be an influx of clever people and writers (like the people I like to follow on Twitter) bunging their stuff up there act as the catalyst for others to also join in (I hope my Twitter friends are reading this).

Also as the whole thing is in its infancy a group of 3 or more people should be able to influence what is on the front page just by block investment. This probably already happens, so investing where others are, rather than what you would like, is the smart move….and totally against the whole notion of group choice.

For my marketing friends I see this as also an opportunity to demonstrate authority should you fit into one of the wide (but in reality narrow if you are focussed entirely on internet marketing) subject headers. Get a following and you will be raking in the attention (and supposedly the bucks).

Even though there is potential to make money on this site, I really think that is a minor part of the whole thing. I get off on being in a crowd (or leading a crowd) that is working on something exciting.

Maybe this will be something awesome, stupendous, game-changing….or maybe it was just yesterday’s news.

UPDATE: Knewsroom now pays $150 for each original story published!