26 August, 2006

I swear.

But if you understand the potential for money here, you’ll understand why I’ve done this.

Don’t tell me to shave my legs, by the way. It’s not happening.

Bam.

Easy money!

… does my thigh look fat in that picture? >_>

 As I mentioned earlier, I was going to see how much of my phone bill PayPerPost would end up covering in a month’s time. Right now, it looks like I’ll be making progress if my posts for today are approved, and if I make just a few more posts in the next five days, PayPerPost will definitely cover my phone bill.

This is the kind of resource that us smaller bloggers need. We need the ability to have guaranteed revenue, like the big dogs do.

Now to go find a way to drive traffic here. <3

Okay, I am aware on some subconscious level that I’m driving the lot of you nuts with my incessant chatter about making money for blogging, but this is something I cannot pass up.

PayPerPost points out an article that has been dug 40 times on Digg.

In this article, Dan mentions organic posts and their growth alongside the sponsored content. I’d like to mention the organic ads growing alongside the already existing posted content. This alone makes it quite interesting: The advertising is in a method I think is the strongest: Word of Mouth.

Word of mouth is exceptionally powerful, too: You’ve got people to try out your product, and they’re telling their friends. Their friends are more likely to go along with what’s said, because, well gee, that’s their friend, and they trust their friend. Everyone has varying circles of friends, too.

So, if Jim tried Abracadabra Toothpaste, for example, and tells his three poker buddies, Sam, Steve, and John, as well as told his coworkers, Chris, Tina, Pat, then he’s got two spheres of influence there. They can be positive (”My, this stuff got my teeth so white, they can blind God!”) or negative (”That stuff scraped the enamel off my teeth, and now I need dental work!”).

Blogging is much the same way. We all have varying spheres of influence. I have my group of friends from LiveJournal, my org from Anarchy Online, the furries from FurAffinity, people from various other sites I visit, etc. that I can be a potential influence to. PayPerPost is just there to harness that bit of influence we all have, and turn it into positive advertising for those who are buying in on it.

So, while I appreciate Dan’s view on this, I do think he’s missed part of the canvas that needs to be painted.

I’m a bit goal-oriented right now.

Since the passing of my mother, I’ve been doing a few things. One of them is looking for another job. I’ll be damned if it’s my fault we lose this house, so I’m looking for a second job. My goal isn’t too unattainable, provided that Albertson’s works with me. I need an additional $600 per month of income to make sure I can afford my share of the bill, plus have gas money, and money to, well, y’know… eat from.

Another is that I’m starting to do PayPerPost posts a little more often. There’s a very important reason behind this: It’s an experiment. I want to see how much of my phone bill PayPerPost can cover in a month’s time. If this goes as well as I expect it to, next month, expect to hear me shouting how much I really love PayPerPost. (Hint!: If you use me as a referrer, and post at least one legit post on your blog, that’s $5 toward me having next month’s phone bill paid. I’m `payperpost.com at pixelechoes.net`, by the way.)

Assuming my gaining of a second job works, as well as my experiment with PayPerPost, the resulting gains should mean I can relax just a little bit. I could use the time to relax — I’m a walking pile of stress right now, and that’s never a good thing.

Some of you may have even noticed that I usually post two or three things, back to back now, rather than spread them out. It’s because I’m that stressed out. It’s just easier for me to do that. Sorry if it ‘floods your friends page’ on Livejournal, but guess what? I hardly post that regularly, so you’ll survive it.

Okay. Gotta find something else.

By now, I’m certain that most of you have heard about Voice Over IP, or VoIP. It’s an interesting technology that serves a purpose in our society.

The simple of it is this: You have two people, perhaps on opposite sides of the planet, who wish to talk to each other. They could pick up standard telephones and talk, but that can be quite costly, depending on one’s carrier. The same goes with cellphones — the price of verbal communication is not cheap.

Enter the Internet. Each person has a computer with broadband internet — a seeming necessity in our time — and a hardware or software solution that allows them to talk. It could be as simple as a headset with microphone, or a full blown solution that converts an existing landline phone to use the internet for its connection (see Skype, Stanaphone, Vonage, and tons of others).

Depending on the provider at this point, the conversation could be as cheap as paying their monthly internet bill, or as little as a few cents, but is generally cheaper than paying the steeper call prices on a landline.

With that particular advance, it does seem that a lot of companies are going the voice over IP route, simply because of this:
These companies are already paying for an internet connection, which is likely unmetered bandwidth, and therefore in need of good usage. By merging their phones into the existing Internet connection, it removes a point of maintenance - no longer does Joe Phoneman have to come out and inspect the phone jacks. He’s been replaced by Jimmy Cableman, and Andy Itman, who get to work together to make sure your system works.
This also has the added benefit of reducing the number of landline phones that have to be paid for per month. Now, granted, it’s always a good idea to have a landline or two on hand for those days where Level3 Communications doesn’t want to get along with the world, but, as we scoot on into this millenium, I see us moving forward with the effort to unify multiple services, and this is one of them.