Experiences

Spamming continues to haunt this site

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Spamming continues to haunt this site

Many of you read the post I placed last week regarding the number of attempted SPAM signups I had received in 24 hours after installing the Stop Spammers plugin. I was astounded at the time that I could possibly gain all this attention in a mere 24 hours but the fun seems to have just been beginning at that point. That was only 8 days ago and lo and behold, this plugin has not stopped doing its work thank goodness! What the next eight days brought Here’s what the new stats show today (June 18) at 2:36 PM eastern time:…

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May 2013: A tale of goal setting failures

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May 2013: A tale of goal setting failures

Ironically enough in April I sort of took myself to task for failing to meet many of my hard-set goals. Well, if April was bad, May was a complete failure in terms of nearly all of my goals. I cannot even begin to explain most of the problem although I have been sick most of the month so if needed I will blame that. Ironically enough, private clients accounted for nearly all of the work I did in May which is probably a good thing since the other stats were so bad that I’m almost afraid to share them! Blogs: Yuk!…

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Next Battle: Taking on Google AdSense

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Next Battle: Taking on Google AdSense

Many of you may recall that back in November of 2012, I lost my blog for an indeterminate period of time.  At that time, I wrote the post “Con Artists Prefer Silence“.  My site was hacked into and completely disrupted for several days while I tried to figure out what was going on. Fortunately for me, I had much of my data backed up. Unfortunately, many of my screen shots, images and even some nifty keywords were lost in the shuffle. I’m still working on cleaning up some of these posts which now look like a kid posted them because…

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April 2013: Goals attained and missed

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April 2013: Goals attained and missed

In my ongoing determination to keep up with goals I set, based on the original January goals I am not doing so hot but remember, I did change these goals in early April. So, with that said, let’s see how well April worked out. In fairness, I should disclose I did not work the last week of April (or the first week of May) regularly (which is why this post is going up today nearly 1/3 of the way through May) so that had an impact on my productivity clearly!  But let’s see how things stacked up! Blogs – April…

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Sometimes it is worth the fight!

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Sometimes it is worth the fight!

I am not known as someone who will sit back and take things lightly — in fact when I feel that someone is being treated unfairly I’ll jump right in and defend them. Sometimes, that does not always translate well into what I will do to fight for myself, but I decided to wage war against Twitter a few weeks back. Some of you will remember the post I wrote about Twitter Customer Service and how poorly they responded to my repeated emails regarding my account. I lost my password sometime between changing computers. Well, I promised I was going…

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Subscriber Milestones: A total head fake!

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Subscriber Milestones: A total head fake!

Yesterday I was tickled to death to see I had reached 300 subscribers on my blog. Daily I am getting about 200 new views (wait until I tell you the most popular search term!) on my blog so this is exciting! Finally, after nearly four years, I’m seeing what appears to be some real movement. But look at that image!  I was actually DELETING the 300th subscriber from this blog! Why you may ask? Can you read that name? No me either.  I have a plugin called Ban Hammer on my site and when I added it I added this…

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Content Mills: Like it or not they are valuable

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Content Mills: Like it or not they are valuable

I recently read a very well written blog post from a freelance writer who made the argument that freelancers should not start off their careers using a content mill. The theory is these sites encourage poor writing, encourage writers to accept lower rates of pay and stunt the growth of most writers. However, in my personal experience, this is simply false in many ways. Experience matters For many freelance writers who are just getting started (myself included), they may have not written anything since their school days. While there is some truth to the fact that many graduates who have…

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Plagiarism: Even lawyers might not understand

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Plagiarism: Even lawyers might not understand

Generally I avoid writing about personal anecdotes for the simple reason that people don’t really give a crap what you’ve had for breakfast, lunch or dinner. I don’t care to be frank about it and in a lot of cases, when I read personal stories I sort of find myself glazing over. However, every now and again, something happens that really needs to have a blog post of its own.  Last night I ran into one of those situations and I was stunned at the ignorance of what I was hearing.  Here’s (in my own words) a conversation I overheard…

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March 2013: Goals attained and missed

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March 2013: Goals attained and missed

March was a strange month and while I think that most of my goals fell short of where they should have, it wasn’t all that bad. There are also some changes to my January goals which should be noted. Most specifically, I will never meet my Textbroker goals as I’ll only be doing select writing at that site. The bulk of the work I originally planned to do there will be done at Blogmutt instead.  In addition, the Skyword goals are shot to hell because frankly, there are not enough new articles to warrant setting any kind of goal there…

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Why some people find it easy to write

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Why some people find it easy to write

For some writers, a single article may involve typing for painful hours on end until it comes out just right. They often feel that they spend too long on their work and are always curious why some people find it easy to write. There is no great mystery, the answers may be more evident than you think. Some articles may take a long time, other times an online article is fast to write. Some of the factors in determining how long it takes to write an article include: Writing about what they know For many writers, writing about what they…

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How to Create Online Income to Pay Bills

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How to Create Online Income to Pay Bills

Internet marketing, freelancing, article writing and blogging are all possible ideas to earn money online. Can they really help pay bills? The economy is in difficult shape, this is no big secret to anyone. For many, this means looking at additional means of earning income to help pay bills. Chances are that if you are like thousands of other people, you are searching online for opportunities that will allow you to earn additional income. While it is true that there are ways that you can earn income from various online activities, it is important that you know what you are getting…

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What happened to February 2013!

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What happened to February 2013!

So here we are again at the end of another month!  First I broke one of my rules: You know the one about not feeding trolls in forums or actually it was more like getting into shouting matches with idiots but ya, that I blew big time.  This was another mixed bag month though I did manage to take two full weekends OFF which I think is a record for me. I did not take them off back to back though! So let’s see what the good bad and ugly of this short month was.  So let’s see what is…

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Working at home: Silly pro and con arguments

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Working at home: Silly pro and con arguments

It is astounding to me in this day and age that Yahoo! has decided to bring their “work-at-home” staff members back into their offices. However, what I find even more ridiculous is some of the views that people have about this move.  I speak from many years of experience. Before I began freelancing in 2007,  I worked at home for two local companies. For me, this was not because I had children at home or because of any other reason that would make a lot of sense to people like Farhad Manjoo  whom I have a great deal of respect for…

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Update: Microsoft Support

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Update: Microsoft Support

A couple of weeks ago I posted about a purchase of Windows 8 and complained about a vendor that really gave me a problem.  However, I do want to follow up on this post because something really remarkable happened. After this post I went back and read the forum where I had posted my original complaint and saw that the person responding suggested I should contact Microsoft Support. I honestly did not expect to get anyplace with this but decided that it wouldn’t hurt to check.  So I called them and I spoke to a very nice young man and…

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Recapping January 2013

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Last month I was determined to set out some attainable goals for 2013 and see if I could do everything possible to meet them. Well, January was a mixed bag of success and failure, some controllable, others not so much.  Because I feel the best way to meet goals is to hold my own feet to the fire, I figured I should see how I did on those goals for the month of January, especially since some of them were monthly goals. So let’s take a look at the good, the bad and the not so good. The blogs This…

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