Welcome to Something for Nothing

Many of you know that I was one of the first bloggers to sign up with PayPerPost. In fact, I believe I was the 61st blogger. Am I happy with my decision to sign up with PayPerPost? Absolutely!! I love being part of the PayPerPost community. I’ve made a ton of blogging friends and made a chunk of change.

Well, one day about 2-3 months ago PayPerPost did an upgrade to their blogger dashboard (in fact, really created the blogger dashboard). One of the major parts of the blogger dashboard was a list of the top 10 bloggers according to how much they had earned. Well, it turns out that my name was near the top of the list. I was surprised and excited at the prospect of being at the top of the list. I don’t exactly know why. PayPerPost didn’t even put links to our blogs on the dashboard, so there was no traffic gain for being on the list. The reality was that no one even knew who was on the list.

I can only attribute my desire to be on the list to the fact that it’s a great feeling to be at the top of any list. Translation: PRIDE. I think many PayPerPost bloggers will understand this feeling. Let’s just say that this feeling pervaded my blogging over the past 2-3 months. I was driven to stay at the top.

Well, a week or two ago I hit a wall. I realized that I was blogging to stay on top and make more money. That wasn’t fun anymore. I’d done that. Sure, I can use the extra money. Sure, it is fun to be on top. However, I hated the feeling that I HAD to blog each and every day. In fact, I had to blog 3-6 times each and every day. Now all you naysayers out there shouldn’t read into what I’m saying. No, I never sold out on my blog. Everything I’ve written on my blog I’ll stand behind. In fact, my blog readers got all sorts of great stories that they never would have heard otherwise, if it weren’t for PayPerPost. I think I found some pretty creative ways to integrate PayPerPost in my blog. In fact, my wife and I would often discuss how I integrated it into my blog.

All I can say is that I’m glad I nearly stopped blogging for a couple weeks so I could fall of the PayPerPost leaderboard. In fact, I was falling so quickly on the leaderboard that one super-nice postie (I still hate that term) messaged me, asking if I was ok.

My answer is, “I couldn’t be better!”

Dropping off the PayPerPost leaderboard has been liberating for me. The one thing I hate most in life is being forced to do something. Ask the two people who know me best, my wife and my mother, and they will tell you that one thing that makes my blood boil is being forced to do something. Being on the PayPerPost leaderboard made me feel like I was forced to blog every night. I know I still had a choice, but my pride didn’t want me to drop from the leaderboard.

Well, I’ve turned my back on my pride and dropped off the leaderboard. That doesn’t mean I’ve stopped blogging. It also doesn’t mean I don’t love PayPerPost. In fact, to the contrary. I still love both of them. In fact, now I love them even more. I’m just focusing more on what I really love most. Traffic and content.

If you don’t believe me, then check out all my blogs:
Smuggle Me
Something for Nothing
EMR and HIPAA
BYU Sports
Lynn Family Blog
Sports Fundraising
So You Think You Can Dance
Cambrian House Blog - Spoil My Spouse
Original Something for Nothing
Personal Journal Blog (You wouldn’t be able to access it even if there was a link)
and a few more not worth noting.

I think everyone that knows me would agree that I’m a pretty frugal guy. I have a couple things that I don’t mind spending money on, but mostly I just don’t spend money unless there is an absolute need. However, I do have one major weakness. It’s my high speed internet connection. My wife and I have to have it. Sure, I could justify it for my work (and man I wish that my work payed for my home internet like they did at my last job). However, really it’s all about my need for speed on the internet.

Well, guess what? I’m in Las Vegas where there is almost no competition in the broadband internet marketplace. I couldn’t believe it either. It made sense when I lived on the North Shore of Hawaii. It doesn’t make sense in glittering Las Vegas. We basically only have 2 choices for broadband internet in Las Vegas: Cox - Cable Internet and Sprint (or Embarq) - DSL.

I’d been paying $50 a month for Cox’s middle package and I was tired of spending so much. Sprint commercials were saying only $25 a month and that sounded good. $25 savings a month is $300 over the year. That’s a lot of dates with my wife. My wife left town and I was stuck at home with my son so I decided to call Cox and tell them that I was thinking about switching to Sprint. I couldn’t have made a better decision.

I guess in the call center industry they use the term Churn to describe what I did. Call it churn if you like, but I call it genius. Really, I should have known what to expect. I worked at Discover card in the call center and I knew that if it got to my supervisor then they would more than likely hook the person up. If it got to their supervisor then you were absolutely going to get a refund and possibly some extra cash on top of that. It was literally the company’s policy. He told us that if he talked to them, then they were getting hooked up.

Well, it took me 3 phone calls and a number of “I’m really serious about wanting to switch.” to get through, but I did it. The key was to find a reason why I could talk to their supervisor. My reason was that one person told me they could give me a deal and then after they transferred me they said I couldn’t. Booyah!! Give me your supervisor. Turns out Cox actually transferred me to customer service where I again asked for a supervisor. Well, she was busy, but she’d given permission to cut my payment down to $25 a month for 6 months.

I should have known it would work, but I still couldn’t believe it when they actually did it. Did I feel good? Not really. I loved the new rate and still felt like the company was getting paid well for what I was getting. However, it wasn’t what I’d call fun. Hopefully it’s kind of like pregnancy and child rearing. After 6 months you start to forget about how painful and difficult it was.

Ok, so really I just have a complete fascination and love for dancing. Before I got married I would go dancing at least 2-3 times a week. I must admit that I think it’s probably the thing I miss most from my single days at BYU. I can’t really blame my wife, because I love country dancing and there just isn’t the same country dancing available outside of Utah. Utah has a number of nice locations to do country dancing. And all you naive people that translate country dancing to line dancing, WAKE Up!! Sure, I don’t mind doing a line dance here or there. It can be pretty fun. However, I’m talking about so much more than line dancing. I’m talking about partner dancing like 2 step, waltz, cowboy cha cha, west coast swing and what I like to call street swing.

Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t say anything about being a good dancer, but I can lead a girl around the floor. I did get a chance to dance a little at the conference I went to in Texas. That was pretty fun, but still wasn’t the pairs dancing I really like. I’m also lucky that my sister has started to get into country dancing and so when I visit Utah I can take my little sister and go dancing.

Anyway, I digress. For now, I’m just sticking with my addiction to watching dancing on TV. Right now I’m talking about Dancing with the Stars. The professionals are amazing and do a fantastic job making the “stars” look great. If you watch the dancing by the professionals and don’t just love it then we think very differently. That’s ok. Just know that I’m right and you’re wrong.

I still have been following the So You Think You Can Dance Tour reviews, videos etc. I’m excited for next year’s So You Think You Can Dance, but I just don’t think it will be quite the same. This year was too good.

You all know my story of how I found PayPerPost on Digg. I’m blessed to say that I am Postie 61. Yes, that means I was the 61st person to notice the greatness that was to be found in PayPerPost. I knew Ted was on to something and I had to be apart of it.

I must admit that I joined on a whim. I figured even if I didn’t get paid I didn’t care because I had absolutely nothing to lose by doing it. It was for fun. Plus, it had a list of opportunities by fox and speed.tv and I can’t remember all the rest, but they were actual companies and not just link to this piece of spam website.

Well, I have to admit that I think I’ve done quite well for myself. I’ve personally slowed down the rate at which I’m blogging since the initial addiction. I’ll write more about this later. However, here’s a quick summary of my earning since June 30th when I first posted to PPP (PPP=PayPerPost when I’m lazy, which is most of the time).

Number of Paid Posts: 195
Average Posts Per Day: 1.72
Amount Paid by PPP: $1,130.63
Amount To Be Paid by PPP: $329.30
Total Amount Earned with PPP: $1459.93
Average Earned Per Post: $7.49

Right now all of that money just goes into my bank account to cover life expenses. I can’t say I’ve spent it on anything. I just don’t believe in going out and buying something because I just earned $1500 extra dollars. I purchase things because I want to or because some other motivation. The fact I have money doesn’t influence me to spend more. I recently won $20,000 in a business plan contest. All of that money is just sitting in the bank earning more money. I have no reason to spend it. I prefer to just save all the money that I can so that later on down the road I have money in the bank to do whatever I want with it. How boring is that? Oh well, down the road when I have plenty of money to do whatever I want I’m happy.

Now, if I can make a personal request of Ted and PayPerPost. If you can just get the payout for the opportunites to increase by about 2 to 3 times the current rate then I could quit my job and just blog and do consulting work on the side. It would be a great combination since with this increase in payment I would make enough to pay all the bills. Then, anything I do consulting would just be the icing on the cake. Am I dreaming? I don’t really think so. I do need to keep developing my blogs, but I think there is a definite potential for this to happen.

If you read my blog you know that I’m completely fascinated with viral marketing. In fact, I think that viral marketing is incredibly powerful when you have the web available. However, today I came across a video that isn’t viral marketing, but it seems like it’s pretty viral. It’s 2 little boys just going crazy. Can people really watch it and enjoy it? Ok. Sure, I can see their mother and grandmothers watching this video. That should be it. No one else. It’s just not worth it. Don’t waste your time.

Now that I’ve told you this video is no good you’re all going to want to see it. Well, enjoy:

Just come talking to me when you wondered why you wasted the last 3 minutes watching 2 kids that would drive you nuts if you were in the same room while they did this same routine.

Anyone that knows me knows that I absolutely adore Italy. I lived there for two years and fell in love with Italy, the food and just the european lifestyle. I was able to return to Europe three years after living there and I had such a great time. This time I was able to stop in the Netherlands (Holland) and even went down to Antwerpen in Belgium where my brother was on an LDS mission. I just absolutely love Europe. In fact, I’ve told my wife that once our kids are raised and out of the house I would love to move to Europe.

I’m currently partial to living in Italy because I speak Italian and I’m not sure there’s anything in this world quite as good as Italian food. However, I think that I might want to just consider buying a property in Spain. Why you might ask? Well, my wife speaks spanish. I try to speak spanish and would love to learn spanish. So, if I really want to live in Europe then I think I better consider living in Spain. At least I’d be close enough to Italy to travel their often.

I don’t know how many of you saw this, but I’m sure a lot of you already have. Well, I think it’s worth another take. Plus, I think people should see what an idiot Dennis Green looks like in this rant after the Chicago game.

I understand that you should have emotion. I also understand how you could be extremely disappointed that your players couldn’t execute the game plan you created. However, that’s no excuse for looking like an idiot on camera. What was he thinking? Oh wait, that’s the problem he wasn’t thinking. I think Dennis Green was a player if I’m not mistaken. Maybe he got hit in the head a few to many times during his playing days. That kind of reaction is inexcusable.

What happened after? Nothing to Dennis Green. At least nothing I could find. Oh yeah, he did demote his offensive coordinator though. That makes a lot of sense.

I’m sorry that there has been so much PayPerPost chat lately. Wait, no I’m not sorry. I don’t really care. I think PayPerPost is interesting and I can’t wait for this blasted “game” to be done. I hate how long it takes for them to get more images out. Anyway, I’m lucky enough to have another image on my website. It shows some of the bodies of PayPerPost. They seem to be the leaning bodies of PayPerPost.

I think this puzzle has to be one of the most ingenius blog marketing ideas I’ve seen out there. Ted is sick today. I feel bad for those working at PPP. It’s a small group right now and one person sick is a major blow.

At least he has a nice big fat PayPerPost truck to make him feel better. I hope he comes by Vegas and lets me drive it down the strip while he films!! Yeah baby!! All hail the payperpostbluemonster.

It seems like blogging for me is really just all about addiction. I might be using the term addiction to broadly, but it is really true. The reason I blog is because it is addicting. I would say that without stats and PayPerPost I wouldn’t blog nearly as much. However, those 2 things set blogging apart for me.

Right now I’m feeling like I might be a little too addicted to PayPerPost. I expect my wife will eventually read this and agree wholeheartedly with me. I don’t know why she should really care because I’m not really going to spend less time on the computer. If I didn’t have a PayPerPost addiction then I’d still be on the computer doing something else. I think what I’ve been doing lately is thinking about what I really should be focusing on.

One thing I’ve been seriously considering is how much I’ve participated on the PayPerPost forum. I really enjoy interacting with those bloggers on the forums. I also love to be helpful. However, I’m not sure what benefit I’m deriving from it. I’ve been thinking that maybe I should stop on the forums unless there is a steamy topic that I want to get in on. Instead, I’ll move that time over to working on my own blogs and also commenting on other people’s blogs. While I’ll miss some of the interaction, I think that I can build some of the same interactions by visiting other blogs and commenting on them.

I’ve also been missing my regular visits to digg lately. I still hit it up every once in a while, but not nearly as much as I would like. I think it’s important for me to do so since it keeps me up on what’s happening with technology.

Also, I hope that everyone that reads this blog will go and vote for my Cambrian House Idea called Spoil My Spouse. You can read more about it Spoil My Spouse on my Cambrian House blog.

Everyone that reads this should know that I’m making money using payperpost Well, I must admit that I’ve really enjoyed watching Ted do what he does best - marketing. Imagine giving a creative marketer $3 million in funding and letting him decide the best way to market something that bloggers and advertisers will love. Essentially that’s what Ted at PayPerPost has going on right now.

Today’s latest entry is what Ted is calling the Postie Patrol. Check out the video:

I must admit that I found the video quite entertaining. The cab driver was fantastic. Also, I think Ted should make sure he’s the one running the camera. It’s always so much more enjoyable to see Brit on camera than seeing Ted. Although, Ted’s commentary is nice as long as Brit’s in the frame.

Ted said something interesting in the video that he was 30 minutes early. Why did time matter? I guess he called beforehand to find out if he could come? I guess that makes sense if he didn’t want to be at someone’s house and they aren’t there. However, it’s much more exciting to do it without anyone knowing he’s there.

I would love it if Ted came to my house. Too bad I’m pretty sure he never will. I don’t think he could afford the cost of putting my son on camera.