However, contrary to reports on the internet that say Paypal has offered no excuse, or justification, they have attempted an explanation. They have said that they are trying to prevent personal accounts being used for business purposes in an attempt to avoid paying Paypal fees.

There seems to be something underlying this though because I am sure that many people in US and Europe do the same thing but have not been penalised for it. However, despite all the comments, tweets and facebook comments flying around the internet I am certain Paypal does not intend to cheat anyone of their money. This is a huge company with a reputation for honesty and security over the internet, not some tin pot here today, gone tomorrow outfit.

While I do appreciate that those in Indian who need their money are suffering because of the situation, I’m sure it will be resolved quickly.  Word has it that Paypal was allowing business payments but has now stopped those as well.

There are many Indian IT coders who work for companies all over the world and get paid exclusively by Paypal and they have been left helpless by the situation. Money may be sent to them but it is being sent back.

Moneylife put forward the idea that this could have something to do with FEMA, the foreign exchange maintenance act in India, or to do with the RBI money laundering legislation brought into being in India during November 2009. So, it may be that Paypal is not the one at fault. It could be that so much money is being moved into India via Paypal and headed ‘gift’ that the government has been missing out on large amounts of tax and they want the loophole plugged.

The only sure way round this until it is sorted out, no matter what the reasons are, is to find an alternative way of getting payment. As for the money held by Paypal, I am sure that it will be released shortly, along with a whole list of new rules, regulations and charges.

Cover of On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

According to the Pew Internet Project, bloggers are aging.  According to the report “a decline in blogging among teens and young adults and a modest rise among adults 30 and older.”  This should not come as a surprise.  For while the percentage of adults over 25 who reported as having read a book decreased to 47.3 percent; that decline was less evident in the 45 to 54 subgroup and was even less evident overall when you account for educational attainment.  Furthermore, reading habits are not necessarily an indicator of reading proficiency.  (Adults might well be able to read—they might just be reading magazines and newspapers rather than novels.)  By contrast, when one measures reading proficiency among teenagers, one finds that it dropped to 35 percent from a “high” of 40.  No wonder then, as 18-year old Sarah Rondeau puts it “People these days don’t find reading that fun.”

And if you don’t find reading “that fun”, you will also not find writing all that much fun either.  In On Writing, Stephen King tells writers that they must “read a lot and write a lot.”  The more and the more widely we read, the more likely are we not only to write well but to write at all.  In short, when we stop reading, we also stop writing.

So the stereotype of the 13-year old stuck behind the computer screen may still be in vogue, it’s highly unlikely that this youngster is blogging.  Most likely he or she is on Facebook or tweeting.  To write a blog—or anything else—one must , after all, read.  Otherwise, it is not only difficult to write but also not a whole lot of fun.

It should thus come as no surprise that bloggers are aging.

Image via CrunchBase

One of most critical strategies to increase your article marketing for your own business, as well as your clients’ businesses is to expand your search engine visibility. Through trial and error, I have found the following techniques to be very beneficial.

Write articles

It’s not hard to write articles. You don’t have to be a certified writer or publisher. As long as you follow good down-to-earth grammar, punctuation, and spelling guidelines, you CAN write your own articles and not have to pay someone else to write them for you.

Have Your Articles Distributed Far and Wide

Choose a good content distribution service where you can submit your articles and let them do all the leg work for you in getting your articles out to the hungry publishers and content site owners. Once such site that I use is Content Crooner. They have over 2,000 sites that they distribute articles to.

Socialize

The advantages of belonging to social networking sites are multiple. Using social media can increase your visibility in search engines. Setting up profiles, commenting, adding friends – this can all contribute to raising your status as an expert in the search engines. By adding links to your comments and profile pages, you will eventually begin to see increased traffic to your website or blog. The increased traffic will, in turn, raise your page rank scores.

Contribute

Contribute what, you might ask. Contribute by commenting on other people’s blogs, commenting in forums, sharing articles on your website, and making helpful comments on other articles you read, if the site owner allows comments. By making positive, helpful comments, you are going to be recognized as an expert in your particular niche. By doing so, people are going to want to learn more about you. They’re going to search you out in Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and other search engines.

Blog

You don’t have to have a blog that a developer creates for you that costs you a lot of money. You can create your own blog on hosting websites quickly and easily. When writing on your blog, you are using a journalistic mind frame – write from the heart while utilizing research material and/or personal experience to keep your reader’s interest up.

Promote

Here’s where a quality content distribution service like Content Crooner comes into play. You will want to take advantage of special features that the service might offer. For example, perhaps you can take advantage of special sharing options that a service might have or special partnerships in order to obtain prominent position on one or several top article marketing directories.

A virtual assistant needs to do multiple article marketing strategies in order to increase search engine visibility — not only for in order to become successful for your own company, but also for your clients. Now is the time to learn the techniques I’ve mentioned above and increase your value and your potential for success. Don’t wait; do it now!

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Am I super hot? Not really. But maybe there’s someone out there who’d be into me. Who’d subscribe to my site, convinced that I had that certain je ne sais quois, that certain something they’ve been searching for.

Even though I’d never have the guts to go through with it, the other day I attempted to research this article by googling what the going rate for amateur pics is.

Needless to say I got a whole lot of spam and porno websites, and there was no concrete number. There was one web cam site where you could set your own prices, but that’s not quite the same thing is it?

What’s the moral of this story? Don’t do porn, don’t take naked pictures? No. It’s probably that I’m too lazy to be a porn star. It requires too much effort to find out the going rate for erotica.

Of course, since I have quite a common name, most of the times that it appears it is referring to someone else, very commonly that John Walsh who leads America’s Most Wanted – once, in Abu Dhabi, while waiting for my daughter who was attending a dental appointment, I picked up a magazine and opened it to find a double-page headline ‘Terrorists Threaten John Walsh,’ which was momentarily alarming. It is because of having a common name that I have always supported the use of numbers rather than names. My undergraduate degree is in English Language and Literature and at one stage we were studying Zamyatin’s We; all other students thought that using a number instead of a name was dehumanizing and totalitarian while I alone thought it liberated the individual because it would give me a name not shared by anyone else.

There are other well-known John Walshes – one writes regularly for The Independent, for example, and another has a bagpipe operation. I have also found executives of companies who flare briefly in the media spotlight and then fade away. A more long-term friend has been the John Walsh who is the Sheriff of Butte, a place I have never been and would perhaps have difficulty locating on a map – alas, my acquaintance with the Sheriff is based on crime and I tend to hear about him only when something unpleasant has happened in or around Butte (it seems to have been quiet for the last few days). Crime, given the nature of the popular media, has in fact become a constant companion: at least two of my namesakes have been brutally murdered over the past year and I believe another was convicted of horrendous crimes. Less startlingly, there is another Walsh who writes articles from a pro-Christian viewpoint, another whose blog and indeed self is located in North Dorchester, MA and any number of Irish Gaelic football players and athletes.

What, if anything, does all of this mean? Well, it is certainly a reminder of the breadth of human experience and, simultaneously, a reminder of how focused we are on the same elements of life (survival, career, self-expression: maybe Maslowe had it right after all). It also indicates the ubiquity of this technology and the possibility of the globalization of knowledge. Above all, it shows the spread of alienation reintegrated through technology – Walsh (and its variants) means ‘foreigner’ (i.e. a Welsh migrant to Ireland) and so, wherever we go, we are foreigners who are connected tenuously with other foreigners.

Image via Wikipedia

I was working on my blog yesterday, trying to post something that would be of use to the blog’s readers.  I was thinking of page views and marketing.  I was thinking of search engines.  I was thinking of online money making.

I put together well over 100 words of new text and then used several words from the archives.  The new text insured that the search engines would pick up the post even though the post was mainly already published text. 

Of course I checked all my stats.  The blog recently passed 26,000 hits.  It took the blog almost a year and a half to get all those hits but 26,000 hits are still 26,000 hits.  When a reader visits your blog, those many hits and those many months tells a reader that a blogger is serious about blogging.  This may influence a reader not only to return or bookmark the blog but maybe even to subscribe to it.

I consider my blog a marketing tool.  Many bloggers consider their blogs  marketing tools.

Yet yesterday I sat back and realized that my blog was more than just a tool.  I look forward to blogging and to doing pay-for-content work.  I realized that I was happy to be doing this work.  I’m having fun, plain and simple.  Fun.  Something most children, if they are lucky, know something about.

Cindy Lauper’s song was a big hit; because girls and boys too just want to have fun.  And if you are having fun your readers will probably have fun, too.

My blog: Pittsburgh Flash Fiction Gazette

Image via Wikipedia

I remember when Dolly Parton tried rock and roll.  She was terrible.

But if a blogger or a content word worker doesn’t try something new, readership may never grow to any real extent.  It’s a real dilemma, especially if making money online is an objective.  I’m not talking big money.  Let’s say a hundred dollars a month.  That’s not much.  But for many of us it may be out of reach, a fantasy that will forever remain a dream.  Why is that?

When a blogger or a content worker picks a general area to work in, the size of his or her potential audience may be huge.  The problem is to reach that audience.  Add to this the probability that there may be millions of other bloggers trying to reach the same audience and you have an idea of the impossibility of some bloggers or content workers ever reaching a large audience. 

Now that I blog only four times a week, I know that the Gazette will never be a big time blog.  What it is doing is sending five, six and seven hits to my Triond content every day.

So, depending on your subject and the number of people working the same subject your readership may always be a small readership.  As bloggers and content workers our problem then becomes, how well do we serve that readership?

Dolly Parton is lucky that country is big and she’s one of the best.

So what does this all mean for the way in which we will surf the web in 2010?  Quite a lot, actually.  For starters, as normblog points out, “this is not good news for bloggers.”  It isn’t good news for blog readers either.  If the best a blogger can do is re-type an article or (due to copyright laws) summarize it, the reader, will have to trust the blogger to get the story right.  In other words, you will have to trust that the amateur (generally speaking) news reporter will not read what he/she wants to read but what’s actually there.  And how much credibility will even big, well-established news blogs such as Huffington Post continue to have if they can no longer direct their readers to articles in the New York Times?

It’s also not good news for Google, Yahoo, and other search engines.  According to a recent study, approximately 26 percent of readers use Google to find news stories.  Will people continue to do that if they know they are unlikely to read the articles free of charge?  (This is unlikely to impact the 44 percent of readers that, the same study found only glance at the headlines on Google.)

As for e-books, the prices that Amazon and other s now charge will make used bookstores competitive once more.  It remains to be seen, of course, if people will stop using their kindles and start using the used book stores but, in these times especially, it seems a distinct possibility.

So will charging for Internet content work?  Will the paywalls make publishers money?  Andrew Sullivan thinks that, at least when it comes to newspapers, it will not.  But I suspect that there may be a long-term and a short-term answer to the question.  I think that in the short term it probably will work.  Search engines like Google probably will lose a portion (perhaps a significant portion) of their readers while newspapers probably will pick up paying readers—in the short term.  And bloggers, especially news bloggers, probably will lose some credibility with their readers.  It’s even possible that used book stores will pick up a few customers.

But in the long term, I am not sure this will make much difference.  The bloggers will adjust—and because the most successful ones give people a sense of community online—the bloggers will retain most of their viewers and, hence, most of their advertising.  And, since most bloggers are not major operations, the loss of some viewers and advertising will not force them to go out of business as it were. In the long-term, I suspect the newspapers will want a share of bloggers’ online advertising, leading the newspapers to enter into various arrangements with the successful news-bloggers.  As for books, once the used book stores start competing with Amazon, Amazon will (once again) drop its prices. 

Of course that’s just my opinion—and I have been known to be wrong.  What do you think?

This is one of the oldest Web sites for job searches. Monster allows you to look anywhere in the world for a job, though it’s probably best known for its job hunting abilities in the United States. You can use the site only for basic job searches, or you can sign up with Monster and post your resume, post a cover letter, seek resume-writing help and more. One great thing is signing up with Monster won’t cost you anything.

Yahoo! hotjobs

If you already use Yahoo!for e-mail or other services, why not check out their offerings for your job hunt? Of course you can do the basic search, but you can also upload a resume, use a salary calculator, network with other professionals and perform tons and tons of other tasks that can help you find that next employer.

Careerbuilder

This site lets you look for jobs, post resumes, seek advice, etc. Sounds pretty familiar by now, right? Well, this site also has the added benefit of being linked with plenty of newspapers in the U.S., which means those jobs listed in many newspaper classified sections are also making it to Careerbuilder.

USAJobs

This is the official job hunting site for federal government jobs in the United States. This site not only lets you look for those government positions, but it also can provide information on the seeming mysteries of the federal hiring process, which obviously will be different depending upon which branch or department of government you’re applying to work for.

Indeed

Indeed is one of my favorite job search engines. Why? Because it is a one-stop search engine for many, many other jobs sites. In fact, several other of the other job sites on this list can all be searched together on Indeed. This particular site even scours some college and corporate sites for open position. But remember, never put all your trust into one job-hunting site online. Why? Read on.

Simply Hired

This site is much like Indeed. It allows you to search multiple other job sites all at the same time. What’s interesting here is that I’ve done the exact same searches, multiple times and different dates, on both Indeed and Simply Hired and the results of the two sites do not match exactly. What this means is each site misses some jobs. And it means each site will have some listings the other one won’t. So, to repeat, use more than one site for your employment search.

Jobs.net

Another basic job hunting site. Perhaps, but you need to know about as many sites as possible. I like this site because it is one of the easier ones to use, in my opinion. Even the main page has a map of the United States, and you can click on each individual state to look for jobs there. What’s easier than that?

Craigslist

Craiglistis a lot like the old-fashioned classified advertisements in your hometown newspaper. You go to the site and there are all kinds of classified listings, everything from yard sales to personals to housing and more. Including jobs. Yep, there are jobs listed on Craigslist, full-time jobs and part-time jobs and temporary gigs and everything between. If you don’t like any of your local listings, and are willing to move, you can also check out the listings in other cities and states and even other parts of the world. Just be careful. There are lots of scammers out there, and sometimes they lurk on job hunting sites.

Eurojobs

Maybe you’re not in the United States, or you are but want a job elsewhere. That’s where Eurojobs can be of aid. This Web site purports to be “the only multi-country site for jobs in Europe.” So use it to find those jobs in France, Germany, Britain, Spain and elsewhere. You can do your basic search, or you can join the site for other benefits.

Snagajob

Maybe you need a job, but you are tired of wading through listings of executive jobs and nursing jobs an doctor’s jobs, etc. You get the picture. You just need a job, you don’t need to be the boss or to run a hospital. Snagajob might be the place for you. This is a place where tons of normal, everyday jobs are listed for normal, everyday folk. You know, jobs that pay by the hour. You can search around the country or in your own region. Plenty of restaurants, grocery stores, convenience stores and the like have jobs listed here, but you might be surprised at many other places that have jobs listed. Worth checking out.

Related links

Need a job? Try grocery shopping for others

Proving the worth of Martha Stewart during these tough times

10 Tips for Saving Grocery Money

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I was working on my blog yesterday, putting up content and links, thinking all the time about how to increase my hits, how to make some money from the Internet.  You know, doing the search engines dance.

I was also reading the Wall Street Journal and there was an article about Lady Gaga.

Why would the Wall Street Journal, that deals with economic issues, have an article about Lady Gaga?  She’s a money machine.  She’s a money machine because she has a talent for marketing herself.  She markets herself by outrageous outfits and outrageous interviews; but here’s the kicker.  Many people in the music industry, as pointed out in the WSJ article, say she’s the real thing.  That she truly has talent.

Bloggers who want to increase their readership and maybe make some money are in the same situation as Lady Gaga was in before she became famous.  Now, %99.9 of bloggers will not become famous or even make much money from blogging.  I hate to be the one to tell you.  I include myself; but all of us bloggers want to do the best we can.

Lady Gaga is unique for her era.  She’s the new Madonna.  A blogger to gain readership must be unique in some kind of way.  Whatever you’re doing is not unique.  Try to do it in a unique way.  You’ve heard this before; but is your blog really unique?  I struggle with this problem all the time.  I’m not that computer savvy so I try to make my content in some way unique.

I had a donation button on my blog but then I removed it after several months.  From what I’ve read about blogging and from my own experience, unless you’re getting 30,000 hits a month a donation button will do you no good.