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Slacking....ish

Ahhhhhhhh I'm back to my usual ways of slacking. Well sort of! I have worked on marketing my articles and that is so tedious and time consuming. My twitter has grown to 1635 followers and I'm so happy with it! I have also dedicated quite a bit of time to SocialOomph so hopefully that will be paying off. It is on a one month trial with me, and so far so good, I am definitely seeing a slow n steady increase in Helium revenue!
At this moment in time I am at a point where I am consciously doing more work for less money.
However, I am building a freelancer website which I plan to "unleash" once I move. I am putting it off because at the moment I write when I catch time and my current situation is unpredictable so I do not want to start getting potential customers and then have to turn them down!
The website will be for a team of freelancers, my husband and myself. He does some writing as well and along with writing services we will offer some design...nothing big but logo design, business card design, etc. So a little bit of my time is going into prepping that.
Oh yeah! My hubby (Sheps) has made us a logo which I am extremely happy with! So far it can only be seen on Twitter but we are getting around to slowly implementing it to the blog and other social networking profiles and merging them to form a brand.....yeah a brand of a sort! I want all of our freelancing stuff to be associated with one another.
In the midst of all this I have pretty much neglected the blog :( . Hopefully I get back on track with it!



Readbud

So I have gotten word of a new website, which could be a hit or a miss but I thought why not give it a try? It is just another way to earn a few pennies online, however it could be worth your time if it is able to provide enough work.
The website in question is

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The way it works is that you sign up and read articles for a small payout. Ideally you would ACTUALLY READ the given article, notice the advertisements and maybe even click on some. In reality all you do is open the offered article, scroll to the bottom and give it a 1-5 rating.
Before you open each article you will be notified how much that specific article is paid. I have spent 12 minutes on the website, 15 including account set up, and have earned $1.16.
The articles I have read were paid from $0.04-0.10.
When you sign up you will be asked to choose up to 50 interest areas, these are the areas in which you will receive the articles you will read. DO select all 50 choices. You can change your selection once every 24hrs if you want to keep things interesting or just get more articles heading your way.
How much you get paid per article depends on its length.

Article content word count and corresponding rewards:

  • Under 100 : 1 cent
  • Between 101 and 200 : 2 cents
  • Between 201 and 300 : 3 cents
  • Between 301 and 400 : 4 cents
  • Between 401 and 500 : 5 cents
  • Between 501 and 600 : 6 cents
  • Between 601 and 700 : 7 cents
  • Between 701 and 800 : 8 cents
  • Between 801 and 900 : 9 cents
  • Between 901 and 1500 : 10 cents
  • Between 1501 and 2000 : 15 cents
  • Over 2000 : 20 cents
I have been offered only 21 articles so far and have easily gone through them in 12 minutes while doing three other things at the same time.

Assuming the website can provide enough articles, I think its worth the time. At this rate if I spent the whole hour doing this I'd be paid $5.80 an hour... Not too bad for an online gig.
They have a pretty high minimum for the payout. You will need to earn $50.00 before you can request a payment. They will pay you via Paypal so that is pretty decent as well.
They have refferal programs where you get $5.00 when the person which signed up through you reaches their minimum payout amount.
On paper the website looks great, however I have spent only 15 minutes on it so far and it will take some time to see if it is 100% legit, and whether it has enough articles for me to rate.
If you are interested in trying it out please sign up through the above link as my referral.


Inbox Dollars


Inbox Dollars is one of many online websites which give you a chance to earn money in return for various small favors, or to "Be rewarded for your online activities" as the websites slogan would say.

Inbox Dollars offers a $5.00 Sign on Bonus and requires you have at least $30.00 earned in your account before it sends out your check. The way to earn this money is to complete certain tasks such as reading the Paid Emails, and by reading that means clicking on them so you are taken to another link. You need to click so the site would register you looking at the advertisement . Just clicking on emails will earn you around two cents per email.

There are other ways to earn money as well and they are sorted...Read More.

Tweepi

In the previous post I quickly showed you a way to connect a few of your different accounts for auto posting on Twitter. All of that is great and valuable info, however if no one sees it then it fails.
Twitter doesn't allow automated adding of friends, or following rather. I have learned a way to follow a bunch of people at once with ease and still be in compliance to Twitter rules.

Assuming you have a Twitter account already go to:








Now on the lower right hand side you will see a link saying Try out 'Geeky Follow' >>  click it and you will be lead to a page that asks for a screen name of a Twitterer that shares the same interests as you, or that you are interested in. So you can enter @TeamShepherd, for instance, and hit enter.
You will be asked to allow Tweepi access to your existing Twitter account. Once that is done you will have a list of the searched users followers.
While the "Select All" button is disabled in order to follow Twitter rules there is a trick you can do to select all users shown on the page with two clicks. Hold SHIFT while you click on the first user on the list, scroll down to the end of the list and hold SHIFT while you click on the last user.
The list displays 20 users per page. You can change this to 40 if you scroll down and tweet about the Tweepi, don't worry they have a preset tweet waiting for you at the bottom of the page!
This is way easier than completely manually going around and following users, and its still quality follows :)







I was talking with people about connecting as many of your social networking (of any kind) accounts to Twitter and intertwining them.
Here is a quick run-down of how to do what I did with my accounts:

Make an account, or just use one of the OpenID options, on
twitterfeed
This is a place where you can basically put in a bunch of your RSS feeds to be posted to Twitter.
If you want an automatic tweet every time you submit an article to Helium you will need to hookup the RSS feed for your About Me page.
- Go to the About Me page through the link you would give to other people to view it (http://www.helium.com/users/491133 rather than http://www.helium.com/users/edit_show/491133)
- Click on the small "H" icon to the left of the address bar, click More Info, then go to the Feeds tab and copy the link listed.

Now with the copied link go to your TwitterFeed account, click the Create New Feed button and follow the instructions.
The process for your blogger (and I assume other blogs as well) is the same.

To connect your Facebook to Twitter go to Facebook > Twitter.
If you have Myspace, other blogs, i think some websites will let you connect with Twitter too, you can pretty much connect either like this or through a similar app.

I hope this was at least somewhat helpful! I like it because each time I submit an article to Helium it goes straight to Twitter, same as when I post them to my Fan page on FB. It's convenient.

Easter Crafts


happy easter. by ~julkusiowa on deviantART


Easter is a holiday usually associated with bright, fun pastel colors. Bunnies, chicks, and eggs turn up on anything and everything. It is a perfect time for easy and fun kids crafts. And a great crafting project to have your child make is an Easter Basket. This Easter Bunny Basket, however will be a little bit out of the box....or made from a box rather! It is somewhat unusual but its a great way to show case your child's artistic side, and it can store quite a bit of goodies as well!

What you will need to create the basket:

- A carton box, it can be anything from a shoe box to the milk container, however only encourage big ones if you plan to fill them with goodies!

- Some sticks, as well as liquid glue, Elmer's or any other school glue will do the trick.

- Enough of colored paper to cover up the box. Now you can use printer sheets that have drawings, paintings, printouts or what not on them. You can use wrapping paper or magazine pages as well. It is up to you, your child or whatever you have lying around the house.

- Color Markers, crayons might do as well!

- Scissors, either child safe ones or you should monitor your child while using regular ones.

- Some of those glue on googly eyes, the bigger the better!

- At least four pipe cleaners, you can use six as well if you like. They will be used as whiskers.

- A craft pom pom, again the bigger the better.

- A stapler and a hole puncher.


How to create your basket:

- First of all you will have to remove one of the sides to your box by cutting it off. So if you are using a shoe box you can cut the cover off.

- Now depending on what kind of paper you chose (construction, printer, wrapping, etc). cut out pieces to fit on the sides of your box. If you are using wrapping paper its pretty manageable so you can wrap the whole box into it then glue the ends on the inside of the box.

- If you are using either printer paper, construction or magazine cut outs, use the stick glue to cover every side of the box with them, on the outside.

- Choose one side to be the "face". On that side draw eyes, and then glue the googly eyes in the middle of them.

- Punch a hole, positioned accordingly, on the "face" side of the box. This hole will be for the bunny's nose.

- Stick your four (or six) pipe cleaners halfway through the hole. Bend them so there is two (or three) going towards each side of the box, as whiskers would!

- The bend the halves of the pipe cleaners, that are inside the box, against the box side and staple them from inside.

- Now cut out two larger ear shapes (think of a long flower petal) and two smaller ones that would fit inside the big ones. Make sure they are contrasting in colors so you can see the difference.

- Glue the smaller ones over the larger ear pieces.

- Once your ears are done staple them to the inside of the "face" so they are sticking up like bunny ears.

- On the side opposite of the "face" glue the crafts pom pom, this will serve as a bunny tail.

Your box is now done! Feel free to decorate it even further, or get right on filling it up with treats!