Running on Echinacea

Guzzling copious pots of tea, water, juice. Bathroom break every ten minutes. Determined to flush these buggers out. Otherwise, husband and daughter fine. Work fine too. My writing seems coherent to me anyway. Then again, my head is fuzzy. I'm not the best judge of good writing at the moment. This is clear from the fragments in this post.

WAHM Stress

If you go over to my personal blog, you'll understand why it has been a while since I updated this blog. Anyway, I had been stressing over deadlines the past couple of weeks and my daughter, who has been blessed with the sixth sense to discern when I really need to rush work, has consistently been unconsciously sabotaging my WAHM system. I had been going ultrasonic over this on my husband when he sat me down and said, "Where is this stress coming from?"
"Deadlines, not being able to work, DEADLINES!!!" I was already speaking in staccato screeches at this point, a true stress symptom in my case.
"What's gonna happen if you don't meet the deadline?" He calmly inquired.
I paused to think. How easy was it to ask for an extension? Very easy. But "People will think I'm not efficient. I NEVER miss deadlines. I'm not THAT KIND of person."
Husband took me by the shoulders and gave a slight shake. "You.have.got.to.get.over.being.a.dork!"
Sigh. That came from somebody who almost wasn't allowed to march in his high school graduation because he had yet to submit one more project. I hadn't met him yet at that time, but I bet he didn't care one bit. I bet he went around laughing it off while his mom and sister stressed over it. How we ended up together and happy I'll never really understand.

A Collection of Surveys

Post For Pay

I'm one of those bloggers who occasionally publish a paid post. I've got a disclosure badge and everything ;-p. For this blog, I currently have dNeero, which simply requires publishing surveys, but soon I'll be adding this blog to my account with PayPerPost and SocialSpark (I'm just building up my number of hits and establishing some sort of presence - this is a relatively new blog after all. And the number of opps you qualify for largely rely on your blog's ranking, of course). So far, I've only been using my personal blog for those. I actually also have an account with Blogvertise and Smorty, but after two opps from Blogvertise, I stopped receiving emails from them. I have yet to get an opp from Smorty although it did accept my application. I've only just joined Smorty, so it's early days yet. However, with the other three, I got an opp right away, even if just to promote their site (still paid though). I've so far refrained from joining other blog-for-money sites because of experience with these two, so I can say that PayPerPost and SocialSpark have been of the most service to me. I've already had more than ten opps from PayPerPost and four from SocialSpark, which is newer (both are under IZEA), but the social networking there is great.
Now, I'm not sure if it was the disclosure badge that did it or the increasing number of paid posts, but I've been getting requests from companies to write a promotional post for them and these indie gigs actually pay much better (understandably since you don't have an "agent"). Of course, they come sporadically, so it's better to be affiliated with an actual site.
I haven't been maximizing my blogs' potential to earn, but if I did, I think they can add considerably to my WAHM income. Again, one of these days. ;-)

Schmay-Per-Click

Have you ever tried bothering with those pay-per-whatever programs? I confess to having tried it. Marguerite was just a few months old and I had a gig writing CMS manuals for this web design company. When I got bored with the sheer tediousness of manual writing, I would start clicking away at the banners on these sites I had signed up with. Seemed like easy, brain-dead money, but all those clicks and you haven't even built up a dumb cent yet, so I thought forget it. However, I found a program that offered an actual complete cent per click or read, so I considered it. Those bux options (moneybux, clickbux, cashbux...) didn't have a lot of banners or emails, but since they offered a clear cent for each click, I thought it wouldn't hurt to give them a try. I was a few months into it, just mindlessly clicking away and building up a whopping $5 in my account bank ($5 is $5 added to my PayPal account; I wouldn't knock it.) when it occurred to me that I wasn't certain what the minimum payout was. Those zillion-clicks-per-cent sites were transparent about the payout amount and I had assumed these bux sites would be the same, but, nope, couldn't find the information I was looking for. I sent a message to their customer service re this simple and singular matter, but, nada. Then I followed up on that message about three more time, the last one saying that I was already marking their emails as spam, and zilch from them. So that's my sad little pay-per-scam story.
However, that was me. I was foolish so I got burnt. This person seems to have a handle on legitimate pay-per-whatever sites, so if you want recommendation, I think he knows what he's talking about.;-p