Smorty works in the same as way as PayPerPost - advertisers and bloggers are brought together in a marketplace for one purpose: to talk about products and services that people might not otherwise know about. They allow people who want to blog for money make that money writing their own unique articles.

These articles are then submitted into the system and upon review and acceptance, payment is given out on a weekly basis.

The process of submitting a post is fairly easy - campaigns are emailed to each user, who must then log in, accept what they would like to write about, and are then given three days to complete the assignment. Qualifications are few, the descriptions for the post short and to the point.

And while the marketplace seems small at first, I believe that given the right amount of time they will grow into a larger network, and more people will be able to get paid for blogging.

Recently, with the unveiling of Google’s backlash upon the internet, there have been multiple sides of the discussion over paid blogging coming from both sides of the field. High ranking sites, dropping from 7s to 5s in PR, and so-on. I’ve had my say on the pro-side for Google’s decision. Now I’m going to have my say on the con-side against Google.

Paid blogging is not going anywhere. Many people have pointed this out. Blogging itself is still a generally new market. Where people once thought un-profitable, many are finding a way to turn a profit. There are companies and people out there willing to front the funds to pay for unique advertising and there are people willing to write this advertising.

I don’t believe that dropping a websites PR is going to do any harm - if their PR was high enough to begin with, then that not only means they were doing something right, it means they have a solid readership and support community. And now matter how many places they fall in Page Rank, they will still have the same users, visitors, readers, and subscribers.

Smorty, among other companies that have ventured upon the field of blog advertising are not going anywhere soon. So long as there is a market, and there is a blogging community willing to write.

an application.

A job with a steady paycheck every 2 weeks (or every week, depending) will trump a job that you have to wait up to a month for payout on a single post.

There’s nothing wrong with monetizing your site through programs like PayPerPost, ReviewMe, Blogsvertise, or the like. But joining these programs without a plan for your blog, a solid readership, good Alexa/Google/etc. scoring, and the like with the idea that it is going to amazingly solve all of your debt problems will only leave you with 2 things: more debt, and disappointment.

On a whim, I decided to log in and see if I got any new reviews. After seeing that I didn’t, I decided to start hitting up the random website generator (it’s a random Yoursite profile that is displayed on the lower left corner of the screen.)

After clicking through 10 of these (each one leading to a website that didn’t exist anymore) and then realizing that probably out of the 2k+ websites listed within Yoursite, only about 45% of them were either broken links or dead sites, I re-realized the notion that Yes, Yoursite is dead.

So why do I keep going back? Habit, I suppose.

And maybe a dim hope that someday, Yoursite won’t be as horrible as it is now.

“You’ve been writing about Web sites, products, services and companies you love for years and you have yet to benefit from all the sales and traffic you have helped generate. That’s about to change. With PayPerPost™ advertisers are willing to pay you to post on topics. Search through a list of topics, make a blog posting, get your content approved, and get paid. It’s that simple.”

“Your last non Opportunity-related post must have been within the 7 days immediately preceding your Opportunity-related post. After any break in blog activity of 7+ days, interim posts, that is, posts between Opportunity-related posts, submitted on the same day as your paid Opportunity-related posts will not count towards this requirement.”

Payperpost Terms of Service: 5.5 POSTING REGULATIONS, B:Interim Posts.

• It can take up to a month for you blog to be approved, up to a month for a post to be approved, and then 30 days after the post has been approved for you to receive payment for the post.
• Your post can be rejected if a previous post is “too short”, or the post that you submitted “can not be easily found”, or was not written within a certain amount of time from another non-paid post on your blog.
• If your blog has more than one author to it, it will not be accepted.

“How insane is that! I have been with them since May and loving every bit of it. How great is that they have acknowledged my efforts and like my blog! I feel so special!”

Source: Ashtonsart.blogspot.com

They list the Top Earners, but do not link their blogs. They have a “Blog of the Day” that seems to generate blogs randomly and without prejudice or concern for the over-all content of the blog itself. (Many of these so called “Blogs of the Day” do not state that the post they are writing was, in fact, sponsored as per their “code of ethics” on blogger/advertiser transparency in the Blogosphere.) It has also been stated that if a site implements a “site wide” disclosure policy, then they are exempt from the Transparency issue (and do not have to disclose on a post-by-post basis whether or not it was sponsored.)

In a way, this destroys that entire blogs credibility. Yes, I see that you disclose that you are paid for blog entries but how do I know which ones are paid and which ones are not?

“By participating in the PayPerPost Marketplace and accepting payment for the content you create you grant PayPerPost and the specific Advertiser purchasing the content a perpetual license to use, republish and distribute the content in all forms of media…Any use, publishing or distribution of a Blogger’s content by PayPerPost or any Advertiser must be accompanied by credit to the author of that content.”

Payerpost Terms of Service: 5.6 GRANT OF USAGE LICENSE

Any copyrights you may think you have within a sponsored post do not exist as the advertisers paying for the post itself hold the right through the PPP TOS to redistribute the material in question without your permission (but with your name intact).

“…but they offered me a LOT of money, and you know me - anything for a buck!”

Cause I’m Famous, Yo!

We’re going to focus on the current “top earner” of all time: Simple Kind of Life (Colleen 692). Disclaimer:none of the following information was obtained through illegal ways - it is all publicly available information.

The website itself is ranked 59,245 at Alexa.com with the bulk of its traffic coming from the United States.

It has a current Google Page Rank of 4/10.

It was created in 2003, and expires in 2008. Both Godaddy and DomainsbyProxy.com are listed within the Registrant information. Domainsbyproxy.com is a group that keeps registrant information (name, address, etc.) of the individual registering the domain private.

“When Jim woke me up this morning, I wanted into the bathroom to pee. Jim was standing (naked) at the sink, about 8 feet away from me. I noticed his rear had a red ring on it, and teased him about sitting on the can before he came in to brush his teeth and shower. Then the unthinkable happened.

I noticed a brown mark on my husbands ass.”

Is that poop on your butt or are you just happy to see me?

Link:simplekindoflife.com returns 522 Results. Taking into account that she runs 6 other blogs (and we need to filter the results for duplicates from the same domain). It would also seem that a lot of the backlinks are generated from within the PayPerPost community itself (or internet marketing type websites) as seen in small quantity here.

We can also look at a more filtered “who’s linking this site” view through Alexa’s own system: list.

We also see a spike in rank in the latter quarter of 2006 (around the time she joined PayPerPost.) Her first Paid post was on July 5th, 2006. Paying for my Hosting One Post at a Time.

(Before and after shots: Before. After.)

So one of the questions that has been on my mind: how does a blog that has relatively no visability in the blogosphere go from zilch to over $10,000 in just over a year and a half? (these figures, while not totaling the actual value she has been placed at, are publicly available through her regular posts on her blog at Simplekindoflife.com.) Especially with a PR 4 blog and and a post limit of 3 paid posts per day with interim posts required between each.

Let’s do the math: At 3 posts a day for 30 days out of the month in the 15 months leading to the present, we’re looking at 1350 posts total. 3 posts a day + 1 interim post for each paid post would = 4050. That’s a total of 578 entries (if the total amount of her income is divided between her 7 sites and if those 7 sites are registered sponsored blogs.) Her main site lists 3290 entries (link).

38 paid posts per month between 7 blogs. Each blog is discerned into a different category (obviously her shopping blog can’t be put into mens topics) so we’ll assume that she has each different blog tailored for different posts. 5 posts per blog.

Now let’s be generous and say that the top post earns 20 dollars while the basic one earn 5. We’ll average it to 15 a post. 570 per month. We get 8,850. With a PR 4 blog, she is excluded from a lot of the higher paying post opportunities, and it’s hard to imagine that she’d make 2k+ in extra PayPerPost income.

Now without the hard copy facts in front of me, these are merely speculations, but they are speculations that make you wonder. Where are these numbers coming from? Especially considering that it takes nearly a month for a post approval (at the most) and another month for payout.

7 of the entries in her media-mom pre-date the first paid post, leaving only 6 that were made after. How many more entries predate the initial paid as well? How many of those 4050 (or 578 necessary) predate the initial paid post?

What also screws with the numbers is the fact that she posts within multiple categories - just because the category itself reads x amount doesn’t mean there are x amount of individual posts within that category - it could very well be 5 posts in 3 categories, thereby padding the numbers by 1 per category.

On a side note, she’s not listed as today’s highest earner, or even this month’s highest earner.

So what is the point of this, you may be asking? There really is no point other than to get you to start questioning the very sources of your income. “Why are the same people getting xxx amount of dollars without any clear reason as to why other than a sponsored blog?” “How do people with seemingly no visibility within the blogosphere suddenly sky-rocket to mass amount of income and back links seemingly overnight?”

But most of all:

“Why continue to pollute the internet with links to things that nobody in their right minds would want in the first place.”

There is a reason that these companies pay people to hawk wares - and it’s no different from the Carpet Baggers and Tonic Vendors of the days long gone.

If people knew any better, they wouldn’t buy them in the first place. Knowledge is your key. Use it on the doors that matter.

Interim Posts. Your last non Opportunity-related post must have been within the 7 days immediately preceding your Opportunity-related post. After any break in blog activity of 7+ days, interim posts, that is, posts between Opportunity-related posts, submitted on the same day as your paid Opportunity-related posts will not count towards this requirement.

Private Posts. Interim posts must not be labeled “Private” or locked out. Interim posts must also be of a reasonable length, at least one paragraph, 3-5 sentences. If your Blog’s interim posts lack quality PayPerPost may terminate your account.

The post in question has bee removed, the post in question for the violation being The Linking Game (October 8th 2007).

“What is the linking game anyway?’ you may ask. More or less, it’s just a post containing links to various points of interest on the internet - stories that may have grabbed my attention, videos that may have made me laugh. Pretty random things with no apparent reason or rhyme (other than that they exist and they were of some sort of interest at the time of publication of the post itself).”

That’s what the Linking Game is, I’m afraid. A post containing… links.

I’m sorry to inform anybody that this is not a page rank builder for products that nobody will ever buy in their lifetime. This is a blog, and we write about interesting things around here.

The Sponsored Post that “violated” their TOS has been deleted and removed from the Opp list.

Let me also point out that it took them a full half month to even get to that post and tell me that it was rejected. I don’t know anybody that is making any real money with Payperpost as every blog that seems to be “the blog of the day” is just another splog, each post containing comments, spelling and grammatical errors out the ares, and poorly written interem posts, not to mention a 50/50 concoction of poorly written regular posts and poorly written sponsored posts.

Not to mention that most of them don’t even follow TOS, writing 2 sometimes 3 Paid poss before they even write a regular post.

I’m losing my faith in you, Payperpost. Are those that said you would fail going to be proven right?

The reception was about an hour long, during the course of which I took photos.

To the beautiful bride and the groom as well, I hope that your days to come are as happy as the days that have already passed and to new futures breathes new hope.

Congratulations, ‘Candi’ and Motown.

About the RE Loot

Check the prices on your server by visiting the SWG Galaxy Trade Forum for your galaxy and simply asking. Most people will not drop 100mil for a gigantic stack of junk loot. Sell it in stacks of 100 at CPU that is the going rate on your server. I got best results by selling for 5cpu less than the other guy. You could also throw it on a vendor in a bag (listing what’s in the bag) for a combine price of all items, or throw it on the bazaar. Best results will come from the Trade Forums in my experience.

Dance Macro

This is the dance macro I will be referencing a few times. Once you create it, fire it off about 10 times.

Macro name: flo

/flourish 1;
/pause 1;
/flourish 2;
/pause 1;
/flourish 3;
/pause 1;
/flourish 4;
/pause 1;
/flourish 5;
/pause 1;
/flourish 6;

Tansanari Point Station.

Since this is the first place you go, and a place you cannot return to, creating a trial account to gain access to this spot is vital as you can grab a bunch of Rever-Engineering junk loot. Best thing to do is make a Commando, grind him to the point in which you get an area attack and then just sit in the Droid Room and area blast the hell out of everything. Using an auto-loot macro, loot the corpses while deleting things like armor and paintings (or keeping the junk dealer window open and selling them as you go.) (We discussed auto-looting and the junk dealer in this post.)

Chapter Gifts

Trial accounts last for 14-days. Chapter Gifts drop in 7-10. For every trial account, that’s one extra Chapter Gift to be sold or kept.

GCW Points

Create a trial account and grind them to within 10 levels of the character you want GCW on, as well as making them the opposite faction. Easiest way to do this is by grinding Entertainer using a simple flourish macro and /changedance ‘ing to the newest dance learned when leveling. You can only get GCW 10x a day from killing the same toon, so make plenty of trial accounts. Have a medic friend rez, and after the first ten, log on the second trial account. And so on and so forth until you get your fill. You can run both your trial and main account on the same pc by creating a new file in notepad and titling it “user.cfg” and placing the following in the file:

[SwgClient]
allowMultipleInstances=true

Two sets of Items

Grind your trial account to a level 90 Combat Ent. using a dance macro, and then complete the quests that give the items you want another one of without having to pay the inflated merchant costs of whatever server you find yourself on. Make sure you are going after trade items and not no trade.

Run your own Credit Farming Business

This one is less likely to make you friends as you this is a very frowned upon practice, but if you’re doing it for yourself and not monetary gain, then it does carry less of a stigma. This one will also require the use of several computers.

The general method of choice is to have 7 trial accounts and 1 main. So that’s 8 people in the group, a possible of 2 accounts running on one very strong machine, and 1 person doing all of the work. 3 computers at best.

Grind all of the accounts to lvl 90 entertainers, make them Combat Entertainers, outfit the main toon (the one who will be doing the destruction) with good armor and a good weapon. Have a multi-person vehicle and set everyone to /follow the main toon.

Have all toons select two missions from a terminal and then proceed to all missions. Don’t worry about the mob surrounding the mission, just go for the kill and take out the lair/flag/whatever.

Repeat.

Keep in mind that each trial account can only hold 500k in credits, so once they are full, transfer credits so you don’t lose any in the Trial Account Cap.

1 mil per two toons at cap, with 7 toons will give you 3.5 mil every cap with a mission limit of 16 for the combined group. Each mission should take roughly 5 minutes to complete, and possibly travel included if you do the smart thing and get missions in the same direction, so you’re looking at roughly 1 hour and 20 minutes per 16 missions.

There are plenty of other things that trial accounts are good for - these are but a few.

/bug
Typing this will open a window that will allow you to report a bug anywhere in the game. Includes several options to check off so that you can be specific with the information you are sending.

/unstick
If your toon becomes “stuck” this will attempt to put you elsewhere on the map (usually within 15m) of the spot that you became stuck in.

/t (playername) (message)
This will send a private message to a specific user.

/r (message)
When using the private message function, this will send a response to the last person to send you a private message.

/g (message)
When in a group, this will drop your message into your group-chat tab.

/rot (left/right) (1-180)
When placing items in a house, this will rotate the item to the left or right the degree amount you specify. To angle them (as in trying to place items in corners, rotating by 15 or 45 degrees works best.)

/mov (up/down) (1-???)
When placing items in a house, this move the item up or down the amount you specify. Best integers to use are 1, 5, 10, 15, 25, 50 and 200.

/target (name)
Targets the item, person, or whatever you specify. Works best when you are in a multi-level structure and are not sure of where something is. Say that you’re looking for Ackbar and have no clue where he or she or it is. Type /target Ackbar and press enter. Then, move the camera around until you see Ackbar being targeted. Works on different levels of a structure and even targets through walls.

Also remember the pressing alt and y (separately) will take you into free target mode and out of “over-the-shoulder-annoying-NGE-mode”.

/notepad
Opens a notepad like text feature that you can (you guessed it) write notes in.

/report (player name)
The player must have entered text in the chat session for this to work.

/getv
Tells you how many days you have logged.

/claim
Claims any rewards you may have earned. If none, a window will pop up stating so.

/follow
Hover your mouse over a player or npc, and type /follow and press enter. You will now follow that person or npc wherever they go.

/forage
You will search the surrounding area for random things. Will more than likely turn up enzymes, but has a possibility of turning up a treasure map (one out of every 100 is what has been reported on this one.)

Macro name: Forage

/forage;
/pause 5;
/macro forage;

Fire the macro, forage, walk forward for about a second, forage again, and then repeat from step 2.

/way (coords)
Replacing coords with the first and third set of coords (the middle is not necessary) will create a waypoint in your datapad to that specific location. Typing /way and pressing enter without entering coords will create a waypoint at your immediate and current coords.

/pvp
When Rebel or Imperial, /pvp will turn you combatant and typing it a second time and pressing enter will turn you Special Forces. You have to visit a recruiter of your faction to go on leave.

Going combatant is usually almost instantaneous, and going from combatant to SF usually takes 30 seconds. Going from SF to combatant or on leave will take 5 minutes.

/paymaint (amount)
When in a building you own, this command will pay maintenance fees of however much you place in the amount. (Increments of up to 100k). Players with a Mustafarian Bunker or Guildhall can place any amount into the structure and be able to withdraw from the treasury menu option. Regular houses do not allow for maintenance withdrawal.

/guildr
Will remove you from your current guild.

Known bugged commands
A bug with /watch is that it will give you the message “You have stopped watching…” and you actually have to radial menu the player and select “watch” from the menu.

While you can no longer /burstrun, you can still /gallop while on a mount.

Typing /unstick in front of a pvp line will not dump you on the other side as on-leave or combatant since when entering a PVP-zone your status is, in fact, LOCKED as Special Forces. If you are on-leave, it will continue to push you back, and if you are combatant, you will be locked in as Special Forces.

I would also like to point out that Swg.allakhazam.com is probably the best resource on the internet that is free and openly available to anyone who finds themselves stuck on a quest in the Star Wars Galaxies.

I would also like to point out that of course we did not write the guides we are linking to - merely pointing to them as a quick reference for those who either didn’t do them, forgot about them, or never knew about them.

Two Sets of Clone Wars Paintings
The Clone Relics: The Hunter Quests on Tatooine for both paintings.
Collecting Survey Data on Kashyyk for the Clone Trooper painting.
The Big Cover-up on Kashyyk (quest line gives General Greivous painting on Second part.)

Katarn Armor
Neutral (no faction)
Imperial
Rebel

RIS Armor Schematic (Master Armosmith)
Save you some reading:

I just went to see Mol today for my first time, and this is what he has to say…if your a Master Armorsmith.

Mol-”You believe you have learned all there is to know about being an armorsmith? You haven’t! I know far more than you ever will, but still there are a few lessons I could teach you. Learning these things will not be easy for someone such as you. It will be expensive in both time and in credits. Furthermore, I have no patience for insolent students. You do as I say and don’t bother me with stupid questions! Give me 50,000 credits and we’ll get started. Be quick about it! I’m very busy.”

You-”I am ready to begin. Here are the credits.”

Mol-”I suspected you would agree to my terms. Let’s get started. I’m going to teach you how to construct my masterpiece invention: R.I.S. armor. This armor has no equal in battle. Everything else is junk compared to this! Of course, it is exceedingly difficult to create, especially for a fledgling armorsmith such as you. But, no matter. We’ll take it slow so you can comprehend. Are you with me so far?”

You-”Yes”

Mol-”As you know, creating armor starts with the armor segment. That is where we shall start as well. Like all armor segments, R.I.S. segment require resources which I’m sure you already know how to acquire. They also, however, require some special components. For strength, they require bone fragments from a Woolamander Harrower. For flexibility, they require the hide of a Recluse Gurk King. Use this schematic to create the armor segment and bring it back to me. I don’t care how you get the materials, but you must construct the segment yourself. You can only learn by doing it yourself! Now go busy yourself with making the armor segment and come back to me when you are done.”

Now you have the draft schematic for the R.I.S. segment. Required resources follow:
-160 units of Titanium Aluminum
-160 units of Chanlon Intrusive Ore
-75 units of Rori Fiberplast
-1 Woolamander Harrower Bone Fragment
-1 Gurk King Hide
-2 layers and 1 segment enhancement are optional

The Warren Badges
(as of October 12th, 2007 the Warren has been infested with ALOT of high level high agro creatures. You have been warned.)
Getting into the Warren
Compassion
Imperial Hero

A quest to avoid
(no experience, no faction, no items. Does nothing.)
Battle of the Witches