Oh boy, I'm exhausted!

Well, that's it. I know how to get onto the front page, and after a day of doing a lot of liking and commenting and clicking and cleaning out my profile comments, I made it there.

That's Bubblews, of course. I'm always on the front page here with every new post.

I'm starting a series there about getting free or cheap tickets on airlines, coupled with how to achieve elite flyer status.

You know Ryan Bingham in Up in the Air? Well, that's kind of like my life. I do a lot of flying.

Anyway. I just thought I'd share the news, because obviously I can't write an exubilant post at Bubblews.

I'll just bask in the glory there for a bit before I write the next in the series.

--Peter

Image: My own work
Copyright © 2014 Skyring and may not be used without permission. Article and photo may be shared, if properly credited and linked back to this source.

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Shoot!

A package arrived this morning from Florida: a Canon Rebel T4i digital SLR camera that I'd bought on eBay for a little bit more than I really wanted. Plus express shipping.

I'd be quite happy with it, save for the fact that I bought one - second hand with a spare lens, a bag and a heap of extras - for a bargain price two weeks ago.

So now I have two. One is labelled 650D but it is the same model.

The new arrival is actually older. One bonus is that it came with a 32 Gb memory card.

The card showed American football games, graduation pictures, a whole bunch of shots of the full moon. Most of them dating back to 2012. I saved them to my hard drive and formatted the card.

I ran a comparison shoot with the two cameras, hoping one was better than the other, but no, they are both pretty good.

I'll put the Rebel up on eBay and hope I can get something like what I paid for it. Along with the 500D I bought a month ago. And two smaller cameras.

Just call me Mister Camera Shop, will ya!

--Peter

Image: My own work
Copyright © 2014 Skyring and may not be used without permission. Article and photo may be shared, if properly credited and linked back to this source.

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Just call me Numbers

When I started out on Bubblews, I also started some spreadsheets in Numbers - that's the Apple spreadsheet product - and I've been reasonably religious in keeping them up to date.

I can make a steady $50 redemption each week, and my figures are just under $1.00 a post. I write more, I get paid more, I guess.

I also look at other writers.

I see a few making over ten dollars a day, and one making over twenty. There's probably a lot more, but I only keep figures for those who catch my eye. I'm somewhere in the middle.

Turning to my stats, I find that over my career I have roughly 15 000 views, 5 000 likes and 1 500 comments. That's reasonably standard. Each figure a third of the one above.

Given the amount of time I spend writing and connecting, I can see that there's a limit, and I'm not all that far from it. I can tweak my style a little, but realistically, Bubblews is not going to be a great earner for me.

However, I noticed a few regular posters whose views/likes ratio is more like ten than three. Athena and javaman74 stand out. Javaman74 averages 8 posts a day, $2.70 a post and $21.50 a day.

Not to be sneezed at. So where are all those pageviews coming from? They must be coming from outside the Bubblews community, and the way to get those is to load up on SEO. That's my educated guess.

SEO keywords, social media and similar. They look like good ways to leverage writing effort.

Any ideas?

--Peter

Copyright © 2014 Skyring and may not be used without permission. Article may be shared, if properly credited and linked back to this source.

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How do we get paid?

I've been looking at my dashboard for my old Blogger blog (Car 58, where are you?) and I see I have $27.00 in my Adsense account. Unfortunately I need $150 to be paid, so I have a way to go, obviously.

It looks like Bloggers with Adsense accounts get paid directly by Google - is that right?

Or does Preferred Writers Group AKA Eden Jaid receive the money directly and it is then distributed through PayPal etc.?

That seems like a fair bit of admin work, as opposed to the more transparent and hands-free Google Adsense method.

I'm not casting doubt or anything, just wondering at the mechanics of the thing. If I read the Adsense information correctly, no payments are made until 30 days after the month in which an individual account exceeds $150, which could be a fair while, depending on how many page views are earnt. 

Anyway, I'm new here, and maybe I'm just totally wrong. Certainly wouldn't be the first time! I like the environment and the concept and I think I'll enjoy my time here.

--Peter


Copyright © 2014 Skyring and may not be used without permission. Article may be shared, if properly credited and linked back to this source.

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Coming back to Blogger

It's been four years since I left Blogger and moved to a WordPress site. I used to run a blogging empire from the driver's seat of my taxi, pulling out my MacBook Air to sign on and register a new domain between customers.

 Had a taxidriving blog on Blogger. It's still there, if anybody wants to have a look at Car 58, where are you? where you may read the night thoughts of a night cabbie.

Well, I thought it was entertaining reading at the time. And so did my brother cabbies around the world - there's still one or two blogging happily away if you follow the links to Dublin and New York.

The photo shows Taxi 58, freshly repaired after some bingle or another. Probably a kangaroo on my shift.

I guess I'm back on Blogger, as a member of the Prestigious Writers' Group. I'll see if I can find something to write about that isn't taxidriving. Shouldn't be too hard, there's a world of fascinating things out there!

--Peter

Image: My own work
Copyright © 2014 Skyring and may not be used without permission. Article and photo may be shared, if properly credited and linked back to this source.

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