Lies, Lies and Triond's Lies

Recently I was checking out Triond as a place to post articles. At first glance Tiond looks interesting. But there is something rather unsettling there.

What is interesting about Triond is that they have many websites. So, if you write an article on health, it can be posted on their health website "Healthmad.com". If you write an article on Sport, it will be posted on "Sportales.com". From the SEO point of view that seems rather interesting.

What is strange about Triond is that they allow their authors to post lies, apparently just to get traffic. I won't name the website because that would only bring them more traffic. But for example, one of their most recent, most popular and most pathetic posts has the title "Death of Bret Michaels". The author of that post writes this about Bret Michaels "Another who chose, in lieu of making a positive impact on the world, to live a life of excess and waste".

The problem is, at the time it was posted Bret Michaels was (and still is) very much alive. In fact, I read that he is recovering and expected to survive his recent stroke. What is Triond's view of this? Nothing wrong, this is just satire. If you look very, very closely, you see that the post is put in the "humor" category. Ha, HA! However, other than that there is nothing obvious on the website that indicates that this is intended to be satire. No humorous titles, no funny pictures. Nada. In fact, if you read the post there is no humor there at all. Just poorly written trash. And many of the commentators to the post, believing the writer's trash, leave their condolences. The same author has previously posted garbage such as "Johnny Depp Found Dead", etc. Triond has been contacted on this subject on numerous occasions, but only shrugs their shoulders and repeats that it is satire. Right.

This falls under the category of "if you post something controversial it will get traffic". This is true, I guess, but it depends on how low you want to stoop for that traffic. Triond must be happy to receive the additional ad clicks that this type of tabloid writing (I can not even call it journalism) will generate. As long as Google allows adsense ads to be put on such websites, I guess it will continue.

Baby Products: Ten ESSENTIAL baby products every parent must have

Before our baby was born, I made a lens about baby products that I thought we would need. I was wrong.

Now, with the benefit of hindsight I have used our experience to update our lens with the ten baby products that we believe are absolutely essential. I have never seen a list like this before. Please have a look and let me know if you agree or disagree.

Plus we have included some reviews of the hits and flops that we bought. I will give a hint here. One of the essential products was footed pajamas. Our baby lives in his footies.

The worst? We bought two of the best known swaddlers on the market. Some babies love swaddlers, or so we hear. Our baby HATED swaddlers. He voiced his opinion about the swaddlers from day one. Our little Houdini struggled his way out of both swaddlers nearly everytime that we put him in one. After a few weeks we surrendered. He won and we stopped using them.

My Experience With World Village

Imagine you spend time writing an article, you spend more time submiting it to a site and getting it just right and publishing it. Then you spend more time getting links to it. It starts to appear in Google. Then the article vanishes. How would you feel?

Well, that is how I felt about World Village. I wrote an article, submitted it, created links to it. Everything was fine until it had vanished. Their technical support was not doing much, after 5 days, I still did not have my article and they just told me to resubmit. So I went to their corporate website and made a plea. The VP of Ideas interceeded and I got my article back. Wow!

Getting the article back gave me enough confidence to write another footed pajamas article, so I wrote an article about matching footed pajamas.

It is still too early to say what the future holds for me with World Village. I am preceeding with caution and will give more feedback later.

Show This To Someone You Know Who Is Pregnant

Do you know someone who is pregnant? If so, forward them this link. In a few months they may thank you for it.

Few people know to use a postpartum girdle. A postpartum girdles is a type of belly band. But post partum girdles are a well kept secret. If you go to some maternity forums you will read, "I wish I had used a postpartum girdle" or "I wish someone had told me to try a postpartum girdle"

Fortunately, someone suggested that we consider a postpartum girdle AND they told us about it in time, before my wife gave birth. We asked our OB/GYN about it and she insisted we use a postpartum girdle.

The postpartum girdle we used was not expensive, in fact our postpartum girdle cost under $20. Frankly, we don't think it matters alot which postpartum girdle you use. Most important is that you use a postpartum girdle.

We looked at it this way. A postpartum girdle might help and couldn't hurt. Our OB/GYN and a friend recommended a postpartum girdle. If the postpartum girdle did nothing, we were only out a few dollars. What did we have to lose?

We actually documented the effect of the postpartum girdle by accident. Once we learned we were pregnant, we took a photo every month at the same time from the beginning of the pregnancy and 1 month after our baby was born. As a result we had nice photos of my wife's belly before (or nearly before) and after. Have a look at the before and after photos and see what you think. Do you know someone you should tell about a postpartum girdle?

Dear World Village : My Article Vanished!

I posted that I was testing World Village to publish articles. Yesterday I wrote an article about adult footed pajamas. Today, to go along with a squidoo lens about footie pajamas, I wrote a second World Village article about adult footie pajamas. There is Good News and Bad News.

Good News: The Footed Pajamas article I wrote yesterday is ranking quickly and nicely in google! It is currently on the second page of Google for its keyword.

Bad News: Yesterday's Footed Pajamas article has VANISHED!! Yes, it is gone and instead, it is replaced by someone else's article about Karate!! Here is a screen shot of my article dashboard (click the image to expand)



I am wondering if that guy has got my footed pajamas article? I wrote to him and am awaiting his response. I also submitted a support ticket and asked for my article back.

So, the first review of World Village is mixed. Lets see how quickly it gets fixed.

An Alternative To Squidoo?

As I recently posted, I am looing for an alternative to Squidoo. It is a difficult task, because frankly, Squidoo is tough to beat. I do not want to replace Squidoo, I want to find a site that I can use along with Squidoo to:

* Drive Traffic To My Website
* Give Links to my Website
* Bring Income

Squidoo is the best thing I have found for all of those things, but I am still looking for a good alternative. Today, I discovered WorldVillage and I wrote an article about how to select adult footed pajamas.

So far, I like what I see. It was easy to sign up for, it was easy to post my article and my article was live immediately, without a review process. So far so good. I will be watching to see if World Village will generate any traffic for my footed pajamas website or any significant income. I will be post what I discover soon.

Is There Anything Better Than Squidoo?

Calling all Squids, I would like to get your input on this question: Is there anything better than Squidoo? Or even: Is there anything nearly as good as Squidoo? If there is, I have not found it.

As I reported earlier on this blog, I have a website about footed pajamas. I am trying to get my footed pajamas website to rank high on Google for important keywords like Adult footed pajamas, children's footed pajamas, etc. I am making progress, but I am not there yet.

So, I am trying to find a site which offers all of the wonderful things that Squidoo is able to offer and I can not find it. Squidoo is great. Squidoo offers me the ability to add Dofollow links from my lens to my website, send traffic to my website AND earn some money at the same time. I am not earning a fortune from Squidoo, but there is some money coming in and it is interesting. Further with Squidoo, I am not rigidly moderated, I can publish when I want and there is a very helpful and friendly community to boot. Squidoo is great.

I am pleased with Squidoo and if I can find something similar at another site, it would be even better. However, experiments with sites like Hubpages and Infobarrel have been disappointing. In my experience, neither site generates any income to speak of nor traffic and Hubpages' links become Nofollow if your Hubrank drops below a certain level. I have written 4 high quality articles for Infobarrel and I get zero traffic to my websites and have not earned a dime. I can not figure out how to be successful at either of those sites nor do I really want to invest a great deal more time trying. Frankly, I have all but given up on both of them.

Ezine and GoArticles are good about generating links and traffic, but not money. Other article sites such as Searchwarp and article base actually give you NOfollow links (Uh, why would I submit an article there?).

Today, I spent sometime investigating Qondio, a website which "allows you" to post a blog and earn 100% of your income. Right. The downside, they forget to tell you that there is a hidden $5 activation fee. I say "hidden", because you read their FAQ, no mention of it there. Read their registration page, again no mention. Only after you submit your registration details WHOOPS!! Please pay $5. Now, that is not alot of money. I just hate it when a website does not reveal the games that they are playing upfront. So, I looked on the internet to what other people are saying. Apparently you can give a link to your website at the bottom of your blog, but it is not an anchor text link, it is just a raw link. Also, I read that there is some kind of automated softwear approval mechanism of your post and some writers complain about having their posts rejected for no stated reason. All of that was a turn off for me. I just do not want to spend time writing for a website that proudly states all of the advantages and hides some of the less attractive things. It makes me wonder what else they have up their sleeves.

I looked into Helium articles and while you can earn money, you can not give a link to your site! However, Helium does now have something called Zones that are something like a Squidoo lens and I recently created a new zone. I will be watching to see how that develops.

I am reading strange things from disgruntled EHow authors. Many people are unhappy there and anyway their links are Nofollow....again a no go.

So, fellow Squids, can anyone tell me a site that even comes close to Squidoo in terms of those three criteria? Where can I find a site which will offer:

* Dofollow links to my website
* Traffic to my website
* Interesting earning potential

Or is Squidoo simply a "one of a kind"?