As regular visitors to this blog noticed last week, I made a special blog entry to announce I had made contact with an internet company that evaluates your writing submissions and posts them on web sites looking for “original content”. This company gave all these special ways you can make money by submitting your writings to them. You make money off the article itself, the ads that are clicked near your article and other vaguely spelled out ways of cashing in on your work. If fact, you may notice the widget I had in the upper right, which had a link to my article on a web site from which I was “earning money,” is now gone.

It’s gone for two reasons; one, it added almost three seconds to my load time. I admit my posts are far too long. I’m working on trying to shorten them up. But, as in my case, if a site takes more than five seconds to load, I’m moving on. So, that was one reason. The main reason, however, was the hypocritical nature of the company. They took an article that I submitted to them and posted it on a web site in need of “original content” where I would “make money.” I think the only people making money is the company in question (just look for my post “A Bit of Gratuitous Self-promotion Here”).

After accepting my first submission (Most Embarrassing Moments), they rejected the next two that I had posted here. They said they only accept “original submissions”. Well, they accepted “Most Embarrassing Moments” completely unedited. Plus, this web site is still just a month old. On a good day, I get maybe 200 hits. That seems to have picked up over the weekend because I had over 500 hits last Saturday (May 3rd) for reasons I’m not completely sure about right now. My point, how many out of the millions and millions of people on the internet would have known if the articles, my articles, were ever posted on the internet? You can say, I should have read the fine print. Well, I did. But, nowhere did it state you could not post your own original content from your very own blog. As I stated, they accepted one entry from me completely unedited from this blog. Naturally, after they did that, I thought it was perfectly within the rules to submit more of my articles from this blog. Actually, now that I think about it, they may have done me a favor not accepting my last two entries. My time will come if I am talented enough to catch the attention of a real publisher.

Oh well. You live and learn. Just goes to show, you have to be careful on the internet just as you are in the real world. People will take advantage if you allow them to. Lesson learned. I’m just a wannabe writer anyway.