The face of online advertising keeps changing and improvising.

Check out this clever form of interactive advertising on Youtube for Nintendo Wii’s Wario Land Shake It! below.

If you want to experience something more than the video, go here.

The hardest thing about blogging is coming up with fresh, new content. It’s really easy to run out of things to blog about if you have no ideas.

Obviously this is detrimental to any blogger who wants to make money from blogging because it is important that you publish new posts frequently – twice a week at the very least – to keep readers interested and earn search engine love.

If you’re feeling stuck, here is a list of 50 blogging ideas that are sure to inspire you to come up with new content for your blog. Most of the ideas can be used more than once, so you won’t run out of blog posts for months to come.

1. Special events – Relate your blog topic to a special event, national day of, or holiday.

2. News – Subscribe to Google news alert on your keywords and write about the latest news in your niche.

3. Book review.

4. Respond to a post on another blog in a niche similar or related to yours.

5. Blog milestone – Write about your blogging milestones, such as publishing your 100th post, getting your 1000th comment….

6. Niche heroes -Blog about a person who made a positive contribution in your niche.

7. Blog memes – Join in blog memes such as “Wordless Wednesday”. There’s at least one for every day of the week!

8. Product review – An excellent way to work in some affiliate links.

9. FAQs in your niche – Write a short Q & A based on FAQs about your niche.

10. Blog comment response – Write a long and expanded response to a comment on your blog.

11. Predict trends – What do you see happening in your niche in a year? 5 years?

12. Historical view – What was your niche in the past? Or what past event influenced your niche?

13. Top tips on any topic of interest to your readers.

14. Best of… – A good year ender, make a list of your best posts for the year.

15. Contests – Organize a contest for your blog readers, or make a list of contests your readers can join.

16. What I learned from… a current event, a person you met, or an experience you had.

17. Definitions – Define terms that are commonly used in your niche but a beginner may not understand

18. New products – Not a review but simply an announcement of a new product relevant to your niche. This is another good opportunity to drop in some affiliate links.

19. Biggest problem – Ask your readers what their biggest problem is about your blog topic or niche. They post their answers in the comments section.

20. Biggest problem follow up – Summarize the comments from #19 in another post.

21. Biggest problem follow up series – Write a separate blog post tackling each question from #19.

22. Interview somebody knowledgeable in your niche, or has succeeded in it, or is otherwise interesting to your readers.

23. Big list – Compile a big list of various resources, just like this one. The bigger the better!

24. Reader Survey – Put up a brief survey online and blog about the results.

25. Be provocative. Challenge a common belief or widely accepted idea in your niche.

26. New idea – What new idea about your blog topic or niche have you come across lately?

27. YouTube – Embed a funny, moving or insightful video on YouTube. You can even have a “video day” once a week.

28. YouTube version 2 – Make YOUR own YouTube video. Publish it on YouTube then embed on your blog. This way, you can attract traffic from YouTube to your blog.

29. Freebie – Scour the ‘net for freebies that your readers will love. Or create a freebie of your own, such as a checklist or special report.

30. Personal story – Use a personal story to illustrate an important concept or principle in your niche.

31. Free to publish articles – Check out relevant articles in article directories such as Ezine Articles… but don’t publish them entirely on your blog. Instead, use an article or a group of articles as your take-off point for a blog post, or several.

32. Link love – This is a post with links to other blogs. Some bloggers set aside one day a week to publish a list of the best blog posts on their topic.

33. Photo – A picture is worth thousand words, right? Search Flickr for creative commons pictures that your readers will like.

34. Hot topics – Look at Digg for hot topics in your niche

35. Pros and cons – Examine what’s good and bad about something related to your blog topic

36. Respond to relevant questions you find in Ask.com

37. Guest post – Invite another blogger to write a guest post for your blog

38. Reader’s post – Invite blog subscribers to submit an article or post to be published on the blog

39. Inspirational post – Write a motivational post for your readers.

40. Update an old post with fresh ideas, new learnings and current research findings.

41. Beginner’s guide – What do beginners in your niche struggle with? Write a post to guide them through it.

Best list – Patterned after “best dressed lists” make a list of the best ___ in your niche.

43. Worst list – Make your version of the “worst dressed list” for your niche.

44. New uses for – Think of new ways your readers can use gadgets and other stuff.

45. Write about a live event that you attended and what you learned from it.

46. Bribe post – Bribe your readers with a freebie in exchange for subscribing to your newsletter or RSS feed.

47. Around the world – Compare how people in different countries do something related to your niche.

48. Seasonal – Relate the month or season to your blog topic.

49. Blog carnival – Join or host a blog carnival, where several publish posts about the same topic on the same day.

50. Host a virtual “conference” on your blog – Invite “speakers” to publish their post on a specified date and time. Q&A happens in the comments section.

I hope that my tips will help you generate a steady flow of fresh content.

Keep me posted

A couple of posts back, I promised to give you the secret of where I go to get my sponsored review assignments that pay up to as much as thousands of dollars per assignment.

Without further ado, here they are – my 2 favorite haunts which make me thousands of dollars through blog reviews.

Sponsored Reviews

One thing I really like about Sponsored Reviews is the fact that the approval process is almost instantaneous. All you have to do is to register as a blogger, register your blog and after that you can start sifting through the assignments to bid for them. All the advertisers here are genuinely looking for blogs to review their products and many of them have good budgets – $20 upwards. Some go as high as a thousand dollars although most are in the $20 – $100 range. How high you can go will depend on how much traffic your blog enjoys and what niche your blog is serving.

From my experience, the niches that pay best are – auto, entertainment, business, finance, technology. It is very easy to make a couple of hundreds here weekly if you are not too pricey and your blog enjoys decent traffic. Sponsored Reviews is prompt on payment and pays through Paypal.

Social Spark

Social Spark is quite a different vehicle from Sponsored Reviews. There are more choices to monetize from as it also offers CPA and CPC opportunities besides sponsored reviews. The sponsored reviews here usually have higher requirements but some of them pay very well – occasionally up to the tune of a couple of thousand dollars.

Signing up for the network and waiting to be approved however can be a pain as it is quite a lengthy process. You need to drop codes into your blog and wait for the network to review your blog before they will approve it. Only then can you look for opportunities. The website has a robust backed system and keeps its opportunities well categorized, so you will be able to look for assignments quite easily. One problem is that the high paying assignments are usually very competitive as there are no lack of top bloggers here. But if you persevere, you will get good assignments finally. Social Spark is also prompt on payment and uses Paypal too.

As a bonus, I want to tell you about two other blog review networks.

The reason why I don’t go to them is because the payouts are usually very low, but if you are just starting out and just want to get some experience and pocket money to go with it, then these networks can be your starting grounds – Smorty and Review Me.

I hope this post has been helpful to you. When you get your first assignment, do drop me a comment here. Good luck!

Mike Filsaime’s Affiliate Jump has been buzzing on the internet for some time now. It opened its doors amidst much fanfare somewhere in August, then closed after about 2 weeks due to memberships being filled up, only to open again recently. According to Mike Filsaime, they are going to close the doors again real fast.

Now before you fork out the money and make the jump, the least you can do for yourself is to read this review and decide if this network membership is right for you.

Before you do so, I would like to invite you to see the videos below.

Mike Filsaime’s Introductory Video

Mike Filsaime talks about the features of Affiliate Jump

I hope you have a better idea of what Affiliate Jump can do for you now.

Allow me to recap, the top selling points Affiliate Jump hawks are these -

CPA – Affiliate Jump specializes in Cost Per Action offers, or CPA offers for short. Due to the fact that CPA usually involves just some form of action like filling up a survey form and do not require the prospect to fork out money, CPA has a higher conversion rate than affiliate marketing for products. Yet, some CPA offers pay out handsomely to affiliate marketers.

CPA Networks Take Ages to Approve Sign-ups -If you are familiar with affiliate networks which specialize in CPAs like Commission Junction, you will know that it is often a hassle to get approval from the vendors. Sometimes you get rejected without even knowing why. Affiliate Jump offers an immediate solution to the problem as it claims to pull offers from all the other affiliate networks to a single location (Affiliate Jump itself) and it offers an instant approval on all offers to its members.

Technology – Affiliate Jump has an integrated system to make it very easy for affiliate marketers to promote and track the CPA offers. (a) It allows users to create websites in seconds (b) It provides the hosting and domain (c) It provides comprehensive traffic sand sales statistics.

In my usual honest fashion, I will translate what this really means and whether it is of value to you, I will leave it up to the individual to judge.

CPA – It is a fact that CPA is a different creature from Cost Per Clicks (CPC) and affiliate sales. It is also a fact that some CPA offers pay off handsome rewards. But with regards to whether it enjoys higher conversion rates is arguable. It all depends on how you market and drive traffic. If you are competent in both these aspects, to be honest, CPA, CPC and affiliate marketing are all fair play. So what I’m trying to say really is that it doesn’t necessarily mean that CPA offers can make you more money. What is fair to say though is this – if you find a really good CPA offer that doesn’t require much from the prospect – then chances of him taking the action which eventually pays you will be higher.

CPA Networks Take Ages to Approve Sign-ups – While it is true that it takes ages for some vendors to approve your application to be their marketer and you get rejected at times, but from what I see in the Affiliate Jump introductory video, at least some of the top CPA offers are obtained from an affiliate network which approves instantly – MarketHealth.com. This particular network has been around for many years and carry high commissions for CPA/affiliate sales for products in the health and beauty niche like acai berry juice, colon cleansing products, cosmetics, etc. Affiliate Jump also carries high paying CPA offers from other niches like credit cards and auto insurance obviously as it currently claims to carry more than 1000 CPA offers, and such niches indeed quite hard to get approval for. So it all boils down to your niche. If you are doing health or cosmetics products, you might want to just sign up for free with MarketHealth.com. If you are in other niches however and you want the convenience, then Affiliate Jump might be the solution for you.

Technology – Now, the fact that Affiliate Jump can create simple sites with your affiliate links embedded and you will not have to worry about setting up a domain and hosting is indeed an attractive proposition for the non-tech-savvy. What you have to do then is to concentrate on driving relevant traffic to these websites. In a way, this is really good for marketers who just want to concentrate on driving traffic and making commissions. The only flip side is that you don’t really own the sites because they are hosted under Affiliate Jump. I don’t think this is really of concern unless Affiliate Jump collapses though. I should also mention that AJ allows the automated creation of affiliate widgets which you can embed into your existing sites to promote CPA offers. This is  a good solution for those who prefer to retain control over how your site looks.

Training – At this very moment, Mike Filsaime is throwing in a host of top training programs to get marketers up to speed with Affiliate Jump. Obviously this is a great bonus for those just starting out in affiliate marketing.

So there you have it. My honest opinions on Mike Filsaime’s Affiliate Jump Network.

Affiliate Network currently offers 3 payment schemes at $39.95, $89.95 and $99.95 per month, each differing in the number of websites and widgets you can create.

My opinion is that if you are uncertain and worried about blowing too much cash at first, go for the lowest package and concentrate on driving traffic to just a few sites first. Trust me, it will be ample enough work for a start. But whatever it is, if you are just starting out and clueless about many things, I think Affiliate Jump is a good place to start off your internet marketing career with minimum investments.

Now if you happen to purchase a package from Affiliate Jump through my review, it means Mike Filsaime would pay me a commission. To show my appreciation to you for doing that, I would give you some solid traffic driving secrets I use to consistently drive tons of traffic to my websites. You should know I’m a no BS person by now, so my word is good as gold. All you have to do is to purchase through this link and send me your receipt at aldric@aldricchang.com. Once I get authentication that you purchased through my link I will get in touch with you personally.

Good luck!

Believe it or not, sponsored blog reviews earn you good money.

I know, because I do.

Following my post on Blogging For Money, I would now like to share where I go to get sponsored review assignments. (For those not in the know, sponsored reviews are assignments where you are commissioned by a 3rd party to write about their products/services/websites.)

Now, this is actually a very valuable post because I am sharing my actual experiences and sources from where I obtain assignments worth up to thousands of dollars. You will not see many internet marketers out there being so sharing. I hope you learn from my sharing and benefit through it. By subscribing to my blog and dropping me a nice comment that will be ample thanks for me.

Anyway, back to the topic.

There are actually several networks which match make reviewees (those who want their products reviewed) and reviewers (those who review products). I’ve been to all of them and from my experience, I can tell you that only two of these networks are truly worth your time.

Before I divulge which ones they are, I want to talk about how these networks work and how much you can expect to earn from each assignment.

How Blog Review Networks Work

Generally a product/service/website owner wants to generate publicity and word-of-mouth for their product, and they subscribe to the belief that the best way is to get blogs talking about it. So instead of approaching blogs one by one, they subscribe to a Blog Review network where there are hundreds of assignment-hungry blogs waiting to snap up the opportunity and post their opportunity.

On the other hand, bloggers who want to earn extra income through reviewing a product sign up with a Blog Review network and register their blogs. They will often be asked to classify their blogs under the appropriate categories.

Whenever there is somebody interested to have his product reviewed, he can then either look through the Blog Review network’s database to look for suitable candidates to review his product, or he can put up an assignment classified and let bloggers bid for his assignment.

How Much Does Each Review Pay?

Generally sponsored reviews can pay as little as a few bucks to as much as a few thousand dollars. Yes, a few thousand dollars!

From my experience, this depends on 3 factors.

1) the network you are subscribed to

Unfortunately not all networks are built equal. Some networks serve really low value assignments in the below ten bucks range while some other networks serve assignments worth up to a few thousand dollars.

2) the popularity of your blog and your web traffic credentials

If your blog enjoys high traffic, it means that the review will be read by many people, which translates to more potential word-of-mouth and sales for the customer. You can command a higher fee for your assignments then.

3) the niche your blog is catering to

Certain niches tend to believe in sponsored reviews more and thus tend to pay higher rates. If you are in the right niche, your assignments can be worth a lot of money.

In my next post, I will spill the beans on my 2 favorite Blog Review networks with which I have consistently earned hundreds of dollars (sometimes up to a thousand) per week. Stay tuned till then!

If you have not already done so, I recommend that you download my free guide on Blogging for Money.

Consider a recent survey of teenagers that revealed the following:

- 91% of kids have an email address
- 60% have an instant-message screen name
- 75% have a cell phone
- 72% have profiles on social networking sites

And on a more disturbing note

- 1 in 5 said they have been “cyber-bullied”
- most share personal info online, though 3 in 5 know it’s dangerous
- 1 in 4 know someone who experienced something bad, from an inappropriate text forwarded around school to being sexually victimized

The internet currently presents very interesting questions and challenges for parents.

If there were an instruction manual on how to be a parent, the section on technology and the internet would be worthy of several chapters for certain. Online activities add yet another dimension to the job of raising our children, as if worrying about them in the “real world” weren’t enough already.

The need for complete information and advice on this subject cannot be overstated.

This 34 page comprehensive guidebook, “Raising Kids On The Internet”, is presented to parents of all backgrounds or experience, whether they are just getting familiar with the internet yourself, or they are a long-time internet surfer. Even experienced internet users have been found to be unfamiliar with many of the facts and issues regarding effective monitoring of children in online activities.

I’ve written this guidebook for the purpose of giving it to internet marketers in the family/parenting/internet/children niches to use for the following purposes -

- to give away as an opt-in product to build their lists

- to bundle as a bonus gift for their main product offering

- to give away as a bonus for purchasing a product through their affiliate link

- and more, depending on your creativity

You are free to give away and distribute this e-book, but you are not allowed to do the following -

- modify any of the contents within

- lift the text within to submit to article submission sites

- claim ownership of the e-book

All you have to do is to fill in your Name and Email above to get your free copy of “Raising Kids On The Internet“. You will also be subscribed to my newsletter and be rewarded with more useful information and free reports in the future.

I have been through the ups and downs of life. I’ve faced success and failure in everything I do. But I never see failure as failure. I tend to see failure as a golden nugget of wisdom for me to gain success.

Success does not come easy, but I can tell you it is not only for a selected few. Everyone has the potential to be successful in all aspects of his or her life. By nurturing good habits and sticking to them it is possible to attain success. It is important that note that all successful people have a certain personality. They tend to think, speak and behave in a particular manner. There is a remarkable consistency in these similarities.

If you too want to be successful, here are 11 powerful tips for success you should apply to your life.

1.    What do you want to achieve in your life? Develop a clear vision of what you want to achieve, keep this in your mind and never lose sight of it.

2.    Believe firmly in your ability to achieve your goals. Believe that you will achieve your dreams without doubt. Believe that there is a higher power that is guiding you and helping you achieve your dreams.

3.    Avoid negative influences and expel them from your life. These include negative people, books, activities, vices, etc. Surround yourself with people or things that emit positive energy and boost your belief that you will succeed.

4.    Your future is your responsibility, not others’. Depend solely on yourself and never rely on anybody else to shape your future.

5.    Once you commit to doing something, never give up and stray away from your commitment. It is important that you always stay focused or your efforts will all be wasted.

6.    Always refresh and examine your affirmations. Recite them and keep your affirmations fresh by referring to them in present tense. Write down your affirmations so that you can examine them in words. This helps you stay focused on your goals and is also a great way to build up your self-confidence and strengthen your belief.

7.    Be specific about what you want to achieve and make these into goals. They should be clear, measurable, realistic and be given a duration.

8.    Formulate a plan of action. Don’t try to take giant strides. Instead, break down your plan into smaller tasks that you can perform effectively and realistically. With every small task accomplished you will be one step closer to your goal.

9.    Persist, persist and persist. Never give up on what you set out to accomplish until you have achieved your goal. Persistence will determine your success. Take every failure as a learning experience and forge ahead with stronger faith and greater wisdom.

10.    Be grateful to all the positive influences in your life. Be grateful for your family’s love and support and show your appreciation. You will be rewarded with more support and love, which will provide encouragement for you to reach your goals.

11.    Never be selfish. Try to give your time and wealth to the needy and to render your services to those who require them. Be kind and generous and success will beckon to you in ways you lease expect.

So there you are. The 11 power tips for success you can and should apply to your life. If you follow them with faith and persistence, you will be rewarded with your success.

Following my post on the 4 Main Methods of Blogging For Money, I would now like to touch on something I coin ‘web traffic credentials’.

You might or might not already know, but anything and everything you do on the internet – if you want to make money – you need web traffic. Lots of it. Tons of it. The more the merrier.

Let’s look at the 4 main methods of Blogging for Money and see how web traffic credentials will affect how a web site can monetize.

Sponsored Reviews – When somebody is paying you to review something, they want to see that you have web traffic credentials. They want to see that your site has a steady stream of web traffic every single day. They are not paying you not just for the 200-300 word writeup on their products/services/websites, because they can easily get a ghostwriter to do it for $10. What they are paying you for is the hope that their review on your site will be exposed to X number of readers and the X number of readers will hopefully tell Y number of friends about the review so that they can get maximum exposure. In advertising dollars, a paid review is a great deal for these guys.

Advertising – Advertisers don’t want to advertise on sites which do not have traffic. If you are an advertiser, would you like to advertise in a deserted town or a bustling city? I’ll bet the latter right? So if you have a low traffic site, basically nobody wants to advertise on your site, some ad networks are picky about accepting you and you are left with only good old Google Adsense. Adsense is not bad, but you only earn if you deliver clicks because you can’t get sponsored ads that promise a fixed sum of money every month if you are low traffic. And if your site has low web traffic, who is going to click on your ads?

Affiliate Marketing – Because in affiliate marketing you are simply selling other people’s products and geting a commission for your efforts, vendors usually don’t care if your site is high traffic or low traffic as long as you are selling for them. If you close sales, it’s good news for them. If you don’t, there’s no loss for them. But there’s such a thing as a conversion rate for doing anything online. It basically means out of every X number of people, Y percentage will convert to become paying customers. The numbers are usually between 0.5 to 2% for most affiliate marketing products. So you can imagine if you have only 10 prospects trickling to your website every day, it will take you ages to get even one sale! Web traffic credentials are not important

Selling Your Own Products – The concept here is basically the same as in affiliate marketing. No web traffic, no sales. Little web traffic, little sales. Huge web traffic, high sales. It’s all about conversion rates and conversion ratios.

In summary, web traffic credentials will not affect your opportunity to monetize through affiliate marketing or selling your own products, but it will directly impact your opportunities to get sponsored reviews assignments and advertising placements. However, it is true to say that without good and relevant web traffic, you will find it difficult to monetize through anything.

So how do you determine web traffic credentials for a site? Or rather, what do advertisers see and check before they advertise with you or assign you a sponsored review?

And also, what exactly is relevant traffic and why is it crucial to making money online?

I will cover more of these over my next few posts.

In this post, I would like to touch briefly on a few ways to making money through blogging.

It won’t be an in-depth post, just an introductory one. But over the next few posts I will be covering these methods more in detail and sharing my personal experiences.

In no particular order of preference, here they are -

- sponsored reviews

- advertising

- affiliate marketing

- selling your own products

That’s it! The 4 main methods of making money through blogging.

I’ve personally done all the above with varying success. Some of my blogs perform better at some methods while some excel in other methods. All these really boil down to the niche and target market involved.

I’ll briefly touch on the 4 methods now.

Sponsored Reviews – You are commissioned by a 3rd party to write about their products/services/websites. While some people may argue that being paid to review something is hardly ethical, it is a fact that reviews are a very powerful form of word-of-mouth. If you see a positive recommendation for a product by an authoritative person or website, chances are you will form a good impression of that product. The opposite is true. Sponsors realize that, and that is why they are willing to pay good money to have sites write positively about their products. This can be a very good source of income for bloggers. The only catch to this method of blogging for money is that your site will have to be quite popular before you can command a premium fee for your reviews. Most small-time bloggers can earn between $5 – $20 per assignment. Popular bloggers can earn up to a few thousand dollars per assignment. I will be sharing where to go to get such opportunities over my next few posts.

Advertising – You sign up with advertising networks who will give you a piece of code to put on your site, and you are ready to start accepting advertisements. Some ad networks serve ads almost instantaneously while others take forever. Prices are usually set by the clients or the ad networks. As your blog becomes more popular, you can look for advertisers and broker deals yourself. Usually that earns you more money. For beginners, it is recommended that you  start out with Google Adsense, as the ads get served almost immediately and you are almost always guaranteed to get ads, unless you are in a very obscure niche. I will be sharing various ad networks and covering advertising more in depth over the next few posts.

Affiliate Marketing – You sell other people’s products and get a commission for your efforts. If you keep a particularly good blog with quality posts and have accumulated a loyal stream of followers, you can sign up with an affiliate network such as Clickbank and look for good products that are related to your niche to market and sell.  This can be very good money if your website is very popular. I will be sharing various affiliate networks and covering affiliate marketing more in depth over the next few posts.

Selling Your Own Products – This involves creating your own digital or physical product and selling it via your blog. The concept  is almost similar to affiliate marketing except that you are selling your own products, but the fundamentals remain that you have to keep a good blog with a healthy traffic with a niche relevant to your product in order to make sales. And of course, your product must be of quality. I will be covering more of this over my next few posts.

So there you have it. The 4 main methods of making money through blogging.

Over the next few posts, as promised, I will discuss these methods more in detail. Do watch out for them.

In the meantime, do download my free e-book on blogging if you have not already done so -  “Aldric’s Guide to Blogging for Money”. It will cover what I have just discussed and more

Till the next post then!

Last Friday I received a nice email from Squidoo informing me that I was officially a Giant Squid. (For those of you who don’t know what Squidoo is, it is a community social media website that allows users to create pages (called lenses) for subjects of interest. Lenses are interactive, and can contain Flickr photos, Google maps, blogs, eBay auctions, YouTube videos, and other links. Squidoo is in the top 200 most visited sites in the world, and in the top 50 most viewed in the United States.)

This is how it read.

“We had hundreds of applications this round and really raised the bar in our search for excellence. And you didn’t just meet it; you vaulted over it. Thanks for the wonderful work, leadership, and for believing in what you can do here.

What now? Well, first, celebrate and do a happy dance.

Next: Please read the Giant Squids Handbook, attached to this email as a PDF. It will let you know about all the fun perks and blogs and tools we’ve created just for you. (And it outlines a little of what we expect from you in return. Hint: It’s not much. Just keep up the great work!).

Last: Come say hello at the secret Giant Squid Tips blog (I can’t divulge it because it’s meant to be secret!). This is your central watering hole where we share info and perks and sneak peeks and more. Please bookmark it (or better yet, grab the email newsletter version) so you don’t miss a thing.

We’re really excited to have you in the Giant Squids. We’ve got some cool stuff planned for you over the next few months. Have fun! And thanks for being here.

Your Giant Squid Organizers,
BDKZ (Bonnie), RMS (Robin), GypsyPirate (Patti) & Megan, Editor in Chief of Squidoo”

Let me say that this did not come easy as I wrote 60 over lenses over the span of 1 year while juggling with all my work. But I’ve been rewarded amply with good SEO links, 1 Lens of the Day, several high traffic lenses, a nice monthly paycheck for my efforts and now the Giant Squid status.

What can I say? Squidoo rocks

In case you want to check out my Squidoo profile, here it is.