I have blogged about SocialSpark often on this blog, it is one of the top companies that pay you to blog in my opinion. I am not the most successful blogger on SocialSpark, but having earned almost $100 per month average from this one company over the past eighteen months has made it one of my favorites. What I like about the service is that as a blogger you get to pick and choose what you want to review and promote. There are no posts for quick backlinks here and all of the companies listed on SocialSpark want fair and honest reviews and posts about their products. You feel free to provide your own honest opinions and you don’t need to feel pressured into just saying you “like” everything you review, if you genuinely find some faults or things you don’t like about the product or service, be honest and open and you will not be penalized for it in any way and you will be paid whether you write a positive review or a critical review.

• Here are some of my tips for succeeding in SocialSpark

First make sure when you sign up for SocialSpark you are part of an an “Insider’s Membership” this will give you access to someone who has been around for a long time in SocialSpark. I am part of I’m Not a Famous Blogger group which is managed by Ben Spark who is a great guy and has been blogging for years. He also is very helpful and always willing to answer questions for new bloggers.

Next is to get your blogs registered as quickly as possible and make sure they are claimed and approved to take opportunities in the SocialSpark marketplace.

May people at this point would just go idle and wait for their blogs to qualify for opportunities, but I am telling you that unless your blog is already getting over 200 unique visits a day this is a mistake. You must gain an active presence on SocialSpark and one way to do this is to take one “Spark Opp” per week. A Spark is a opportunity that offers you no payment but most of them do offer a “backlink” to your blog and you get to make connections and network with other bloggers by taking their “Sparks”. I have created many Sparks on SocialSpark myself and in my earlier blogging days I have taken dozens of Spark opps over my first few months.

By taking a Spark Opp you are getting some traffic in the SocialSpark system and taking a Spark opp does count as an opportunity. This gives notice for advertisers to see your writing style. You should also do searches for other bloggers and advertisers that fit your blog niche and befriend them. An introduction and greeting message along with a friendship request are also nice.

When your blog does start qualifying for opportunities always make sure you keep in mind that “quality” is what is the key here. Make sure you double and triple proofread your blog posts for typo’s or grammar errors. If you don’t like the product you are reviewing I would use constructive criticism about what you didn’t like rather than any sort of slander or bashing, word it in a way as to be as positive as possible.

I have told my bloggers month after month how SocialSpark is my single top earning program and this is because you can find some very hiqh quality advertisers and high paying opportunities here if your blog has the traffic and pagerank to qualify. This is also one of the only blogging programs where you can qualify for many opportunities with traffic alone, I was able to earn many opps when DragonBlogger.com was a PageRank 0 just because I was getting so many unique visits to my site.

-Dragon Blogger

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Warning:

This review includes details about the Season 4 Finale of Heroes which are spoilers, go watch the Finale and come back to share your thoughts and point of view after you watch it. I don’t want to spoil it for anyone.

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This episode tonight “Episode 18 – Brave New World” marks the end of the Season four or Volume 5 finale. I thought it played out pretty well considering it could have been a mess, with clever use of many heroes and their abilities to help thwart and weaken Samuel to the point that not a single notable person was slain in the entire episode. This is the first season finale for Heroes where nobody was killed (or almost killed) and it was enjoyable.

Sylar partially redeems himself by saving Emma from Eric Doyle who forced her to draw in people to the carnival where Samuel was to cause a great act of death and destruction to announce their presence to the world. Woe be it for him that Peter comes flying in only to absorb his ability and hold him at a standoff with it. When Hiro and Ando combine strength to mass teleport hundreds of the carnival family out of Samuel’s area of influence, he becomes powerless instantly.

I felt so sorry for Hiro in how he finds Charlie and the difficult choice he has to make, you literally can see his heart broken by the fact that there is nothing he can do, and he will never have the life with her that he wanted. Samuel had robbed him of so much by his actions and this was probably the most vicious and heartless of all the things Samuel has done in the season.

It was both shocking and a little exciting to see Claire make her final bold and brash move to the media at the beginning of Volume 6 – Brave New World where she demonstrates her invulnerability and immortality in front of live television characters. This led to a great opener for the next volume and we can see how the world reacts to people with abilities, though I see another potential parallel to X-Men here as there have been so many already on the show. We don’t need another government hunt, chase and capture again and if this were to become another cycle that repeats then I fear the show will become nigh unwatchable.

I also would like to see Sylar start to become the Hero he always wanted to be, a Hero who really can’t kill but is so powerful he can disarm virtually anybody. Would be great to see him help the others and maybe a newly formed company track down and take out the dangerous ones to keep society protected.

Who knows whats in store for NBC Heroes and whether or not it will actually air Volume 6 later this Season, but if they have fresh idea’s I think it could have potential and I certainly will be there to watch it and see how it plays out.

-Dragon Blogger

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Ileane over at Ms. Ileane Speaks wrote an article listing the top 11 reasons why she loves wordpress.com and the advantages of using a free wordpress.com blog instead of running your own self hosted blog. It is a well written article and I agree with all of her points, any blogger should choose wordpress.com over blogger.com in my opinion as you do have more power and flexibility at your fingertips.

I won’t go into listing the eleven reasons as you have to go read her blog to see what she listed as the reasons for using a wordpress.com blog but I wanted to let my readers know that if you are serious about monetizing your blog, you will ultimately end up transferring your wordpress.com blog to a self hosted wordpress site. The reasons are simple.

Advertisers want to know you are invested in blogging, if you aren’t invested in your own site then you could stop, abandon at any time. You are also subject to the rules of wordpress.com and blogger.com about advertising and I have known bloggers whose blogs have been removed from testing and trying new advertising programs just to experiment. You trade freedom to test and try what you want for convenience of cost.

If you look on SocialSpark, SponsoredReviews, PayU2Blog or many other systems you will see specific statements from advertisers that they won’t accept bloggers on wordpress.com, xanga, blogspot or other free blogging sites. PayU2Blog made a statement last year that they were no longer accepting any blogspot blogs into their account and I don’t know if they included wordpress.com blogs yet.

With the millions of bloggers out there you don’t stand out as much by being just another wordpress.com blog, or another blogspot blog you have to show that you are independent and serious about blogging and be committed to it. If you are just a casual blogger who is blogging for fun, then by all means go ahead and start a free blog

But if you are a serious blogger who wants to either make a career or at least a decent amount of income from your blog, then you are going to need to invest in a wordpress self hosted blog. Don’t think you can do it later, by shifting your blog to a new site later you will lose all of your pagerank and it will take months to recover the traffic and statistics you will work so hard to build up on your current “free” hosted blog.

Whereas if you have a self-hosted blog with your own domain name, you can move it between hosting providers with no loss in visitors, pagerank or Alexa (unless you have long term outage issues). I was able to move my blog from 1 hosting provider to another in less than 24 hours and took only about a two hour outage.

These are just my observations on blogging over the past fifteen months, and gone are the early days of blogging where someone can get rich and famous from a salon.com account. It worked when these services were new, but now that they are so heavily used you just make it that harder to stand out among the masses.

I don’t even go into the fact that I know so many blogspot.com blogs that are hacked and have trojans inserted or other malicious code.  You have a much better chance of security your website with a self hosted wordpress install where you can install security packages and lock down your site.

-Dragon Blogger

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Disclaimer: This was a sponsored post, commissioned by mDistribute.com. I was compensated to learn about the service and share my thoughts and opinions. The words and opinions are mine and mine alone.

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I have always had an interest in the film making industry and keep tabs on things related to movies and entertainment. This is why DragonBlogger.com is also an entertainment and movie review site in addition to a Technology and Blogging portal. I was intrigued by a site called mDistribute which lets amateur film makers license their films to be distributed on mobile content.

This program appears to bring film makers and web content providers together by allowing film makers to list their films and set a license price for distribution. Buyers purchase the license to the film and are able to distribute across any mobile medium. They list the top selling amateur film right now called “The 73 Virgins” which has earned over $19k (not bad for an amateur film earnings by any means).

So if you are a content provider whether you do live film, animation or other video and you might be interested in seeing if you can license and make money for distribution, check out mDistribute, it may be a way for you to bring in some revenue for your art.

-Dragon Blogger

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