Beware of emails from different Michaels of BloggerMarkets.com

I haven’t been paying much attention to the spam mails I receive daily. I just noticed these five mails I got from someone named Michael with different surnames. The mails have the same subject: Looking for Bloggers.

The first email came from MichaelMCorp . It says that he is part of the outreach team for BloggerMarkets.com and that they have recently launched a sponsored blog post offering looking to add quality sites to their offerings.

If you will search Google for BloggerMarkets.com, it won’t give you any site with the same URL. There is a BloggerMarket.com but it is a site offering blog resources and information and not a paid post program. The thing that will give you a doubt as to the authenticity of this email is that the link to the form they are asking you to fill out is shortened. It does not give you the exact URL but a shortened version of it.

An hour or two after I got that email from MichaelMCorp, I got another email with the same subject from someone named Michael Flores this time. The content of the email is the same as the first one. No change at all.

A few days after, I got an email from Michael Traugott . The content of the email is the same as the first two except that this time around, he didn’t mention BloggerMarkets.com anymore. He just mentioned a new blog monetization network. The rest of the email is the same. No words have changed.

And then another one from Micheal Spayer and Michael jezzer with the same content as that of the third email from Michael Traugott. The same email, no words were changed at all.

I am writing this entry to let all of you know that this might be a scam or a way to lure you to click on that form link with the tiny URL. It might be a virus or a way to hack your computer. It might be a phishing scam. Whichever, I think you will agree that there is something fishy with these emails I got. I have posted the email samples here. Just click on the image for you to see the larger version of it.

Do not be lured easily by these fly-by-night sponsored blog post programs. We all know what happened to a couple of bloggers scammed by Blogavertisingstore.com and PayingPost. Just be careful with accepting invitations to join a program. Remember that if it’s a legitimate offer, you won’t be reading about it in an email. You will be reading about it from other bloggers who are talking about it in their blogs, in forums and such.

Transfer of blog

I am in the middle of transferring my blog from one cpanel to another. The size of my blog posts and comments is almost 8MB. I am having a hard time uploading all of it so please bear with all the dust here. I have yet to upload this blog’s theme as well so this default theme will have to do for now.

Happy blogging!

PayingPost and Blogadvertisingstore.com: A Scam?!

I just read a post that really bothered me. It’s about Paying Post and Blog Advertising Store. According to the blogger, Jenie, PayingPost hasn’t been paying up!

I was one of the many bloggers who tried out Paying Post when it was starting up. I wrote a couple of posts for them and when it reached $50, I was able to withdraw my earnings from them. In fact, I wasn’t even withdrawing my earnings that time yet but was just tallying my earnings recorded on my list versus what they have on record. Robert (support@payingpost.com) was a very pleasant person to talk to and he helped me correct the amount of my earnings on their end. And to clean up my account, he paid me right away while we were still exchanging emails about it. I earned $51 from them and that was in December 2008. From then on, I checked from time to time for new opportunities until I just got so lazy I didn’t check anymore. In short, I stopped using PayingPost after that $51 I earned from them.

To be honest, I already forgot about them until I read this tweet from Cherry that alerted me to this news about PayingPost. Apparently, Jenie has heard so many negative things about PayingPost not paying people on time or not paying them at all. And then she just learned that Blogadvertisingstore.com, apparently PayingPost in disguise, has been putting blogs at risk with the script they’re asking their members to embed in their sites!

If you are a member of any of these programs, I would like to hear your experience from them. If you are a member of Blogadvertisingstore.com, beware because your site might be infected with a virus that is supposedly coming from them! Check and double check!

So, is PayingPost really a scam? Because on my part, I had a good experience with them back in 2008. I don’t know what happened back in 2009 that led to these whispers of them being a scam.

Let me know your thoughts.

Active in 2010

I haven’t been active in posting in the latter part of 2009. I had so many topics I wanted to write about but not enough motivation to do so. In short, I am just plain lazy last year! No more of that for me. I need to step up to achieve my goals for 2010. And that includes writing more, daily if my brain permits.

I have already a number of entries scheduled for posting. I have updates on entries I wrote in the past. Most are about local news I posted. I will be more active in Entrecard this year. I just might join other social networking sites, too. I want this blog active and I want to gain more friends for 2010!

What are your plans for your blog(s)?

Spam comments

I am really having problems regarding spam comments. Sure, Akismet catches most of it. But it gets really annoying seeing how many spam comments manage to get into this blog. Just a minute ago, I deleted 22 spam comments. A small number, considering, but I also deleted around 40+ a few minutes before that.

I want to use a stronger spam filter plugin. What are you using?

Entrecard participation

I am not active with Entrecard anymore. Not by choice. I am having problems with my laptop and desktop, plus I had issues with Google’s Chrome. I got a virus from one of the sites I was regularly dropping on and it messed up with my computer. Right now, I can’t log into any Google-related site – Gmail, Blogger, Youtube. I can view Blogspot blogs and Youtube videos. But logging in, I really can’t. I also can’t do any Google searches because I can’t access Google.com itself. So much mess from a single drop. Hay.

As you might have noticed, I haven’t been dropping for over a month now, I believe. I miss dropping. But I can’t risk giving any of you the virus my pc had. I already installed a licensed McAfee AV. I am still monitoring it. I hope that this will solve my problem regarding the virus. With regards to logging into any Google-related site, I still don’t know how. Any ideas?

Wordpress 2.8.6

Wordpress released version 2.8.6 already. You can see it in your admin page. I just upgraded to version 2.8.5 and then here comes another version! I read that version 2.9 will be released pretty soon. I might wait for that before I do another upgrade. It’s easy if you only have one blog. But if you are maintaining multiple blogs, it gets tedious.

Have you upgraded yet?