Good news!

Both my Paypal withdrawals, made on January 25 and February 1, 2008, are approved already! Finally, the problem has been resolved. I do hope everybody’s pending withdrawals are completed by now.

Happy Tuesday everyone!

*All the tags and awards will be posted in the next few posts. Thanks!

Update on Paypal withdrawal problems

Here is an update on the issue regarding Paypal withdrawals that are still pending for quite some time now.

Paypal acknowledged the problem already.

We are aware that users in certain countries such as Malaysia, India, Indonesia and the Philippines, are currently unable to complete withdrawals to their Visa® credit, debit or prepaid cards. We are working diligently to resolve this as quickly as possible so that you can access your funds. We hope to have this resolved in the next 72 hours and will let you know once we have more updates.

So there is no problem on Unionbank’s side. Nevertheless, in my opinion, they should still make an official announcement regarding this issue. Some bloggers assumed (that includes me) that the problem lies in their system. Or probably relationship with Paypal. Most of the bloggers who got affected by this withdrawal problem are Unionbank EON cardholders.

Anyway, here is an email sent to Pam…

Due to a technical issue we have experienced starting on January 20, 2008 we have been unable to successfully withdraw funds to your credit card. As we work through resolving this issue you may experience one of the following scenarios:

* Pending status - if your withdrawal is ‘pending’ then we are still working to resolve the issue and complete your request. We are treating this issue with high priority and will update you as soon as it is resolved.
* Completed status - if your withdrawal is ‘completed’ then we have processed your request and the funds will post to your credit card in 5 to 7 days

You should not see any delays on future withdrawals.

We apologize for any inconvenience caused and we appreciate your business.

Yours sincerely,

PayPal

Apparently, there was a maintenance done on January 24-26 causing glitches in Paypal’s system. Some of those who had/are having a problem are now showing Completed in their withdrawal transactions. Good for them! My two withdrawals are still showing a Pending status. Hopefully Paypal will be able to sort this out soon. What’s important is that they have acknowledged the problem and is doing something about it as evidenced by those with their withdrawal transactions completed already.

I would also like to recommend to you guys to use the Withdraw to Bank Account instead of the Withdraw to Credit Card option. I tried withdrawing $100 yesterday and it is already completed as of this afternoon. Ganon kabilis! Hopefully it gets credited to my Unionbank account right away.

As you can see, withdrawing funds to your credit card takes 5 days. 2 days more to get it credited to your bank account. With the other option, it takes a day to get it processed within Paypal and hopefully, two more days to get it credited to my bank account.

Will let you know how long it took to get the funds credited.

Happy weekend everyone! May the following week will bring more luck and love to all of us

Aargh! Paypal!!!

It seems there has been an ongoing problem with withdrawing funds from Paypal to your Unionbank account. I have withdrawn funds last January 25, around 9PM to my Unionbank Savings Account. I expected to receive it last February 1st or 2nd because it normally takes me around 5-7 days before funds get credited to my account. It’s now February 5.

Last Sunday, February 3, I contacted Paypal asking if there is a problem with my withdrawal because it is still showing a ‘Pending’ status. I haven’t received any response. Last night, I can feel symptoms of a panic attack so I emailed them again, now citing the ID number of the transaction because I forgot to include it the first time. Still, no response.

So an hour ago, I called up 84186 - Unionbank’s Phone Banking, and talked to a customer support representative. I didn’t get any answer from the CS aside from she will report the matter first. I expected as much. After that, I called up the branch. I talked to a very pleasant Joy of Emerald Avenue branch (Wynsum Bldg) and she listened to my problem and told me she will get back to me after she has talked to someone from their head office. She did call me back but she still has no answers for me. Head office wants the customer to call CS directly. I. DID. THAT. ALREADY!

Now I am into a full-blown panic attack. I have withdrawn 2 batches of my funds there! I have been advised by my good friend Devilicious that her writer has been having the same problems with her withdrawal since January 14. JANUARY 14!!!

Someone from Unionbank needs to address this right away. Because according to D’s writer, Paypal’s response to her is to get back to her bank. Paypal has nothing to do with the withdrawal processing. She’s using an EON account, by the way. EJ Foronda of Unionbank called me up a few minutes ago, most likely because of Joy from Emerald branch. He apologized and promised me he would look into this matter right away. He told me to email him the details of my pending withdrawal and he will try to get to talk to someone from VISA or Paypal and will get back to me asap. Thank goodness!

UPDATE: I haven’t gotten a call from EJ of Unionbank yet. When I called CS, they still cannot address my concerns and is actually passing the blame to Paypal. According to a CS I spoke to, Unionbank is just a receiving bank. If they don’t get any remittance from Paypal, then there is nothing to credit. Might be true. But what is frustrating about this answer is that, it just skirts the issue at hand. Shouldn’t they be looking into this??? In my opinion, they should! A friend of mine withdrew funds to her Citibank credit card and encountered no problems. I am thinking that if the problem lies with Paypal, then there will be complaints coming from other than those using Unionbank accounts! That simple!

Unionbank better address this right away! A lot of people are experiencing the same problem as mine. Read the links below…

Aggie’s Paypal Money Withdrawal Problems

I got the following link from her blog post. Thanks, Aggie!

E-bay Forum - PayPal Pending Withdrawal Problems

Read comments in this post and at Aggie’s as well. And Pam is also having the same problems. My Feb 1 withdrawal should have been showing a “Completed” status already. It’s “Pending” till now.

Now, I am wondering if any of you have encountered, or is currently settling, the same problems as mine? Care to share what happened and how you were able to solve it?

*Originally posted last Feb 5, 2008 at 11:33AM

Webhosting and dNeero

My blogs went down for a few hours this afternoon. In all honesty, it really pissed me off. Big time! I have been monetizing most of my blogs. And I have experienced being flagged by advertisers because they thought the review I did went missing in just a few hours or days after I submitted it. I was flagged twice by Sponsored Reviews because my blog was down during those times they were checking. Bummer! Thank goodness they were very considerate.

I have been contemplating on getting another webhost for a couple of days now. I am thinking of getting Bluehost but I heard some contradicting feedbacks about it.

My current webhost dishes out great service. I can contact them via email and text messaging if something went awry with my blogs. They respond immediately. The only thing I don’t like from them is this downtime I encountered several times already. It doesn’t matter if I am just running a regular blog. I am monetizing at least 90% of all the blogs that I have. I cannot afford to get flagged again, or lose a potential advertiser because when they went knocking, my blog was down.

What webhosting service are you using? Would you recommend it to me?

***

Check out this survey that I did…

If you want to join, leave a comment and I will go and invite you. Or you can visit this link

Withdraw funds from Paypal to your Philippine bank account

Good news everyone! You can now withdraw funds from your Paypal account directly to your Philippine bank account!

UPDATE!
An official announcement has been released by Paypal a few minutes ago. I just received an email from them. For your questions regarding this new feature of Paypal Philippines, go to this LINK.

I just saw it now when I opened my Paypal account and have seen this option when I try to withdraw funds.

*Click image for a larger view

Check it out! Now we can withdraw funds without being charged the $5 fee. Yey!

PageRank Update

It seems there is really some confusing implementation of Google’s PageRanking system.

I am a lurker at Colleen’s blog, PPP’s top earner. When the Google slap happened, a few weeks after the first and second hits, her blog which was a PR5 went down to PR0. Just a couple of days ago, I noticed that her blog went up to PR3 again. I emailed her last night about this and asked her if she did anything at all to get some PR back. She said that she hasn’t done anything at all.

There is hope after all

Now there’s another PPP top earner’s blog that I’ve been lurking at. She’s an obnoxious person but she dishes out tips and tricks in making money online and some wordpress tricks so I read her blog entries. She has a PR4 then went down to PR0. She gained back her PR4 a few weeks back by cleaning her blog. She removed all make money banners and sidebar links. She made links No Follow and have removed any post associated with PPP. Then she submitted her blog to Google for reconsideration.

You can do that as well. So many blogs have regained their PR by doing this. But of course, you need to say goodbye to the incoming extra dollars. What would you be needing a PR for if you can’t earn from it?

Then again look at Colleen’s blog. If there’s one person in the whole www associated with PPP, that would be her. And she gained back her PR without doing anything. Tina S. is another popular PPP member doing PPP posts with a banner to boot. Yet she still has a PR3 until now.

Google’s PR is really one big mystery to me.

How to attract advertisers

In my entry about Making Money with a PR0 Blog, Mel asked me this…

…how to improve my site and kung paano maka-attract ng mga advertisers lalo. (how to attract advertisers even more)

Hmm… I am not really an expert but I have been browsing sites of the BIG probloggers and these are just some tips I gathered from them:

First and foremost, choose a good theme/template. Remember that your site’s layout is the first thing advertisers see. Make sure you have a clean layout. You should have a predefined corner where advertisers can put their ads. I read somewhere that it is better to choose a SEO-ready theme. And there a lot of this kind of themes.

I love themes by the following designers: Randa Clay, Brian Gardner, Solostream. I also check out themes from Rock-Kitty.net and Sadish Bala.

If you see a layout that you love but you don’t like the colors or the header or the background of the theme, you can tweak it a bit. Don’t be afraid to do it. It’s easy. Just make sure you ask permission from the designer or it says in the theme info that you are allowed to change portions of the theme. I will dedicate a post for tweaking themes one of these days.

Content is important. Most advertisers choose a blog which is relevant to their ads. So if you want to attract travel advertisers, then write posts about travel. Things like that. And remember to write in English. Most advertisers don’t like blogs written in any other language unless they are targeting a specific audience. If you really need to write in your local language, just make sure your post title clearly states so.

Site statistics. This is very important to advertisers. Advertisers need a reason to buy space in your blog. What are the benefits of doing business with you: high blog traffic, large circulation, PageRank, Alexa stats, Feedburner count… Other bloggers down play their stats. But I believe if you really want to attract advertisers, put your stats strategically. Put it in a place where advertisers visiting your blogs would likely see it. What are you most proud of? Do you have a high PageRank? Then put it in a place where advertisers will see it right away. High Alexa rank? Do the same. High Feedburner subscriber count? Show it.

So that’s my take on how to attract advertisers. Again, I am no expert. These are a product of what I gathered doing the rounds of blogs of the BIG probloggers out there. Do you have anything to add? Feel free.

Technorati Authority and Rank

Have you noticed that Technorati has not been updating their Authority and Rank accurately? There have been some extreme ups and downs with numbers and even some are not moving at all. I already opened a support ticket for this one a few weeks back but I guess there are too many bloggers like me who are complaining about this to them.

I had this problem with one of my blogs before wherein whenever I ping it, it says that I haven’t updated for 60 days already (and counting) when in fact I update a couple of times a week. When I got the chance to email Technorati, they told me that for some reason, their spiders couldn’t reach my blog. They ‘manually released their spiders’ and my Authority and Rank jumped by a 100+. So you can just imagine the inaccuracy of the numbers because of that problem. For a time, everything was normal. Until December of 2007 when the same problems arose. Now I am waiting for them to look into the problem and address it.

Technorati Authority and Rank is important to some advertisers, especially in Sponsored Reviews. The higher the Authority you have, the better your price per review will be. So I am really concerned whenever there is a problem in updating my Technorati Authority and Rank.

Check out yours. Go to your account, click on Edit beside your account name, go to Blogs and ping your blog(s). If it accurately says how much time has elapsed since you last updated, then you don’t have any problem. But if the time is inaccurate, then you are having problems like mine. Open a support ticket so Technorati can address it right away.

Annoying

I don’t know if it’s just me or you also feel this way… I get annoyed whenever there is a request for a blogger to vote for him or her in this or that contest. Let me clarify that. I don’t get annoyed if the request is from my blogger-friends. If the request is from someone I don’t even know… blah! How can I vote for you and say that your blog is really great when you’re not even in my blogroll and I haven’t seen your blog yet???

Aargh! Some people!

Temporarily…

I will not be visiting your blogs most especially this coming weekend. We are all going to Pangasinan and will be staying there for 3 days. Family will be back by Monday morning. There is a bit of an emergency at the province because of my dad’s uncle suffering a series of heart attacks. This is the uncle who provided my parents shelter when they eloped some 30 years ago. This is the same uncle who makes sure we get to enjoy our vacations when we’re there in Pangasinan. So you can just imagine our desire to be with him in this time of need.

And why am I telling you all now when it won’t be until Friday?

I need to do tons of tasks which due dates will fall on the weekend.

Blessed weekend everyone!

Try Yuwie now!

Come join this newest money-making scheme. I just joined and you know what, this is an easy way to earn money. All you need to do is sign up and then earn money by referring friends. Great, isn’t it?

Try na rin natin ito. Wala naman mawawala if ever

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*Please note this is not a sponsored post. Thanks!

Behind the decision: A meme

I was tagged by iRonnie to reveal my decision(s) behind monetizing my blog(s).

Well, I am not hiding my reasons behind monetizing my blogs. I will not be a hypocrite. So here it goes… I love earning dollars! Who doesn’t? Can you just imagine how much it is in peso when you write a $10 post? For 50-200 words, in a matter of minutes, you earn approximately 400 pesos. In a matter of minutes, I earn more than what an average worker here in the country earns in a day. Will you say no to that?

The truth is, I was not planning on monetizing any of my blogs. I didn’t even know about PayPerPost et al until May of this year. When everyone is into monetizing as early as 2006, I was
just contented writing blog posts and learning how to earn money from Google Adsense. But there are things I wanted to buy for myself that I just couldn’t get from my salary at work. You see, I am a breadwinner. I am taking care of almost 75% of our household bills and providing for my family is my number one priority. So when a friend taught me how to monetize my blogs, I eagerly started doing so. And when I did, I was able to buy something for myself. I was able to start saving some money. Great di ba?

Anyway, to make it simple, I started monetizing my blogs to earn some extra income. And since I am earning a bit more now, I made a goal. A car by December

To ate Ghee and others who are thinking about this Google slap, no, Google’s PageRank drop is not altogether dependent on sponsored posts. There are non-monetizing blogs whose PR dropped by -2. While there are monetizing blogs whose PR increased. So, all we know is that Google is out on a PR trip and we are all vulnerable.

So to those who are raising their eyebrows when they see a blog with sponsored posts, just keep it to yourself, whatever bad things you are thinking and wanted to say. You cannot give us the dollars we are earning by criticizing us. And when you don’t want a blog with sponsored posts, then just close the browser and that’s that.

“BEHIND THE DECISION” originator: Thesserie

Instruction:

• Please share the reason/s why you decided to do ads/paid posts. State how your earning is helping you in any way.
• Pass it to 2 bloggers/publishers only.
• After my name, list ALL your monetized blogs. If you have more than one blog, add the next blogs by using numbers only (such as 1, 2, 3, see my example) instead of long links.
• Use the button but please no direct linking.
• I would really appreciate it if you could drop me a line should you decide to entertain this tag. I would like to pay you a visit and add you on my list.

*Thesserie, 2 & 3 | Marie Vanidosa , 2 | Girlie, 2 | Rhada | Rach , 2 | Ironnie, 2 | Jane | Mari | Jo | Ghee, 2, 3 & 4 | Sasha

And now I am tagging Mousey, Maiylah and tita Liza.

And by the way, I am re-launching my akoni as a personal blog once more. Visit naman kayo dun