Saying No to the Culture of Death

I am a blogger, and I am not one of these people who will respond to appeals to my greedy self. In the past few weeks I have joined a number of traffic exchanges and I have enjoyed the games that I have found, plus I like the idea of getting bonus points. Since I am no longer in the workforce I need some forms of distraction in order to help me not to descend into the depths of depression out of the loneliness of knowing no one in my new location.

The problem with traffic exchanges is the fact that you have to surf to get your pages seen. I started with Blog Explosion, Blog Soldiers and Blog Mad. I have dropped Blog Mad because of the lack of satisfaction over an issue relating to one of my blogs. In the past I had managed to verify the particular blog through Blog Mad, but in July I was notified that my blog was deactivated because of lack of activity. That, however, was not true, and I had posted to that blog within a week of the deactivation. Since I was moving I could little about the situation. I attempted to reactivate my blog but nothing worked and I kept getting a message that the code I had placed on the blog was not detected. I requested support and after 2 months I had not had the problem resolved. This particular blog is operated through Blog Spirit. I like Blog Spirit as a provider but I am only using the free features since I cannot afford the upgrades. After so little in the way of satisfaction from the support area at Blog Mad, I decided to call it quits and I deleted my account.

I prefer Blog Explosion because I find that the games are more useful than the ones I found at Blog Mad, and I did win extra credits. As far as Battle of the Blogs is concerned, I think that winning or losing boils down to the politics of the viewer as much as anything else. If I go against a blog that I find is really lousy, thinking that I will win the battle, I can still lose, because a lot depends on who votes during the contest. However, it is still fun, and I like the scratch cards as well as the Blog Rocket. All of these things create both diversion and exposure to my writing.

There are other forms of traffic exchanges where the majority are people who have their own multi-level marketing systems. Do they work? I do not know. Some offer what is known as click to pay. The payout is very small per click but it is cumulative, but one cannot expect to make a fortune from this type of activity. I do not like some of these exchanges, but I have found others that are fun. It is hard work, but I do like Royal Surf, because there is that competitive team spirit. Traffic Dodgems, Majestic Hits and Medieval hits have also been fun. The purpose of Royal Surf is to earn enough points to finish in the top teams in order to win credits. The top team is Cavelot. One needs to surf at least 600 pages per day to keep up with the Cavelot team. However, this is my first week for Royal surf and I must admit to a personal best surfing record for myself. I have made it to the top team but I suspect that I will drop back again. One of the bonuses whilst surfing is to find the next letter for the quest, so that it can be completed before the week ends. To be successful one has to surf at least 100 sites per day. This should be achievable by most people who are into surfing the sites.

There are down sides to these traffic exchanges, and I nearly fell into a trap on one of the sites. I dropped the site immediately that this happened. These traps include the pop-ups, frame breakers, and downloaders. Some of the sites have been primed with a virus. I hit a site where they wanted to download a piece of software. My system is not slow and it does not need software that comes from an undisclosed source. I had to stop the download before it could begin, because this is one sure way of ending up with a virus on one's machine. Another down side are the sites that have audio, but no means to shut them up. A good example is the bird hawking the "apple patch diet". Now if ever there was a con, then telling people that they only have to wear an apple patch is definitely "it". Yes I really am that skeptical about some of these selling techniques.

I am using the exchanges to promote my blogs. I am not interested in marketing any wares, especially get people to part with money when there are no products that are actually being sold. A lot of the sites on these traffic exchanges are aimed at people who want to be rich. I guess there are thousands who continue to be fooled by the marketing hype.