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Friday Fives – New Blog Hop!

Lisa — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 18:40:54 +0000

My Thoughts, Ideas, and Ramblings - A day in the life of a busy mom . . .

My friend Elizabeth has a great new meme she’s starting. It’s called called Friday Fives, and it is super easy to do. You just list 5 of your favorite things –

Last five TV shows watched
Last five pins on Pinterest
Five favorite blogs or websites
Five favorite types of candy
Five favorite restaurants

It’s pretty easy and open ended, so here’s my list:

My 5 Favorite Movies

300
Inception
Reservoir Dogs
Red
Monty Python and The Holy Grail

Link up your post so I can come to your blog and read your list. This is a fun way for us to get to know each other better! Not a blogger? You can make a list on your Tumblr page, you could create a new board on Pinterest, post your list on your Facebook wall, or even post your list right here in the comments!

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Did you ever have one of those weeks?

Lisa — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 18:52:43 +0000

My Thoughts, Ideas, and Ramblings - A day in the life of a busy mom . . .

I had one of those weeks last week. You know, one of those weeks where everything goes wrong. Like if you sit in your Adirondack chairs and they break or it rains every time you have plans. I’ve had bad days before, but it seemed like last week was against me. It kicked me in the butt.

We spent that entire weekend looking for Madison’s retainer. You know, those suckers are $500 and insurance doesn’t pay to replace if you lose them. She’s been so good with it that it was amazing that we lost it. We dug through garbage at our house and at my mother-in-laws house too. We looked everywhere inside and outside, under outdoor wooden benches and even the kids beds! We literally tore 2 houses apart. Her orthodontist was on vacation last week, so we couldn’t get in to see him to see what we could do. I knew heading in last week we were in trouble since the weekend sucked.

So that happened. Then, my sites went down. This was a 2 prong problem. First, I had no access to my sites. You may have seen some funkiness on my sites. That’s why (it ended up having to do with a WordPress upgrade. Hostgator ended up fixing it) I was a wreck on Twitter, on Facebook, and on Google+. While digging through the backend stuff, I found out I was almost out of disk space. Now, I currently pay $50 a month (yes, I know its a lot). They told me I’d have to upgrade to the $80 month package (yes, I almost keeled over). I had a great friend dig through my sites and found out that I had a rogue plugin that was backing up my site. It wasn’t suppose to be saving to the server, but it was without my knowledge. I had backups dating to 2007!!!! Needless to say, we deleted 10 GB of backups!!!!! (Crazy, isn’t it?).

Those two issues pretty much consumed my week. However, this looked up by the end of the week. First, Hostgator fixed the issue. In talking with friends, I found a cheaper host for my blogs (which I’ll be moving to this week sometime if any funkiness happens). I’ll get more space for less money! I know somebody using this company already and they love them. Best of all, I was doing laundry Friday morning, and guess what I found??!!??

Madison’s retainer.

My laundry room is also a junk room and also has a freezer and fridge in there (its all downstairs). I was throwing in towels to the washer and her retainer was sitting in front of the fridge down there. It looked great, and I ran it upstairs and brushed it. The bad news is that she can’t get it into her mouth now. However, we found it and it can be adjusted. We have an appointment Thursday morning to do just that.

It’s amazing how your week can just turn better on a dime. I now can sit outside on my Oakland Living outdoor furniture and relax. How did your week go last week?

I’m Too Big

Lisa — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 15:21:58 +0000

My Thoughts, Ideas, and Ramblings - A day in the life of a busy mom . . .

You may have noticed that my site has been up and down and up and down, and sometimes could have been showing some weird stuff. I know. I’ve had an issue across all of my sites and have been dealing with my host. Come to find out, I’ve got some really huge blogs. (Who knew!?). From what I’ve been told, I outgrew my shared hosting and had to move to VPS hosting. That is a price difference of paying $7 a month to $50 a month. I had no choice but to upgrade. Unfortunately, that created about 20 more problems and didn’t fix my original one. That’s what I literally have been doing for a week. I’ve talked to Hostgator (myhost) more than my husband! (And no I’m not kidding). However, I did learn how to great cpanels for each of my blogs and lots of other cool stuff that I’ll never remember how to do again LOL

Thank you for sticking with me through this mess, and I think I see the light at the end of the tunnel. I’m crossing my fingers that everything will be working great here on out. If it’s not, let me know!

Why I am no longer a PayU2Blog Blogger . . .and maybe why you shouldn’t be either

Lisa — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 17:10:16 +0000

My Thoughts, Ideas, and Ramblings - A day in the life of a busy mom . . .

Now, I am not writing this to piss anyone off. I know I research companies before I work for them, and I just want to give you a point of view that you don’t see unless you blog for them. Now, anyone who does blog for them won’t ever post one bad word ever, because if you do, you will be kicked out (yes, I know people who this has happened to). If you happen to mention something that got said on their “private” forum, you’ll get kicked out (but this rule hold true for only certain people because I’ve seen things blogged about and nothing was done to that person). Before I go on any more, let me tell you my story, what I’ve seen, and why I am not sure I’ll go back even when I will be allowed back in.

I think it was about two years ago when I received an email from PayU2Blog asking me to join them. I was flattered, and it was a great way to make money off my blogs. You get paid $5 for a minimum of 60 words. Those were the rules when I started. However, they aren’t posted anywhere, and if you don’t have access to the forum, you’d have no idea to all the changes that just seem to magically show up at their whim. One day you can be following the rules, the next you aren’t. The latest example of this (besides the reason I just got kicked but I’ll go into that a bit later) is when Izea came out with blog sponsorships. If you had one on your blog, they (at least sent you an email BEFORE they did it) kicked you out. Now, no where in their “rules” does it say you can’t have them nor would any new bloggers even have known it. Actually, I understand the reasoning behind it. However, there are so many bloggers that left Izea, because they felt PPP was telling them what they could and could not do with their blogs. Well, this step is one big one towards that for PayU2Blog.

Another issue I have with them has to do with a friend of mine: Drew. Now, the upper brass their have a bad habit of calling out who they think are “cheaters” on the forum. Drew decided to quit and emailed them to let them know. This was exactly what he was suppose to do. He then wrote a post about why he left PayU2Blog. He then was called out on their “private” forums by PayU2Blog for being a jerk and other things. He couldn’t even defend himself, since he was locked out of the forums. Well, low and behold, they found his email. They then issued a half assed apology on their “private” forums, and actually, sent him a pretty snotty message before they realized their mistake. I’m sorry, but this whole mess could have been avoided if they didn’t badmouth their bloggers. They also start witchhunts among their members and I often myself unable to disagree with them on their forums. You would often find that the members would gang up on the one lone person who disagreed. I found that long standing members would no longer comment on the forums, because they felt they couldn’t. Now, I also noticed that my work seemed to go down if I disagreed (now, this could be purely coincidental since it didn’t happen every time I spoke out, but did seem to happen enough that I noticed). As much as all this annoyed me, I keep working for them, because money is money. That may make me a bad person, but that money paid for Christmas and a lot of other things for my kids.

Now, what happened to me. As you all know, I was picked to be an Izea Insider. I have written a small amount about this. However, no where to the level of a “personal cheerleader” like I was accused of being. However, PayU2Blog disagrees and has told me that I cannot work for both Izea or PayU2Blog. It is one or the other. I was not the only one told this either – Brett, Corrin, Heather, and Julie were also kicked out. Now, PayU2Blog seems to think that Izea has it out for them, and we are all spies. Ummm, no. We applied for this position never thinking in a million years that this would be considered a conflict of interest. I consider myself a professional blogger and can separate what I do for each company. Heck, Izea obviously agrees since they knew we all worked for other companies besides them and have no problems. The best part of all this — the blogs that are not affiliated with the Izea Insider thing I am doing (like Lisa Reviews) are also kicked out. Now, I don’t mention PayU2Blog or Izea on that blog, but since I am Izea’s so called personal cheerleader now (which I have done no post to even suggest that) nothing I do is good enough for them anymore. Now, their advertisers lose out the most with this decision. This blog got over 300,000 visits in October alone, and I average anywhere from 500 – 1,000 visits a day on here. Since their advertisers are only after SEO (and maybe some hits from the posts itself), it really shouldn’t matter what my other posts are even about.

Now, what does this “personal cheerleader” get for being an Izea Insider? I will get a template makeover for this blog (it’s coming and looks awesome!). I was given an Affiliate Summit Pass and Sears gift card to give away. I am also being given a $1500 stipend to spend on conferences. Now, I actually have to pay out of my own pocket first and get reimbursed. As you can see, this isn’t as glamorous as it was made out to be by PayU2Blog. I have been nothing but transparent about this, but whatever.

I hope this doesn’t come across as sour grapes — I really do. I have a lot of friends that still work for PayU2Blog and that I hope this doesn’t affect our friendships. However, I do feel that you need to hear both sides of a story, and if you are thinking about working for this company, you need to be prepared for what may happen. You will not hear this from somebody currently working for them, because they will get kicked out if they even mention in a blog post that they are doubting this company. If you do a google search, you can see all the people who have had problems with them. I can’t vouch for those posts — only what I personally went through and what people I know have also. Since, I am over 1,000 words, I’ll end it here even though I could probably go on for another 1000 words). I just have to say that it isn’t fair to change the rules in the middle and not allow me to work for both companies especially on blogs that have nothing to do with me being an Izea Insider.

Madison and Sparky

Lisa — Tue, 27 May 2008 03:36:55 +0000

My Thoughts, Ideas, and Ramblings - A day in the life of a busy mom . . .

Madison loves stickers, so when she saw that I got a sticker from Agency Bootcamp (this is a seminar I went to last week on how to leverage social media for brands. I went for my freelance position –not so much for my blogs. The cool thing is that I got to meet Corrin in person. I have known her for almost two years online, so it was weird yet cool when she came to pick me up to go). This was one of the few times that Madison actually wanted her picture taken and I didn’t have to threaten her that I was getting some life insurance quotes if she didn’t listen. Here are the pictures of her modeling her new sticker (and she did such a good job that I’ll take offers for her to model other things – lol):