Karlonia.com

In freelance writing, it is always important to make sure that your prose is grammatically correct. However, it is also important to make it as clear and concise as possible, especially if you’re trying to meet word count limits. One of the ways in which our writing can become annoyingly long-winded is through the use of redundant words and phrases that may be grammatically correct but would read (or sound) much better if they were shortened to more concise variations. Here is a list of common English redundancies, beginning with redundant acronym phrases and followed by other types of wordy phrases along with suggestions for improved versions.

Redundant Acronym Phrases:

1. ATM machine: This is probably the most common redundancy I have encountered, especially if we include spoken English as well as the written form. ATM stands for Automated (or Automatic) Teller Machine, so the word “machine” in this phrase is unnecessary — just say “ATM.”
2. SEO optimization: This one is far less common in popular culture and is not even listed as a redundancy on most other websites, but I encounter it quite frequently in my daily reading. It is gradually becoming a pet peeve of mine because SEO already means Search Engine Optimization, so we are actually over-optimizing by adding the word “optimization” to it.

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Today I received a nice little tip from one of my SEO-oriented email newsletters about an informative question-and-answer dialogue that took place on October 22 over at Google Webmaster Help. In this session, Matt Cutts and a few other important figures who work for Google answered questions from people in the webmaster community via live chat. Most of these questions pertained to search engine optimization issues, some of which have been the subject of much debate.

Although Google’s staff did not directly answer all of the questions (which is not surprising because the company is known for vagueness and lack of transparency), there were a few persistent myths debunked along with some additional nuggets of information that one can reasonably infer from the general tone of the answers provided. Since the full text of the conversation is rather long, I have summarized the most useful answers in bullet point format below for those of you who do not want to read through it all.

1. On site age and length of domain registration: Matt Cutts significantly downplayed this as a factor in the rankings, even saying that it doesn’t matter in the majority of cases. Google did not rule it out as a factor completely, however.
2. On submitting your site to directories: Google acknowledges that this suggestion was removed from the Webmaster Guidelines, but says that they have NOT changed the way that links from directories are weighted.

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Major retailer Barnes & Noble dispatched its latest newsletter to affiliates today, highlighting some “best practices” and suggestions for the upcoming holiday season. Mostly known for its brick-and-mortar bookstores, the company has recently expanded to include additional product offerings such as toys, home furnishings, games, magazines, and music. This latest guide details many of these new item categories, some of which have recently become eligible for commission payments. Meanwhile, if you would like to visit the main Barnes & Noble site for some holiday gift ideas, you can do so by clicking on the logo banner in the upper left portion of this paragraph.

It’s that time of year again, with the holiday shopping rush about to begin in earnest. To help prepare you for this busiest of seasons, we have put together a brief guide to keep you in tune with what Barnes & Noble is doing this year. Remember that you earn 6% on products purchased through your affiliate links, including PC/Video Games and even Gift Cards!

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This afternoon I received a warning about an autosurf site called MegaLido.com indicating that the program may close down soon and move into the scam category if late-arriving “investors” are not paid. John Stankiewicz, a frequent reviewer of cyclers, autosurfs, HYIPs, MLM programs, and other decidedly non-mainstream investment vehicles, sent out a brief email to subscribers informing them that it might be a good time for people who have a significant amount of money in the program to cash out their profits. Here is the text of the message:

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Today Wes Benedict has released a letter detailing election day results and other related issues to members of our Libertarian Party affiliate in Texas. Despite the disappointing totals for presidential candidate Bob Barr, the party set several new records in other races, including highest percentage and vote total for U.S. Senate, highest number of candidates on the ballot, and over one million votes for our Court of Criminal Appeals statewide candidate. Only one other LP candidate, John Monds in the race for Georgia’s Public Service Commission, surpassed the one million vote mark nationally.

Here is the text of Wes Benedict’s email, which includes a link to the vote totals and percentages for all Libertarian Party of Texas candidates. Meanwhile, if you’re looking for the election results for LP candidates nationally, you can find these at the LP.org site here.

Dear Texas Friend of Liberty:

Thanks to our donors for coming through recently and helping us to purchase more door hangers and yard signs. Our Assistant Director, Arthur DiBianca, and I worked feverishly for the past couple of months recruiting volunteers and shipping door hangers and signs to as many of you as we could find and recruit.

Texas Libertarian candidates did great on election day, breaking some new records. Thanks to all of our candidates and volunteers who worked hard for the past two years, and to our donors.

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According to this article by Kristie Leong, we may be seeing new ingredient and nutrition labels appearing on food and beverage products coming from some of the major distributors soon. I’ve always been a big fan of reading ingredient labels on food items to find out exactly what they contain or perhaps some hints about how the product was made. There is nothing quite like the experience of finding out that select ingredients such as “glycerol ester of wood rosin” have been added to certain kinds of sodas to improve their flavor. Yum!

If you’re like most Americans, you’re trying to eat a healthier diet. You may realize that too many calorie-laden processed foods are not the key to a long and healthy life and won’t help you maintain an ideal body weight either. But sometimes it can be difficult to make the proper food choices. Adding to the difficulty is the fact that nutritional labels on food products at your local grocery store can be difficult to decipher. Other times food nutrition labels can be downright misleading, especially when they give a caloric value which sounds reasonable and it turns out that it’s only for half of the item.

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Overall traffic did not change much last week, but I am beginning to see an increase in the number of article pages receiving visits from search engines and other sites. According to Google Analytics, there were 312 different pages on the site that received traffic with a total of 5,248 page views. Meanwhile, the best news of the week was that I received my first AdSense check from this site’s earnings, which I will probably be posting about in a few days after I do the image scan. I am also beginning to broaden my range of available affiliate programs, which should increase future monetization potential. Meanwhile, here is our usual eclectic mix of questions from the search engines.

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Earlier this week, one of the Entrecard members sent me a message asking about the correct usage of bear and bare. Specifically the query involved the common phrase “bear with me”, and the person was asking about which form of the word was the proper spelling. Since I have not posted an English usage topic for the past few weeks, I figured that I might as well pass on the information to the rest of my readers in case anyone else is still confused about this issue. Afterward, I will list some other uses of both bear and bare that fall outside the scope of the above query but that you may want to know for future reference. Here is a redacted version (irrelevant portions of the text have been removed) of my response to the Entrecard member:

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Today I ran across an interesting little article that has been showing up in forwarded emails and occasional blog posts recently. Labeled as “Bar Stool Economics”, it is a simplified version of why “progressive” income taxes (that is, taxes that are weighted heavily against people who are relatively wealthy) do not work very well even when we try to lower the overall tax burden. As I have mentioned in a few previous posts, as long as taxes cannot be practically avoided, I would much prefer a consumption-based tax to any type of income tax because people at all levels of income would have an element of choice in how much tax they pay based on their actual spending. Of course, there are also several other advantages, but I will leave those as material for another article.

Our Tax System Explained: Bar Stool Economics

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

1. The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
2. The fifth would pay $1.
3. The sixth would pay $3.
4. The seventh would pay $7.
5. The eighth would pay $12.
6. The ninth would pay $18.
7. The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

So, that’s what they decided to do.

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Earlier tonight I received a pleasant surprise in my email when I received a message from Greg Wieder, Director of Publisher Relations at the Panthera Network, notifying me that I had been approved for the program and that I would be receiving an approval mail within a few minutes. He also apologized for the delay (it had been nearly a month since I originally sent in my application) and explained that he had been away at Ad Tech in New York and was also having to deal with a large backlog of fraudulent applications. A few minutes later I did receive the official approval mail:

Hello Karl,

Congratulations. We have reviewed your application and you have been approved as a Panthera Network publisher. You may now log in to our private partner area to obtain creatives to promote all of our products and offerings. To log in, please go to www.pantheranetwork.com and log in with the following:

Username: xxxxxxxx
Password: xxxxxxxx

Your unique affiliate ID will be automatically populated in the creatives.

Please feel free to send us your comments and suggestions at any time. Our goal is to be your favorite affiliate network and your first choice when it comes to running campaigns. As a welcome bonus you will earn $150 when you generate your first $1,500 in commissions. To qualify, the $1,500 must be generated within sixty (60) days of your signup date.

Thanks,
The Panthera Network Team

PS: Don’t forget our referral program. The Panthera Network offers a 5% referral fee for any publishers you send our way. That’s 5% for an entire year! So sign up friends in the industry and earn when they earn.

This is very good news because it significantly expands the opportunities and options I will have for monetizing this site and giving it the “critical mass” it needs to finally become a truly successful operation. I am already familiar with many of the offers available under the Panthera Network as I have encountered them through various get-paid-to (GPT) types of sites whose owners promoted the offers to members and kept a percentage of the revenue.

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The November issue of the SendEarnings Newsletter has been released, this time with some interesting facts about “Black Friday” included. When I first started reading, I thought this was a reference to the “triple witching hour” phenomenon that occurs around the last Friday in October when various options contracts expire simultaneously, which often has the effect of introducing greater than normal volatility in the stock market. However, the newsletter was actually referring to the Friday after Thanksgiving, which many people regard as the beginning of the holiday shopping season (others consider this period to begin on the first day after Halloween). Apparently, the Black Friday thing started back in the 1800s as some type of “gold rush” phenomenon where prospectors were able to have a dramatic effect on the financial markets of the time.

Meanwhile, I am beginning to make significant progress with the SendEarnings program. Just before I received this newsletter email, I had received another message informing me that one of my previous offer completions had been credited, putting me over the $30 minimum payout threshold on my account. Now all I need to do is redeem the earnings and I should receive another check. An image of one of my previous checks from the program can be found here.

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Homemade applesauce is a delicious, healthy, and versatile food that can be eaten alone or used to boost the flavor and health content of other foods and recipes. This article by Kristie Leong provides some suggestions for using applesauce in ways that you may not have thought about but that can help to supplement a healthy and tasty diet.

Apples are a rich source of flavonoids which are thought to reduce the risk of certain types of cancer, promote heart health, and even protect against vision-related problems such as cataracts. They are also high in pectin which helps to lower cholesterol and promote weight loss by giving a feeling of satiety.

With so many wonderful health benefits, it’s obvious that apples and homemade applesauce should be a part of your diet. Although you can buy canned applesauce at your grocery store, it’s worth the extra effort to make your own apple sauce as the taste difference between homemade and store bought versions is remarkable. Plus, you don’t have to worry about added sugar and preservatives when you make it yourself. You can find a variety of recipes for homemade applesauce on the Internet.

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Earlier tonight I found out something that I didn’t know before — apparently coupon discounts are not exempt from sales tax. In other words, if you buy something and use a coupon to lower the price, you still have to pay tax on the original price of the item, not the discounted price that you actually pay. As this article by Shannon Christman explains, the rationale behind this is that the tax is applied to the price that the original product vendor actually receives, which includes both the amount that goes to the merchant and the amount of the coupon, which is usually paid by the manufacturer.

Interestingly, although the law in most states requires that sales taxes be paid on all coupon discounts, the last part of the article suggests that individual stores do not always enforce this. Out of curiosity, I might start paying attention to coupons more often so that I can run an experiment on which of our local stores are actually collecting tax on the coupon amounts.

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After several weeks of consistent increases, overall traffic actually dropped off slightly last week. Halloween (October 31) was a particularly slow day, with a noticeable decline in search traffic volume across the board. Google seems to have reshuffled the rankings of my pages again, as it has been prone to do every few months. Rankings for some pages have increased, most notably on quote-related pages and my Fair Tax page, which is now at #1 for its main keyword.

At the same time, however, Google has dropped rankings on several other pages, causing a slight recession in my overall statistics. I can probably counteract this by gaining more backlinks to the low traffic pages and getting them re-crawled by the various search engine spiders. However, blog commenting, my most reliable method of getting backlinks, is very time consuming and the motivation for it is increasingly difficult to obtain with so many other things I need to be doing to supplement the revenue from this site until it reaches full-time income status.

Nevertheless, it is still possible to have some occasional fun after doing the keyword research and then watching the search queries and comments come in with so many stories about how people are dropping their cell phones in various liquids and freaking out over frogs. The other long tail queries can be interesting to look at too, such as those in this week’s sample below.

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This article by Julianne Kelsch provides a brief explanation of fixed rate and adjustable rate mortgage loans. Overall, fixed rate mortgages are best when prevailing interest rates are low (like they are right now, for instance) because you can lock in these rates and do not need to worry about your payments suddenly increasing whenever the Fed decides to raise the rates in the future. Adjustable rate mortgages may be worth considering during periods when interest rates are higher and you are planning on selling or flipping the house within the next few years. Meanwhile, if you have already decided on the basic loan type and are simply wondering about how to deal with the paperwork, you can look at my previous article on What to Bring When Applying for a Mortgage.

You’ve finally done it — found the home you are going to buy. Now it’s time to procure financing. The loan institution is going to give you a few different loan/mortgage options. The two most popular are the fixed rate mortgage (FRM) and the adjustable rate mortgage (ARM). As a homeowner you will need to have at least a basic understanding of both loans to make an informed, educated decision.

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