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Marilynn Dawson Products, Reviews

Hashing Adspace and Target Markets. Newsletter-Turned-Blog-Post

Hey Team,

I haven’t sent out a weekly newsletter for awhile now, largely because my team is shrinking, not growing. I want to welcome a new member to InfinityMailerBoost since the weekend, don’t forget to confirm your email address and activate your account to get started. There is a little grey box up top in your dashboard and you need to check off as many of those tasks as you can to position yourself for maximum benefit from the system. You even get an additional 300 ad credits for crossing off all eight startup tasks. No reading emails necessary at that point. I’ve already been paid by IMB once so far, so I can tell you they do pay. Instead of sending this out to just a few people, I am making a blog post out of it instead.

hashing adspaceA paid ad-earning system that I got in on free back in November, is going to be offering free-to-earn options soon. Hashing Adspace is a different pay-to-click service where instead of earning something up to this point, you mint a new coin in the Asimi crypto-token space. This means buying your first Asimi stake to begin the process. If I had to pay my way in, I wouldn’t have joined right off the bat because their help files were horrendous. Video only, as if most of us are still back in preschool and need visuals to help us along. However, they now have an actual helpdesk thanks to zendesk, and it’s quite extensive! I just had to suffer through without it for a few months. I don’t recommend joining sites without a help system built in if you aren’t the type to click around on your own. I am, but I needed assistance with one major task and couldn’t find help for it anywhere that I could read and reread as necessary.

I muddled through and can tell you that the site does pay. (see payments gallery further down) I am now implementing a plan that will hopefully earn me multiple payouts every month starting in May. If all goes well, this site will eventually earn me a monthly salary that will start paying down bills and debts accrued over the past few years due to health and other issues.

One of Hashing Adspace’s latest announcements is as follows:

– Free earrings (View to Earn)
– Free sign up bonuses (details coming soon)
– Free new marketing materials (new capture pages and follow up emails)
– Free lead generation (for those people included in the lead rotator)
– Free Asimi bonus give away! (Daily prizes)

For people who could afford to invest in the Asimi token, their monthly income is already replacing day jobs and paying for university tuitions according to some of their testimonials being shared in these announcements. I hope to add my own testimonial eventually, as a former free beta member.

If you want to login and check out the dashboard, the helpdesk, and other features, use this url here.

Over at SFI, my weekly newsletters have recently been looking at our target market in our promotional efforts. Who are they and where do they hang out? What are they looking for and does your personal brand appeal to that market?

Today we looked at Lesson #27–PERSONAS and how building a persona of your target market is different than merely using keywords. Now don’t toss out keywords with the bath water, they are still a valid method for tracking down where your target market is hanging out and who is responding to your keywords. Keywords you use for placement in the search engines can be turned into hashtags for use on social media. I see them as helping you figure out who that persona is that you are trying to reach.

Keyword tracking is the tool that helps you in this scenario. Google Analytics, or Bing’s webmaster tools both give you analytics that let you see countries, languages, browser types, length of stay, etc. So if you are finding that your keywords seem to get the most clicks from a particular country, that helps in building the persona of the person you are trying to reach. They are likely to be from that country. That greatly narrows down the data you need to gather next on who your persona is. What do people in that country value? What do they need? What are their aspirations? Do any of the answers to these questions line up with your personal brand? Can you offer what those people long for?

I know I’ve mentioned keyword tracking before, but I had to bring it up again, largely because this is one of those bits of marketing prep that I fail at badly. One of the reasons for that is busyness at my offline end. As a single mother, you don’t always have the time to sit down and really study who you are trying to reach. You’re playing Mom’s Taxi, doing housework, trying to work to pay the bills, buying groceries, etc. Then if your health isn’t the best, that eats into time you could spend studying your target market too. One thing with these traffic exchanges, email safelists and ad viewing earning sites, is that the target market for those is already using these services too. Advertisers for anything from baby care to essential oils to crowdfundraisers to brand new social networks are all trying to get word out. You have what they need right here, with the added bonus that they will be paid for their time spent at these sites as opposed to others they could be and perhaps are already using.

For example, I now have a large single monitor instead of two smaller ones. The two smaller ones died within months of each other. This one is so big it doesn’t fit into the cubby designed for the monitor on my computer desk, so it sits on the armoire’s arm instead. BUT. . . I’ve discovered that on Windows, Start/left or Start/right will snap a window to either the left half or the right half of the screen. So now I have two browsers open, each snapped to the left or right side. Most of my paid-to-use sites are in one browser, while most of the non-paid to-use sites are in the other. I say most, because there are a couple where I have them in the non-paid-to-use browser because of the next paragraph here.

To make sure I get paid for the time I spend marketing and promoting, I will open a paid site in one browser and a non paid in the other, at the same time. I will click back and forth, ensuring that almost every click in the non-paid is matched by a paid click in the paid side. So I match InfinityMailerBoost, BTC Clicks, and CoinBulb on the paid side, with Easyhits4U on the non-paid side. I match Bitter.io with Mega-50 or #1EasyBitCoin on the non-paid side (#1EasyBitCoin is a TE only offering a BTC contest, not actually paid for clicks). I pair AdBTC with Pangea, and AdFeedz with FreeAdvertisingForYou. I’ve been paid once by IMB, 9 times by BTC Clicks, 3 times by CoinBulb, 1 time by AdFeedz, 1 time by AdBTC and I keep InfinityTrafficBoost on the non-paid side because while I earn there (and been paid 3 times now), I check emails, do banking, surf social networks etc while clicking through ITB for the day. Hashing Adspace is also on the non-paid side because there is nothing to pair just a few clicks with. Of all of these sites, Hashing Adspace has the fastest potential to a decent monthly income that is ongoing.

Arranging the monitor for two browsers like this means wiser use of my time than just one browser. I’ve been paid 3 times now by CryptoTabBrowser and use it for most of my social networking, job-related, and paid-to-earn sites, as well as for most of my research. They’ve tweaked their mining algorithms and it appears I am now earning close to 100 satoshi per day in that browser, on an aging computer. I’d imagine newer machines could earn faster. But the fact I can mine and still find the browser working better than Firefox on this aging box, has sold me permanently on the new browser. it definitely is my primary browser now.

Marilynn Dawson Products, Rants, Reviews

Be Careful You Don’t Get Cut by Bleeding-Edge Technology!

I’ve always known that if you are going to get in on the bleeding-edge of something, there’s a high chance you’re going to get bit. As a computer repair tech, I’ve always advised against going with the latest and greatest of anything until at least 6 months into the existence of the thing so as to allow for any major bugs to be worked out of the system, required initial patches rolled into the product, etc. People who have ignored that advice often speak of trouble connecting to peripherals, or losing data, or suddenly can’t use a favourite program or some other productivity-halting complaint. It might be the latest smartphone, the latest OS upgrade, a new laptop with an unfamiliar operating system, etc.

Most of the time I am pretty good about abiding by my own advice. Partly due to household finances, but largely due to my general aversion to risk-taking and wanting to be sure that any move forward is always sure-footed. I like to know what I’m getting myself into before I go there, and that it is largely stable. But in the Fall of 2019, I found myself joining beta-testing for three different online initiatives. Of those three, one got me so frustrated I nearly gave up on it. The bulk of that frustration dealt with the lack of a support system outside of purely video content. I don’t watch TV. I rarely go to the movies. I rarely throw in a DVD at home, as in perhaps once a year, sometimes not even that. If I watch anything on YouTube, it won’t be because I went to the site to watch something on purpose. It will generally be because I was on another site with a video embedded, such as Facebook, the local news website, the national news website, etc. I don’t even watch the news online, I read it. Videos on these particular sites are often the cute kind that I watch, dolphins using a puffer fish as a ball to play with, cats curling up under a dog’s nose, a 3yr old drumming with an orchestra, that kind of thing. So yeah, the fact that one of these three sites was so heavily loaded down with nothing but video content in their help area nearly sent me packing when I really, really, really needed some informational tidbits and couldn’t find them anywhere in text! Did I feel bit??? You better believe I did! Now I’m pretty good at figuring my way around things. I teach people to give themselves self-guided tours of websites they wish to use before they actually use it, so they learn where everything is and what it does. Eventually I figured out what I needed to do, and eventually found help files for the second half of a very important task. But I had such a bad taste in my mouth with the lack of readable assistance that I very nearly hung up on this one.

The first beta test I joined back in the Fall, was for a new social network called Webtalk. Webtalk is kind of a coded-from-the-ground-up mash-up between LinkedIn and Facebook, with a touch of Slack thrown in for good measure. Being a beta-tester there meant occasionally reporting bugs or unexpectedly-missing features to the official business page on Facebook. There is still one feature missing that I am hoping they will implement, but the last time I inquired, other things were taking priority over that one. They are hoping to come out of beta soon, the original date being sometime in March of 2019. Joining is by invitation only until they come out of beta. Users of this social network will be able to earn from ads viewed while sharing data, they will be able to maintain both personal and professional contact lists, sort those lists when creating new posts, and more. The timeline and list of future features is long and some are even patent-pending.

AdFeedz Profile BannerThe second beta test I joined was over at AdFeedz. Similar to InfinityTrafficBoost, InfinityMailerBoost, AdBTC, and EasyHits4U, AdFeedz is all these things rolled into one with 6 ways to earn an income while advertising your own site(s). I’ve been paid once by these guys already, and we’ll see how long it takes for the second payment to accumulate.

hashing adspaceThe third beta test I joined, and the one that very nearly sent me packing, is Hashing Ad Space. This site mashes together advertising earnings with minting a cryptocurrency called Asimi. Asimi trades on the Wave DEX, and the last time I looked, it was around $2.50+ give or take. You can check the DEX to see where it’s trading now. As a beta tester, I got in on minting Asimi by viewing ads, for free. I was also able to become a sales affiliate for free as well. Asimi earned during the beta period could not be cashed out, so I used it to claim an Asimi stake. Staking Asimi decides how many ads you can view per day, as well as roughly how many Asimi you’ll earn per day based on those ad views. For 24 days after Hashing Ad Space left beta testing and went live, I was earning from 2 ad views each day, one being the free stake while in beta, the other being the stake I purchased with the Asimi I’d earned during beta.

Compared to other advertising sites listed so far, viewing a single ad on Hashing Ad Space earns much faster, because you aren’t “earning” per se, you are “minting”. Because Asimi is an in-house token for H.A.S., it isn’t useful to you until you exchange it on the Wave DEX into a currency you can use elsewhere. The value of Asimi therefore, is stated either in BTC on your HAS dashboard, or in USD in your HAS wallet. The Wave DEX lets you sell your Asimi for any other type of coin or token however, so you can view the index to see what a single Asimi is going for in whatever currency you prefer.

The day came near the end of February when I wanted to do a test of the cashout system. I hadn’t had a chance to do this during beta, so it took the period of having 2 ad views per day before I could test this feature. This was where I ran into the lack of anything written down that I couldn’t quickly figure out on my own. Two days later, and a fair bit of frustrated correspondence with my upline, I finally got the withdrawal made into the Wave DEX, the exchange done into BTC, and the BTC sent to the wallet I prefer to use (because it earns me interest). During this time, I was so certain I was ready to throw in the towel, that I didn’t mint for a day. I thought it was a couple days, but my graph only shows one day’s minting missing during that troublesome few days.

A few days after that scenario, word came down from the site owner that a support system was in the works and should launch Monday March 4th. Monday was a busy flurry of household activity so I didn’t get a chance to check for the new support system until today, March 5th. HAS has set themselves up with Zendesk, and have a very nice text-based support system now! Plenty of graphics are included to guide people along who need a more visual cue added to the text. This means that those who prefer to watch videos can. Those who prefer to read can, and those who need the instructional screenshots, can have those too.

Whew!!! Oh my word! This computer repair support tech can finally tell you about a system that finally has decent support built into it! There is one benefit to me getting bit by that problem instead of you. While I had to proverbially apply bandaids to the cuts sustained on the bleeding edge of this particular bit of technology, you don’t have to. Barging trails as a kid meant I got the thorns in my sleeves while those behind received fewer to none of them. The same applies here.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t give you this breakthrough until AFTER HAS left beta. This means if you want to join me in minting Asimi with just a few ads per day, you need to purchase Asimi stakes using your own money to begin with. You’ll need a Wave DEX account, install the desktop app so you have access to the support website from the info area under the gear in case you need assistance using the interface, and you’ll need to fund your country’s currency into that asset in your Wave account. From there you can buy a Wave token or two to handle Wave transactions. After that, you can trade for enough Asimi to purchase one or more Asimi stakes. Each stake right now is just under 56 Asimi. When you create your HAS account and click on Asimi Stake, you will get a more exact count of how many Asimi you need to purchase for one stake. Go back to your Wave account and trade for that amount. Return to your HAS wallet and fund it with your Asimi from Wave. Go to the Asimi Stake tab and purchase the stake(s) you want.

After those steps are completed however, you can put a plan together that has the potential to earn you a decent income minting Ads on HAS. The best part of your plan will include the fact that your initial out-of-pocket expense has been reduced to mere transaction fees now over at Wave, and no further fiat currency needs to be used going forward. In fact, further Wave tokens can now be purchased with Asimi, just be sure you still have Wave token bits available to handle the transaction fee for that.

My own plan is to earn enough for another stake and purchase that, then earn enough for minimum cashout. Then earn enough for a third stake, then earn enough for minimum cashout. I plan to repeat this cycle until I am earning roughly $100 USD per day in Asimi, and depending on how things are going at that time, I may continue the “purchase, then cash out” cycle. There is a contest going right now for anyone who can get themselves up to 25 Asimi Stakes. The first group to get there will win the contest. If you are reading this later in the year, that contest may be over by now. You’ll have to check if other contests are going.

As noted earlier, I generally don’t get into bleeding-edge situations, but I did with this one. I think if support stayed solely with nothing but video content, I would have had strong thoughts about walking away, because I can’t promote something I can’t support. Either that, or I would have begun doing what my upline was doing, which was writing out his own written help files.

What I can say about Hashing AdSpace, is that they are definitely paying. They deliver what they say they will, and I have my payment proof to prove it. Stars denote dates and times, and where the Wave title is on the dark theme of the desktop app. Now that I have a better idea of what I’m doing when it comes to cashing out, those dates and times should be closer together in the future.

hashing adspace payment proof

Commercial hair care product
Marilynn Dawson Saving Money - Groceries

Feeding Your Skin, Your Hair and Your Health

Ashtree WildcraftingAnother season of foraging is just around the corner.  With only three ingredients remaining in the list of wild plants we wish to sell in our wild-crafted tea blends over at Ashtree Wildcrafting, we are already thinking of how we will continue to bring locally foraged, wildcrafted loose leaf tea to market.  At worst, we will be stuck with craft fairs and online.  At best, we will earn enough to purchase business licenses and get our products into local stores.

With organic and non-GMO being the current fads out there, sometimes claims cross my screen that haven’t been thought through too well.  For example, a new hair care company is claiming that you take care what you feed your body, now do the same for your hair.  The only issue with that statement however, is that by feeding your body correctly, you are, by extension, also feeding your hair by giving it the nutrients it needs to grow.  Perhaps I am one of the few people out there who have noticed that anytime I start eating better, my hair gets thicker and longer, faster.  Less stress also helps the hair grow better while more stress causes me to start losing hair.  Needless to say, with how stressful 2018 was for the latter half, I am currently relieved that my hair is on another thicken-and-grow stage with very little being lost to the brush now.

Can you feed your hair with shampoo and hair care products?  Most hair care products are unnecessary and contain chemicals you don’t want anywhere near your body.  Those ingredient lists are almost too tiny to read on purpose, and when you can read them, many of the ingredients are on the banned-but-allowed-under-a-certain-threshold list on the Canadian government website.  It has been the experience of my daughter and I, that making our own shampoo and conditioner eventually reduced to shampoo and an Argan oil blend as needed.  The oils and the castille soap are purchased at the store.  However, we infuse the water with a blend of herbs that we’ve harvested from the forest and meadow.  These herbs treat the scalp more than they treat the hair, which is necessary due to my daughter’s flaky skin issue on her head.  Nettle for example, does almost as good a job as Head and Shoulders in treating dandruff.  The high Vitamin E content of the Argan oil blend feeds the skin directly as well.  Mint, Dandelion, and Burdock have anti-inflammatory properties that calm the scalp as well.  The recipe we use calls for a tiny bit of olive or jojoba oil, so we infused some olive oil with a similar mix of herbs, swapping out the mint for plantain.

These herbs help the skin of the scalp to function better, resulting in healthier roots for our hair.  Researching shampoos and conditioners led us to believe that it would roughly a month before our hair stopped looking limp and oily all the time.  For us it was the better part of 6 months to get past that phase depending on the season of the year (seasonal changes can result in brief bouts of ongoing oiliness), and another year and a half before we both began noticing our hair getting thicker, healthier and longer.

It is important to remember that once your hair leaves the skin and flops around on your head, the part you brush and wash is actually dead.  The roots in the skin follicles are what you are feeding whether directly through the skin itself, or via your diet and lifestyle.  Having said that, Plantain and Burdock aid in darkening your hair colour, while Dandelion aids in lightening it.  Needless to say, the streaks my daughter gets in the summertime don’t go away half as quickly, and her un-died balayage treatment in the lower half of her hair sticks around throughout the year now.

Two-thirds of the way through our first year or so of making our own shampoos and conditioners, we began to discover we didn’t need the conditioner as often.  For the past year we haven’t used any conditioner save for the occasional squirt of Argan oil rubbed between our hands to touch up the ends of our hair or a squirt along the part on top to keep the skin from drying out.  This has led us to another conclusion, that the hair-care industry has largely manufactured its own market.

Curly-wavy hairStudying the origins of hair care as we know it in the modern-day, led us to discover that the lie was perpetrated that your hair was greasy and needed cleansing.  That was followed up by, your hair is brittle and too wispy, and full of knots, tame it with conditioner.  The shampoos that were made commercially were responsible for the brittleness and the development of knots.  Both my daughter and I have long hair by today’s standards, and neither of us are using conditioner now, even of our own making almost 3 years later.

One of the things that you will be taught if you take a marketing course, webinar, or spend time educating yourself on the topic via articles, books, etc, is that if you have a product for which there is no existing market, create it!  You create your market by creating the problem that your product will fix.  You then tell people they have this problem and that you have the solution for it.

This wasn’t just done with shampoo and conditioner early on, it was also done with deodorant and antiperspirant.  As those have aluminum in them, we are now finally experimenting with homemade deodorants that will replace the commercial brands.  A few years ago, I began only applying the commercial stuff a couple times a week because what I was buying had long periods of active behaviour.  The latest commercial antiperspirant in my drawer says it will last up to 90 hours!!!  It’s also motion-activated, so I would apply it on Monday and find myself fighting with the soap to get it off on Thursday before I shaved or it would gum up the razor.  However, even with the slowed pace of application, I am having to use a Ph-rebalance solution first, because the deodorant we made was causing me to rash out.  This rashing is normal when moving from chemicals to natural, but the Ph-rebalancer aids in the transition, and is to be used anytime the homemade deodorant causes rashing in the future.  Homemade deodorant has baking soda if you can’t afford Bentonyte clay.  Some recipes combine the two, or use corn starch.  Ours uses corn starch and baking soda to reduce the environment necessary for bacteria to grow, but because baking soda does this via its alkaline nature, the need to rebalance your skin’s PH balance will crop up from time to time.  My son and I are having to start with the rebalancer.  One source said that for some people, that’s all they will ever need.  We’ll see how this experiment goes.  The skin’s pores need to a) unclog from years of being deliberately clogged, and b) calm down and not work has hard as they used to, to do the same job of removing impurities from the body.

But the point is that in an effort to create markets and sales for products we never needed, companies have created problems we didn’t know we had and have sold us the solution.  We only make lifestyle changes in this house when it fits within our budget to do so.  As we’ve noted in the past, we are saving quite a bit of money not buying commercial hair care products, toothpaste, and now deodorant.  We do buy the castille soap, our carrier oils that fit our budget, the baking soda, etc.  But we forage for the herbs we put into these products.

Overall, we are healthier for the changes we’ve made, including our hair.