Minneapolis Examiner.com Children's Crafts Examiner review

Haha the title is a bit of a farce... I am the Minneapolis Children's Crafts Examiner so it can't be much of a review. Atleast not an unbiased one. However I love it and I think my articles are great. If I didn't I wouldn't publish them. (Trust me I have several that are awaiting rescue on my hard drive) Some days there just doesn't seem to be much to write about but do a little searching and you can always find something. My favorite thing to do right now? Browse the internet for craft ideas. I write about crafts the ideas have to come from somewhere right? Well many of them do truly come from my own head but seeing as I can't come up with 4 or more original ideas a week I also focus on children's crafts in the community. Did you know that National chain hardware stores Lowe's and Home Depot offer free kids crafts? Well neither did I till another parent told me. This word of mouth in the parenting world is invaluable and that is my goal on Examiner.com to be an invaluable source and tool to all local parents on children's crafts and art projects. Did you know that Martha Stewart actually has some kids art projects on her website? I always associated her with high time and alot of work when it came to her craft projects. Now I would say I still have that opinion on some of her crafts posted online, but there were some really cute ones too. Some are similar to the ones that I come up with on my own. My most recent kids art project that I "created" is a fingerprint, finger paint tree for spring. Say that ten times fast! I came up with the idea completely on my own (if Martha Stewart has one I haven't seen it - the woman's got like a million crafts) My kids art project was based of another project that I saw on the kaboose website. Great site if you haven't ever been. The project they showed was a finger print bumble bee hive with bees around it. I didn't like the hive much and everything was similar in color but I LOVED the fingerprint idea. So I started thinking the bees are really cute what else could I make out of my kids fingerprints? Birds? maybe but it would need more than just birds on a page... A tree, little fingers are just the right size to make tree leaves and I have always been a fan of any artwork that came home from preschool with fingerprints and handprints on it, and so my fingerprint finger paint spring trees were born. This is the way I think, kind of random and going off on tangents regularly and it seems to work well when it comes to kids crafts. The entire thought process from start to finish including writing probably took me about an hour once I got going. Not bad. It used to take me 3-4 times that long when I started writing. Still does if I don't know my topic well. So yay for Examiner.com and yay for the bit of income it is providing me with. So far it pays my monthly water bill each month and maybe if it really takes off and I can truly be a valuable source to parents in the Minneapolis St. Paul communities it will pay more of my bills. Until then I will continue to write and be happy that I can be home with my children. For me there is no greater gift than to be home with them.

ehow and Demand Studios

Well there has certainly been alot of talk around this change in the ehow format. Previously anyone could join and post to ehow simply by registering with the site. Now all articles on ehow will be written by writers from Demand Studios and will have to go through an editor before being published. This has caused an uproar at ehow. It is a complete and total reformat and while I like some of the changes, I mean - come on guys some of those writers made us all look bad - there are many more that I am not so thrilled about. The new format calls for all writers to go through the application process to become a Demand Studios writer. I was one of the "lucky" writers who was pre-approved and accepted immediately. It also appears that I was in the very first group to be moved over to the Demand platform as I was able to sign in to Demand the very first day that the announcement went out. What! you say I actually signed on with Demand and am looking at their titles? Don't I know that I will no longer own my content and that I get paid "a pitance" for my work? What about how in the Demand policies it states that they can reprint your articles forever and never have to pay you anything more? Or that it states they can edit and change your work however they want to? Well I am aware of those things. I am also someone who reads everything before agreeing much to the annoyance of all those pencil pushers waiting for me to sign. Because of this I knew when I signed on, that all of these things existed in the DS (Demand Studios) agreement. Now if you have been with me from the beginning when I posted my ehow earnings in exact numbers you will know I was not making much. While I did hope to increase those earnings and was progressing well in February, I faultered in March. While this minimal increase in earnings can be attributed to many factors the largest one in my opinion was actually the ehow publishing bugs. Not having the patience to wait around for the bugs to be fixed repeatedly I went looking elseware for income and found 2 more additional sites. Redgage.com and Examiner.com due to my lack of income on ehow I went into these sites with my eyes wide open and not expecting to make much money. Once I got looking at Examiner.com and realized that I got a base pay of the HUGE amount of $1.00 an article to write locally (find your laughs where you can) I thought it might be more worth it. Turns out the page view payout is higher than ehow as well and there aren't annoying ads all over the side of the articles. So I have been investing alot of time researching and have found that while I personally don't have a problem being paid $15 and article to write a How To article I am not thrilled with the loss of copyright. I have no interest in writing my own titles and getting paid residual on ehow because it never paid me more than $4 an article before anyways... So when it comes to the new writing platform and the changeover on ehow I am still going in with my eyes wide open and if I find an article I feel I can write on accurately with out a days worth of research I will probably take it. So far nothing has caught my eye so I am focusijng on my other writing platforms like Examiner.com and Redgage.