• Candidate Views on the Subprime Mortgage Crisis
• Candidate Views on Employment
• Candidate Views on Social Security
• Candidate Views on Health Care
• Candidate View on Taxes
• Candidate Views on Education

You should notice that the national average 30-year fixed interest rate is down to around 5.8% as of the time of this writing. That’s the lowest national rates have been since 2005 and represents a drop of 30 basis points (0.30%) over December 27th, 2007 data. Interest rates dropped so significantly because of the recent jobs report that showed private-sector jobs actually dropped over the holidays, which is pretty unusual as seasonal, holiday employment is usually pretty significant. In fact, unemployment rose from 4.7% in November, to 5% in December.

One of the most confusing things about mortgage rates is the fact that they tend to fluctuate in the opposite direction one would expect sometimes. A general rule of thumb to keep in mind about mortgage rates is this…

Rates will generally drop with negative news about the economy as money flows out of the stock market and into the bond market, and vice versa. However, there are certain exceptions to this, one being inflation. Rising inflation is certainly negative economic news, however, inflation triggers major fears in long-term investments such as mortgages, which causes investors to back out of bonds, leading to rising interest rates.

Things get a little more complicated when you’re looking at smaller fluctuations, but for most consumers, this is a great rule of thumb to understand.

If you’re interested in lowering your mortgage rate with a company you can trust, fill out the form to find out what you qualify for.

What Is Pay Per Post?

For those that aren’t familiar with Pay Per Post, it’s a service that links bloggers up with advertising opportunities and pays you per post to write about those opportunities. The interface is incredibly easy to navigate and understand. When you log in, your presented with a dashboard with general information like the number of posts you’ve written, the amount of money you’ve made so far, as well as some featured advertising opportunities.

The User Interface

After logging in, you can click on the “Open Opportunities” tab and browse or search for money-making opportunities. The way it works is a website owner registers with Pay Per Post as an advertiser, that advertiser then creates an “Opportunity,” describing what he or she wants bloggers to write about, as well as some other specifications, like required links, overall tone of the post, etc. Once an advertiser creates an opportunity, it’s displayed for bloggers to browse and write about if they choose.

Money-Making Opportunities

An example of an opportunity would be something like writing a post about a new type of credit card offered by such-and-such company. When the advertiser creates an opportunity, he can create some requirements a blogger and his or her blog must meet before accepting the opportunity and being paid. Requirements include minimum pagerank, minimum tack, minimum real rank, excluded domains, blog categories, blog host location, and whether a disclosure is required. When browsing opportunities, bloggers can choose to display only those opportunities for which they qualify.

Accepting an opportunity is as easy as clicking the “Reserve this opportunity” button, writing a post, and then telling Pay Per Click the location of the post. 30 days after you submit your post, it is checked to see that it is still live and meets the requirements of the opportunity, and then you’re paid through PayPal.

How Much Can I Make?

This is all great, but I’m sure the question on everyone’s mind is, “How much will I get paid to post?” The answer to that question depends on whether you and your blog meet the requirements of the high paying opportunities. Generally, the more traffic you have, the more money you’ll make per post.

I’m getting paid $20 for this post, for example, which isn’t bad for 10 minutes of my time; but that’s an opportunity higher than most, offered by Pay Per Post itself. To give you a better idea of the kind of money you should expect per post, Truthful Lending dot Com has a Pagerank 2, and all the opportunities available to me right now are paying $5-10 per post. Once your blog gets a Pagerank 4, you’re looking at closer to $20 per post. Pagerank 6, maybe around $150-200 per post, depending on your traffic ratings.

What Are The Opportunities Like?

Obviously, the main goal of a lot of the opportunities is to generate traffic and a link back to the advertiser’s site. The opportunities will generally state what the tone of the post should be, and, to my surprise, they didn’t all require a positive tone. In fact, most of the opportunities I’ve seen so far are geared towards bloggers who are concerned about writing biased content just to get paid. There certainly are some opportunities that require a positive tone, and you can choose to accept those or not; personally, if the opportunity requires a positive tone, I won’t take it because remaining an unbiased resource is much more important to me than a couple of bucks.

I originally signed up for Pay Per Post several months ago. To be honest, I don’t remember how I heard about it, probably through another blog. So far, I’m pretty impressed. Pay Per Post seems like it could be a solid money-maker, and for newer bloggers with little traffic, it could be the biggest source of blog income every month.

If you’re interested in Pay Per Post, check it out and get paid to blog