IZEA Corporation: Secretly a Clown Troop Masquerading as a Company? Fortunately, no.

Image by zencohe via Flickr

 Background: The IZEA corporation recently rejected my blog for the reason that "Your blog appears to exist solely for payment, or to post referral links." Here is my response.

Update: The customer service team from IZEA contacted me and approved my blog after I complained. So, I should take this post down. However, I am not going to, because it's a funny post (although slightly harsh in the last paragraph).

My blog has over 700 (!) entries. It is nearly three years old. I have over 50,000 followers on Twitter. I also have nearly 80,000 friends on Myspace, over 1,000 friends on Facebook, presence on Digg, etc. Further, I have all types of posts, from short posts about videos I enjoy to well thought out long blog commentaries.

The blog DOES NOT, and I repeat, DOES NOT "exist solely for payment, or to post referral links", as you claim in your rejection of my site.

During my lifetime, I have made perhaps a few hundred dollars from blogging. Considering the thousands of hours that I have put into creating my blog, building traffic to it, making friends with other bloggers, etc., this works out to a pay rate of a few cents (or less) per hour. I can assure you that, if I had wanted to do something for the sole purpose of making money, I would have been much better suited taking a part-time job. In fact, the only reason why I even post paid entries is because I am signed up for a related website (Blogvertise) and, after months of inactivity, I recently received an email with a personal appeal from one of the employees for that company that asked me to reactivate my account because companies that advertised through Blogvertise had specifically requested to advertise on my website.

In light of these facts (many of which would have been obvious to anyone with half a brain that actually LOOKED at my blog instead of having a computer auto-reject it), I am left to conclude that your company has a load of buffoons working for it. Therefore, I respectfully request that you delete my account and refrain from contacting me in the future with any offers to write sponsored entries. I no longer wish to do business with your company.

Respectfully,

JC

P.S. The full contents of this email are going to be posted on my "shill" blog for all the world to see, including my 50,000 twitter followers.

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Review of Walden University website

For this blog post, I thought that I would review the Walden University website: WaldenU.edu.As a warning, I do get paid for some of the posts that I write for this blog, and this post happens to be among them. However, my getting paid to review a website would never affect my review of said website, either positively or negatively for Walden University's online degree programs.

From my initial pass through the website, I can tell that their site is very clean and looks very professional. It is relatively easy to navigate, with a large pull down menu on the homepage and a nice layout that directs me to different parts of the website. So, I give them high marks for this feature. Below is a screen shot of the homepage:

The part of the website I am most interested in is the degrees that they offer. So, I click on that link and check out the doctoral programs that they offer on the site. This directs me to the following page:

The doctoral degrees that they offer seem to be geared more towards education professionals, which makes sense for an online university and is probably a good thing. After all, you wouldn't want to drive on a bridge built by someone with an online degree, now would you?

After seeing the program for a doctorate degree in Education, I am curious how much this would cost me. So, I click through the Tuition and Fees tab and find the cost per semester hour in a table.

Wow!!! A quick calculation reveals that 770$ per semester credit hour times 54 credit hours minimum plus fees easily puts a student over 42,000$ for a Ed.D. degree. To me, that seems like a lot of money.

I guess that, if the student is able to get a good job after with an online degree, then it's fine. However, as I said before, I am not sure who would hire a person with a Ed.D degree from an online university over someone from a brick-and-mortar college.

So, I am impressed overall with the website, at least in terms of the technical aspects of the site. The site is easy to use and easy to navigate. I'm not sold on the programs they offer, however.

Click here to learn about Walden.