Setting Up Your Profile at MyLot.com

MyLot is a site that pays you a to participate in their giant forum. If you like Facebook or other on line networks where you can post and be responded to and discuss things, you will probably enjoy MyLot. They pay you according to how often you post and respond and the quality of your responses, which other members rate. I have, at the time of writing this, been a myLot member for a week. In that time I have worked myself up to one of the highest ratings and started or responded to 139 discussions. I have made $6.28. This is about twice as much as my 30 hubs earned for me here in all of August.

However, once I earn something for a post or response on myLot, I will not earn anything more by having it there. The saying on myLot is, "If you don't type, you don't earn. It's like when you get a paycheck, you won't get another one unless you do more work. I like the idea of being able to see on the top of my profile each day how much I've earned. I know when I have accumulated $10 (or a higher amount if I so designate) I will have a payday that month. If I keep this active, I am practically assured of making $30 by the end of September. That is more than I can currently expect to earn on any of my other writing sites. Your mileage may vary, according to the hours you put in.

It's very easy to join. If you haven't joined yet, I'd appreciate your joining through my referral link. It helps me without taking anything away from you. And it means I will give you all the help I know how to give. We will automatically be friends if you join through this link, and that will get you off to a good start because you will already have one friend. So why not sign up today?

Added later: As I was testing the links here on a different computer, I had to sign in before I could get to the "edit profile" page, and I was reminded of something I did not tell you because I have gotten used to it. Like most sites, myLot gets the money it pays you because it has targeted ads which you see in small print under the posts in discussions. The first time you sign in after registering, you are taken to a few pages that encourage you to sign up for ad sites. There is a place at the top of these pages which will let you skip each page and continue to where you were going, but the first time one of these pages pops up it can be confusing and make you think you have to fill in the forms on those pages to continue. You don't. Just click on "skip? at the top and go on.

After you join, the first thing you will want to do is make your profile. I have made profiles on a lot of different sites, but MyLot's was the most complicated for me. Filling out your basic information is pretty easy, but the rest can be challenging -- especially if you don't understand the purpose of listing your interests. You can see the parts of my profile we are discussing in these pictures on the right. Just click to enlarge them. You will notice that on the left side is my slogan above my picture. Under that is some very basic information,some of which is filled in by MyLot. Under that are some tiny links to my activity categories. After that are your avatars and links to all your friends.

Next comes the part that's very different -- your interests. On most sites, there are some blanks you fill in. Not on MyLot. Here you get to choose from hundreds of icons which are arranged in no particular order. There are some very broad categories such as Life, Hobbies, Foods, Products, Technology, Music, Movies, Goals, Travel, Schooling, Health, Books, Places, Jobs, etc. I made the mistake of thinking this part was for the purpose of letting prospective friends know what my interests are. It's much more than that. It also, I'm sure, is primarily so they know how to target the ads you will see. If you believe it's good to be thorough in listing your interests, think again. Even if you don't care about which ads are targeted for you to see, you should know that every time you want to start a new discussion, You will have to start it by clicking on one of these interest icons you have selected. But, when you see this icon list while starting a discussion, it won't look like the profile page listing where everything is arranged by category. It wil look like the picture above.

If you were as thorough as I was before I knew this, you may have 500 icons to go through in no particular order and many will be repeated, since you may have put a state you used to live in under "Places I Have Lived, " and "Travel." You may have listed friends or family in several different interest categories. But they will all be spread out on this page all mixed up. If you listed 50 movies and 100 books, they will also be in this mix along with friends, foods, you name it. At first the only way I knew how to start a discussion was by choosing one of these icons as your starting place, but I've since learned another way I will share in another hub.

When you make your profile, my advice is to list a few broad interest categories. You might want to leave books and music and movies out completely and list "Reading" in only one place -- either hobbies, things I have done, goals, or whatever. Then when you want to start a discussion, if you can't find something appropriate in what you picked when setting up your profile, you can go to the top of the page in the banner with the myLot logo and click on "interests" in the menu right under it. Then click on "edit interests." That will let you add the icon you want to start a discussion about. The best way to set up your interests to save you time later is to just list the interests you want to talk about most in very broad categories, and if you want to list music, books, and movies, just list a few favorites -- not every book you've read and liked.

If you follow this advice on making the left side of your profile, you will be off to a good start in making friends at myLot and participating.

This is also trickier than it is on some other sites. For example, here on HubPages you get to write what you want people to know about you in the top section, and it's very easy to include links to your other sites or certain hubs without knowing any HTML. You can organize your hubs into groups so they will show that way in your profile. HubPages pretty much does the rest for you.

On myLot, they will also fill in part of your information in boxes called sorties. Some are put there by default, like your activity. The rest you choose to display or not. To add or change sorties, you first click "edit profile" on the top right under your avatar and vital information. Then, in the top right-hand corner of your profile you click "add content." You will then see the sorties you can add or edit, such as HTML, Photos, etc. Some of these you may not want to activate until you have something to put in them, such as Best Responses or Interest Rankings. When you are in edit mode, if you hover your mouse over the right corner of the box, three things you can click appear: a refresh symbol, an "edit," and an "x." i haven't played with the refresh symbol yet, but "edit" lets you add or change things, and the x will remove that sortie and what's in it. So, be careful when you are messing around in editing mode where you hover and where you click.

I had seen some profiles where people had put links to all their sites or banner ads for referrals to other sites. I wanted to add links, too, and knew I needed to add an HTML sortie to do this, but I hate coding. So I opened my blogging software on wordpress.com and made my sortie there, copied the HTML, and pasted it into my sortie. I wasn't sure how to save it. I think I clicked "refresh." I think all you really need to do is "View Profile" to save. That does work.

When I did this, I noticed my sorties were added at the bottom. I wanted them at the top. The FAQ page said when I'm in edit mode I can grab them at the top and drag them where I want them, but it doesn't exactly work that way, at least not easily. When I started to drag, I could see the shadowy form of the sortie moving, but it seemed to have little connection to my mouse. It was sort of like trying to drive on an icy road and steering while the car does as it pleases. Since I'd been getting warnings that my mouse batteries were low, I changed them, but it didn't help. Somehow, after many attempts, my sorties finally landed where I wanted them. Before that I started a discussion to ask old-timers on myLot what I was doing wrong, but they replied this is normal and the problem is in the source code, and to just keep trying. If you have any more questions about setting up your profile, visit the FAQ on this subject. I've tried to alert you to the problems I ran into these questions didn't cover.

Once you have everything just as you like it, click "View Profile" again on the right and you are ready to go to conquer myLot and start earning money. I will give you my hints on how to do that in my next hub on Discussions on MyLot. To join, please click my referral link here.