FAQ

Articles
Sites
- What kind of sites can i add as a publisher?
- What do site classes mean?
Points
Publications
Automated publications
Referral program

Articles

Q: What kind of article content is not allowed?
A: Generally, there are three catogories that must not be posted via Host My Post:

Stuff that can get the publisher into the legal trouble. Yep, that's quite a broad definition, but it is the best we've got. If you are unsure — don't post.
Junk. Something that was not written by human and intended for other humans to read. Machine translated text, text produced by Markov chains generator, chatbot logs, etc.
Poor HTML formatting. Because we want to make the process of publishing as easy as copy and paste (or even easier), we want advertisers to provide proper HTML source with limited subset of tags allowed. Tags must be correctly nested and every tag must be closed (or indication of that no closing tag will follow is needed). And when we say "every", we mean it:
<img src="http://www.example.com/incorrect.gif"><br>
<img src="http://www.example.com/correct.gif"/><br/>
Luckily this can be checked automatically.

Also you should provide correct categories your article falls under. If nothing fits, please contact us and we will work it out together.

Q: What if i break these rules?
A: Nothing if you didn't do that on purpose and are willing to cooperate and fix it. However, we keep a track of all the reports and if we find you abusing our service we will ban you and you'll lose all of your points. Consider that as the part of the deal.

Q: What is the "blocked" (or "hold") budget of the article?
A: These are points already spent on publications, but not yet transferred to publisher accounts. You can learn more about Host My Post points transferring policy here.

Sites

Q: What kind of sites can i add as a publisher?
A: There are quite a few requrements for sites, actually. Your site must match the categories you have specified for it. We have zero tolerance for cloaking. You must have access to the home page of the domain (this is not necessary must be a second level domain). To verify that we will ask you to place a bit of our HTML code on the home page. If you can not handle that — don't bother adding a site. After our bot finds this bit of HTML, your site gets reviewed by the moderator and off you go. However, we reserve the right to reject sites as well as to change these rules.

Q: What do site classes mean?
This is how Host My Post rates publisher sites. Sites can have class from A (top rated) to G (worst rated). Ratings are estimations based on your site traffic (Alexa Rank at the moment) and "expected PageRank of the page, where articles are published", they are updated by bot on periodic basis.
You can refer to the table below, which represents Site Class and "our calculated PageRank".

Class A - PR 5 or higher
Class B - PR 4
Class C - PR 3
Class D - PR 2
Class E - PR 1
Class F - PR 0
Class G - Not Indexed

Please Note: Sites in "G" class can't publish Host My Post articles.

If you have good traffic on your web site (the fact we, obviously, like) - then the Class of your web site will be higher.
If you consider your site is not ranked correctly, or site of some other publisher is not ranked correctly - please contact us.

When you create an article campaign (Advertising / Add article) you do not have to specify pay-per-post value for all of the publisher site classes. If, for example, you set 10 pts for C-class and leave all the other fields blank then publications on better rated sites (A-class and B-class) will still be rewarded with 10 points and publications on lower rated sites (D-, E- and F-class) will not be rewarded at all and thus will not decrease article budget (in fact, we do not even register such a publications, if you make the content publicly available we can't stop people from reposting it for free at any site). Obviously system won't let you to set lower price for higher class because it doesn't make any sense.

Points

Q: What are the Host My Post points?
А: Points is something you spend when advertising (posting your article on other people's sites) or earn when publishing (posting other people's articles on your site). You can consider 1 point approximately equal to $0.01 USD, however the rate at which our customers will buy/sell them could slightly vary.

Q: How can i get points?
A: You can use our secure order form at Plimus.com (credit cards, wire transfers, PayPal and checks are accepted):

Or if you are looking for a better deal you can go to our forums and find someone who is selling them for real world money. Or you can earn them by adding your site into system and publishing articles on it.

Q: How much one point is worth?
A: 1 point is approximately equal to $0.01 USD, but there's only one way to find out the exact rate: go to the forums and check.

Q: How to convert points into real money and what else can I do with points I have earned?
A: First of all, Host My Post will always be happy to buy your points, go to the "My Account" > "Sell points" section, located at the Main Menu of the Site. For more details about conversion of points into real money please visit our forum.
Or if you are looking for a better deal you can go to our forums and offer them for whatever favors you want.
Or you can spend them on spreading your articles with your links all around the web.

Publications

Q: What rules should i follow when publishing an article on my site?
A: The rules as they are at current moment are listed below. However, we reserve the right to change them.

The article must have the permanent address at your site and be available at that URL whenever your site is available. Any form of cloaking is strictly forbidden and will cause account ban.
The article must not be further than 1 click away from the home page within one week period and not further than 3 clicks after it. You shouldn't worry too much though, most Blogs/CMS software are perfectly ok with us (e.g. WordPress)
If you are going to publish articles (or links to articles) on your site's home (index) page, the minimum word count must be 100 words.
If advertiser had specified that the content of the article must stay unchanged then changing it is violation of the rules. However, if the advertiser doesn't mind, changing the content a bit is a good practice because it can help with search engine rankings.

Q: What is the publication effective date?
A: When publisher reports that he has posted advertiser's article on his site, the points are not instantly transferred from atricle budget to publisher's account. Instead this points go to "hold" or "blocked" article budget. This means they can not be spent in any way by any party until the effective date (which is publication date plus hold period which is different for every publisher). If nothing happens (e.g. publication is reported fake or breaking site rules) during the hold period, then on the effective date points go to the publisher with no refund possible.

Q: How is the hold period calculated for publisher?
A: The main idea behind the hold period is that the better publisher you are the sooner you get the points. Best publishers (guys who post a lot and are not reported for abusing) have hold period of 24 hours (this is minimum), but eventually they will drop to 7 days (this is default for new publishers) if they stop publishing.

Q: How the violations of the publication rules are handled?
A:

Cloaking == instant ban
If (and only if) the violation is reported prior to the publication effective date, the publication is not rewarded and the advertiser gets the refund.
The first violation resets the hold period for the publisher to 7 days, the second to 14 days, the third one causes account ban.

Q: How can i request a refund from publisher?
A: Go to Advertising / My articles click on the publications count next to the article in question, then click "Details" for the publication you'd like to be refunded and file an abuse report. You can get to the very same page by following the link in the publication notification email. Note: you will only get the points back if the publication effective date hasn't passed yet.

Automated publications

Q: What's that?
A: Imagine you are logging in to the backend area of you site, click on "fetch new articles from Host My Post matching my criteria", select ones you like and voila: articles are posted on your site and points are earned at Host My Post. Or this can be set up so that it requires no efforts from you at all, everything can be performed by scheduled tasks! If you are an owner of WordPress powered blog you can download a plugin from our site that adds most of this functionality to your wordpress installation.

Note (for those publishers who already have Wordpress on their sites): our plugin requires Wordpress version 2.3.3 or higher, please consider upgrading if needed.

Q: How do i download plugin for Wordpress?
A: You can download it from here (~10k).

Q: Is this plugin hard to install?
A: It's as hard as unzipping plugin archive to a folder on your site and then clicking few buttons in the wordpress admin area. In fact install instruclions included in the zip file are 4 lines long.

Q: How do i download PHP example?
A: Standalone example still has to be produced. You can not download it right now. However, you can check the wordpress plugin. It's in PHP and has less than 300 lines of code.

Q: What are the publishing XML interface specs?
A: Sorry, no specs yet, but these sample requests and responses should give you some idea:

Request 1

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
	<request q="get articles for site">
		<option name="account" value="MyLogin" />
		<option name="site" value="www.mysite.com" />
		<option name="publication_key" value="MyPublicationKey" />
	</request>
</xml>

Response 1

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
	<responses>
		<response>
			<article>
				<title><![CDATA[
Article Title
]]>
				</title>
				<id>1</id>
				<source>
	<![CDATA[
<h1>Article Title</h1>
Article body<br />
<a href="http://mysite.com">Article link</a><br />
Article body<br />
	]]>
				</source>
				<ppp>1</ppp>
			</article>
			<article>
				<title><![CDATA[
Second article title
	]]>
				</title>
				<id>3</id>
				<source>
	<![CDATA[
Second article body
	]]>
				</source>
				<ppp>1</ppp>
			</article>
		</response>
	</responses>
</xml>

Request 2

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
	<requests>
		<request q="register publication">
			<option name="article_id" value="1" />
			<option name="account" value="MyLogin" />
			<option name="site" value="www.mysite.com" />
			<option name="publication_key" value="MyPublicationKey" />
			<option name="permanent_url" value="http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mysite.com%2Fwordpress%2Findex.php%2F2008%2F02%2F06%2Farticle-title-16%2F" />
			<option name="non_zero_reward" value="1" />
			<option name="comment" value="" />
		</request>
		<request q="register publication">
			<option name="article_id" value="3" />
			<option name="account" value="MyLogin" />
			<option name="site" value="www.mysite.com" />
			<option name="publication_key" value="MyPublicationKey" />
			<option name="permanent_url" value="http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mysite.com%2Fwordpress%2Findex.php%2F2008%2F02%2F06%2Fsecond-article-title-10%2F" />
			<option name="non_zero_reward" value="0" />
			<option name="comment" value="" />
		</request>
	</requests>
</xml>

Response 2

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
	<responses>
		<response>
			<status>error</status>
			<message>you can not publish this article at this moment</message>
		</response>
		<response>
			<status>posted</status>
		</response>
	</responses>
</xml>

You should POST xml body to http://www.host-my-post.com/gate.php script.

Referral program

Q: What's that?
A: Referral program is a way to earn Host My Post points by referring publishers to our system. When publication is made, advertiser points are split into 2 parts: the bigger one goes to the publisher who made the publication and the small percent is split again into two shares: one for the user who brought (or referred, or signed up) the publisher the other for Host-My-Post. Here's the scheme:

As you see, the rate at which the publisher gets his share is individual for each advertiser and is called A-Rate (advertiser's rate) and the rate at which the remainder is split is individual for each referrer (R-rate or referrer's rate).

Q: Ок, what are the real rates?
A: If you sign up now you'll have A-Rate = R-Rate = 100%, i.e. best possible values both for advertisers and referrers for account lifetime. Of course this is a part of our promotional campaign and certainly will change in future. Also we plan increasing rates for our future users as a part of bonus programs. You cand find your personal rates on My Account / Info page.

Q: How do i refer someone to Host-My-Post?
A: Simply give him link to our sign-up page with your ref_id in it. You can copy-and-paste this link from your My Account / Info page.