I've been reviewing my travel insurance options, having been quoted an exorbitant amount for renewal by my current insurer. It was handy, therefore, that I was asked to review what was on offer from Cover My Travels, a UK company specialising in medical travel insurance and cover for those with a medical condition.

My weight is getting to be a problem (there being too much of it), so I looked around for something that might help in my endeavours to reduce same. I came across MyFitnessPal, which has more or less what I was looking for - a way of keeping myself informed of what my intake and/or energy output has been over a period of days. The site looks pretty good - calm blues and whites.

If you can write reasonable prose, and can create an intelligent review of a web-related product, then Smorty.com want to hear from you.

Blog advertising is the name of the game here, and is a relatively new way for advertisers to improve their rankings. You get paid for blogging, they get better ratings.

We all know that the more links you have to your site, the better you ranking is likely to be in search engines like Google or Yahoo. By having (and paying) bloggers to write mini-evaluations - just like this one - with the right sort of internal links and keywords, everybody gains. The advertiser gets what he wants and the blogger makes a little bread.

So advertisers as well as bloggers can contact Smorty, to see how their ranking can be improved. If bloggers can get paid to blog, it seems a reasonable way to gain an additional income.

In order for a blogger to be approved, the blog must meet a few criteria, such as

* Your blog must be indexed by Google and Yahoo
* Your blog must be older than 3 months
* Your blog must not contain any violent, hate related or adult content
* Your blog must be active and have a history of minimum average 2 new posts per week.

You have to apply, and if you pass muster, you are given assignments - you don't have to accept them - to complete within a set period, usually 72 hours.

To get paid, you need a PayPal account.

It was easy to get started, took less than 48 hours, and the assigned tasks are not onerous; well, not yet!

You will make roughly US $6 per posting (this can increase if you have a highly-rated blog), which must be acceptable to the advertiser. This probably means that a totally negative assesment won't fly.

Advertisers have also to comply with certain criteria before they're accepted for blog advertising, and they have to pay for their campaign up front.

It will be interesting to see how many Smorty ads we start seeing in the near future.