WebDiggin.com: An Adventure to Make Money Online

There are several companies out there (i.e. payperpost) that provide a marketplace connecting bloggers with companies that will pay bloggers to write about them. Or, more accurately, they pay for the traffic and the associated page rank.

I initially tried to get in with PayPerPost because they offered a $20 opportunity for a neutral toned post about your experiences with their company. My first post on our travel blog was rejected because my next post on our whattheduck website was a quick message to friends that our penguin pictures would be arriving shortly. The message didn’t include enough text, so PayPerPost rejected our neutral toned post and the opportunity closed.

I then removed our travel blog from PayPerPost and listed the PayPerPost referral on this blog instead. Unfortunately the $20 initial opportunity is no longer available. PayPerPost wrote the following response:

Thanks for reaching out to us! Yes, the $20 PPP opp is only available once for new users, once taken regardless of accepted or not, the opp can not be taken again on any past, present, or future blogs on your account. this opp automatically disallows someone who took it to take it again. I know it must be disappointing but this is why that opp is not available. Hope this helps.

I might try to create a new account to have the $20 initial opportunity reappear. Or, I might not. PayPerPost (among other organizations that encourage paid links) has come under attack by Google. Webmasters around the internet are complaining about their PageRank getting dropped to zero.

In theory, a low PageRank should drop your website’s position in the natural search results (as opposed to the paid search results). However, some people have reported that this PageRank drop hasn’t affected their business:

We’ve had our site for over two years now, and experienced a similar issue going from a PR 6 to 0. We haven’t really bothered to figure out what the issue is though since no traffic or anything has been affected. Dec 18, 2007

Others agree that although the traffic volume hasn’t changed, the drop in page rank meant they were no longer a hot item for companies paying for link traffic.

“Unless something changes in the next month, I won’t be seeing any more money coming in from blogging,” Lisa wrote in an e-mail to Wired News. “My visitor count hasn’t dropped because of the PageRank; however, visitors do not equal income.” http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2007/12/payperpost

PayPerPost has responded by releasing their own page ranking system, RealRank, which claims to be the first system focusing on the impact of the blogosphere. The formula has been made public: 70% on daily unique visitors, 20% by daily active inbound links and 10% by daily page views as reported by ITK (Izea Toolkit). RealRank allows companies to know which blogs are popular, and pay for those sites, accordingly.

RealRank is the first site ranking service that focuses exclusively on measuring the traffic and influence of individual blogs throughout the blogosphere. The service is designed to help advertisers analyze the relative reach of blogs and make informed online advertising purchasing decisions in the long run. RealRank aims to replace historically unreliable influence indicators such as Google PageRank, Alexa and Comscore by providing more accurate statistical data collected directly from the source.

Google has also responded. They point out that buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and “can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results.” (source: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66356)

They do point out, however, that not all paid links violates their guidelines:

Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

• Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the <a> tag
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

SOURCE: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66736

PayPerPost has had some issues last year with websites that used the “nofollow” attribute. More, precisely, they rejected them:

This is a notification to let you know that you blog, BinaryWolf Blog, has been rejected for the following reason(s): Thank you for your interest in PPP. We are unable to approve of your blog right now. Your blog contains ‘nofollow’ tags, which basically mean that search engines do not index or crawl your pages when searching. SOURCE: http://binarywolf.com/blog/2006/11/02/your-blog-has-been-rejected-by-pay-per-post/

Some bloggers are choosing to abandon payperpost schemes in favour of the Google PageRank. Others are choosing to make their money with paid posts and pay the price of the PageRank.

On principle, it seems that driving traffic to your site and making money through content-based advertising is better because it is scalable. Drive more traffic to your site and make more money through referrals. Making money with paid blogging is directly dependant on how many posts you write. (Although, the more traffic you drive to your site, the higher you can charge for those posts.) Perhaps I’ll experiment with both strategies.

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