Pay Per Post. Again.

Mar 05

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This is a neutral-toned, sponsored post about blog ads.

So. Here we are again. Addressing the issue of getting paid to blog, specifically with Pay Per Post. It’s potentially dangerous and can kill your Google PageRank, but as the amount of revenue generated from Google AdSense on this site is minimal, we’re going to take the plunge and experiment with getting paid to blog with Pay Per Post (again).

Pay Per Post provides a marketplace where companies can pay bloggers to blog about their products. Bloggers can decide which opportunities they want to blog about. Opportunities vary in the amount of money they pay, although most seemed to be around $10-$12. Some opportunities require you to put a positive spin on the post, however, others, like this post, can be neutral in tone.

This introductory “I signed up for PPP!” opporunity offers $20 to get you to try the Pay Per Post system. You have to write a minimum of 200 words in a neutral tone about what you love best about Pay Per Post:

We are looking for new Posties to talk about what you love best about Pay Per Post. We want to know why you signed up and how you heard about us. Have you made any new friends? What have you learned? Spread the love!

What are you going to do with all the money you earn!?!?!?!

***Please remember to have at least one original/non-sponsored post before and after this post. (required for all sponsored posts)***

The review requires a link to Pay Per Post, which is of course the point of all of this. Companies are willing to pay bloggers to post about their products because 1. they want to create a viral marketing campaign through social networks, and 2. because they want to increase their pagerank in Google by having links to their site.

In the marketplace, instead of the usual try-to-read-the-squiggles-to-prove-I’m-not-a-machine question, they had a “Captcha Question” (Ted has 20 toys on his desk. If Jamie steals four of them, how many are left?) - which I suppose eliminates the computers, and the Grade 2 students.

There are, however, a number of requirements outlined in the terms of service that may scare off potential bloggers (or frustrate new people trying to jump through their hoops). Initially, Izea, the parent company, required blogs to be operating for 3 months with 20 posts (although because bloggers can control their post timestamp, they can effectively edit the date of their first post and bypass this issue.) Now, Pay Per Post requires your blog to be up for 1 month with 10 posts.

Secondly, Pay Per Post requires your sponsored paid post to be sandwiched between two non-sponsored, original posts. This is where we were rejected last time:

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 post was rejected, so we tried again, only to find out that we couldn’t because the $20 opportunity to blog about Pay Per Post had expired and could only be attempted once. So, someone else from WebDiggin created an account, and here we are again.

The next big danger with getting paid to blog is that search engines will slash your rankings in their natural search listings. In effect, Google reduced the pagerank of bloggers who had paid-per-post links on their blogs down to zero. In theory, this should drop your search engine traffic, but in practice some bloggers were reporting that while their pagerank was destroyed, it didn’t affect the stream of traffic. Pay per post responded by creating their own pagerank system called realrank. (More popular blogs could charge more for their sponsored posts, but once Google deleted the pagerank of bloggers, Pay Per Post needed to come up with an alternate system to measure which blogs were popular.)

One solution to avoid having your pagerank slashed by Google was put forward by Google. Simply add a no follow tag in the link:

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

Pay Per Post has responded that nofollows can be used if the advertiser paying for the post chooses the nofollow option when they create the opportunity. In the terms of service, Pay Per Post is quite specific that if the advertiser does not include a no follow in their link, you cannot add one yourself:

Manipulation of Code. Any Pay Per Post Link code must be pasted directly into blog pages without modification. Pay Per Post participants are not allowed to alter any portion of the code.

Nofollows. Nofollows may only be included within the required link of a post, or additional required links, if the Advertiser chooses the nofollow option during Opportunity creation. Unless an Advertiser chooses this option, required links are not to have nofollow attributes within them. Here is an example of a nofollow attributed link:
<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.example.com/">Anchor Text</a>

Finally, Pay Per Post specifically outlaws other third party links or inline ads to be used in a sponsored post as per their terms of service.

Inline Ads and Links. There are to be no third party links, ads or other detractors located within the sponsored post.

So. After all that, why are we still choosing to go with Pay Per Post? Because some sites are doing quite well with the pay-per-post business model. Johnchow.com for example charges now $500 for paid posts. However, in his post about some of the biggest sites online raking in adsense money, it’s clear that some people do very well with Adsense, indeed.

Bottom Line: There are multiple streams of internet income, including getting paid for your blog posts, as well as using contextual ads like Google AdSense. Although the Pay Per Post model isn’t scalable (you have to write more posts to get paid more) and the income you generate is directly proportional to the amount you blog (as opposed to affiliate marketing or google adsense, where once you have a system going, it works even if you don’t), it does work for a small blog like ours which doesn’t have the critical mass in internet traffic to make Google AdSense a viable source of income. Besides, in the future, if we feel that paid links are negatively impacting our ad income, we can always remove the paid links and ask Google to reconsider our website from Google’s webmaster tools.

Let’s see if they accept my post this time…