Paid posts – Do it or don’t
If you a blogger then you are familiar with paid posts. Paid post are more popular these days because more and more blogs coming to blogging world. For most of people this is main source of making money from blog.
What is Paid post?
This is like a normal post made by blogger but he is getting paid for it by advertiser. He make a review of site/service of advertiser. Bloggers earn money and advertiser get buzz on their sites.
Where from to get it?
There are many ways to get advertiser. If you are a famous blogger then just put a link at your blog where people can buy reviews on your blog. If you are new then you can get them on Webmaster Forums or you can try some sites that connect bloggers and advertisers. You can use SponsoredReview, LinkWorth etc.
What is the risk behind this?
There is no big risk in paid post if you do it carefully. If your blog related to cars then you must review only car related sites. You should never post any review for money, first check that sites yourself then decide. Wrong choice can decrease your blog’s popularity. Try to do less amount of paid post as they don’t looks better. Make them useful so people enjoy reading them.
Who do paid posts?
As I know most of professional bloggers do paid posts including John Chow, Jim Karter , Tyler Cruz etc. I also do it but most of posts are on my other blogs. All new blogger do this for starting money.
Do it or Don’t?
This depends on you. If you have good traffic and earning good money from ads then you don’t need it. If you are a webmaster then it hard to earn money form PPC type ads as Webmaster are banner/ad blind, they can’t see ads. For webmaster its good to make relative site reviews. For software related blogger its easy to make of paid post of software because paid post looks like normal posts on these blogs. If you have educational blog then I advise you to not to make paid post, If you need money then ask for donation. If your blog is helpful then you will receive more donation then you can earn from paid posts.
If you have any questions/myths to paid post, you can ask them in comments. It will be my pleasure to help you.
In my case it’s “don’t do it”. I do sell advertising on my sites and like to earn money, but the content is mine. I feel like I would lie to my readers if I would do this. If you want some “hard words” I can tell you I consider this to be a kind of a “prostitution”. It’s something I just want to do.
@Ramona
I agree with you but if your website is new then no one will buy advertising at your site. Traffic is also low that means you can’t use PPC or CPM ads.
If your site is new NO ONE will pay for a review. Or you’ll get way to little money to be worth the effort. If a site is small, then my first thought is to make it big: write articles, promote a lot, work on the future PR. A 1 month site won’t monetize, I don’t expect this either. And when it’s big enough you’ll be able to get quite some revenue from the advertising, without compromising the content.
The thing I hate the most when it comes to some of the big bloggers is the fact they are prostituting themselves. I come for useful articles and a paid review is not useful to me at all. And when I see 3 paid reviews in the first 10 articles list (as we see in some of the blogs which shall remain nameless), I do think about coming back again
@Ramona Iftode
Thanks for this.
Now I think I should quiet paid post and start work on promoting my blog.
You don’t have to thank me Armaan
The moment you start attracting some visitors who also comment and can’t wait for you to post something, that’s the moment you realize you have something they like. You know they come to you for your sincerity and the charm you have to present something to them. We don’t discover America each day, most of the articles we post have been ‘touched’ by others before us. It’s all in the way we present the things and what we believe about them.
Just like here: we’re discussing if paid posts are OK or not. They are OK as long as they are not on my blog
I mean I would gladly do reviews or such things on someone’s blog, but my blog IS MINE and if I do a review, be sure I mean it.
I dislike Resellerzoom now for the fact they offered me a crappy hosting service and my entire network is having downtimes. Am I paid to say the “nice” things about them? Oh no, I am just mad and I’d like to know that other people are aware that they might have issues. If I do like something personally, then I recommend it. Even if it’s a book, a song I love, a TV show (BTW I am addicted to Grey’s Anatomy
), a SEO book, a forum script etc. then I do recommend it to you.
It’s not a paid review, I am not getting paid for my ideas, I just offer you a friendly recommendation.
Believe me that once you have some people who are “addicted” to your blog posts (which will happen if you keep on posting quality content) you’d hate to disappoint them. And paid posts are a huge kick in their faith in you.
Even if my blog will become successful, be sure it would have banners and links (of course I need to eat a good meal too), but the content is mine. Because that content drives visitors to the blog and those visitors make the advertisers pay a lot for ads. Before we had this thing with the paid reviews, many people were able to secure a revenue without this. I just cannot understand why we need to compromise content for some bucks
I had last exam yesterday.
Now i will try my best to post what I can do.
Hope your blog get more and more popular soon….
I hope this too and of course I wish you success with your project too. Now that you can spend more time on it will surely show traffic wise.