Blogging Keyboard

Paid blogging is an area of the web that has been a massive growth area in the last couple of years. Blogging has been a massive growth area in itself, and its no surprise that people wanted to make money from doing it. If you’re not familiar with blogging, we’d best start off with a definition. Thanks to elise.com, here’s a pretty good definition of what blogging means nowadays:

Blogging is easy, almost instant, publishing of content to a website, where every entry is preserved in a database and is therefore categorizeable and searchable. Content can be photographs, recipes, restaurant reviews, or anything digitally storable on a computer that you can categorize.

Paid blogging is the process of deriving money from writing blog-based articles, stories and reviews.

The Principle

The idea is that you find someone who is willing to pay you to write an article. That article would typically review or mention their website with a few links to their site.

Advertisers and Brokers

There are sites and services who act as brokers between advertisers and bloggers. The advertisers pay the broker some money for paid blog posts to be written in a certain way. The brokers then pay you a large cut of this money to actually write the review or article. The brokers get their cut for finding the advertisers for you. Some of the more well known brokers include PayPerPost, ReviewMe.com, Blogitive and SponsoredReviews.com.

You can of course try to find your own advertisers by looking on webmaster forums such as DigitalPoint. This means you get 100% of the paid review fee, rather than losing a portion of it to the brokers.

Is paid blogging worth it?

There are lots of views on this. My personal view used to be that paid blogging was great. It was a good income, relatively easy to do, and you quickly had a busy schedule of writing blog posts.

However, my view has changed largely due to changes in Google’s policies on paid links. With the sweeping penalties for blogs who sell links without using no-follow attributes on the links (and many broker services require do-follow links), the whole paid post world is a nightmare. You could start out making a few hundred quid by selling blog posts, but then find that Google has penalised your site in the search engine rankings.

So paid posts are a way to make money, but its very likely you’ll damage your site in Google’s eyes. Given that up to 90% of a website’s traffic can be derived from Google search queries, you don’t want to annoy Google, otherwise you risk losing that valuable traffic. Regardless of whether you agree with Google or not, its something to bear in mind.

I personally do not agree with Google’s policy where a webmaster has to modify their content to abuse the rel=”nofollow” tag. It’s a failing by Google to correctly identify link types. It’s only a matter of time before such a policy backfires.