Computer Realm

Paid Blogging is a comparatively new form of blog monetization. It has become popular over time as a monetization method for blog for its relatively high ‘payouts’. Bloggers (and bloggers only) post ‘sponsored’ post for a price. Typically over $5 per post, and high payouts which are generally offered to high traffic and high Page Rank sites are offered upto even $200 per post. Some paid blogging companies require you to disclose that the post was sponsored while others forbid you from doing so. With the introduction of this monetization method it has caused mixed feelings in the blogosphere.

The Bad

Firstly because it ‘pollutes’ the blogosphere and it this method of monetization has come to be known as ‘polluting the blogosphere’. The reason why it has been regarded this way is because most of the time sponsored posts are written by bloggers who virtually know nothing or little about the subject which results in the post being written with a lot of assumption about the post which are generally wrong assumptions. With paid blogging gaining popularity the future of the blogosphere is now being looked at bleak as with time a lot of blog will be filled with a load of BS sponsored post than with real quality content.

Another reason why it has been looked at as a ‘pollutant’ is because it has been looked at as a form of ‘Black-hat SEO’, typically because the sponsor decides which text in the post links to their website so that when those text are typed in Google the sponsor’s site will be among the top, and generally these sites aren’t the most relevant for the keyword.

In this post, Google Employee Matt Cutts elaborates on what I have explained above about paid links.

The Good

With the considerable amount of bad effects on paid blogging there are few good things about it as well. Typically this is the shortcut route to making money online as you don’t need a high traffic blog to get good offers. Also most paid blogging companies pay weekly via PayPal so you get your cash pretty quickly. So virtually your ROI is very high, you invest something like 15-20 minutes for a post and get paid $5 to $200 per post depending on your site’s page rank and other stats.

Also if you don’t have the time to patiently develop a high traffic blog you will want to probably take the ‘pay per post route’ as it doesn’t generally affect your site’s traffic. Don’t worry about wrong sites showing up on search results as Google will take care of that.

The Ugly

With the growing negative effects paid posting causes on search engines, Google now looks for blogs with paid posts in them and reduces your PR based on the depth of paid blogging in your site. You could lose your page rank by 1,2 or 3. Never heard of it reducing more than that (yet).

And The Rest

While traffic is not important to get an offer your Google Page Rank is. Advertisers pay for the valuable backlink from your site which also gives them a slice of your Page Rank and the SEO it provides for the Anchor Link to their site. Traffic is just a thing on the side.

Here are some affiliate links to some of the popular paid blogging services:

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