[Disclosure: I know the guys behind PayPerPost since it was a spinoff company from the agency I used to work at. This has put me in a unique position to see the inner workings of the company. I also am a blogger and advertiser, which allows me to speak from an actual “users” standpoint on this product – unlike many naysayers who only blog]
One of the common themes you run across within the blogosphere is the tradeoff of time spent blogging and the payoff for your time. If you’re a great blogger that writes things that people like reading, then you’re off to the races with companies knocking at your door for advertising space, sometimes willing to pay up to $10,000+ per month for that 125×125 ad. If you’re a good blogger with a lot of pageviews, you might go the route of Google AdSense and get some money that way.
For those in the second category, and the “ordinary” blogger, there’s not much else. This summer Ted launched PayPerPost, a platform that allows advertisers to put forward opportunities for bloggers to write about. An advertiser might pay $7 for you to write a 200 word post about their product. Usually they just want a straight and honest review. As the blogger, you can do a couple of these each week and easily make up to $100/week. Not bad for us ordinary blokes!
Now, PayPerPost has a ton of controversy surrounding it. Why? Mainly because the alpha bloggers around the web believe that it pollutes the blogosphere – taints its purity if you will. There’s all types of finger pointing about how this is a conflict of interest, and that you don’t come to blogs to read advertising. I guess it’s just interesting reading that type of comment from bloggers that take advertising and write about those same products.
You make the call on whether you think it is right for your blog. I know that if I was looking to make some money off of my blog, that I wouldn’t hesitate to pick up on one of the many opportunties within PayPerPost. If I was living in Africa, was a stay-at-home-mom, or just wanted to make a couple hundred bucks each month, I would definitely do this. I can see the top earner so far has made $2,700.
Why PayPerPost Will Work
There are a couple reasons actually. First and foremost, remember how everyone cried about putting paid search results on the search engines? Well, Google figured out a way to create a platform for advertisers and websites that allowed ads in search results and on people’s personal webpages. They make a lot of money on that – it worked.
Second, advertisers are struggling to find ways to reach increasingly niche and dis-established groups. Old media isn’t holding peoples interest anymore – they need/want to reach people at a more personal level. Bloggers are their ticket, PayPerPost will be their platform.
How do I know this? I’m a marketer. I’ve tried PayPerPost. It works. Here are my results for one test campaign that I did a couple weeks back for my eBay sales tool List’d:
So, for about $900 I was able to get over 41,000 people to view 100 blog posts about my product – not bad. Not shown here is the fact that List’d now shows up as the #2 result on Google’s search results for the term “listing tool”. As someone who knows a little about search engine marketing, I can tell you that that result is worth it’s weight in gold. We get a lot of registrations from that term alone each week.
November 6, 2006 at 7:17 pm
Impressive Erik! You have unveiled another side of the payperpost concept to the uninitiated like me. Thanks!
November 6, 2006 at 11:33 pm
Thanks. What kind of products because if you are not a tech junkie, then?
November 7, 2006 at 2:51 am
Not that I mind, but is this an ad?
November 7, 2006 at 6:05 am
PaulF, no this is not an ad. I’ve been thinking a long time about PayPerPost and finally got around to writing about them – that’s all. Ted didn’t ask me to write this, I’m not getting paid for it.
November 7, 2006 at 10:06 am
How do you review an article and come up with an opinion, if the product is in the USA and you’re in Kenya?
November 7, 2006 at 11:12 am
Good question JKE. I’ll use my own advertising opportunity as an example. I asked for people to write an opinion piece on List’d. List’d is accessible by anyone, whether in Africa or elsewhere. In this case it doesn’t matter if you’re a Kenyan blogger or an American blogger, you can still honestly blog about this product.
This is true of many of the blogging opportunities that I see listed on PayPerPost. You don’t need to live in the US to take advantage of them and start writing.
November 8, 2006 at 8:27 am
hi erik..got a business proposal that i suppose u might think is great. only that i need some guidance on some of the facts..any way you could arrange something.
November 29, 2006 at 2:09 pm
HASH what’s up dude?
Nice informative post – as usual. 🙂
I joined up so lets see what happens. The concept gave me a few ideas.
Oh, I’m going to Zanzibar in a few days to set up a 2003 Server and fix up an email system for a hotel. Hope things are going well for ya!
L8tr!
Max
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February 22, 2007 at 12:00 am
would like to make money reading / writing blogs!! let me know how or where to guy!!
thanx
keith
June 5, 2007 at 5:47 am
Haha, just read your about page, and yeah, I also thought you were from SA – that’s strange, me being from SA myself 😉
I suppose you might have the same problem in Kenya, with paypal not allowing you to receive funds.
I found this out after a couple of posts of mine were already approved, and I had earned just over $80!
I wrote a mail to payperpost support, and I was really surprised that they were willing to send me a check instead – pretty decent hey?
So if you do decide to join sometime or another, just be aware of this, and notify the Payperpost support staff. Instead of transferring the funds to your Paypal account they send you a check to the address which you have in your Payperpost profile.