Paid Blog Posts and Blogvertorials
Hired Bloggers Must Weigh Ethics and Services When Monetizing Blogs
Feb 25, 2009
Blogs are so endemic in online writing that many people aren't even aware that the word is short for “web logs,” or online journals. Savvy marketers have been trying to leverage the blogosphere by hiring bloggers to write reviews through such paid blogging services as PayPerPost for several years. This model for monetizing blogs has been forced to change over time, most particularly when Google blacklisted PayPerPost bloggers for “gumming up the search giant's ability to filter real results for consumers hunting at google.com,” according to an editorial written by Ben Kunz in Business Week. Blogvertorials, as they are sometimes now called, now frequently come complete with a disclosure that the post has been paid for.
Ethical Considerations of Hired Blogging
According to Kunz, most bloggers don't struggle with the morality of writing a post for pay as long as that fact is disclosed. PayPerPost now requires such information be revealed, but some services, such as the German company Be-A-Magpie (which inserts paid advertisements into Twitter streams) merely include an option for users to disclose that some of their tweets are bought and paid for. Tongue-in-cheek, Kunz suggests that people seek out advertisers for their daily conversations, to see how far they are willing to take the experiment.
Some services come to terms with the ethics of paying for blog posts by allowing the blogger to post honest opinions, positive or negative, as long as the links in the post meet certain criteria. This “any-press-is-good-press” model is made clear to advertisers beforehand. Ultimately, Kunz concludes for Business Week, “There is an ethical line between buying ad position and buying an opinion, but honestly we don't know where that line is.”
Evaluating Blog-Monetizing Services
Another factor that must be considered when converting a blog into a profitable business writing venture in its own right is how lucrative the available offers are. DoshDosh's so-called definitive list of paid blogging websites indicates that most services in the field have only a limited number of topics to offer their bloggers at any given time. In addition, the payment schedules and methods available can lead to a long wait between blogging and payment – and in some countries, there's no option of being paid at all by some services.
Bloggers must also consider the risk to their own blogs which, if popular, can take a big hit if Google blacklists them as it did many PayPerPost blogs. This writer's experience suggests that one will not raise Google's ire if one's posts are not designed to chase keyword algorithms, and instead are written naturally.
Even as bloggers consider what services to hire themselves out for, those services will be evaluating the blogs of the applicants. Many paid blogging services have minimum standards of popularity as measured by search engines or blog directory sites, and those criteria are not always readily available prior to sending an inquiry.
Other Options for Blogvertorial Writers
Bloggers that are particularly enamored of being paid to write reviews and other content should consider other paid web writing opportunities as well, including applying to write for such sites as Suite101 and ghostblogging for businesses that need fresh content to drive traffic to commercial sites.
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