Paid posting sites enjoyed a HUGE SPLASH a few years ago. The way it works is you join a pay to post site and sign up for offers that your blog qualifies for. You can get paid anywhere from a dollar or two to over $300 for one post! This is a good way to kick start your blog’s earnings, though newer blogs tend to get lower paying assignments. While they aren’t as “in” as they used to be, you can still earn some money online with this method.
The most recognizable name in the paid posting world is PayPerPost. I did hundreds of PayPerPosts on my Hot Dog Truck site a few years ago and earned a little over $3600 in my first year. Here’s an example of my favorite PayPerPost on that site. The posts usually require the writer to put some links to the advertiser’s website in the body of the post. Articles can be anywhere from 50 to 300 words.
The reason this type of posting gained popularity was it allowed advertisers to get a lot of targeted, inbound links to their site for relatively short money. In theory this would improve their search engine results for keywords they wanted to be known for. In practice, it worked for a time but Google got wise to the whole thing and penalized bloggers who were writing paid posts by devaluing their page rank. A lower page rank meant less money for paid posts, amongst other things. Google also slapped the sites that were hiring paid posters by devaluing their search results. This kind of defeated the purpose of paid posting in my eyes, but the practice lives on.
At the time, I thought paid posting was a good idea. It certainly was a good way to earn some extra dough. It did make the site look a little spammy- I even confessed to being a “link-ho.” Once Google whacked my page rank from a PR 4 down to ZERO, I rethought this strategy as a long term, viable income producer and I ceased doing paid posts en masse. I still occasionally do a paid review, but I don’t like to call attention to them they way I did in the past.
Is paid posting for you? Maybe. As I stated earlier, it’s a good way to jump start your earnings. The problem is when a blog is new, you don’t have any (or many) readers, so you won’t get higher paying assignments. The good thing is SOME MONEY is better than none!
The bad thing about paid posting is it can take away from the main focus of your site. If you have a blog about vegetarian cooking and you do a paid review about auto insurance, it really doesn’t match up well. When I do paid posts now, it’s only for something that fits into the overall context of the site.
For a newbie blogger, I’d say give it a whirl, just don’t overdo it.