Blogging Power Tool

PayPerPost is an upfront, fairly easy way to make money with your blog. You won’t get rich through PayPerPost or with any other similar service, but if you’re a fast, accurate writer, it’s a good way to make an extra $20 or so once in a while.

Through PayPerPost, advertisers ask bloggers to write short (100-200 word) posts about their product, service or website. Usually, the advertisers are websites hoping to get good reviews or even just inbound links to help raise their ranking in Google.

Here’s how it works:

I’ll get an email from PayPerPost telling me there’s an opportunity for me. I’ll sign in and check it out. You can reject any opportunity you aren’t interested in.

If the advertiser doesn’t expect too much for too little (such as a 300 word post for only $10) and they don’t seem to be running a scam, I’ll click on “Take This Opp.”

Let’s say the advertiser is a Miami Beach real estate company that wants me to post about its new website and its cool features. I’ll write up a post about the Miami Beach site on my own blog, carefully following the instructions given by the advertiser. I make sure the post is the length the advertiser has requested, and that I’ve included the requisite number of links to their site. It’s important to write a factual, truthful post about the services being offered, based on the information you’ve been provided: “This is the most respected real estate agency in Miami Beach. You can search their site for condos and houses, rentals and purchases. You get access to the Miami Beach MLS listings,” etc.)

Three tips: First, I don’t want to irritate my regular blog readers by shoving these paid blog posts in their faces. So I backdate the date on the paid post, so that it shows up closer to the bottom of my blog. For example, if the date I’m writing the paid post is January 20, I’ll edit the date on the blog post to January 17. The blog post still shows up, satisfying the advertiser’s request, and my regular readers won’t get turned off by an obvious ad.

(I say “obvious” because I always ad the phrase “Sponsored Post” at the bottom of the post, to satisfy both my readers and the government, which insists that bloggers make it very clear when they are getting paid to blog.)

(Here’s an example of a post I wrote for a PayPerPost advertiser.)

Second: after you publish the paid post, PayPerPost asks you to submit the permalink for it, so they can run it through their system to make sure it has met all the advertiser’s requirements. Now, normally when I create hyperlinks in a blog post, I format it as “Target/Open link in new window.” However, I’ve discovered that doing that can get your otherwise perfect post rejected by the PayPerPost system. So when you include links as requested by the advertiser, be sure to format them as “Target/Open link in same window.”

Third tip: if you are using InfoLinks contextual advertising to make money with your blog, go into the HTML of your paid post and insert the tags shown HERE to disable InfoLinks in this post only. After all, the PayPerPost advertiser won’t appreciate seeing ad links for other companies in his sponsored post!

I’ve been signed up with PayPerPost for a while. They’ve always paid on time and otherwise seem pretty reliable.

I recommend trying out PayPerPost to see what you think.