Additional methods to make money from your blog : Paid Posts
I’m sure most of you are aware of the most popular ways to make money from your blog. Affiliate links and sales of banner and text links make up the majority of ad revenue for blogs however there are other methods which you can use to increase revenue from your blog and the more subscribers your blog gets the more opportunities you have to take advantage of these methods.
I have been thinking of adding paid post options to the advertising page of BloggingTips so I thought I would discuss some of them in this post 
As Tom Cruise said in Jerry Maguire, ‘Show me the money!!!’
Paid Reviews
Paid reviews have been around for quite a few years. They have proved very popular with low to medium traffic blogs using companies like ReviewMe, SponsoredReviews and PayPerPost.
It’s worth using these sites to get some review orders however if you find that you are getting a lot of advert requests directly through your blog it may be worth dropping them and selling reviews directly (remember, sites like ReviewMe take a whopping 50% of your review price!).
Paid Advert
ReviewMe calls them ‘Advertorial’s’, Tyler Cruz calls them ‘Paid Plugs‘ but whatever you want to call it, allowing an advertiser to place an advert in one of your blog posts is a good way to make some extra cash.
Whereas with a paid review you will need to spend a few hour’s writing a post about the advertiser’s site or product, it’s the advertiser who writes the post in a paid advert.
Remember, since this type of post is going to be extremely biased you should limit the number of paid adverts you post on your site and you should also make it very clear in the post that the content was written by the advertiser.
Press Release
A few days ago I posted about the new blog directory Blogged.com (you can see my post here). Blogged.com had emailed me their press release to announce the launch of their new site but I decided to review the site instead of just mentioning that a new blog had arrived.
I’ve had quite a few press releases emailed to me in the last few weeks but that was the first one which I thought was worth posting about however it did get me thinking that many sites would be more than willing to pay for having their press release posted on a blog which has a lot of subscribers. Of course, this is essentially the same as a paid advert with the only difference being press releases are more ‘newsy’.
Overview
Whatever ‘Paid Post’ method you prefer I believe it’s vital that you tell your readers whenever a post has been paid for, even if your paid review has been critical of the advertiser. In the last year we have also saw Google crack down heavily on paid links so it might be worthwhile to add no follow tags to all links in paid reviews.
Bottom line, in the battle to increase revenue from your blog ‘Paid Posts’ are definately something you should consider.
What do you think? Are you a fan of ‘Paid Posts’ on blogs?
Simlock verwijderen | February 28th, 2008 at 4:14 pm #
A question: If you do paid posts or reviews and Google knows it? Could it damage your PR or something like that or not?
Interwebhunt | February 28th, 2008 at 4:18 pm #
Paid postings are great for making money, but if you care anything about your google PR rank then paid reviews are one of the worst things you can do. If you’ve got a PR of 4 or 5 you’ll be down to a 0 in no time with a google slap.
Otto - American Interests | February 28th, 2008 at 4:24 pm #
Kevin | February 28th, 2008 at 5:24 pm #
If you are linking to the advertisers site with specific anchor text then google could slap you and some would argue that they should.
This is why I believe you should attach a no follow tags to all of your links in a paid post. If you do this google cannot punish you at all (their words not mine!).
I’m considering posting paid posts at bloggingtips but if i do, all links in the post will have no follow tags attached to them.
James Mann | February 29th, 2008 at 6:21 am #
I have been kind of scared off of paid reviews because of Google but if the nofollow will save what little PR I have then I am willing to give it a go. Just not on my main sites, yet.
Just to be on the safe side though I will first give it a try on one of my lessor domains that I am not so concerned about.
david | February 29th, 2008 at 10:22 pm #
don’t use google will banned your site
Karl | March 1st, 2008 at 12:59 pm #
I’ve been reading your blog for quite a while. Thank you for this excellent article. However, mighty Google considers paid reviews pretty much the same thing as paid links, and will slap you hard unless you make the links nofollow.
L L Woodard | March 1st, 2008 at 9:46 pm #
Glad to have found this place, but think I may be out of my league. I have almost zero knowledge of html and don’t know what it means when you say the “no follow tags.”
Blogging On my Way | April 9th, 2008 at 5:10 am #
Great Post. I am into Affiliate marketing. Right now i am into Global Domain International
Begin Earning Online | June 11th, 2008 at 12:04 am #
I am thinking to jump into Paid Posting, but many of the Paid-To-Post companies dont allow you to use the no-follow tag. Kevin, can you let me know of Paid-To-Post programs that don’t prohibit the use of no-follow tag and pay through other means than PayPal. (My country does not support PayPal)
headline news | July 17th, 2008 at 6:06 pm #
why google hate paid review?