Let’s start with an honest admission: unless the blogger in question is Mother Teresa or the Pope, they are planning to get ‘paid’ for their blogging. Whether the pay in question is notoriety, free merchandise to review, the esteem of their colleagues, or cold hard cash, no one is blogging simply for the love of the written word. Otherwise they would put their blogs on a server in their home and periodically reread what they’d written, hiding it forever from the outside world. Even if you just want people to read what you write, then you are looking for personal validation - a form of payment. It’s that simple.
Once you look at it in those terms, what is so horrible about blogging for pay? The biggest key, as I see it, is being honest with your audience. Tell them when a post is sponsored by an advertiser, and don’t take those opportunities which require a specific point of view. If I can’t be honest about a topic, why should I write about it in the first place?
With this in mind, you will want to review your options for blogging for hire very carefully. One program which has received a lot of press (both positive and negative) is PayPerPost. I have used them in the past, but I am moving away from this program for a number of reasons - chief among these being the decision by management to shift away from grassroots marketing and into ‘big name’ blog advertising. There was a time when this service provided an opportunity for the small blogger with a loyal following to pay his or her hosting fees and thus sustain an independent voice in the blogging community, but this time is gone. Desperate for validation themselves, and looking to be recognized as a ‘mainstream’ advertising agency, they have recently changed their structure to only provide opportunities to the bigger bloggers - come on, who has a REAL Alexa score of under 100,000 and still wants to take a ludicrously under-priced $10 blogging opportunity? If you’re pushing those kinds of traffic numbers, you have most likely already negotiated better direct terms with advertisers more relevant to your content. (That or you’re using Google Adwords.) And if you’re artificially inflating your Alexa to meet these new, unrealistic goals simply so you can be paid, then the advertiser isn’t getting their money’s worth anyway and will soon go elsewhere - and probably soured on blog advertising effectiveness to boot.
The types of opportunities now available to the grassroots who built the community are now restricted to $3 - $5 that at best provide $15 a day in income - you’d be better off working a couple hours at McDonald’s than wasting your time with PayPerPost as a small blog owner. And with so many of their bloggers fighting for these tiny opportunities, it now seems certain that the best talent will leave for greener pastures, creating a smaller pool of substandard bloggers writing boilerplate PR text - exactly the effect PayPerPost was trying to avoid.
It’s unfortunate that such a promising service seems to be collapsing under it’s own weight, but don’t despair. There are a number of new programs which are taking varied approaches to the blog-for-hire business, and I would bet that there will be another breakout star before long. The whole experience has NOT soured me on blogging for pay - far from it! I continue to find new ways to improve my blogs, to provide useful content to my readers, and eventually to make a living solely by blogging. As I find new and better ways to do that, you can be sure I’ll post them here.
