I became involved in a rather bitter ‘debate’ with a couple of people on a rather well known message board (I’m not going to name the message board) recently about the subject of being paid to write blog posts on your blog.
I am quite happy to go on record and state that I see no problem with this form of advertising and truly believe that it is a win/win situation for both blogger, reader and advertiser. After all it is YOUR blog so you should be able to decide what goes on it.
Blogger
The blogger earns money from the advertiser for writing the blog post and leaving links on their blog for the foreseeable future. In some countries, like Philippines or Malaysia, this is a very welcome source of income for bloggers.
Reader
The reader might find some of the reviews helpful. A case in point would be three months ago when I was reading a blog and came across a review post about a web hosting company which I found very useful as I was looking for a new host at the time.
Advertiser
When advertising on the internet it can be incredibly expensive and, to be honest, there is no real guarantee that the adverts will be seen by visitors never mind clicked on. This is where review posts come into play.
With a review post visitors WILL see the post and nine times out of ten will read it. And unlike regular adverts there is no time limit to how long the posts will be around, most blogs will be around for at least four or five years.
The main argument that these two gentlemen were trying to put across was that being paid to blog about advertisers was low and generally conning your readers into thinking that you actually care about the product.
I don’t think this argument holds water anymore now that more and more blogs are placing disclosure links on sponsored posts to inform the reader that this blog post was paid for by an advertiser.
Yes if you do too many and not enough non-sponsored posts then you will feel the wrath of Google but if you are lucky enough to be listed in DMOZ, or another major directory, then I don’t think you’ll notice the drop in traffic anyway if Google does kick you off their search engine like they did to John Chow.
Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay
