PayPerPost

I joined this site after hearing about it from a friend and doing some research on similar sites that pays you to blog. Now that my site has 10 posts within the past 30 days, PayPerPost finally approved it. The idea of being able to make money by blogging seemed like a very appealing idea at that time, and it still does now that I’ve been paid by other similar sites.

There are controversies out there about these pay-you-to-blog sites though. Some people think that by doing this, we the bloggers are:

1. providing misleading information by posting on subjects in which we have little to no knowledge of
2. helping the advertisers increase PageRank through the whole buying and selling links scheme

I never realized the negative side of writing sponsored posts until I read about this, and the sad thing is that these arguments are legit. However, there are always two sides of looking at things. Since I’m no expert when it comes to PageRank or SEO (search engine optimization), I won’t discuss the second issue. I will, however, talk about the first one.

I agree that by participating in these paid-to-blog sites, some of the entries you are required to write about can be a bit drab (like bad debt or hotels in Europe) and chances are, you’ll have little to no knowledge about the subject. However, even if you posted 10 entries on random subjects like these, I don’t understand why anyone would try looking for legit information on a non-professional weblog. As a matter of fact, when I searched “bad debt” on Google, the first page of results that came up were either from government websites or other reliable sources. I’ve looked through the first couple pages, and the results either came from reliable/professional sites or they didn’t. None came from blogs, which brings me to my second point and third point.

Even if there were no paid to blog sites, these buying and selling link schemes would still continue and people could still have websites with bogus information that pops up as the number one search result in Google. It’s been like this since I’ve started using the internet, it’s still like this today, and chances are it’ll still be like this tomorrow. I feel like it’s up to us the searchers to be able to filter out reliable sources from bogus ones, which is why all your teachers in high school and college tell you that you shouldn’t use Google search to find reliable sources! By posting sponsored posts we the bloggers might be contributing to this, but just how significant is that increase? I always considered it common sense to use the databases provided by my school for formal research papers, but heck, what do I know, i’m just a college kid.

So forgive me for being a bitch, but the first argument is absolutely stupid. Why are people complaining about blogs providing them misleading information through sponsored posts when in fact, they really shouldn’t be doing school research through Google in the first place? And forget that most schools provide great online databases to find information, there are lots of free online databases that elementary school kids can use if they want. But if they’re going to consider blogs a legit source, much like my first grade classmate Sam considering Lion King a legitimate source, then yes, lions really do live on Pride Rock.

So should you join this paid-to-blog bandwagon? Sure, why not. It’s your blog, you write what you want and do with it what you want. If you want to make a little extra on the side with it, I don’t see a problem with it either. Hop on over to PayPerPost to get started.

If you think it’s evil and should be banned from the face of the earth, I respect your choice too. All I ask is that you respect ours too.

P.S. My opinions about paid to blog are in no way associated with PayPerPost. I just thought it’d be easier for me if I talked about the whole paid-to-blog issue in one post instead of two.

Filed under: Rants, Reviews, WWW on May 4th, 2008