Some people think that pre written Adsense blogs are a great money spinner. But to be honest, they are not and if you want to run a blog the easy way, you still can. Why are they so bad and what is the alternative?

You have probably seen plenty of the adverts offering you a complete blog with a variety of themes to choose from along with loads of content. It sounds like a great offer and an easy way to make some extra cash, but it is far from that. The main problem is that the content you are publishing is duplicate. You and loads of other blog owners are hosting the same material and the theme might even have a link back to the seller’s website, just to make sure they get the benefit of your work.

All of this duplicated content is picked up by the search engines and they quickly notice the plethora of blogs displaying the same articles. And when the search engines apply their filters, you are left without any traffic on your website. So, what is the alternative for the automated blog?

The alternative that works
Well you are left doing a lot of the work yourself, but even with an off the shelf package, that was still the case. In either case you are left trying to optimise the website and getting more traffic onto the website, the only difference is now you also need to provide some content.

But that is not all that difficult. There are plenty of systems that you can sign up to and be sent plenty of free guest posts to publish on your blog, maybe even automatically publishing them. Some systems will even send you multiple posts per day, so you quickly build up a huge stock of fresh content on a day by day basis.

And best of all, these posts are unique and written specially for your blog. You are not at risk of being found to be hosting duplicate content and the penalties that go with it. And all that these guest bloggers require is a couple of links back to their blog.

Why do they do this?
In return the guest bloggers want some “link juice” and maybe some traffic. They want to be placing their posts on blogs that have some sort of Google PageRank and some relevant traffic. So you really do need to build both of these to get the best results, but there are still guest blogging sites that will provide you with plenty of posts, for free, even if you are a brand new blog.

So do not pay for a pre written Adsense Blog. Just set up a simple WordPress site with a theme of your choice and then sign up to publish guest posts. Much more effective!

This is an often posed question – “How do I get more leads / opportunities on PayPerPost?”

First, the difference. An opp (opportunity) is an offer from an advertiser for you to do a post for them, whilst a lead is where advertisers are polling bloggers to find out who wants to take up the offer.

So, how do you get more of either?

Pricing
Advertisers will trawl the list of available blogs having limited them by a maximum price for what they want. Ask a lot above the recommended amount and you won’t appear in the list; ask a lot below the recommended amount and you will stand out as there possibly being something wrong. So take the recommended price.

Backlinks (YBL)
Advertisers can also select on the minimum number of backlinks that your site should have. If you don’t have enough, then you won’t be in the list. So work on link building.

Disclosure
You can either post on each post that it is a paid post, or have a disclosure page. Most advertisers don’t want the disclosure on the page, so create a disclosure page and set your blog to allow either type of disclosure.

Approval Rate
Advertisers can see how many of your posts have been approved by previous advertisers (as a percentage). So make sure you are doing good work. If half of your posts have been rejected then you are unlikely to be getting any new offers!

Your Website
Although not an initial selection process, many advertisers will look at your blog before deciding whether to make you an offer. If it is full of advertising, badly written and spammy looking, you either won’t get offers or are at risk of the offers being rejected!

I’ve used quite a few different paid to post systems over this year in the hope of earning a good income. Yet, out of all of the systems that I have tried, only two have really fulfilled the promise. Why?

PayPerPost
I have to say that although it has gone quiet for me the last few months (I was earning $600 – $700 per month at peak, now down to $250 – $300) this is one of the two that I still check daily. Easy to use, a good support forum and generally fair prices. Well worth it.

BlogDistributor
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I didn’t like this system when I first tried it, but it grew on me. Well worth having a go, but your blog has to be perfectly written else you won’t be accepted! Write your post and submit it for approval. Once approved you then link to the advertiser. No approval = no free link, which is great and they pay well. The problem is lack of variation in tasks, but that should grow as they build. This is the second site that I still like to use.

SponsoredReviews
This is the first system that I “dumped”. First I got fed up of bidding on tasks that I hardly ever got to do. Then I got fed up of the tasks that came through the marketplace. You see, a 100 word and a 300 word article are paid the same amount, which is crazy, and the amount was next to nothing. No communication from them when they had a problem with a post and when I asked for help, no emails either. I just had to logon and see if there was a support reply.

InPostLinks
I do, sort of, keep running with this one but only because I don’t like to let things go! The problem here is that you have to keep logging and and looking for work. Then, when you find it, to get $2 for a 200 word post is a good payment on a PR3 blog. Maybe if the blog is a lot higher ranking and US based (I’m UK based) then some of those tempting better paying offers become available. But, one for the future, maybe.

SocialSpark
I’ve not really given up here, just I don’t see how to get a good volume of work through and I have no idea what their ‘points’ payment system equates to. A good idea in that you submit the post to them for review, but I’ve been waiting now for my last post to be reviewed for 12 days. Again, maybe shelved for the future for when my blog traffic has increased even more, although the ops I have had from them have not been aimed at my highest traffic blog.

BlogsVertise
I think this could be a good system, but as with BlogDistributor there just isn’t the work. At first there were plenty of jobs coming through, but with a range of PR2 & PR3 blogs there is almost nothing about. Prices vary widely, without any reason. I think if they spelled out what they were looking for in blogs it would help, but I have no idea. I thought at first maybe they were too new, but there is less work now than months ago.

Ebuzzing
This is a site that I want to use a lot, but as with others, there just is not the work available. There are plenty of video campaigns and especially recently I’ve been asked to take part in a lot of these, but given they are paid per view and completely off the topic of my blog, where would be the point? Shame. When there is an article it pays well, there just needs to be more opportunities to write articles for them!

ReviewMe
I have done maybe one or two posts for this site and never heard from them since, although they did pay out. Again, it is not clear what you need to do to get plenty of work. It seems that most of the work goes to the bloggers with the best reviews on their posts. But, as a newbie to the system, how do you get good reviews?

Sponzai
Another that I’ve not given up on, rather it has given up with me! Although there is a balance that I can withdraw. This is all about being paid to include guest posts. However, it is a sister site to PayPerPost and some of the interface is well behind the development there, so it looks like it is not being maintained (also their Twitter account has not been updated for 10 months). Good idea, in a way, but just not the demand maybe?

Disclaimer!
Obviously all of the above are just my opinions, based on my experiences with these systems. My blogging started a year ago and my venture into paid blogging started earlier this year. That means that most of my blogs have ‘low’ PageRanks™ (PR2 / PR3) because Google hasn’t updated the information in 8 months and they are all experiments in blogging so traffic across them can be low.

Maybe if your blog is higher ranking and higher traffic you know the secrets of working these systems. If so, do let me know by leaving a comment!

If you are thinking of making some money from your blog then you might have thought about selling advertising space? Is it going to work? Can you really make a little bit of cash that way? Or are you wasting your time?

For it to be worth your while working out where you can slot in some advertising in to your blog, you need to know that advertisers are going to be taking you up on the offer. Spending time and effort redesigning your blog to fit in some adverts and then not selling any adverts would be highly annoying.

So, what do you need to know first?

Well all advertisers are after one of two things. Provide either or both of these and then you are part of the way there. These are:

1) Traffic. If you blog has plenty of daily visitors then advertisers might just be willing to pay for an advertising space from you to raise their awareness within your readers.

2. PageRank Again, if your blog has some Google PageRank then advertisers may be willing to pay for a link on your blog, in order to help increase their own search engine ranking.

However, having either or both is not always everything that an advertiser wants. They also want to see a good looking website if their company is going to be seen to be sponsoring part of it.

Part of this is not over doing the advertising. Most blogs can get away with 1 or 2 advertising blocks per page. Any more than that and the blog looks spammy and it will put advertisers off.

So, where do you find the advertisers? Well you can try selling links, paid posting or just good old Google Adsense. All of these can easily provide plenty of cash as can affiliate selling. But again, will any of these work?

Well it all depends on just how how your traffic and PageRank is. If you are thinking of Google Adsense, you might be talking about a few dollars or pounds per thousand page hits. Fine if you are counting your daily hits in the thousands, but if you are in the hundreds, then the income is going to be low. However, for the effort of a single change to the page then in the long term the income might be worth while.

But with affiliate selling you really do need to be seeing thousands of daily hits to see a reasonable income, and with the rate that affiliate schemes come and go, unless you are seeing a lot of income it might not be worth the time.

As for selling links, if you are hoping to be paid to post and have a low PageRank, then there will be little popularity in your blog and low prices when you get work.

Yes, you can charge for various forms of advertising on your blog, but to be viable you need thousands of hits or a half decent PageRank.

Many bloggers choose PayPerPost as their source of an income. But, many newcomers are struggling to earn and asking how to earn more. Well, read on!

The reason why so many people use PayPerPost (PPP) first and before other paid to blog schemes is also the major problem with the scheme. And that is that any blogger can join. Some bloggers will also sign up to PPP before they create their first blog.

Daft as this might seem, it happens, and then they ask why are they not earning. Well although it is a free marketplace, advertisers want something in return and you have to make sure that you are giving them exactly what they want. What’s more, give them what they want and you make your blog more attractive to the other paid to post systems that will vet you before setting you free on their system.

So, what’s needed? Well first of all a Google PageRank is the main driving factor in the system. With a grey bar or PR0 blog then you earn next to nothing per post. PR1 blogs earn more and PR2 even more and so on.

However, we have not (at the time of writing) seen a major PageRank update for over 7 months, so it looks like this measure has been retired, even though most paid blogging schemes use it as a basis for how much to pay per post written.

This lack of an update also means that you have very little control over what is going on with your blog, but there are other elements you can work on.

Hidden from bloggers is the Yahoo Back Links count (YBL). The more backlinks you have showing on Yahoo the higher you rank within your PageRank list. A relatively new blog will therefore be bottom of the PR0s. However, get plenty of backlinks and you go to the top of your group and there are advertisers that appreciate that a good YBL count counts for a lot.

The next thing to work on is a little contentious. Some agree that it is required, others say it is not needed. But, it does appear that themed blogs without too many paid posts do get a lot more opportunities than those that don’t look so good, are poorly written and full of paid content.

I know from my own collection of blogs that I get more opportunities (everything else being roughly equal) on those blogs that I write to often, but these slow down if I am too busy to write for long and too many paid posts appear.

And that is basically it, apart from set your prices realistically and make sure that your blog description reads well, in good English.

To summarise, work on the backlinks your blog has and add plenty of quality content along with the the paid content. Quite simple really, it just takes time and effort.

Out of all of the methods of making a bit of cash through blogging, which are the three that I would keep above all others? Well, it’s an easy answer, but ask me again in a month and I could just have changed my mind!

Indeed, what I favour today for making cash could well be in my pile of wastes of time in a year, month or even a year. However, I still feel these are a good three to stick with.

Google’s Adsense – an easy and simple way to make some cash, if you have plenty of traffic to your blog and better still if your topic is highly profitable. Hobby blogs might not have lots of high paying keywords, whereas finance and a lot of other categories could have keywords that pay very well. If there is a lot of PPC adverts on suitable search terms, then there is probably a lot of value in the adverts.

But it is very simple to use – install the adverts in a block or two and as long as you have high traffic levels, there should be a little income. However, it is not quite as simple as this. If your high traffic is regular readers, then you might not earn that much, the best comes from one off readers!

PayPerPost – probably my favourite paid to post system. Add your blog and wait for advertisers to open opportunities to you. You set your prices and with each paid post that you create your account slowly accrues payments. As with all paid to post systems, you can end up writing a lot of off topic posts as if you turn down to high a percentage of opportunities, you will stop seeing any opportunities being open to you.

What I don’t like is that the advertisers individually set down the rules as to how many words they want and so on. They might have paid for 30 words, but if they insist of 250 then that is what you have to do. They can also unfairly reject posts, however that is very rare.

BlogDistributor – a new system and one that is growing and needs to grow! These are very strict on blog quality – both existing posts and what you write for them – so a lot of non native English speakers will not be approved. Posts are checked by their team, which should mean consistency, but not always!

However, they pay well and because the approvals is by the team, rather than the advertisers, you quickly learn more about what they expect and it is generally a lot fairer approval process.

BlogsVertise is another spin on the old paid to blog systems that sometimes you will either love or hate.

It is reasonably easy to set up within BlogsVertise. Just sign up and add your blogs. From experience, you really need to be adding blogs of PR3+, but PR2+ do also get some work.

Then they allocate your tasks and give you a week in which to complete the work. The instructions are a little vague, asking for 2 – 3 paragraphs, which seems rather small, although I did also find mention of a word count buried somewhere in the T&C one day.

They also ask for 3 links, unless otherwise specified. This is quite a high link to content ratio for 2 – 3 paragraphs!

Once completed, tell them your post’s URL and they then approve or decline it. Declined posts can be fixed, but most of my declines have been really stupid reasons, such as “The advertiser has changed their mind on keywords” and the best was “Your PageRank has dropped”. That excuse was given almost a month after submission and really annoyed me!

Payments are a little erratic. Each job comes with it’s own (random???) price. There’s no rhyme or reason to their pricing – this week I’ve had a PR2 post for 30% more than a PR3 post of the same size. Then a month after making the post it becomes eligible for payment. However, this is a manual process and can often be a week late and pretty random.

There is supposed to be a way of grabbing extra tasks by selecting one of the uncompleted (not enough bloggers took it up) tasks. When I first joined these appeared a couple of times per week and there was a good choice. However, I’ve just gone 2 months without any tasks from them at all, then 2 in 2 days.

Whether they themselves were struggling to find advertisers or whether the demographics required suddenly excluded my blogs I do not know. However, the posts that I did were completely off topic, but well paid.

Give it a try if you have a blog with a PageRank, but the offer price is supposed to increase as you prove your blogging quality, so you probably need to be fluent in English.

This is a system that I have grown to enjoy working with. Although, I must admit at first it annoyed me no end and seemed a waste of time. But hang in and it works!

It’s like many other paid to blog systems. Submit blog, wait for jobs, complete the work and then leave it live to await payment.

So, in what ways is it different to other blogs? Well, they control a lot more of what is going on than other systems. There are a lot of quality checks and they have higher quality standards than other sites.

It starts with the review of your website. If it is not written in perfect English with perfect spellings you will be asked to correct the blog and resubmit for consideration.

Then you get going. Prices are set within the system according to your PageRank. You are told there are jobs available and if any interest you, sign on and reserve a slot. This is a good way of working and I like it this way around.

It’s just not clear how long you reserve a job for. The T&C says you have 24 hours, but I’ve had reservations released in a lot less time than that.

That aside, you write a post around the given keywords, including the exact keyword in the title & post. But, you do not know the advertiser’s website. You only need to prepare for 1 keyword and typically you would be writing about 100+ words per post.

Then it is submission time again. Submit the post for review and if there is a slightest spelling or grammar mistake you are told to correct it. You have a maximum of 3 attempts to get it right, or the submission is scrapped.

Once they are happy with it you are then given the advertiser’s site to link to. This means going back and editing the post, which at first I found to be a pain. But, you get used to it quickly.

Payments are issued at the start of each month for all posts completed the previous month, if you have a minimum of $100 accrued.

It is a good system, however at the moment the system is new and the jobs are completely off topic and the same ones keep coming back day after day. I’ve written about metal roofs, Vancouver web design and a few other topics many times.

However, they do pay well and reasonably quickly! Take a look at blogdistributor.com and maybe they will soon get the publicity they need to expand and get more interesting work through!

A lot of bloggers earn money through paid to blog schemes, but these have a lot of problems involved with them. If you are thinking of starting out with these or are already involved, what must you know?

When you start out down the road of paid to blog (or paid to post) the most obvious problem can be hitting your readers with lots of adverts.

These schemes work in one of two ways. Either you are presented with lists of opportunities and have to select those you are interested in, or you are passed opportunities / jobs from the system without any prior input.

And this is the big problem that I find. If you pre-select the posts you will work with there is a lot of effort looking through what is available and bidding on the work and only a few ever turn into paid posts.

However, if you are just sent work straight away without you pre-selecting, then you get all sorts of junk. You might have chosen to categorise your blog correctly, but desperate advertisers wanting lots of posts will just select every category they see.

And systems that work this way usually punish you if you start turning down more than a few percent of the work offered to you. This leaves you with a stark choice. Either you do it and put up with perfume adverts on your business blog, or you forget the easier money systems and just use the labour intensive systems.

A related problem is the advertisers’ understanding of the way the system works. Some will give very detailed specifications as to how the post will look, telling you what it must contain, how it must be written and so on.

However, they are forgetting that you are writing an advert aimed at the readers of your blog, not an advert for national press. You, the blogger, know what attracts your readers to your blog and know your style of writing. Having a style that is totally different dictated to you can really throw the flow of your blog.

I have even had advertisers insist that the post be written in French, even though my blog and its audience are all English speakers!

Lastly, of course, is the fear of what punishment you might get from the search engines. My experience of guest posting, article directories and other times when we are publishing articles with external links suggests that as long as everything is in proportion, the search engines will probably overlook your deeds.

If you are writing 400 – 500 words and inserting 2 or 3 links, then the ratio of content to external links is quite good. However, many advertisers try to be greedy and I have seen paid posts demanding 3 external links within 30 a word write up. This is obviously the advertiser trying to pay for less, but the ratio of content to links is poor and the search engines will at best ignore the post, at worst punish your blog.

In short, if you are willing to put up with irrelevant adverts that are completely off topic and do not mind sometimes writing a lot more than the advertisers are paying for to keep your content to link ratio good, then paid posting can succeed.

However, if you are expecting a lot of offers themed around your blog’s content you could be very disappointed and quickly walking away!

Almost immediately after writing about the problems of paid posting systems in which the advertisers approve the posts, I was hit by a pair of perfect examples of why this is a problem.

First, the above example of a rejection from today. The advertiser paid for a 100 word post and I gave them about 120. That should have been more than enough, but they rejected the post and demanded at least 250 words.

The problem is that all of my readers have now seen that post (given that they have 3 days in which to tell me they aren’t happy, that’s most of the exposure) and if I want to get paid, I need to write far more than they have paid for.

However, I should probably count myself lucky as this advertiser currently is showing a 66% approval rating, so a third of the bloggers’ posts have been rejected, without even being given the opportunity to rewrite it. Add to that figure the rewrites and they are really taking the mickey!

The other example from today is an advertiser that paid for a link only post, in which they want a write-up about a particular home alarm system along with an image of the product. These guys have been doing this and getting away with it for ages – I’ve already seen their opportunity a few times – yet they keep getting away with under paying bloggers. Not fair on bloggers and not fair on other advertiser who are paying a fair price.