Some people will fret over adding a Pay Per Post site wide disclosure to their site. It sounds difficult and complicated, but it isn’t.

The purpose of a disclosure is to ensure that American regulations are kept. Whether this affects you if you are not a US citizen and not blogging from the US (like me) is open to debate, but systems like Pay Per Post insist that all blogs have a disclosure.

They are quite simple. All you are saying is that you do write paid posts, but your posting is always based on your own opinions. For example, take a look at my own disclosure that reads:

This blog is a personal blog written and edited by me. This blog accepts forms of cash advertising, sponsorship, paid insertions or other forms of compensation.

The compensation received may influence the advertising content, topics or posts made in this blog. That content, advertising space or post may not always be identified as paid or sponsored content.

The owner(s) of this blog is compensated to provide opinion on products, services, websites and various other topics. Even though the owner(s) of this blog receives compensation for our posts or advertisements, we always give our honest opinions, findings, beliefs, or experiences on those topics or products. The views and opinions expressed on this blog are purely the bloggers’ own. Any product claim, statistic, quote or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer, provider or party in question.

This blog does not contain any content which might present a conflict of interest.

To get your own policy, go to http://www.disclosurepolicy.org

Quite easy! Just copy and paste something along those lines onto a page of your blog and ensure that page is linked to from every post you write.

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!

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.

With so many bloggers monetising their blogs and many new bloggers starting blogs just to create an income, I thought I would take a look at some of the different paid to post schemes and my personal experiences with each.

PayPerPost – probably one of the leaders in the field, PayPerPost accept absolutely any blog and give you a chance to earn some cash. It is a marketplace to bring together advertisers and bloggers, with the emphasis on control being between these two parties. Advertisers make offers to bloggers and then approve, reject or ask for changes. Bloggers set a price for the basic post plus an additional price per word based on their PageRank. So on a PR2 blog, you are recommended to charge $4.50 for a 50 word post and $6 for a 200 word post.

InPostLinks – as with PayPerPost InPostLinks is from the Izea family. Here your blog must have existed for at least 3 months and have a good ratio of content to paid posts. Advertisers create opportunities and segment on location, subject and PageRank, but that is when the fun begins. Advertisers also state the price they want to pay and then it is open to all eligible bloggers to grab a slot. When a decent opp arrives you may have seconds before all of the available slots are gone. So you need to be checking regularly for open offers to get a lot, and when you get them for your 200 word post you can be getting next to nothing. Up to $5.50 is sometimes offered for PR2 blogs, but mostly the offer price is $1.50 / $2 and sometimes the offers are less than a dollar.

SponsoredReviews – this is a system that I have tried to like, but not succeeded. It takes a lot of effort to get a few posts. You need to look through the list of available jobs and bid on those that are interesting. If you are lucky, an advertiser might accept your offer and you then have a week to do the work. Sometimes advertisers will make you a direct offer that you can accept or reject. It sounds good, but I’ve found the system slow. Next to no opportunities and then a few at once. Even with a few blogs registered this happens, with all my offers being to one blog for a few weeks, then rotating to the next one! Also, for a PR2 blog I get $10 offers, which sounds good but you only receive half of that. Given that sometimes the demand is for 400 words, $5 (or less sometimes) isn’t much considering the effort put in to get there in the first place.

BlogsVertise – in theory, quite a good system, but even with some PR2 and a PR3 blogs, the work has dried up. Just one offer of an advert for a bingo site (how’s that related to my sites?) in the last couple of months. Shame, the system worked well with the staff allocating work to bloggers. Typical tasks were 2 – 3 paragraphs of writing for $9 – $10 on a PR2 / PR3 blog. But approvals took an age and I had a few times rejects, usually because 2 weeks later the advertiser wanted the anchor text changing or something. The payment system was manual and paid out once the post was at least 30 days old. But being manual, sometimes they were forgotten for a while.

ReviewMe – I signed up, completed 1 review which I was paid for and that was the end of it. Just 1 of my popular blogs is listed, maybe a couple more might be more relevant?

BlogDistributor – the new kid on the block. At first I have to admit I did not like the way it works, but eventually I got used to it. You are allocated a task which you can accept (or reject) . You write the post, typically around 100 words, but the minimum varies (and is very strange, e.g. minimum 93 words!) and submit it for review. Their team review it, requesting any changes and then when they are happy they tell you what website to link to. I didn’t like this returning business at first (my login security being such a pain), but now that I am used to is and am seeing the annoyance of advertisers falsely rejecting on other systems, I am really getting to like it.

Out of these, PayPerPost and BlogDistributor are my favourites. PayPerPost just about wins as there is more work there, BlogDistributor is a bit too new and the tasks are repeating a lot, which is getting tiresome. Hopefully, with more bloggers on board to attract more advertisers, that system could become my favourite.

I promised a couple of weeks ago a series based on ways to turn your blog into a money making machine, so about time I actually started to put down the ideas!

So, to start with, my most successful and probably my favourite way to monetise a blog is via PayPerPost.com. I’ve already talked in a lot of detail on these pages about using PayPerPost, so what is it that makes it so good?

Well the latest version, PPP4, is just an open market place between bloggers and advertisers. There are absolutely no acceptance criteria, other than you own a blog. That blog might have been created 10 minutes ago on a free system and you can still submit it to the system and hope for work to appear.

Earning Money
You earn money quite simply by posting on your blog. The system provides the link (or links) that you have to post to your blog, maybe a few requirements and a minimum word count. You write the post, submit the link and the advertiser approves it within 3 days, or can request changes or just reject it outright. Should they not approve it in 3 days, it is auto approved.

30 days after submitting the post, as long as it is still found on the same URL and the link is still in place, the fee for that post is transferred from your confirmed balance to your earned balance. When this reaches $50 you can cash it out, although if you are desperate, you can cash out less than that for a $2 fee.

How You Are Paid
By PayPal. There are no PayPal fees to cover – these are all prepaid by PayPerPost, hence the minimum cashout or $2 fee. Payment usually arrives in seconds into your PayPal account.

Who It Is Suitable For
One word – bloggers!

Whether you are low or high traffic, low or high Page Rank, few or many Yahoo backlinks you can sign up and get posts. Recent changes have made it easier for advertisers to pick those bloggers who are from native English speaking countries, which seems to be moving opportunities to these places and away from non-native speaking countries, so if you are from one of these then you might not get as much work.

Also, there are many complaints from bloggers about low levels of opportunities. But, usually the blog is full of spelling or grammatical errors, or too much advertising or other aspects that are putting advertisers off.

If you have a good blog, say PR2 or above, then there can be plenty of work at a price that you set yourself.

The Disadvantages
Yes, there are a few problems. Advertisers set up the opps themselves and sometimes get the setup wrong, demanding hundreds of words per post having clicked the option for just a link only. However, maybe there has been a system change as I haven’t seen that recently.

On the same theme, some advertisers request 30 word posts and 3 links and other equally silly requests which do them no good and can harm the blog.

Summary
If you have a well written blog with a few Yahoo Backlinks showing, then you should be able to get at least a few opportunities from the system. PR0 / PR1 blogs seem to get a lot less work, but there is some there for them to get going. As with any of these systems, the work is in fits and starts. But it is well worth joining and probably the best of the lot.

Many bloggers earn an income through paid posting and others spend money promoting their blogs the same way. So I thought a piece about getting the most from paid posts would be useful – for advertisers to get the best and bloggers to be aware of some of the checks.

Home Page
It is not enough to just create a post that is hidden from archives, categories and the home page. You want a paid post exposed to the home page, so when you check the post also make sure that it is on the home page of the blog.

The problem – well 24 hours on the home page is considered to be fair game. So you must review all posts within this time. If the post isn’t there then you can reject it or ask for it to be placed there. After 24 hours this is a lot more difficult.

If you find a post not on the home page for 24 hours, maybe even raise it with the network.

Making It Found
Getting your paid post on the home page means home page visitors see it, but what about search engines? On a PR0 blog, Google might only visit once per month. It doesn’t take many posts to make sure that hardly any are found there. So it can be better value to pay for a PR2+ blog, where Google should come visiting at least most weeks for a guarantee that the post will be found.

Be Social
You, the advertiser, can help the blogger and your post! If you haven’t already done so, sign up to stumble, digg and other such sites.

For a couple of very good posts use social bookmarking techniques of stumble, digg, facebook, Twitter and so on to share the post. This can increase the exposure of your post as well as helping the blogger’s traffic.

Especially if the blogger displays most popular posts this could even ensure that every page of the blog links to your post giving it plenty of PR, whilst making your post seen by many people.

Link Saturation
The reason many bloggers try to hide paid posts is that they are afraid of Google punishing them. But in my experience of guest posts on blogs, you can easily get away with 2 or 3 links per post. But, there is a condition.

There has to be plenty of content per post. A 30 word post even with 1 link will be highly saturated. In my guest posting experience the posts were all above 450 words, giving a lot lower saturation.

Uninterested Search Engines
Another problem with 30 word posts is that they do not hold search engine’s interest. Some people say 200+ words, others 250+ words are required to make sure a page is cached.

So buy buying even a 100 word post, you are probably not going to see the post cached on the search engines. It might cost more to pay for 200, 300 or even 400 words, but if it means that the post is cached and the link saturation is reduced, the value is increased many times over. It is well worth paying more.

Off Topic
Does a marketing blogger really want to write about bridesmaid’s dresses? Worse still, do the readers want to read about them?

Choose blogs that are remotely on target, or at least where the blogger has a chance of being able to weave your theme into their theme.

This reduces the number of eligible blogs, but these will have readers that are interested and if you pay them to write 300 – 500 words, the search engines will love the posts.

Is The Blog Worth It?
Before you make the offer, glance through the blog and look at the writing. Does it look as though they will have an audience that is relevant to you?

Favourite good posts and maybe ask them for another post in a month or two.

Summary
In summary, social bookmark the best of the posts; check within 24 hours that posts are appearing on the home page of the blog; pay for less posts on higher ranking blogs with longer posts (at least 200 words) and stay roughly on topic.

If you have been following the Pay Per Post category you might be wondering how to complete posts. There are always a lot of questions in this area, so here is some help!

Hopefully you have set up a PayPerPost account and claimed a blog or two. If so, then there are only two more terms that you need to be aware of – Leads and Opportunities.

Leads
The system will send you leads, which give a bit of information about the job and allow you to either say that you are interested, negotiate a price or indicate you are not interested. This, for some reason, confuses many people who have not read up fully how it works. If you say you are interested this does not mean you will be doing the job. Likewise, negotiating does not guarantee the work.

If the requested price is higher / lower than you would normally want to work for, hit negotiate and type in your price. If you are happy to do it, then hit that you are interested. As soon as you do this the lead will vanish from the screen. Select any other blogs from the drop down menu and process those leads.

If you are interested or have negotiated, then this is flagged to the advertiser who sees a star next to your blog as an indicator that you are willing to do the work. They might then invite you to do the work, which takes us nicely to the next section.

Opportunities
This is what you want! This is where an advertiser has selected your blog and wants you to write a post for them. All of the details are there, so read them well as advertisers get upset when bloggers do not follow the instructions properly. If the opportunity ask for an In Post disclosure, then you are expected to mention somewhere that it is a paid post.

But basically write a post in which you can mention the link(s) and is at least the required number of words. Usually you have to write the post around a subject that is relevant to the link. Do be careful when pasting in the link(s) as certain visual editors will remove the signs, so make sure that you paste in the links only in HTML editor.

Then publish the link, review the post and copy and paste the link into PayPerPost. It should be approved within 3 days (if you have followed the instructions correctly) and 30 days after submitting the post to the system, as long as it still exists with the links in tact, the payment moves from the pending to the earnings amount. Once it reaches $50 earned (or less, if you don’t mind the $2 cashout charge), you can transfer it to PayPal.

Many people do struggle with submitting posts and the automatic checks. These are nearly always caused by pluggins adding to or changing the link. For example adding rel=”nofollow”, target=”_blank” or some form of javascript to count the clicks. All of these will cause the check to fail, so if you are having any sorts of problems disable any plugins that could be doing this.

In the final installment I’ll look at quickly setting up a new blog – if you are interested, just look through the PayPerPost category.

If you have been following the PayPerPost series, then this is the final installment – how to quickly set up a new blog.

For some people, getting started earning money blogging quickly is essential. But if you don’t want to do the full setting up of a blog on your own hosting, how are you going to start?

Some people look at using WordPress.com, because of its community feel that should proivide instant traffic. But, WordPress.com does not allow advertising or paid posting and if they discover you are doing it your blog might be deleted. Other free services are likely to do the same, so check the terms and conditions of any free blogging system that you are using.

At the moment, Blogger.com does allow these activities, so it is well worth setting up an account there. But advertisers are quite often reluctant to pay for adverts on free hosted blogging platforms. It is far better to use your own URL for your blog, but if you click around the settings of blogger you can register your own domain name through them for not too bad a price.

So sign up for an account with Blogger, create your first blog and within the settings menu go through the process of registering a new URL to use. Then, when you sign up to PayPerPost, give the new URL name that you have registered and advertisers will see that there has been some investment on your behalf in your site, which encourages more to give you some opportunites.

Hopefully you have gained something from this series. Do feel free to leave any comments about anything else you would like to read about in the field of blogging.