AboutBlogging.Info - Making Money Online

When I logged into PayPerPost this morning I was interested to see an announcement that there had been a change to PPPs Terms of Service. Previously in order for your blog to qualify for PPP it needed to be at least 90 days old with at least 20 posts written within that time. This has now been changed so that your blog needs only be 30 days old with ten posts written within that time.

The reason for this is unstated but obvious: Googles smackdown of bloggers in the PPP network has hurt. There is the awkward situation existing now that many of the PPP bloggers (Posties as we’re called) have blogs which do have traffic and figure highly in search engine results but who have a PageRank rating of Zero. Meanwhile most of the advertisers with PPP continue to demand PageRank as a requirement for their posts.  PPP’s RealRank system has still to be widely accepted by advertisers and the new SocialSpark site is still some way from launching.

While posties with PR0 still manage to make some money they now do so at a greatly reduced rate to what they once did. On the other hand, if you are lucky enough to still have a blog with at least some PageRank within the PPP network you find that your competition is greatly reduced. This is good for the Posties with PageRank but bad for PPP and their advertisers. The easing of the ToS would seem to be an attempt to make it easier for blogs which might still have PR to join the network.

For any bloggers who have new blogs which got PR in the last update and were thinking of joining PayPerPost but are still younger than three months this must seem like good news. The question you must ask though is: is it worth it? Since average posts with PageRank in PPP are worth about $7 and you can take three of them per day, it would be easy enough to make about $20 per day with PPP but if you are writing sponsored posts at that rate it is likely that Google will detect you and remove your PageRank fairly quickly.

I think that many people will decide that it is worth it even if they get away with it for only a few weeks. This is likely to lead to an upsurge in throwaway blogs in the next month. And also greater competition for those already within the network.

It’s been two weeks now since I earned any money on PayPerPost. Up until the Google-slap at the end of November PPP was the best of the sponsored post sites. Even after my PageRank was reduced to zero I was still able to make money on it, albeit at a reduced rate. When I joined PPP at the start of November it immediately became my number one means of making money online with an average of $60 per week for my first three weeks. Since then and the PageRank reduction the earnings dropped but overall it still added up to a total of $316.00.

For me the good times ended on January 3 this year. That was the last time I earned any money from the site. The problem is that the PageRank on the blogs that I use for sponsored posts has been reduced to zero while at the same time the vast, vast majority of advertisers who use PPP still have PageRank as a requirement to qualify for one of their opportunities. Meanwhile Google presumably continues to play its global game of tag and sends more and more blogs into the PR Zero sin bin.

It appears to me that the problem is that the pool of job opportunities with no PR requirement is unchanged whereas the amount of PR Zero fish is increasing. This means that the available job opportunities are filled up quickly. I have found for the last two weeks every time I log in to check on the opportunities that I have been looking at the same, solitary one; a 200 word post about bad credit mortgages which I refuse to do.  (Incidentially, this must be a boom time for those blogs who haven’t had their PageRank effected and are finding less and less competition for the PR job opportunities.)

I hope this is a temporary blip until PPPs RealRank becomes more accepted among advertisers. It may be a temporary blip but it could also be fatal. We’ll have to wait and see. I might have to rethink my plans about making a living from blogging in the meantime!

Incidentially PayU2Blog is now advising its bloggers not to link to external disclosure policy generating sites. It doesn’t give an explanation for this advice but it’s easy to assume that Google is using linkage to such sites as evidence that a blog is writing sponsored posts. Such a link might be enough to send a blog off for a manual review. While PayU2Blog doesn’t require its bloggers to disclose their sponsored posts its advice for those who do have such a policy is to write their own and host it on their own site rather than to link to an external site.

Spurred on by the latest attack of the Googlebot, PayPerPost has accelerated the launch of RealRank. This is PayPerPosts new in-house blog ranking system which is designed to give an alternative to PageRank and Alexa.

If you already have Google Analytics or Statcounter code or similar installed on your site you’ll find this is similar. By installing PayPerPosts Tools code on your site you allow them to track your blogs statistics. They then use these statistics to give you a ranking which is independent of PageRank or Alexa. The ranking is similar to Alexa, ie the lower your score, the better.

PayPerPost is a very lucrative earner and so I think it’s worth my while to allow them this access to my stats.

Your RealRank is an indication of how you measure up against other blogs within the PayPerPost system, which would be what advertisers would be interested in. It is still in the roll-out stages yet so the rankings are fluctuating quite a bit.

After I installed the code a few days ago my RealRank stood at around 3,000. It has since gone from that to 1995 and then to 1500. Thanks to my viral post getting re-infected last night it now stands at 100, although I expect that to drop back very quickly.

The reason it can fluctuate so much at the moment is that many Posties have still to install the code. When they do the RealRank will become more stable, more competitive and, God forbid, more accurate than Alexa or PageRank!

In the long-run what RealRank means is that the quality blogs who attract the most visitors will get the better paying jobs. It is only fair after all.

PageRanks latest adjustment seems to have been directed against bloggers who write sponsored posts.

I was away from my computer for a few days. When I returned to check my stats yesterday and saw that my PageRank on this blog had been reduced to zero I was a little surprised.

I got my first indication that this was a more widespread thing from reading an e-mail from John Chows site; I was one who signed up in the recent competition!

Considering that some people have seen their site knocked by PR5 all the way down to zero my fall from PR2 down to zero doesn’t seem so bad.

The PayPerPost blog has advice for posties:

“If you have been hit by Google unfortunately there is little we can do. We know that Google PR does not reflect your actual traffic and it is sad that Google chooses to over look that to protect their own bottom line. We now know from some of our friends inside of Google (thanks ‘bob’) that they are now looking for phrases such as PPP, PayPerPost, ReviewMe, Payu2blog, etc. in the text of your post. For that reason I would suggest refraining from using any type of this text in the body of your posts, sponsored or not. When you disclose thank the sponsor, not PPP.”

Personally, I’m not prepared to remove references to sponsored post sites on this blog to get the PageRank restored. I’m not prepared to do this because I have found them to be so profitable! I now have a weekly internet income of $100 per week through a combination of PayPerPost, Sponsored Reviews and Smorty.

Because my PageRank was only a PR2 anyway the effect of it’s loss on my ability to make money online through sponsored posts is very slight.

In any case PayPerPost are about to introduce a new system which will go some way towards making PageRank irrelevant for posties. Ted Murphy also revealed on the PayPerPost blog that they are accelerating the release of their new RealRank system which they intend to use as a replacement for PageRank to rate blogs.

My PageRank’s Gone And Left Me

My PageRank got up and left me in the middle of the night. We had been together for less than three weeks. When I first got PageRank at the end of October I was delighted. She was only a 2 but she was my 2 and I loved her. I thought that she loved me too and we were very happy together.

However this all changed suddenly a couple of days ago when PageRanks domineering parents, themselves having taken a vow of poverty, became shocked and disgusted at my honest attempts to make money blogging. They decided I was no longer good enough for their little PR2 and ordered her to come home. She went. And now I’m sad.

Well, I’m a little bit sad. The $100 I earned last week on the internet, largely from writing sponsored posts has been some consolation to me!