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

An advertiser accepted my bid for the first time yesterday on SponsoredReviews.com. I registered two of my blogs with them last week and so far I have applied for nine opportunities. Of the other eight, one has been rejected and the other six are still pending. A second one was accepted today.

When I decided to try writing sponsored posts I first thought of PayPerPost. In fact I have applied and failed to join PayPerPost twice already. My application is in for the third time now and this time I think I have fulfilled all the criteria.

(BTW The reason I have been rejected twice so far is that I failed to read the qualifying criteria correctly. To have your blog accepted for PayPerPost your blog must be at least three months old. In addition to that you must also have 20 written posts within the past 90 days. My blog was more than three months old and had more than 20 posts so when it was rejected the first time I thought it was a mistake so I changed the settings to display 25 posts on the first page and submitted it again. When it was rejected the second time I actually read the reasons for it; I had only 17 posts in the last 90 days. Everything should be ok this time.)

Compared to PayPerPost, Sponsored Reviews is easy to join. The criteria for joining  Sponsored Reviews are that:

“1. Your blog must be at least 3 months old, and it must also contain at least 10 published posts in order to be approved.

“2. Your blog must have, and maintain, at least a 2:1 ratio of non-paid to paid content. The ratio is calculated on a monthly average.”

When you register your blog it is automatically graded, based on its Yahoo link count and Technorati and Alexa rankings. Your blogs grade with Sponsored Review is an average of the three. PageRank isn’t counted in the grading although advertisers often do specify it as a requirement in the opportunities.

Anyway, while I am still awaiting an acceptance into PayPerPost I got my first job from Sponsored Reviews last night . Writing the review was pretty simple. There were few requirements from the advertiser apart from a 300 word minimum and the inclusion of three links in the text.

It took me an hour to write and check the post. The review came pretty easily to me. It’s not exactly poetry but somebody is giving me actual money for writing it, which is a first as far as me and blogging are concerned.

When I was finished writing the post I put it on my blog and then I went back to the Sponsored Review web-site to post the url. As soon as I submitted the url the fun and games started! The automated checker on the web-site brought back a message that there was a problem with the links in the post and that I needed to fix these. It also said that if there was a problem that I should submit a ticket to the support staff.

The links that I placed in the post were exactly as I was asked to do in the post. The only possible problem I could see was that there was a redirect in the link. There was a setting in my blog which redirected every external link from my url via “go.php”. I created a ticket to the support staff and told them my problem and asked them if this might be the problem.

I have to congratulate the support staff because it took literally minutes for a reply to come back to my e-mail. They confirmed that the problem was the redirect in the links. They also suggested that I change the format of my links. I had them with no decoration (ie no underline) which made them less conspicuous. Support suggested that I should make them more conspicuous, otherwise the advertiser might miss them and mark it as a bad review. (This goes to show the importance of links and the real value of your sponsored review to advertisers.)

I sent back a message to the support staff asking them if they had any advice on how to solve the problem. Again the reply from them took only minutes. Unfortunately they didn’t have any specific advice to give as they weren’t familiar with my particular host. They did try to give some general advice but it didn’t help my particular problem.

Part of the problem with my personal blog is that it is on a free blog host. I don’t have complete access to the files. I can customize certain features through the dashboard. For anything else I have to delve into the mysterious world of editing the code in the theme.

I am far from expert at editing code. After more than half an hour of it I start to see double. Three hours later, after scouring the theme manually and using the ‘find and replace’ function, I couldn’t find any reference to ‘go.php’. It was like a phantom that jumped from the shadows when I least expected it with the sole intention of ruining my paid posting career. After three hours of this I became goggle-eyed and went to bed.

During the night I woke up around 3am with this problem on my mind. I got up and googled something like “wordpress, go.php”. The second link I clicked on gave me my answer. One of the plugins, called ‘click counter’ was responsible. I deactivated it and the redirect disappeared from my links.

This all goes to prove that nothing is ever easy! Not even earning a living from blogging! On the lighter side. I wrote and published my second sponsored review within 30 minutes today.