7 rules to ensure paid blog postings don’t alienate your readers

Posted by stuart as , , ,

Yes I know, payperpost is evil, it is the harbinger of the demise of the blogosphere etc., but everybody’s gotta make a buck, right?

So here are my seven rules for ensuring that payperpost doesn’t ruin your blog or alienate your readers:

1. Only accept payperpost assignments that you can work into the theme of your blog. If your blog is about cats, there’s little to be gained by accepting payperpost assignments about birth control products
2. Write no more than one payperpost post per day
3. Ensure that you post at least five “legitimate” posts between each paid post.
4. Always have another “legitimate” post ready to post immediately after the payperpost post, so that the payperpost post is not the top post on your blog.
5. Always tag your payperpost post with something like “pay per post”. I’m using this and only this tag on my paid posts, so that the readers can see the post for what it is (payperpost.com forbids actually writing in the post that it is a paid post)
6. Ensure that your paid posts are of the same quality as the rest of your posts. Don’t just phone them in. You need to provide value for the advertiser, as he has paid for the post, and you are more likely to alienate your readers by posting obviously paid rubbish.
7. Set your blogging software to display only five posts per page. This way you will never have more than one paid post on the home page of your blog.

You can say what you like about paid posting, but it has certainly given the small time blogger a chance to monetize their content much more quickly than before. So follow these rules, and you will kepp your readers, and your paypal account happy.