Payperpost review - six weeks in

Posted by stuart as , ,

Note - this is not a paid post - it is a genuine review by someone who uses the service.

Well, despite the controversy, I’ve kept up with my payperpost experiment. I’ve been using the service for around six weeks now, although since the controversy here, I’ve been reticent to use it here, so I’ve kept it for other blogs for the time being.

My initial thoughts on the service are that for a blogger who struggles to monetise their content, this is a good idea. I’m not going to argue the pros and cons associated with payperpost here, as this is a review of the service.

For those still unaware of what payperpost is (where you been, man???), the concept is pretty simple - blogger writes posts linking to an advertisers website, fitting within the advertisers guidelines for the post, and once the post has been live for 30 days, the blogger gets paid. payperpost.com simply act as an intermediary between the blogger and the advertiser.

I thought that I’d run through the whole process, from signup to payment,and give my thoughts on each individual step of the way.

Signup: This is pretty straightforward, simply fill in the form, including your paypal address (they only pay by paypal at this stage), and your blog URL. There’s a lot of talk about needing to give an EIN number or tax ID before you can join. I chose not to do this (I live outside the US), and there hasn’t been a problem getting paid. Payperpost will manually assess your blog to decide whether it fits in with their requirements, this will take a couple of days. One thing that it’s important to note here is the requirements your blog must fulfill to be accepted:

• Your blog must also be at least 90 days old, verifiable by a third party index of the site.
• If over 90 days old, your blog must have at least 20 entries in the past 90 days. If just around 90 days old, your blog must have 20 pre-existing entries.
• No blogs with gaps over 30 days (no entries posted for 30+ days) will be accepted.

I imagine this is to stop a million junk blogger blogs being submitted, to maintain the quality of the blogs using payperpost, so this is a good thing.

Choosing an opportunity: Once your blog has been accepted, you will be given access to the bloggers dashboard. This page presents you with data for your account, such as how much you have been paid, and how much money you have waiting to be approved once your posts reach the thirty day threshold. You will also be given access to the “opportunities” area of the site, where the current paid post assignments are listed. Currently, there are 84 opportunitites available, although this number is increasing all the time.

Upon choosing an opportunity which you would like to take, you are presented with the requirements for that blog post. These include:

• The opportunity description
• The amount being offered by the advertiser for you to write the post
• A URL for a custom (transparent) tracking image which must be included in the post.
• The minimum words required in the post
• The “type” of post - opinion, review etc.
• The “tone” required of the post, these are generally either “positive”, or “neutral”
• The URL’s of any optional images that the advertiser requires you to include with your post.

Once you have read the requirements, and are satisfied that you can meet them, you will click the “take this opportunity” button, where you will be taken to the next page. This page is pretty similar to the last one, with the exception that it includes the HTML of the link that you are required to include in your post. this code must be copied eactly into your post, as the advertiser chooses the keywords for SEO purposes.

Once you reach this page, you would go to your blog, and write the post, ensuring that you meet all the requirements as laid down by the advertiser. Once you have written and saved your post, you will go back to the “take this opportunity” page on the payperpost site, and fill in the form. This is simply a case of filling in the blog post URL, title, choosing which blog you have posted to, and clicking the box which confirms that you have read the terms and condittions.

You will also be given the opportunity at this point to donate your earnings to charity. This is an individual choice, and I’ve never been pressured to do this.

Once this is all done, you will click the “Take opportunity” button, and you’re done. The post will be assessed to ensure that all the criteria have been fulfilled, and the clock will start ticking to count down the thirty days till payment.

You will be able to track the progress of your posts by clicking the “My posts” tab at the top right of the page at any time.

Adding another blog: If you would like to take paid posting opportunities on more than one blog, this is possible. Something to keep in mind, though, is that you may only add a new blog to an existing account once you have had ten paid posts approved in your initial blog. So when signing up, you would do well to consider which blog you want to use for paid posts first. I would think that this needs to be looked at by payperpost.com, and maybe allow approved bloggers to add new blogs, as long as they meet the initial signup criteria.

Payment: So far this has gone without a hitch, money is deposited into my paypal account on the correct day, and the correct amount. Upon payment, you receive an email from payperpost detailing how much was paid, and for which post. The email tells you that they’ve “hooked you up”, and that you should “hook them up” by telling your friends about payperpost. This seems a little desperate to me, and I’d rather not be implored in every payment email to tell my friends, but it’s only a small inconvenience.

One great thing is that payperpost seem to absorb the paypal fees. I was expecting to get my fee, minus 2.4% and 34 cents or whatever the paypal fees are these day, but no, I received the full fee quoted every time. This is a good move by payperpost, as it will definitely build goodwill with their bloggers.

Other things to think about: There seems to be a sub-culture of “posties”, as they’ve named themselves, who are sitting on the payperpost website, refreshing the page, waiting for new opportunities to arrive, then grabbing them. As each opportunity can only be taken a certain number of times, this means that bloggers who “have a life” might be missing out.

The value and criteria required of paid posts seems to be tightening considerably. From the intitial flurry of ten dollar plus opportunities, there now seems to be a move to lower value projects, with more stringent criteria, such as pagerank and alexa rank, to be met before the post is accepted. Payerpost will need to watch this trend carefully, as I don’t think there’ll be many bloggers who will take a $2.50 opportunity for their blog if the requirement is a PR of five and an alexa rank of 50,000. Bloggers, should I say quality bloggers are the lifeblood of this business model, so to keep these bloggers happy, the rewards for effort need to be sufficient.

Closing thoughts: The processes at payperpost seem to work quite well, it’s arguable whether the system provides value to the blogger or the advertiser, but I’ll let others decide that. The main thing that payperpost will need to keep in mind is striking the balance between providing that value for both the blogger and the advertiser.

Another issue that will confront the owners of payperpost is whether the business model will hit a critical mass at some point, when the advertisers have had their day in the sun and stop advertising, and there are thousands upon thousands of bloggers waiting on each opportunity. This will cause bloggers to become disgruntled, and move on.
The final issue I can see happening is the search engines clamping down on this form of link buying, if they decide that the number of backlinks to a site has increased too quickly. Maybe this is a positive of advertiser placing stringent criteria on their opportunities, as they will be taken up more slowly, and the link building will be seen as organic by the search engines.