Why Bloggers should avoid PayPerPost

If you Google "PayPerPost", you will find many blog posts advising that doing paid blogging for them is a good way to monetize your blog. Don't believe it! 

First of all, though PayPerPost say they sell advertising (trying to get advertisers' products in front of a blog's readers), what they are actually selling is "link-juice". The people advertising with them arn't interested in your blog traffic at all (which is likely to be low in any case). Instead they are trying to game Google's search results by using the fact that Google assigns PageRank to authority blogs, and blogs with a high pagerank pass on "link juice" to any blog they link to, which increases the likelihood that the site you are linking to rises in the search results. That's why all the advertisers on PayPerPost (who are owned by IZEA) require a link from you and also demand that you anchor the link on certain keywords.

Now Google doesn't have any problem with advertising - put a banner on your blog that pays you per impression, and they don't mind in the least - because all you are doing is trying to get the attention of your own blog readers. Sell links based on their proprietary PageRank system though, and they will come down hard on you: you will likely find your PageRank reduced to zero within a month of you selling links on PayPerPost. They hate people trying to game the search engine results.

PayPerPost never tell their new bloggers that they may lose their PageRank. They lure in bloggers who have a PageRank of 2, 3, 4, tell them they can make money doing paid blogging. What then happens is that Google detects this. It isn't hard for them - if loads of links appear across the web all to a certain site and all anchored on a certain word, something fishy is going on. Natural links simply don't build in this way. Google then slaps your blog down to a pagerank zero, and for good measure they will probably also reduce your placing in the search results too, as you are now a "bad neighbourhood".

You now find that within a month of starting with PayPerPost, you have a useless blog. Because the advertisers in their system want PageRank and won't bother with a blog with pagerank of zero. You may get some paid blogging from them for $1 a go, but usually to advertise something dire. In desperation you might decide to take these dire ops (you now arn't making money any other way because you've trashed your blog in Google's eyes and are not getting search traffic). But taking these dire ops ruins your blog even further. You can earn more on the minimum wage than slaving away for a $1 a post! PayPerPost don't care - they will simply replace you with new innocent bloggers who have PageRank. And the cycle starts again.

What to do? First STOP using PayPerPost. Clear out and delete all the paid posts on your blog, clear the codes they tell you to embed, make your blog good again. Then ask Google for reinclusion using their Webmasters tools (and tell them all the steps you have taken to clean your blog). And then never ever do paid blogging again.

So how do you make money if you don't do paid blogging? Well, learn some basic SEO (and there is tons of material on the web on how to do this), which will get your blog ranking well in the search results so that you get natural organic traffic. Then monetise with with Google Adsense (or Kontera, Bidvertiser or other ad platforms). Or place appropriate affiliate ads on your site for Amazon, Clickbank, or Commission Junction. Or place image ads that pay you per impression from companies like Adify. Google doesn't mind any of this type of advertising, as you are not trading PageRank to game the search engine, you are genuinely selling/advertising to organic traffic.

And the truth is that doing it the honest way will make you WAY more money than by doing paid blogging. And you will be happier as you will completely control what you write about on your blog.

The ideal would be if new innocent bloggers weren't suckered into signing up for PayperPost in the first place. Which is why I am writing this article. Don't do it people. You'll just ruin your beautiful blogs.