How To Make Money With The “Paid To Post” Model
Making money online with paid posts can be an example of home-based business model which works. Although it can become boring and very frustrating after several months, writing paid posts can earn you a living until you learn how to generate some residual income.
The advantages of making money with the “paid to post” model
- You don’t need to have any other skills than writing, in order to run your business
- The initial investments are low (and can be zero, if you decide to go for free blogger blogs), provided that you already have a computer with an internet connection
- There’s no minimum traffic level requirement in order for you to get accepted
The drawbacks of making money with the “paid to post” model
- If you stop writing, you stop earning
- Writing paid reviews which contain links to the advertisers’ websites, which are not tagged with no-follow, is against Google’s rules concerning internet marketing and SEO, and you risk to get your blogs de-indexed from this search engine. This means that your blog won’t appear in the results pages for any keyword, plus you’ll be taken away your PR which you may have earned by gathering links
- If Google catches your blogs faster than you can build them, your earnings will be under initial expectations, so it is not a highly reliable business model
- You can’t use it if you don’t have a PayPal account, as this is a must for getting accepted by PPP
So, this looks very much like a 9-5, ordinary job: you do it, you get paid, but the income stops the moment you quit it. However, it is a job with flexible working hours, allowing you for example to stay home with your children and still make some money. If your objective is to find a way to make a living without having to commute every day to and from the work place, and with the possibility to work at any hour of the day you wish, then this can be a suitable model for you.
If you aim for getting rich, or earning a residual income (the so-called “make money while you sleep”), or setting up a business you can scale later on, then this is not the method for you.
Now, let’s see how making money with “paid to post” model works:
Despite the fact that many blogs have been “punished” by Google lately, and found their PR dropped to 0 over night, there are many bloggers who still use paid posting services, like PayPerPost.
Why do bloggers still use paid posting? Because it is easy. Just try this scenario:
- Build 10 blogs on Blogger (or buy 10 domains, host them somewhere cheap, and install Wordpress on all of them; you can also buy one single domain and define 10 subdomains, if you don’t have the money for 10 domains)
- Write 3-4 posts on each blog. Don’t use duplicate content, go find some Private Label Rights (PLR) articles and rewrite them. Usually there’s a fee you have to pay to get access to PLR articles, but there are also free ones available. Private Label Rights give you the right to modify the articles in any way you wish, and sign them with your name. This is not theft, this is the purpose they’ve been written for.
- Bookmark all your posts with del.icio.us and other social bookmarking sites. If you don’t have the budget for some good submission software, you can use SocialPoster, which is free and which saves you a good bunch of your time.
- Submit your blogs to some 100 free blog directories. If you don’t use any helpful submission software, this would take you about 3 hours for each blog. You’ll see the benefits in several months or so (if you want to get indexed in directories faster, you have to pay, and I don’t think it’s worth doing it in this stage of your business).
- Rewrite a bunch of the PLR articles and submit them to article directories. Rewriting is necessary in order to appear unique. By rewriting I don’t mean mixing up the words with whatever words mixer software, but to express those ideas with your own words, and even complete the article with your own ideas about that topic. It’s true it takes a bit longer than just using automation, but it is worth spending time to create things that make sense. In this way, your articles will be more appreciated by people who seek content for their sites, and who will publish them on those sites, giving you backlinks with your desired anchor text, because they must keep the author box intact (and it is you who writes the author box and the links in it)
- Continuously add content to your blogs. If you do 2-3 posts per week, in one month’s time you’ll have at least 10 articles on each blog.
- Keep on building links to your blogs. Bookmarking helps a lot here, and it shouldn’t take you more than 10 minutes per each post.
- At the next Google PR update you’ll probably get some PR between 1 and 3 for all your blogs.
Open a free account with PayPerPost and submit one of the blogs. The good news is that PayPerPost have just announced that their TOS (terms of service) for accepting new blogs into the network, have just changed:
Until now, blogs had to be 90 days old and have 20 posts published. Starting February 13th, blogs have to be only 30 days old and have 10 published posts in order to get accepted.
Once accepted, you’ll be allowed to write maximum 3 paid posts per day. For PR1 blogs, the payouts average $7 per post. So you can make $21 per day, for some 1 - 2 hours of work, depending on your writing skills.
Once you have 10 paid posts approved (this can take about one week), you can submit more blogs to PayPerPost.
Let’s say you enroll 4 blogs with PayPerPost, while taking care to update the other 6 every other week or so. For 4 PR1 blogs, you can earn $7 x 3posts x 4blogs = $84 per day. For this you’ll have to work 5-8 hours. Keep in mind that you cannot have two consecutive paid posts on your blogs, so you’ll have to write also your normal blog posts (3 per day, per blog).
At each Google PR update you’ll probably have the unpleasant surprise that some of your blogs are downgraded to PR0. Let them stale and replace them in PPP with some others you already had been growing, but never used them in ways which are not conform with Google’s policies.
Don’t forget to keep on building new blogs, so that you can always have 2-3 blogs with PR1 at least, which are “clean”.
Possible monthly earnings
With 4 PR1 blogs in the PPP network, and writing 3 posts per day on each of them for 25 days a month, we come to an average monthly income of $2100. If you work 10 months per year, you can make $20,000, which, depending on the country you live in, can be the equivalent of an average salary, or even better.
And this is not the most optimistic scenario. Some of your blogs can get a bigger PR, depending on how fast you are at getting inbound links.
Besides, if you choose for your blogs some topics which are pretty hot, after a couple of months you may get some traffic from the search engines. Nobody stops you to put some AdSense or some affiliate links and banners on your blogs, for additional income.
The expenses can be zero, in case you decide to go for free hosted blogs, or they can reach some $200-$300 per year, if you buy the domains and the hosting.
If you decided to give it a try, even if it is only with 2-3 blogs, or even with one blog, just for some extra pocket money, please find out how to get your blog ready, from our PayPerPost review. You’ll also find out from our review why we have chosen PayPerPost and not any other paid-to-post program to illustrate this home-based business model.
Stumble this post!
If you liked this post, please consider to subscribe to RSS feed.
If you want to receive new posts directly to your inbox, you can subscribe by Email.
Related Articles
13 Comments »
Sponsors
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
-
Search
You have some great ideas here. Thank you very much. I am working with just one blog, and I lost my PR because of paid posts.
I was thinking about creating other blogs but I was not sure that this would be useful.
Now I see how wrong I was. I have two other domains so I think I will be using them really soon.
Thanks again!
Hi Claudia, I’m sorry to hear about your blog’s PR. Please be aware that this model cannot bring you income on long term, as long as we are not allowed to put nofollow on the links included in the paid posts. However, if you look at your blogs like they were lemons, you can drain all the juice they can bring you, then drop them, at least for a while.
I have been earning through Paid posts since last April-07. Right now the earning goes anywhere between 400-700 per month. [Still I fight to find out time to do that now]
I also encouraged many of my friends to start blogs and opt for these services. They are also making somewhere between 100-200 at the beginning, eventually they will make more.
I had posted about my earnings breakup from paid reviews here for Oct month, might be interesting read for you Simonne.
http://www.lifeiscolourful.com/earnings-break-up-for-paid-blogging-services-oct-2007/
Just check it out.
Life is Colourful’s last blog post..Lead Management Software Review
I’ve checked your post. This is a good example that paid posts can still make some money. I believe that one of your best achievements was to get advertisers to contact you directly.
Yeah certainly, Since Oct month - I have received much more jobs to do the review directly, thanks to advertisers who visit my website through some or the other channels and thanks to the ranking widget that shows my technorati and alexa ranking on the right side. These rankings overcome the Page ranking certainly. I am foreseeing your blog soon coming to those levels.
Please keep on adding useful posts for new bloggers. How about writing some more about gaining traffic.
Life is Colourful’s last blog post..Lead Management Software Review
Of course, without traffic, there’s no point it talking about making money online. Traffic is one of the main topics on our agenda, and you’ll see some articles on that very soon.
[…] You must disclose the paid reviews. You can choose for a site-wide disclosure (you can generate your own disclosure policy on http://www.disclosurepolicy.org) for Google not decrease your PR (but I’m not really sure of that) or you can identify each post as a sponsored review, if you want to be fair with your readers, but in this case you can get penalized by Google and you might loose your PR. It’s your choice. You can read some tips on how you can deal with paid posts and Google on Simonne’s article, How To Make Money With The “Paid To Post” Model. […]
[…] can earn good money, but you have to work for that. For more information you can read our article How To Make Money With The “Paid To Post” Model, where you can find also a scenario regarding possible monthly […]
[…] you decided to make money online with the paid to post model, then you need to know that more and more, the advertisers require a sitewide disclosure […]
Hi Simonne,
Tania is back with her stupid questions.
I’ve always thought about joining PPP and similar sites. But I’ve heard that most paid review offers are available only to US residents and/or to bloggers who have their own domains. These things discouraged me. This is why I still hesitate in joining such sites.
So my questions are: how much could a blogger realisticaly expect to earn, if her blogs are hosted at Blogger and if she isn’t an US resident? Would she be able to make at least $300/month (considering the average amount of paid review offers available to her in such conditions)?
Your post gave me some hope because you taught us how to deal with the PR issue (building several “disposable” blogs is a brilliant idea, I hadn’t thought of it).
Hi Tania,
There are no stupid questions, it’s normal that you ask yourself such things before investing time in schemes which may not work.
There are enough offers in PPP for people in Europe to make at least $400 per month. However, with PR0 sites you won’t be able to make not even $50 per month, because almost all posts require at least PR1. Again, many advertisers don’t accept blogspot blogs, so you’ll need your own domains, with at least PR1. You can get such domains from aftermarket (look at http://www.freshdrop.net, at Closeouts section) for $5 plus the $10 fee for the first year of registration. If you use the coupon code gdbb776 you’ll get $2 discount.
The domains will be transfered to you within a few days, then you’ll install Wordpress and write about 12 posts, dating them in the past, so your blog seems one month old. Then you’ll have to wait about 1-2 weeks until you get them approved, then you start writing, and the first money would come in 30 days from the first post approval.
Most offers available in PPP for blogs with PR1 are $7 and you are allowed to write maximum 3 per day, per blog. This leads to about $600 per month from one PR1 blog, but you’ll have to work a lot, as you need to write the in-between posts, so it makes 6 a day.
In the aftermarket you may even find domains with PR like 3 or 4, at the same cost (remember, check only the Closeouts section).
If you are not in a hurry, you can start now some blogspot blogs, grow them, gather links, and maybe at the next PR update you’ll get at least 1. But this would be just too much work only to give Google some more food for penalization. In my experience, the longest time I managed to keep a blog in PPP without losing PR was 4 months (and it was one out of three - the other two were caught at 2-3 months after I started writing paid posts on them).
Wow! Thank you very much for these detailed tips!
I’m going to take a look at that site (thanks for the link).
Well, I live in South America, which isn’t considered as important as Europe. So I may be subject to more rejection from potential review buyers.
Still, I think I’ll give this thing a try. If I succeed, I’ll let you know. And if I don’t succeed, then I’ll just move on. Regardless of it, I will continue to read your blog to learn more from you and Diana. 
Hey, I’m in Europe, so I cannot tell how it is for South America. Nevertheless, you can start with one domain, and if you don’t like the offers, you can always use it for something else, like a niche store or AdSense.