Paid Blogging Ethics

I am a PayPerPost postie. I use a couple of other blogs, such as Gothic-Peach.Net & The Divine Miss Charity to write paid posts. However, I read this article on PPP’s blog today about giving advertisers more bang for their buck, and I realized that what this person was saying makes sense.

Some paid bloggers have a tendency to snap up the high paying posts, even if they know nothing about the subject or couldn’t fit the subject into their blogs. They struggle to meet the word count requirements because they have no idea what to say. What ends up happening is that they post a mediocre post about the subject. Not all PPP bloggers do this, and I am not trying to imply that they do. In fact, most bloggers will admit to Opp Orgy, that is, taking posts just to get posts regardless of content. I am one of them. I fully admit to being one of the guilty of taking whatever high paying opps I could find and posting mediocre posts at best just to have opps.

I don’t do that anymore. The ethics of paid blogging, in my opinion, require that posties carefully select their opps. If you aren’t writing about something you know about, perhaps you should let that opp slide. After all, if an advertiser asks for 10 slots, and 8 of them are mediocre posts by posties who didn’t understand the topic of the opp, that advertiser certainly isn’t going to want to come back to PPP again. So I now try to choose my opps carefully. If I don’t think I can fit them into my blog, I don’t. Granted, my blogs are more or less general blogs where I could conceivably talk about anything, and I have. Believe me, I have. But if I don’t believe I could fit it in, if I don’t think I could make a post that didn’t sound like it was forced, I won’t take it.

As for extra links in posts, I give extra links if they are requested. My reasoning behind this is, if an advertiser wanted more links than the required link, they would have said so. Going above and beyond by posting extra words is great, links can be great too, but some advertisers only want the required link. So I generally play it safe with that. As the author of the above article mentioned, this is a gray area that no one has a definitive answer to as to whether or not extra links should be given.

In short, my advice as a somewhat seasoned postie is to blog about what you know, blog about what you are comfortable with, and if you can’t fit it into your blog or you can’t figure out what you’re blogging about, leave it alone. There will be more opps in the future.

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