Easy Earning

Inbox Dollars pays you to read the emails that are sent to you once you sign up. It is absolutely free to sign up. Once your registration is confirmed, you’d start to receive mails that contain advertisements. You’d be credited money to read those advertisements.

To sign up at Inbox Dollars, click here

Resource A Day

Resource A Day is another paying website. It is free to sign up here too. You’d also receive a bonus of $10, just for signing up. You could earn more by referring people to this site. Once you have signed up, you’d be provided with a web page, to which you could direct your referrals. The site also provides a calculator that enables you to calculate how much you could earn with a certain number of referrals. You can also avail the several free resources provided by Resource A Day. The site also provides free tools ranging from free antivirus to free spell checkers. You’d also be introduced to special offers and trial versions.

To sign up at Resource A Day, Click here

Pay Per Post is another money making website that pays you to write about products of their advertisers. Pay Per Post, or PPP, provides a significantly higher earning chance compared to the paid email or paid survey programs.

What you are basically supposed to do with PPP is to find open oppurtunities and make use of them by writing reviews for the products mentioned in your blog or website. Apart from writing reviews, you could also earn by writing referrals.

To get started with PPP, you need to initially submit your blog, which would be evaluated. Only approved bloggers are allowed to write reviews.

My advice is to initially enhance your writing skills to their best before signing up for similar programs. If you are not a good writer or if you have adult content in your blogs, then there is every chance that you get bans, which is never a good thing to happen.

Then, there are the PPP tools. To implement the PPP tools, you must get a piece of code and implement it in your blog. This enables PPP tools in your blog. The referral program mentioned earlier is one such tool. There are a few others like the one which allows users to review posts in your blog. This increases the popularity of your blog and gets more visitors.

More visitors means more traffic and hence, more income. So, go ahead and sign up on PPP.

Yet another service has launched today that enables bloggers to write sponsored posts in return for a payment from advertisers. This one is called ReviewMe and has been talked about for a couple of weeks now in the wake of much of the controversy around PayPerPost.

Reviews cost advertisers a minimum of $40 but the cost is actually different for each blog’s statistics (ie Alexa ranking, Technorati ranking etc). The ReviewMe site says that bloggers will earn between $20 and $200 per post.

Bloggers are required to disclose that the reviews that they write are sponsored posts and they are not required to write positive reviews of advertisers products or services.

Review me is owned by Andy Hagans - a blogger who will be familiar to many ProBlogger readers.

While I’m still not a massive fan of sponsored posts (I can see a place for them when the products being reviewed are relevant to the topic of the blog - but many sponsored posts that I’ve seen bloggers posting using PPP are totally out of context of their blog’s topic) I think reviewMe seems like a better concept than the alternatives at this point.

PS: no this is not a paid review of ReviewMe - even though they’re offering some nice coin for reviews of their service.

A question that I’m increasingly being asked about is whether I agree with sponsored posts as a way to make money online from blogging.

Sponsored posts are nothing new - bloggers have been doing it for years - writing posts in exchange for payments. What is new is the organized way that the practice is happening with services popping up that match bloggers with those wanting to get blogged about.

PayPerPost is perhaps the most prominent service that does this but there are others too. They include CreamAid, inBlogAds and ReviewMe (others are popping up as well).

• So what do you think about sponsored posts as a concept?
• Have you used them?
• Would you do them?
• Under what circumstances would you do them?

I’m interested in people’s experiences and opinions on the topic and won’t cloud this post with my own thoughts on it (I’m happy to write my own opinions on it at a later point once others have had their say).

I know people feel pretty strongly about the topic either way so expect this to come through in your comments but simply ask that you keep to the topic and not take it into a personal flame war if you disagree with what others say. All opinions will be listened to and are welcomed.

It’s been months since programs like PayPerPost and ReviewMe launched - offering bloggers money to review products, sites and services.

In that time there’s been a lot of controversy around the ethics of paid reviews and whether disclosure should be compulsory or not. I don’t really want to get into that again here - but I do have a question.

• When you see a paid review on a blog do you read it?
• If you read it - do you give it any more or less authority or credibility than a non paid review?

I’m asking the question(s) without any agenda - but out of my own experience of seeing more and more blogs writing paid reviews (some blogs are doing them daily and are making good money doing so).

My own experience is that while I don’t ethically have a problem with a paid review as long as it’s clearly disclosed - that I can’t remember too many times when I’ve read them beyond the first paragraph.

Perhaps I am not a typical blog reader and have become a little hardened in my old age - but I’d really love to hear of other people’s experiences. Do you read paid reviews?

I’d also like to ask a question or three to those doing paid reviews:

• What type of response (positive or negative) have you had from readers to your reviews?
• Do you find comments on paid reviews are higher or lower than your other posts?

Again - I’m only asking this out of a genuine interest. While I’ve not gotten into the paid review game myself because it doesn’t quite fit with my style of blogging I’d love to hear from others who have - particularly around the questions of whether you feel the reviews have impacted the quality of the interactions you’re having with readers.

It looks like ReviewMe is adding another product to their range - this time it’s Advertorials.

On their Advertisers page they share what they are:

• You can browse our marketplace of top blogs and choose the blogs to run your message which you remain in full control over.
• Advertorials also feature full impression and click tracking so you can measure your return on investment.
• Advertorials are a great way to generate buzz and traffic while controlling the message and measuring your results!

They don’t seen to have officially announced it yet but what it seems like is that instead of the blogger writing the review - advertorials have more input by the advertiser. I’m hoping that they’ll be marked/disclosed as such (as they require for reviews).

OK - so as a blogger, would you use this type of service?

I’ve always had mixed thoughts on review posts. I think if they are on topic, genuine and disclosed they are one option to explore as a blogger - as long as you don’t become obsessed by posting too many of them and as long as they give actual useful information to your readers (and realize that for some readers they can be a turn off).

I personally don’t do paid reviews because I don’t want to put myself in that kind of position with my readers - however some bloggers seem to be doing well with them.

With advertorials I’m feeling similar thoughts - although am probably even further away from running them on my own blogs than running paid reviews. While I guess ReviewMe will give bloggers full control of whether an advertorial is placed on their blog (after seeing the copy) I think there are a couple of downsides to this as a blogger wanting to develop a community and relationships with readers:

• Disruption of Style/Voice - one of the potential downsides is that the voice that advertorials are written in could well be different to the voice that you write your blog on. I guess this will be a case by case thing that bloggers need to assess - but most advertorials that I read in newspapers and magazines have a certain kind of ’spin’ on them. I guess to be fair that this disruption of voice is similar to when you put a guest post up on your blog.
• Loss of Balance - the point of an advertorial is to sell something. Whether it be a product, brand or service - an advertorial is an advertisement of some sort and as a result it is not generally a balanced exploration of the pros and cons of that service. Is this what your blog is about - this is a call that a blogger will need to make for themselves.

I’m not about to reject the idea of an advertorial completely for all blogs - but I would suggest bloggers think carefully about running them or not (as I would encourage bloggers to do with any type of ad on their blog. Remember that everything that goes up on your blog either adds to or takes away from how readers perceive it - particularly those things that appear in the content areas of your blog.

They are my initial thoughts, having not seen many details of what the service entails. What do you think about advertorials on blogs?

PS: one last question that I have about this - will advertorials be unique from blog to blog? Seeing the same advertorial numerous times around a niche could become annoying to readers but also could have implications when it comes to SEO both of the advertiser and blogger - ie duplicate content. Knowing the smart SEO types behind ReviewMe I suspect they’ve given this some consideration and will be interested to see what they’ve come up with.

Update: Thanks to Patrick from ReviewMe who has made the following clarifications for us:

New Yorks’ Media Whiz advertising firm has acquired Cincinnati’s Text Link Ads. The deal was announced this morning, but the financial details aren’t being disclosed.

Text Link Ads typically sells small text ads for a fixed monthly rate, not pay per click. They advertise on blogs extensively (disclosure: including this one). The company recently released a product called “Feedvertising” that allows publishers to easily place ads from Text Link Ads, ads the publisher sells themselves directly or other messages into their RSS feeds. We use this service to promote other sites in the Crunch network. I hope that this product continues to flourish post acquisition.

Media Whiz was founded by Jason Cohen in 2001. The company offers lead generation, affiliate, display and email advertising services. It looks fairly old school to me and acquiring Text Link Ads is probably going to be a big step in moving into the emerging social media space. Jason Cohen’s previous company, Wise Ads New Media was acquired by About.com in 2000. Cohen began his career at DoubleClick. People talk about the power of PayPal alumni - I’d like to write a post about all the interesting things DoubleClick alumni are doing around the web, they’re everywhere.

There has been some amount of controversy around Text Link Ads because they don’t use javascript or “no follow” links to serve up ads on blogs and thus carry more weight with search engines than some people believe paid links ought to have. The Text Link Ads site is very clear that customers are buying inbound links and search engine weight, not just traffic. Some people contend that this is not a problem and that the more granular control over individual ads that Text Link Ads can offer its publishers by not using javascript is positive. Still others contend that “the link is dead” (perhaps because of things like links for sale) and all of this will be irrelevant soon.

Patrick Gavin, President of Text Link Ads, tells us that this is just one of several acquisitions in the pipeline at Media Whiz. It looks like a smart one; look to start seeing the Media Whiz name more and more around the blogosphere.

This is a sponsored review containing affiliate links. I’ve been using Text-Link-Ads on this blog for a while as a means to monetize it. Far and away Text-Link-Ads is the best method to make money from a blog like this, focused on small business marketing and branding. The people behind the company contacted me through the ReviewMe.com site and requested a review, and I since I have a good history with Text-Link-Ads I decided to oblige.

Bear in mind this isn’t an article about marketing or branding a business, rather a service that other bloggers may consider as a monetization method to use on their blogs. The small business niche can often be hard to monetize given the nature of the audience, so if you blog about small business or similar topics you might consider testing Text-Link-Ads yourself.

If nothing else this article will serve as a fantastic example of an online business model that generates revenue as a “middleman” service using a many-to-many system, which is ideal and affords the owners near-unlimited potential for growth and scale without significant increase in infrastructure costs. You may also find the ReviewMe model interesting because it is also many-to-many and is owned by the team behind Text-Link-Ads. Two great small businesses concepts that created unique ways to make money online and satisfy the needs of two types of users - publishers and advertisers - using the new darlings of the web media world - blogs.

How It Works

Text-Link-Ads acts as a brokering service between website owners, in particular blogs, and advertisers wishing to increase traffic by purchasing text links from other sites. Text-Link-Ads accepts blogs through an online application form, categorizes and ranks each site accepted into the program and based on things like traffic, PageRank, AlexaRank, RSS subscribers and other variables, determines how much a link costs.

The blog owners can choose where to place the links on their site, with “hotspots” returning more money. You can use the Text-Link-Ads calculator to see how much a link is worth on your site depending on where you put it and whether you chose to offer a homepage only link or a site-wide link on all pages.

Advertisers then browse an online catalogue of sites they can buy from, including data on all the metrics used to evaluate each site as I mentioned above, and purchase as many links as they like.

Text-Link-Ads takes a cut from the purchase price and gives the rest to the blog owner. The online system handles all the transactions, although there is a human-approval process on new applications.

My Results

I was one of the first bloggers offered an account at Text-Link-Ads, which I eagerly accepted hoping it might return some results on this blog because previously it had been hard to monetize the traffic. The first owner of Small Business Branding, Michael Pollock, had trouble making more than $100 per month using things like Google AdSense, which performed terribly on this site.

Text-Link-Ads sold out of my ad inventory within about a week and since then month after month I rarely have any link positions available (I chose to make 10 link positions available - the maximum amount you can offer). The result is a steady $200+ USD each and every month since I installed the links.

That’s not a huge amount but it was more than double what the site made from AdSense. I also tested other money making methods, some of which I still use today, but Text-Link-Ads has been by far the most consistent and best of all, I don’t have to do anything once it’s set up. I get automatic Paypal payments each month and I don’t have to work at all to sell the links - Text-Link-Ads does all the selling for me.

Bad Points?

The only real issue I have with Text-Link-Ads is that sometimes the advertisers who buy links seem to be a little off topic to what we write about hear at Small Business Branding. I’m not sure how good their results are but most keep renewing so they must receive some value from their purchase.

I have no issues wholeheartedly recommending Text-Link-Ads to you provided you are prepared to see links going away from your site and of course you have intentions to make money from your blog.