Saturday, February 23, 2008

Earn Money With Paid To Post

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:

  1. 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)
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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).
  5. 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)
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.