Get Paid To Post Without Losing Your Soul
This post sponsored by PayPerPost.
So, this wasn’t really planned to be the first post in the Siteonomics section of the site, although there is a nice irony to be it being so. Siteonomics is my little word for monetizing your site, which is to say, making some scratch from all your hard work. There are many different things people do to monetize their sites, and I’ll cover plenty of them over the coming months. That said, there is one thing you absolutely must not do. If you do it, you will kill your site and any chance to make any money at all. That thing is selling out.
Now, some would say that any attempt to make money from your blog or site is selling out. To them, I say “good luck with that.” There is nothing wrong with making money from your work, however creative it may be. Novelists earn royalties. Artists sell their work if they can. Musicians get paid for gigs. Regardless of whether some folks might find is gauche, getting paid for something is our society’s main way of saying that the something has value. The payment might be indirect such as commercials during TV shows or it might be unequivocally direct such as commissioning a work of art. It can be the two bits you toss into a busker’s guitar case, or it can be Budweiser deciding to sponsor a charity event.
Back to the not selling out part. The trick to all of these examples is that the person doing the work doesn’t compromise their ideals in the process. Compromise is a somewhat fuzzy word, of course. Would the tv producers rather not have commercials during their shows? Maybe, although they have certainly learned to use the commercial brake as a structural element to their story telling. Does the charity change what they do because they were sponsored by a brewing company? I hope not. If they did, that would be selling out. That’s the trick. Do what you do, and find a way to make some money from it. Sure, it sometimes means playing your guitar in the park for some change instead of in your apartment. And it means you have commercials in your tv shows and you maybe tweak the ending of your novel to keep your editor happy. But you have to find the level of compromise that doesn’t change what you are trying to say or do. It is a personal choice and it should be. I can’t tell you where the line is that you shouldn’t cross; you have to figure that out for yourself.
All of which brings us to the actual topic of this post, which is getting paid to post about a given topic or product or service. At first blush, this sounds like an absolutely phenomenally bad idea. How much clearer can you get on the subject of selling out that writing an endorsement of something because you were paid to do so?
Well, it is not quite that simple and there are ways to do it and still stay true to your site’s purpose. First, there is the very simple solution that you are not being forced to post about anything you don’t want to. Maybe a cigarette company will ask you to put a post on your alternative medicine site about the healing power of nicotine. They have deep pockets and offer a nice payout for a positive spin. It doesn’t matter. No matter how much they are offering, there is nothing that says you have to accept the offer. So can pick and choose the offers you accept. If a publisher wants you to push their book without necessarily even reading it, you don’t have to do it. On the other hand, if you know the author’s work and generally like it, there isn’t anything really wrong with saying so and mentioning that a new book by her is coming out and you are looking forward to it. And if the book would be of interest to your readers it is even good for your site, creating the often mythical win-win situation.
A second piece of dealing with this little ethical dilemma has to do with disclosure. Tricky bit, this. If you don’t tell your readers that you are being paid, that is dicey business. On the other hand, if you do tell them, they might feel you are selling out even if you are being careful not to. My advice is to be as upfront and open and forthcoming as possible with your readers. Tell them the deal. Yes, you will sometimes accept payment for posts, but you will only do so for things that are actually worthwhile. No, you will not try to shove crap down their throats just because of a check from crapco. Yes, it feels weird, but you hope they will understand that you would like a little payback for all your work.
As far as how you go about getting paid to post, there are plenty of services out there to hook up bloggers with sponsors. As with all things in life, however, some of them are less meticulous that others. A good one that has been around for a while is PayPerPost v4.0. They make it very easy to review offers before accepting them, to set what level of payment you accept, and to let advertisers know what your site is about. They have been around since 2006 and it their fourth major version is in beta now. If you’ve checked them out before, you will be either happy or dismayed at the web2.0ishness of the new version. I personally like it, but the old look never bothered me either.
The new version has only just been opened to advertisers — it had been invitation only — so there are not a lot offers yet. Given their track record, this should improve soon, so it is not a serious concern just yet. And they have a very strict policy on disclosure. See the top of this post, where is says “This post sponsored by PayPerPost”? That’s the level of required disclosure in most cases, although some sites do enough of this to make a sitewide disclosure more palatable. If you don’t like the terms, you can just ignore the offer and wait for something else to come along. The requirement of disclosure makes me more comfortable working with them and I don’t mind writing about them because their service certainly has its merits.
Getting paid to post is not for everyone or for every site. But if it something you want to try, you can do it without selling out. Just figure out your boundaries, be upfront with your readers, and go for it.
Leave a comment