Blogger v. Advertiser: I Switched Sides (Just for a While)

I have been on PayperPost and Smorty as a blogger for over a month now, but since my blog's PR dropped from 2 to 0, I haven't been able to take any more opportunities to blog for money (this sounds almost dirty!) since the end of last month.

I am just telling you this as you may be wondering why someone (me) who owns a Blogspot blog and didn't even bother to pay for web hosting and buy a domain name would go and spend all that money on advertising: well I didn't!

Last week, a BlogCatalog user was giving away free $100 coupon codes to advertise with PayPerPost, so I quickly grabbed one and now I am an Advertiser as well as a Blogger with PayPerPost. I guess it was a lucky break which explains the sudden surge in traffic to this blog today, as some bloggers are visiting Smart Ways to Earn Money Online to find out what the hell it is they are supposed to blog about!

Being a registered blogger with PayPerPost, they did not accept my existing email address, user name and password so I had to create a separate account for advertising; I didn't have to get a new email adress, as I already have one on the side, but if I hadn't, all I had to do was create a free yahoo, gmail or hotmail account.

For those of you who own a website or blog and are interested in advertising with PayPerPost or any other Get Paid to Blog website (I don't think there would be much difference in prices), I will let you know what $100 can afford, given my own circumstances:

- this blog only has a PR0 and since a PR0 entitles you to write only a small amount of sponsored reviews, I decided to be generous and did not request the bloggers reviewing me to have a PR either (enough now with politics).

- Since I did not request the reviewing bloggers to have a PR, I decided to make them work for their money, requesting a positive review (why would I ask for a negative review when I can get a positive one for the same price?) with a minimum of 300 words (I could have chosen a minimum of 50, but I think this little blog is worth more!).

- Let's talk about money now: once again, my blog has a (very) low PR and I did not request the bloggers writing about the smart ways to earn money online to have a High PR either so I think the minimum of $5 per review I gave them was fair.

- Prices vary a lot according to the blogs' Page Ranks and Real Ranks (I should talk about the difference between these in another post); I chose to opt for the real rank option and requested a minimum of 1-2; this could afford me 14 reviews at $5 each.

Yes, I know, 14x5=70, but how do you think PayPerPost make their money? Fees! 14 reviews at $5 costed me (and earned PPP) $29.50 in fees, so to round the figure, I got myself a fancy bold title on the opportunities list which set me back another 50cent and emptied my available balance!

I am not in a position to say whether advertising on PayPerPost has done much to increase my blog's traffic, as I assume the traffic surge I had today has been mainly caused by 14 bloggers studying my blog so they could write about it, I think it would be wiser to wait until Internet Junkie has been removed from PayPerPost's opportunities board before I can judge the full benefits; however, I am happy enough with the fact that I have gained 14 more links from other blogs, all including the main keyword I am targeting (What, you didn't notice the change in my blog's name?), all are "do-follow" and coming from blogs related to making money online, so even though these do not have a high PR, this can only benefit me in the long term (who knows, some of these blogs could grow to a PR4 or 5 in the future!).

I think I would have benefited more if I had requested the bloggers reviewing Smart Ways to Earn Money Online with Internet Junkie to have a higher PR or Real Rank, but I don't know enough yet about SEO to determine for sure which is the best: quality or quantity? What I know for sure is that I am grateful to Izea for giving me an opportunity to advertise for free with PayPerPost!