Getting Paid to Blog

December 15th, 2006

TechnologyUh, so lately I’ve been seeing more and more “get paid to blog” type deals. Here’s a company called BlogKits that seems to be yelping in my general direction.

They claim to serve up well-paying ads to bloggers who aren’t marketers and just want to write. TechCrunch goes a little deeper, getting the founder (who looks a bit like Ricky Gervais) to mention that their target blogger is someone who gets 100 visits a day and $10 over six months with Google AdSense. I can’t say anything about ads but those numbers are well below mine.

I then came across an article from Mashable! about how to make money from social sites. There is the mention of PayPerPost (they pay you to do reviews, with or without disclosure), BlogBurst (seems to aggregate blog articles to “old media” outlets that haven’t figured out blogging is technically pretty easy), and ScooptWords (lets people buy your articles). All variations on a theme, which is the temptation of more exposure in return for cash.

But there’s a larger issue of how I would really benefit, besides the potential cash. My hosting is ten bucks a month and the day job covers all costs. Plus, I wouldn’t want to annoy what few readers I have with ads, or start looking like a splog, which I’m morally opposed to.

Basically, my web projects aren’t motivated by money. Although I joke about the “net worth” of this blog, when it comes down to it, I’m ambivalent. I recall a brief stint I had selling cellphones in retail and how the manager would play these ridiculous games like: “The next person that sells a cell phone wins all the cash my wallet!” That was the worst job I ever had, especially when some poor customer would try to return a phone they were strong-armed into buying and I’d have to break them the news they had a binding contract.

Money can be a great motivator… for screwing your fellow neighbor over. But on a lighter note, going nutty with the ads would probably be a distraction from concentrating on what really matters to me: decent writing and having fun.

Which is why I wrote up my Webomatica goals for 2007. One item was “maintain my integrity - I won’t ’sell out’ or diverge from the purpose described on my About page.” I don’t think more ads would help me with any of my goals, and may actually hurt my feeble grabs at more traffic and increasing my Technorati rank by scaring away potential readers. I can handle being called an “Apple fanboy” but definitely not a shill.

Anyhow, in the interest of fairness, I probably should spend some time investigating some of these outfits and doing blog posts about them. I meant to do this a while ago with PayPerPost but got sidetracked watching James Bond films and writing about cats and Macintosh. I suppose just as money isn’t a big motivator for me, these companies that are trying to “monetize” stuff aren’t terribly interesting to me, either.

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