Darren’s article asking people if they have written paid reviews on their blog came at an interesting time since I just got notified by pay per post rejecting the review posts I wrote sometime back!
Looking at the survey question responses on problogger, its clear that the blogging community is heavily divided on this issue and emotions run pretty high on both sides!
I wrote 2 (supposedly) paid review posts and both were a negative experiences for me. First one was on the car garage guy which got rejected because I included a video in the post! Well, I thought Tim Allen’s video would make an otherwise boring review post interesting but obviously the advertisers didn’t think so!
Second post was on pay day loans, a concept that I had never heard about, before reading on their site, and was titled Strapped for cash. This post also got rejected because pay per post guys cannot find a record of me first ‘reserving’ the ‘opportunity’ before writing about it! Even if they had found the record that I did everything I was supposed to do, they would have declined to pay because there is a link to another site in the post, my bad. Sometimes including interesting links only makes these otherwise bland posts a bit better, I thought – well, so much for what I think, they refused to pay!
I also thought the post headline was pretty good, if not better than a lot of the headlines Lyndon thought up if he were to write the same article!
Although I was pretty hesitant to write these kinds of posts to begin with, I confess I got tempted to earn $7 for some 50 to 100 word post! Now that this blog got page ranked 4, I see some ‘opportunities’ for as much a $20 per post, which can add up to a nice pocket money at the end of the month.
But as soon as I wrote the posts, I received a few emails from my readers suggesting I shouldn’t take sponsored posts! I haven’t tried Simonne’s guide for excluding the sponsored posts category from RSS feeds yet , which I think is a brilliant idea, but I am wondering if this would really work with people!?! Hiding these posts from the feeds doesn’t mean people wouldn’t be upset if they decided to come to the blog to read the articles and we do want to encourage them to comment and participate in the discussions, don’t we?
So, there, as much as I would like to write some sponsored posts, I’m afraid of driving readers away from here. I am thinking of building another blog (without fresh perspectives of course), but building content to get it approved would require time!
What about you? Are you writing paid reviews on your blog?
pelf
I used to write sponsored reviews on my blog, but I realized that my readers did not respond well to them — meaning, they did not leave comments despite the fact that those posts were written from a personal point of view (not from a marketing point of view).
That, and the fact that I was paid about USD25 for each review, which I have been told was low because I write good English, and my PR and Alexa and other “jazzy” stats are impressive, and that I actually deserved more..
Ouh well..