Make Money Online

PayPerPost has announced a new service similar to SponsoredReviews and ReviewMe – PayPerPost Direct.  If you are trying to make money blogging, this is another tool that you can use to mazimize your profits.

However, it seems that PayPerPost has done an end-run around both of their primary competitors in this direct-to-blogger marketplace.  They are only charging a 10% transaction fee for their PPP Direct service, and instead of penalizing the blogger by reducing their post amount, they are charging the 10% fee to the advertiser!

This means that if you charge $50 for a post on your blog, you will receive the full $50 from the advertiser, and they will pay a nominal $5 service fee to PayPerPost.   Compare that to SponsoredReviews, which would only give you $32.50 and keep $17.50 for themselves, or ReviewMe, which would give you $25.00 while keeping a tidy $25.00 for themselves.  All for you advertising their service on YOUR Blog!

Even more of note is that PPP Direct essentially takes the middleman completely out of the relationship between advertiser and blogger when you consider that ~ 5% of the transaction goes directly to fees charged by credit card companies (advertisers usually pay PayPerPost via credit card) and PayPal (used to compensate bloggers).  So any way you cut it, competitors are charging 7 to 10 times as much as PPP Direct does.

This increased efficiency will keep more money available to the blogger <=> advertiser relationship and will result in better pay for bloggers and better/more results for the companies choosing to advertising in this fashion.  And that is ultimately good for everyone involved.

I often run into posts from bloggers that outline how much money they make online. Often, they will also include “schwag” in their earnings reports. How do they get that, you ask? Most often, it’s received from corporations looking for a product review, or picked up at networking events or TradeShows.

But what if you don’t get out much? There’s also prizes to be won while you blog for money. For example, Pay Per Post has started HDTV Tuesdays, which is sponsored for the month of May by Bid4prizes. The past two HDTV Tuesdays had winners picking up Apple TVs and PlayStation 3s, and this Tuesday, you might be lucky enough to grab a Slingbox, Nintendo Wii, Yamaha Surround Sound System or a Logitech universal remote.

With HDTV Tuesdays, Pay Per Post is following up on their very successful “Thousand Dollar Tuesdays,” which helped engage the members of their network in pursuit of the$100, $500 or $1,000 prizes.  Members will discover the special prize opportunity as part of their normal course of working with Pay Per Post.

Is this new promotion as good as cold-hard cash?  In one way, maybe not, as you will need to pay taxes on whatever prizes you win, just like winning or making money.  However, winning a prize can be a good way to actually get something that you want, instead of postponing a purchase “until you can afford it.”

In any event, Pay Per Post is to be commended at bringing these opportunities to their members.  If you haven’t signed up yet, be sure to do so before the next Tuesday contest!

PayPerPost (PPP) has taken a beating by the “A-listers” in the blogging world, but PPP can count as its own a vast army of the unknown – small bloggers that do not bring in $10,000/month per ad placement, and are simply wondering why their blog isn’t bringing in more than $10/month in AdSense revenue.

There is no getting around the fact that the simple act of starting a blog and making a few posts will not make an author any money. Indeed, by most accounts, the majority of bloggers earn less than $100/month for their efforts. Blogs need to create significant traffic in order to monetize their efforts, and this simply takes a lot of time. Time that many bloggers can’t afford to take without any extra income.

And this is where PayPerPost has disrupted the online business model with their viral marketing service for advertisers.  PPP let’s bloggers earn money in direct correlation to a specific effort – Write a post, get paid. Before PPP arrived on the scene (and still today), most “new” bloggers would be writing content specifically geared to gaining adsense revenue (what little you can get as a new blogger), or be writing product reviews geared towards driving visitors to affiliates.

I’ve been with PayPerPost now for about 2 weeks, and with this post will hit $100 in earnings. Not much, but certainly more than I could have expected with AdSense or any affiliate programs this early in the process. What is this going to? Typical business expenses — hosting, domain name registrations, etc — that are a necessary part of growing your online business. More than anything, it has helped establish a rhythm of posting, as you need to publish non-sponsored posts in-between each of your paid posts… and that forces you to create a habit of creating and writing interesting content, which is absolutely vital to making your blog better.

My next step is to start interacting with other “Posties” that seem to be more than willing to help each other out, as evidenced by the levels of participation at the PayPerPost forums.

There are a small number of opportunities available to new bloggers within the PPP network.  By this, I mean people who are just getting started in the blogosphere who have not yet achieved a Page Rank of 3 or above, a low Alexa score (a general rating measure of how many Internet users visit your site – the lower the better) or a low Technorati rating (a measurement of how many blogs are linking to your site – again, the lower the better).

But this should not get you discouraged about PPP.  On the contrary, you should view it as an incentive to establish (and continually improve) your blog as a valuable resource on the web.

So what can you do while you are waiting for more available opportunities in PPP?  Focus on these six blogging activities to make your blog better naturally, and you will start seeing more PPP opportunities available to you as your page rank rises, more readers and rss subscriptions come to your site, and your Alexa and Technorati rankings improve.