Review of Getting Paid for Blogging

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I have a confession… it’s the mom’s guilty conscious thing… and this isn’t about one of those bad parenting moments when you say something without thinking first and wonder if you just hurt your kids self esteem for the rest of their lives…or the fact that I dropped my hairdryer on the baby yesterday while she was innocently sitting in her bouncy seat (yes, it was at least off but I still feel awful). I only feel slightly not as guilty when every other parent around me fesses up to their “accidental” moments.

This is about the fact that I occasionally take money to write a post on this blog. GASP! It’s a method of adding an additional revenue stream to a business, and a large majority of blogs include Affiliate Links.

For anyone that is not familiar with Internet Marketing or Making Money Online an Affiliate link is a link in a post/article/banner for a company/product and if a reader clicks thru and buys it or signs up for something you get a percentage of $ kick backed to your account.  It’s very straightforward and it’s actually a fool proof way to make money online that costs a person nothing except the time of promoting the link and can be fully automated.

I signed up with two different companies when I started to look into the process of getting paid to blog. Linkworth and PayU2Blog.  Here is the scoop:

A summary of LinkWorth: You sign up for a free account and submit your blog to be reviewed to see if it is an acceptable blog. If you have a Blog that is full of random spam affiliate links, don’t bother trying to get accepted, they do have good standards of quality blogs… after all, I got accepted.. sorry couldn’t resist.

Once you are approved and classified, you will get emails from companies that think your blog is a fit for their company and offer you X amount of money to write about them within a certain time frame and meeting their requirements of word count, keywords and outgoing links.

Here is what I like most about LinkWorth, YOU get to APPROVE or DECLINE the offer! The ball is really in your court. What I do is visit the site, poke around and I think it’s worthy I will accept it.  If I think it’s crap, I decline it.  Yes, I hate to decline the money for something that will be about 10 minutes of work, but I don’t want my readers to have to sift through junk because you’ll get irritated (just like I do on other sites) and won’t come back and in reality, my readers are more important then a quick buck.

Now, once you approved the assignment and write up your wonderful review or post you publish it. You have several options to let them know it’s been posted, you can login and do it manually, have an html option or what I think is the easiest, use a WordPress LinkWorth Plugin that does it automatically. Perfect.  The LinkWorth team will then review the post and approve/deny the post.

My first assignment I was denied three times… I missed one certain keyword that needed to be created into an anchor text link, I fixed it and re-submitted and was approved. Within a few hours, the money was deposited into my PayPal account and I was at the mall the next day getting the kids new sneakers… just kidding, but really it is deposited into your PayPal account very quickly.

NOW, PayU2Blog is another story. I am actually very disappointed with this site and more so because I saw so many other bloggers endorse it and thought highly of it. If anyone reads this and had different results, I would love your comments posted below and I would be willing to re-examine.

First, PayU2Blog was almost the same as LinkWorth regarding the Free Sign Up process and approval period.  However, the biggest difference is you MUST complete every assignment that is put into your cue. You don’t have the option to pick and choose what you consider is high quality- or average quality for that matter.

They also don’t send you an email notification to let you know you have an assignment. You need to manually put a tickler on your calender to enter every week or two and see what you have waiting. They state every two weeks, but I waited two weeks, logged in and I had 8 assignments in my cue and 4 were already past the “post deadline”.

This is where I found that out of all 8 of my assignments, ALL of them are what I would consider spam businesses. You know, the ones that you delete from your email account about Drug Rehab centers and DeTox and well, you get the idea.  The first thought in my mind is, OK, I’m the “Mother of Four- Goddess of Chaos” talking about being a work at home mom, small business and kids….. and they want me to post 300 words on a Drug Rehab??? I DON’T THINK SO.  Don’t get me wrong, a drug rehab is very important, and I’m sure somewhere in this world there is a Work At Home Mom over the edge that has some issues and may need this service.. was it my post about struggling to wait until 5 oclock to have my glass of wine and unwind after a day of hell???

But again, as I posted in the above, I can’t write about that here, it’s totally irrelevant. I did contact Customer Service, since I signed the agreement during sign up saying I will complete every assignment in a professional manner, I felt I had an obligation to not just ignore this.  I kindly asked what the process is for giving out these assignments and if there was anyway to filter or even know if I’m going to get crap after crap because then I’m not interested.  Another black mark, I never heard back…. hmmm..

I do feel guilty, because I maybe I shouldn’t have been so naive about “posting every assignment” but it really just didn’t dawn on me that I would actually be asked to promote spam like companies.

In summary, you have to know that I love to review products/businesses/services and I mention a ton of them here because anyone who knows me, knows I’m well…. “opinionated”, some of them will be giving me money, most of them not. I just share what works or does not work for me so maybe it will help save someone else time or money or good food for thought.

I do promise that I will not promote anything that I personally do not agree with or find value. I have high standards and will keep those standards, and that’s my rambling confession for now.

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