PageRank punishment

I have noticed that in the last week or so, some of my newer blogs that had PR, have been slapped presumably for carrying PPP or associated paid to blog posts. I have only done a few paid posts on these blogs but it seems that these few posts have had an effect on PageRank.
I had two blogs which had started to build up PR, one was ranked 2, the other 1 - these have lost a ranking point each. Not a huge problem you would have thought except that once more the opportunities that I was getting for these blogs have depleted from an average offering of between 8-12 posts each time I logged into PPP, (usually about four actually available) to currently about 4 (one of which is available). So ironically, it is the taking part in PPP which is lessening the opportunities I am offered.

There are doubtless several ways in which Google can 'detect' PPP opps, firstly there is the tinyURL link that you sometimes have to use - these could easily be sniffed out by Google. then there is the fact that the jobs are so specific with the link requirements, that using the 'link:' search function would throw up all the links that had been put on the internet in the duration of the opp on PPP. Who's to say that there are not Google employees with accounts at PPP using the information from each oppotunity to search for paid bloggers??
The upshot is that the more PPP you do the less likely you will be able to do PPP again because your PR will come down and opps will dry up.

No such worries with PayU2Blog thankfully as the jobs keep coming regardless of PR - there was a bit of a rush before Christmas, and it has been quiet since, but I noticed a few more PU2B opps today so I will have something to do at the weekend...

PPP revival

Having moaned at the fact that PPP dropped munny4hunny, I should point out that they were quite justified in doing so, and I will be able to limit paid postings on M4H to just PayU2blog opportunities.
You have to complete 10 posts on a PPP blog before you can add an extra blog to your PPP account, once M4H was removed, I was left with one blog registered with PPP which only had three paid posts on it. I have had to complete another seven posts just so that I can register another different blog for PPP opps.
On one hand it was a bit of a pain, but as it happened I managed to find posts quite quickly and of course, it means that I have generated some PPP revenue this month which will help to boost the monthly earnings.
I will take more care of the paid post ratio in the future, but would point out that if you plan to use PPP and PayU2blog on the same blog, you are going to have to generate an awful lot of content to keep the paid to non-paid ratio acceptable for PPP. Hence I will not be mixing these two schemes on the same blog for the future.
Those blogs that I may use PPP on, will have regularly generated new content anyway so there will be less pressure to scout around for fresh material. However, they both have a PageRank, so it will be interesting to see if the PR will be sacrificed as has happened previously.

PayPerPost too fussy?

Since PPP were no doubt the market-leaders about 12-18months ago, there was no problem with them making their 'posties' jump through hoops to get approved. You had to have a ninety-day old blog, there had to be so many posts and you could not have more than a 1:2 paid to non-paid ratio etc.. etc..
They seemed to relax their rulings a little after the great 'google slap' where, let's face it, having PPP on your blog was the main reason for losing PageRank. Presumably at that point PPP lost a lot of blogs and relaxed the rules to try to pump the numbers back up. I doubt whether many of the blogs that left have yet gained their PR back, but that's another story...I have found it a lot easier to complete PayU2blog opps in the meantime, they come thick and fast, and are very easy to complete and have very quickly proved to be at least as good at income generation as the slightly jaded PPP - plus they pay in two-week slots so you get paid a lot quicker than with PPP.
Due to the rate of paid posting on this blog generated by PayU2blog, PPP have deemed this to be against TOS and munny4hunny is no longer a PPP participant. Is this fair? Yes...why not their money, their rules. In the words of a well-known UK comedian: Am I bovvered? Well, I was a bit put out, but I am making very little from them and now at least I don't have to worry about their TOS and about placing the IZEA rankings code on my blog signalling to Google loud and clear that I am a paid blogger and don't deserve any PR!
Talking of IZEA, I don't know what you have found, but I have not found it to be a welcoming experience more of a totally confusing one, and couldn't even be bothered to do the one opp I was offered which was to post about how great IZEA is... I can see how they are trying to combine a social experience with paid posting opportunities, but the result is a site which honestly does neither thing terribly well - I have found other paid posting sites to be easier to use, and I have found other social sites to be better for finding like-minded acquaintances.

IZEA rankings

I have had trouble with my IZEA ranking since I changed to a dot com, initially my IZEA rank was zero, which admittedly is a nice low number (??!!) but not one that was any use to me. I tried re-registering for IZEA rank, but kept getting an error from the URL in the confirmation email.
I then had to take the drastic step of completely removing the PPP script from the HTML of the blog (I tried this before but put it back after three days with no change...). This time, after a couple of days, my ranking went meteoric up to beyond 22,000 - not much use to anyone, but at least something was happening. I put the script back in and after a couple more days I am back with a respectable rank again... This has been a long hard struggle during which I have been relying on other sources of income and have even started a new blog...

What you can find here...

It's sometimes difficult to ascertain the flavour of a blog from the first few posts, and I am aware that in the last week or so, in my efforts to be a helpful blogger this month - my blog looks more like a free software review site...
So for newcomers (welcome!), Munny4hunny is a site which has reviewed and signed up to a selection of different paid to post schemes (see 'quick-search' in the side-bar). I pursued maximum paid to blog earnings in May, and managed $184 on my PR2 blog. My aim since then has been to raise PR so that I can try for higher earnings. Consequently June was my 'increase popularity' month where I dragged my Technorati Authority up from 23 to it's current level of over 340. This month (July) is my helpful blogger month, where I will be posting tips and hints, answering questions and pointing the way to some excellent free software for PC users everywhere. If I find any good competitions, I will post about those too. When pagerank has been updated, I will be in a position to blog for maximum earnings again, and I for one will be interested to know how much more can be earned with extra pagerank (assuming my rank goes up!!).
I have not blogged for cash for a while now, and that is mostly down to the lack of opportunities open currently. PPP opp's are snapped up really quickly nowadays, and I can't be bothered to wait around for the juicy adverts. Other schemes seem dismally quiet and have remarkably few opp's, and even then I find some of the opp's are not the sort of thing I want to support anyway. I don't promote gambling or plastic surgery... I have even seen opp's for escort agencies, which I won't do either... there was decent offer from Creamaid, but the subject was female fashions and I couldn't get in touch with my feminine side sufficiently to bring myself to create a post for it.
I wonder if the thrill of being paid to blog is wearing off for me?
I am sure a new improved pagerank will change all that - leave me a comment if you have the inside track on when page rank will be updated.

PPP have $7m in new funding...!

Hot off the press is the news that PPP have SEVEN MILLION BUCKS TO SPEND!! To celebrate, a 7 day promotion entitled LUCKY 7's has been launched.
For this particular opportunity PPP are asking what we think the money should be used for. Well, what could be better than spreading the rewards amongst the posties themselves... Over the next week seven thousand dollars worth of opps will be launched carrying rewards of $10.77, $70.00 or $700.00 and any PPP postie will be allowed to take one of each while they are still up for grabs... I'll reiterate that bit... ANY postie whatever your page-rank or URL.. If you only visit the PPP opps pages once in a blue moon, make sure it's during this coming week or you could miss out on $700!!. In fact if you get one of each opp completed, you could earn a total of $770.77 from these special opportunities. Make sure you're part of the Lucky 7's buzz and get involved right now...
If you have not signed up for PPP before then this is the week to get involved, PPP have a strict policy on blog ethics protecting interests on every side. PPP ask you to report your honest opinion and not to complete opportunities if you have a conflict of interest or cannot be honest.
In order to ensure more revenue in the future, it would be prudent to invest some money in promotion of PPP in general and maybe in research into new ways for PPP to generate opportunities for us in the future. PPP is already the market leader, so I think they should think about using the money to keep ahead of the game. See the Press release below:

Press Release:

The PayPerPost Revolution Accelerates, Sponsored Blogging Marketplace Secures $7 Million Series B

Draper Fisher Jurvetson leads round and joins Board of Directors

ORLANDO, FL – (June 12, 2007) – PayPerPost, the leading marketplace for advertisers to reach bloggers and other consumer content creators, today announced it has completed a $7 million second round investment led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, an investor in the company's Series A and one of the world’s leading high-technology venture capital firms. The financing brings the total amount of capital raised by PayPerPost to over $10 million, giving the company considerable resources for further development as the industry’s leading Consumer Generated Advertising marketplace. Additional participants in the round include existing investors Inflexion Partners and Village Ventures as well as new investor DFJ Gotham. With this investment, DFJ Managing Director Josh Stein also joins PayPerPost’s Board of Directors.

“PayPerPost created this exciting new advertising space and has established itself as the industry leader,” said Ted Murphy, chief executive officer of PayPerPost. “Although we’ve only used a portion of our first round capital, this added support from investors unlocks significant growth potential. Our content creator and advertiser ROI metrics clearly demonstrate the upside for PayPerPost’s model. We intend to use this capital to build the infrastructure, visibility and professional expertise necessary to reach and retain a greater network of advertisers and content creators than ever before.”

Since its founding in June of 2006, PayPerPost has signed more than 6,500 advertisers to its groundbreaking service, which has enabled Consumer Content Creators to be compensated for their efforts discussing specific companies, products or services via blogs, videos or other media. The content creators are required to disclose relationships with advertisers on their blog, providing transparency for the end reader. Over 125,000 Internet postings, most in the form of blogs, have already earned money for their creators through PayPerPost’s innovative marketplace. PayPerPost recently released PayPerPost Direct, a disruptive new service that allows advertisers to contract and negotiate directly with individual bloggers they identify through a safe, managed system.

“PayPerPost has laid a strong foundation for the future,” noted Tim Draper, founder and managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. “It continues to attract a critical mass of participants from both the advertising and blogging communities. Analogous to Overture’s sponsored search model, we believe PayPerPost’s business model holds disruptive potential and will enable the company to thrive in the evolving paid-content arena.

” To mark the $7 million dollar funding, PayPerPost has launched a new website detailing the company’s service offering at http://www.payperpost.com. Bloggers and advertisers can easily sign up at the site and begin leveraging the self service marketplace.

Paid to blog update

SMORTY.COM is the latest paid to blog service that I have registered for, most of these type of services are very similar to each other, but there are some distinctive points worth remarking upon regarding smorty:

• You get paid weekly!!
• You have 72 hours to claim an opportunity
• You may post your opinion, you are not required to endorse any product or service
• Minimum 150 words, maximum 400 words per post

Initially there were just three opportunities available, but a fourth one appeared this week, and I remain hopeful that other opportunities will be offered. I have been paid for the first weeks 'work' so can report that much at least.

This month has proved that as far as earning potential is concerned, no other service can get near PayPerPost in my opinion. Even for a PR2 blog like Munny4Hunny, there are new opportunities every day ranging from $5 to $15. If you have a PR6 blog, earnings can be in the hundreds for a single post...

Blogsvertise appears to have all but dried up for this blog at least.

I am new to Bloggerwave, but at the moment, I have completed three offers and no more have appeared - but I can report that they have paid out and the money is sitting in my paypal account...

My one other source of income that I have not really talked about until now is an online survey company.
Ciao pay out in £GBP, they send me surveys by email, I fill out the survey and cash rewards are credited to my account. This did not yield anything for the first couple of weeks, but then the surveys started coming in. It has proved a useful additional income which doesn't take as much creative brainpower as paid to post. Most surveys start with a few questions to determine whether you are a suitable candidate, and I qualify for about half of the surveys I am sent. The payouts are small but not a bad return for minimal effort. For ease of comparison, I have assumed an exchange rate of $2US to £1GBP. They also offer opportunities to do product reviews but I haven't really worked out how this works yet...

I will add the latest paid to blog schemes to the 'quick search' in the side bar and look forward to posting actual earnings for May 2007 very shortly...

Making hay while the sun shines

Well yesterday was an odd day for posting… I slipped up firstly because I saw a few days ago that there were three new opps in PPP with $8-$10 rewards (that’s about the most I usually get offered for posts on a PR2 blog). I figured that I would select them over the next week or so – That was my mistake… I logged in the next day, and although they were potentially long-running campaigns, they had already disappeared - I guess the quota of ads had been taken by all those eager PR2 bloggers out there…
At the same time I decided to investigate PPP TOS (terms of service) – see below .. and discovered that you can actually publish three PPP opps per day (if you post other stuff in between).

I hadn’t planned to go down the multi-post route, but had visited PPP and found two NEW opps for $8 and £10, so I naturally started on the better-paid one.
I completed the post, did all the research and added in a media file only to find that when I went to ‘accept’ the offer, I got re-directed out of the PPP website. This happened at least three times, so I thought I would leave that post in ‘drafts’ and see if I could do the other one.

I completed the second post after extensive research and much creative thinking (!) and that one went through fine. I got on with the job of re-writing my ready-prepared draft of the days’ personal post, and when I had finished, I went back to PPP to see what changes had taken place (I logged a ‘ticket’ about the faulty ‘accept’ URL). I tried the same offer again and this time it worked – with no further ado, I published my already completed post, added in the widgets and had two PPP ads up and running on the same day. This left me with having to create another personal post, so I completed another post in order that there was no chance of having two PPP ads sitting next to each other.

Lessons learned:

• PPP have an ever-changing range of offers – call back often


• These offers are taken quickly – take what you can while you can


• Have several ready-made personal posts in ‘drafts’ or stored somewhere so you can ‘whip em out’ when you need to pad your ads out…

PPP update

I have been reading Payperpost terms of service and noted some interesting rules that you could easily miss:

• You may post three PPP opps per day
• You must post personal posts in between PPP posts
• You must post a personal post at least every seven days
• A personal post submitted on the same day as a PPP post does not count towards the one post every seven days

So beware! If you use the strategy I was aiming for ie. one PPP followed by one personal post, then you must ensure you continue to do personal posts but have at least one day off PPP in seven...otherwise you may be contravening the TOS. Of course you can make up for it by posting two or three opps a day...

I have added one other source of income - a UK survey company that pays a small amount for completion of online surveys. It took a while to be offered a survey, but they seem to be arriving regularly now - I will post about this at another time. Blogitive continues to reject my advances, as does Loudlanch - I will need to scout around for another source of income before the end of the month.

PPP - why do I love thee?

blog reviews
I am new to Payperpost as my blog has only very recently reached to 90 day minimum age. I have eagerly anticipated being able to take part in this scheme and have not been disappointed with my experiences so far. I am signed up for several different paid to blog services, but PPP offers a wider range of oportunities than any others I have seen. This post will be the third opportunity that I have been able to complete in just 11 days and I shall be receiving a total of $27 for those three posts should they all be approved (one down, two to go...). I have been fussy about the opportunities I have chosen to take, if I was less principled I could have blogged about gambling and earned another $15 from a single post (all this for a blog with a PR of 2!). You will see me blog about PPP with equal enthusiasm even when I am not paid to do so later this month. If your blog is 90 days old and you would like to blog for cash, then Payperpost is a must-try scheme - if your blog is less than 90 days old, mark the 90 day date on your calendar and get ready to advertise on blogs.

Update

Good News today! Not only did I get a referral for a conversation in Creamaid, but I got TWO referrals... More about this when I post earnings for this month. On top of this I have been accepted for PayPerPost, which is great news - I have yet to find a suitable offer, but I hope to get more active with PPP soon. As you will be aware from the buzz, Page Ranks have been allocated - I have a PR of 2 on this and my other blog, and the rank on my website has gone from 2 to 3. Overall, I was not disappointed until I realised how many more opportunities I could have blogged for in PPP if I had one more Page Rank point...
I have spent the last weekend devising a new heading banner for Munny4Hunny (hope you like it!), adding a search list at the top of the sidebar, a new time-widget, and general tidying up - I also did a quick mini-banner, but it really needs some work...
Next post will be earnings, then the quest to make May profitable begins in earnest...

On a different tack, if you need a laugh today......take a look at this (If only all mankind could have as much fun today as this little fellah is having!)