A lot of bloggers earn money through paid to blog schemes, but these have a lot of problems involved with them. If you are thinking of starting out with these or are already involved, what must you know?

When you start out down the road of paid to blog (or paid to post) the most obvious problem can be hitting your readers with lots of adverts.

These schemes work in one of two ways. Either you are presented with lists of opportunities and have to select those you are interested in, or you are passed opportunities / jobs from the system without any prior input.

And this is the big problem that I find. If you pre-select the posts you will work with there is a lot of effort looking through what is available and bidding on the work and only a few ever turn into paid posts.

However, if you are just sent work straight away without you pre-selecting, then you get all sorts of junk. You might have chosen to categorise your blog correctly, but desperate advertisers wanting lots of posts will just select every category they see.

And systems that work this way usually punish you if you start turning down more than a few percent of the work offered to you. This leaves you with a stark choice. Either you do it and put up with perfume adverts on your business blog, or you forget the easier money systems and just use the labour intensive systems.

A related problem is the advertisers’ understanding of the way the system works. Some will give very detailed specifications as to how the post will look, telling you what it must contain, how it must be written and so on.

However, they are forgetting that you are writing an advert aimed at the readers of your blog, not an advert for national press. You, the blogger, know what attracts your readers to your blog and know your style of writing. Having a style that is totally different dictated to you can really throw the flow of your blog.

I have even had advertisers insist that the post be written in French, even though my blog and its audience are all English speakers!

Lastly, of course, is the fear of what punishment you might get from the search engines. My experience of guest posting, article directories and other times when we are publishing articles with external links suggests that as long as everything is in proportion, the search engines will probably overlook your deeds.

If you are writing 400 – 500 words and inserting 2 or 3 links, then the ratio of content to external links is quite good. However, many advertisers try to be greedy and I have seen paid posts demanding 3 external links within 30 a word write up. This is obviously the advertiser trying to pay for less, but the ratio of content to links is poor and the search engines will at best ignore the post, at worst punish your blog.

In short, if you are willing to put up with irrelevant adverts that are completely off topic and do not mind sometimes writing a lot more than the advertisers are paying for to keep your content to link ratio good, then paid posting can succeed.

However, if you are expecting a lot of offers themed around your blog’s content you could be very disappointed and quickly walking away!

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