Scandal

Write scandalous or convenient half-truths to fire up a link and traffic fest in the blogosphere, gain subscribers and push contextual or niche adverts at them.

Advertorial With Disclosure

In many ways a paid post or an advertorial is a more honest form of content monetization than conventional advertising. All the cards are on the table in clear sight.
As long as there is clear disclosure and the content is relevant and interesting to your readership, there is nothing wrong with the occasional paid post.

Paid Reviews

In fact paid reviews can be one step better than advertorials in magazines, because a blogger can choose to treat the review as if they were hired in a consulting role, and are publishing the results

Example of a Paid Review

Here is an example of a paid Review I have just written for Volusion

• There is not even a hint of the paid review affecting my opinion
• There is no question of bias towards the product
• I have provided what I feel is constructive criticism that will hopefully help improve the service for both current and future customers

They could always hire a “consultant” to tell them something similar for $2000 per hr, or maybe pay a marketing company to set up a focus group.

Why not pay a college student $20 to fill out a 1hr survey or questionnaire about a product they would never use?

Asking a blogger for a real opinion about a product, and being willing to pay them some compensation for the time invested is a very worthwhile method of gaining feedback, and is not buying opinion.

Please don’t give me the SEO argument either, Volusion have 1000s of links and the few they would receive from this review or any others are really insignificant.

Hmm, I think I might join up with Pay Per Post and with their new affiliate program get people to write reviews of the review I did of Volusion for ReviewMe.

It is five years, almost to the day that Yahoo started charging $299 per year for a listing in their directory as this article on Pandia clearly illustrates.

The main benefit of being in the Yahoo directory isn’t traffic, it is pagerank / trustrank. Who actually uses the Yahoo directory for anything other than listing their own sites?
It is many years since I went to Yahoo to lookup an entry for anything other than a competitor in a niche.

In all those 5 years, I haven’t heard anyone suggest that Yahoo should use “nofollow” for all the directory listings. All commercial websites don’t have a free option to get listed.

It is widely believed that a Yahoo directory listing is given a significant search engine weight.

Commercial Internet

Big business has a huge advantage over the little guy on the internet. Lets take Ebay as an example.

Many shoppers wouldn’t realise it, although the relationship is made very clear, that Epinions.com is owned by Shopping.com, which is itself owned by Ebay.com.
There is lots of interlinking between the different sites, though it could be achieved in a much more search engine friendly way. There is certainly no clear notification by every link that money is being made on every purchase.

Whilst reviews are user generated, there is certainly editorial control over which products are positioned prominently to maximise sales.

2006 in Perspective

Bloggers have been victimising PPP and to a lesser extent Reviewme.

Google, who claim to “do no evil” are actively discouraging paid posts and paid links from small services. They are suggesting that “nofollow” should be used to denote paid links, rather than their previous intent, untrusted sites (for various reasons).

Google unfortunately made paid links from Yahoo “saintly” since the beginning of their existence. It is only $300 and Yahoo receive payment even if they don’t include your site.
Google don’t regulate major corporations from cross-linking commercially.

During 2006 I have seen Google likened to God.

2007 A Reality Check?

My hope is that bloggers come down to earth a little, because the ranting and raving about paid posts is really displaying quite clearly how narrow-minded they are.

Paid posts and paid links give the little guy a chance to make some money writing about and linking to relevant content. They give the site linked to a greater chance of competing with the massive corporate machines as well as valuable feedback.

There is recent news that PayPerPost have acquired Performancing metrics. Nick at Performancing can be blunt, crude and highly opinionated. He is also a damn smart and ethical guy.
If you have been listening to his recent podcasts, you would know that he has been looking for someone to take metrics onboard for quite some time, as it was a money sink, and he was also talking to VC Dan Rua.
I have mentioned in the past that I have nothing but respect for the PPP guys. The PPP guys didn’t create any scandal, bloggers did it themselves. PayPerPost didn’t object to the free publicity, but in all the comments I have seen made by PPP guys in response to huge amounts of criticism, they have made some quite compelling counter arguments, and taken any criticism as genuine feedback.

I have seen people suggesting that they are going to be immediately cancelling their Performancing metrics accounts for ethical reasons.
Almost every advertiser and affiliate network you work with on your sites is gathering data. PayPerPost seem to have some smart guys backing them with VC funding.

PayPerPost are a business. With VCs backing them, they are not going to take risks in regard to personal data.

Why should PPP be compelled to enforce disclosure when Yahoo doesn’t proclaim “These are paid links?”

From what I have seen of PPP opportunities, they are in the main not for product reviews. It is quite possible they would be totally unaffected by the recent FTC / WOMMA discussion.

Create Great Content and Links Will Follow?

Give it time… maybe. Most websites don’t attract a lot of natural linkage. You can get a few links from various directories for free, though many more require payment – paid links are evil remember?

You can also gain lots of links from things like article marketing or press releases.

But that isn’t the natural linking Google say you should be looking for, to your great content, though I suppose a few sites pick up articles and press releases manually, most collect them automatically based by category of keyword searches.

# natural links per post = blog readership / 1000

That is a very rough figure because many blogs gain far more links, and many gain far less.

Techcrunch doesn’t gain 140 links for every post they make, and I gain more than one link on average for every 5 posts. Then again a large number of the links I gain are from splogs picking up tags used on Technorati.
There seems to be a critical mass for the number of links a single post can expect to receive unless it is exceptional linkbait.

Pay For Your Traffic

You can pay Google $0.15 for some traffic. If 1 in 1000 visitors decides to link to you then that link cost you $150. Hopefully you can convert some of the traffic into customers or subscribers because otherwise that is a horrendous cost, paid to Google as an alternative to natural search.

Who gains more money if paid links and sponsored content is condemned?

Trust and Duplicate Content

Linking through to someone is most of the time a statement of trust. You are sharing your visitors, subscribers, and maybe your customers with the other site. If you link through to them it should always be a followable link, unless you don’t trust them.

Google recommend always linking through to the original source if you syndicate content so they can determine the origin. The same would be true for any quotations. If you quote anything from a site, you should thus always use a followable link.

Techcrunch and Pay Per Post seem to have a love/hate relationship. Who will Techcrunch write about now that Pay Per Post with their requirement of disclosure can no longer be pinpointed.

Some of the comments on the latest Techcrunch post are quite revealing…

Here are some quotes from Michael Arrington

baby steps, Ted. Just writing something positive about your company nearly killed me.

and a bit later on…

The Foo – you are right. Controversy sells.

PayPerPost have actually been encouraging disclosure for some time, with their launch of DisclosurePolicy.org and even in recent blog post giving tips on disclosure.

Jim Kukral is claiming the change in policy was in some way down to him and wants some credit.
But Jim is just one of 100s of bloggers who have given their views, and certainly doesn’t mention in any of his posts relating to PayPerPost that he is the founder of a competing monetization model to PayPerPost.
Also just because it is now official policy doesn’t mean it wasn’t highly recommended for some time.
It should be noted that the minimum cost for using PPP as an advertiser has been increased to cover the costs for both PPP and a “postie”. If you se a rule in stone, you also have to police that rule. But having it voluntary (but a good idea) in the past, it didn’t need to be policed.

Now if Jim was using WordPress instead of MT, he would be able to use my disclosure policy plugin.

There has been quite a bit of affiliate discussion going on. Teli posted about this the other day, and I just read what Terry posted

Lynn Terry is a marketer I highly respect, and has been exploring paid posting for quite some time. Lynn has always used disclosure within the content. She might find using my plugin will save some time, and make it easy to change the wording on disclosures at a later date if necessary.

Paul has been looking at disclosure in regards to podcasting. I detect a little bit of sarcasm there. If he adopted my disclosure policy plugin on his multiple blogs, he might find it much easier to manage.

Of course the legal aspects of disclosure are very important, and Colette Vogele has expressed her views on disclosure. Hmm, how much can I quote of what a lawyer says? Ah, a clear creative commons license. So maybe I will quote a little more than 1 sentence.

First of all Colette stated

A badge on your blog site reflecting the sponsorship or affiliation or a statement in the disclosures at the end of your podcast would make sense to me.

But then Colette went a little beyond that

I think you’d need to go beyond a statement in the website terms of service, if not for the legality then for the sake of maintaining the trust of your readers. I think this way because, other than me (and perhaps lawyers like me), who reads terms of service documents? They are *very* important in my opinion, but the average reader will not click the link and go on to read it. So, if you’re goal is to not hide the ball from your reader/listener, then burying the affiliations in your terms of service doesn’t sound like the best practice to me.

This is why my disclosure policy plugin allows you to add disclosures in all kinds of ways within the content of your blog, and in RSS feeds.

It is funny, but with all the mentions of PPP I have made over the last few weeks, if I was actually a “postie” I could probably have earned $40 by now. But I am not, in fact I have no commercial relationship with PPP whatsoever.

I do respect them. VC Dan / DP Dan who is one of their investment partners is highly active in the blogging community. Some might look on that as damage control, spin control or protecting his investment. There might be a little bit of that, but it is highly interesting reading his replies in the comments, as not only does he show a positive outlook for the PPP business as a whole, he also proves he has done a huge amount of research about the industry before he made an investment, and I believe honestly listens to feedback.

Seo Blog has a solid overview of how each search engine treats nofollow.
I am not sure the final conclusion regarding Yahoo and treating nofollow for ranking purposes is correct. I know many people who have done well with blog comments with Yahoo search, even on blogs using nofollow. I haven’t got any recent data.

Michael Campbell has written an overview of the differences between nofollow and dynamic linking. In summary the effect can be the same and it is much easier to implement nofollow. It is maybe not always the same if you think of the previous article and Yahoo stats.

There is also some interesting discussion on the use of NoFollow with ReviewMe reviews today.

Darren Barefoot posted a review of some backup software. He has made a policy decision that any post he makes that is sponsored will be linked using “nofollow”.

This has been picked up by Jim who has been following about paid posts recently.

This has also been discussed on Tris Hussey’s blog.

Darren Barefoot’s main arguement is that he has done this so that he doesn’t have to make a decision with each post, which I suppose is fair enough. He does however suggest that he will be posting sometimes about sites that may not fit his readership, or that he is effectively only posting because he is being paid to do it.

My ReviewMe Opinion

You shouldn’t be reviewing stuff if it doesn’t relate to your blog and your readers.
Any money you might get is a bonus.
If you review a site, and your opinion isn’t totally negative, I personally would give them a useful link. A long-term link on my blog, even from the comments or a trackback, is probably worth more from an SEO perspective for someone’s site than a link in the old content of many top bloggers.

Darren Rouse (yes a different Darren), did a short interview at Bloggertalks.com discussing among other things paid posts.

Here is an excerpt, but you really should read the full thing.

Having said that – I don’t do paid posts and wouldn’t recommend other bloggers do them unless:

* the product or service that you’re reviewing is highly relevant to the topic of your blog – will your readers be interested in the post?
* you’ve got something of value to say about the product/service – will your post be useful to readers?
* you’re genuine and give both pros and cons of the product/service – are you being true to yourself and your readers?
* make a disclaimer that you’re being paid to write the post – are you being transparent about your motivations for writing the post?

Don’t forget to read the full interview

Why is a link here worth more for SEO?

As an example just 1 month ago Robert Scoble linked through to me. I had a small spike in traffic that weren’t really interested in what I had written. It was approximately 500 visitors, but only a fraction clicked through to a previous post on the same subject, and only a couple cared to leave a comment here.
For a day or 2, a Google search for Andy Beard would show Robert’s post in the top 10 results. Then it slipped to page 2, and now it is already on page 3.
In 2 or 3 months time that link will be totally worthless for passing on pagerank. Once content leaves the front page, it enters free-fall in a bottomless crevass.

On my blogs, I generally create lots of safety nets, and I am stiving to also create a fixed platform such that content can only drop down a short way from the spotlight.

Would I Do Paid Posts?

Yes… but not for the reasons most people would do them.

I value my time, and the $30 I would currently get from ReviewMe to do any justice to a review just wouldn’t cover my time.

But any niche website is relevant to this blog

1. I can quite happily rip apart the SEO and offer some improvements
2. I can also comment on the monetisation, sales page etc.

In fact ReviewMe might be an easy way for me to find Victims.

Disclosure?

I have actually been thinking about disclosure for a long time. Disclosure is a total pain on a blog, not so much from an ethical point of view, but management.

• You have to type all this junk every time you even mention a company.
• Maybe today you have no financial relationship, and then in 6 months the same firm is a major sponsor of your blog, and you get some search traffic to your old content.
• Maybe you are on best of terms with someone today, maybe working for a company such as Microsoft, and you are writing a personal blog. A year later and you now work for Google.
• Maybe you are a lawyer, and want to include some kind of disclaimer on all your blog posts pertaining to legal advice. That might actually be something a law or health related blog might want.
• Then of course political blogs have to be very careful about open disclosure.

Disclosure Policy Pluginâ„¢ for WordPressâ„¢

It exists, development started at the beginning of November, and it was meant to be a very fast development project. But I kept on adding features, and those inevitably caused bugs to creep into the code that cause more delays. I will probably release a beta version either tomorrow or most likely Monday.

There are more features I want to add to it, but as more and more people are having different ideas about they wish to handle disclosure now and in the future, I think it is best to get this “out there” so that they won’t have to edit even more old content.

Yes, this was another one of my rambling posts that went off in lots of different tangents. The big question is…

Was it worth reading all the way to the end?

They provide you with a series of example phrases which you select, and eventually generate a final Disclosure Policy.

It is a useful service, even if like me you don’t expect PayPerPost content to appear on your blog.

Here is what I generated with it

This policy is valid from 31 October 2006

This blog is a sponsored blog created or supported by a company, organization or group of organizations. For questions about this blog, please contact  Andy Beard.

This blog accepts forms of cash advertising, sponsorship, paid insertions or other forms of compensation.

The compensation received may influence the advertising content, topics or posts made in this blog. That content, advertising space or post may not always be identified as paid or sponsored content.

The owner(s) of this blog is compensated to provide opinion on products, services, websites and various other topics. Even though the owner(s) of this blog receives compensation for our posts or advertisements, we always give our honest opinions, findings, beliefs, or experiences on those topics or products. The views and opinions expressed on this blog are purely the bloggers’ own. Any product claim, statistic, quote or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer, provider or party in question.

The owner(s) of this blog would like to disclose the following existing relationships. These are companies, organizations or individuals that may have a significant impact on the content of this blog. We have a financial interest in the following that are relevant to our blogging: various example niche websites or services.

To get your own policy, go to http://www.disclosurepolicy.org

You are also given permission to change it as much as you like.

It is not a final proof, but it does give you a reasonable backbone to work with to produce a final document. (which I will probably do, I have been a little lax in this department on this new home for my blog)
If you can’t generate income from your time invested & content in other ways, I suppose PayPerPost is a viable option, but I much prefer using affiliate links and/or adsense.

Important to think about is the lifetime value of the content you create, and of course the dynamic linking structure of your site. You wouldn’t want to emphasise the PR sent to an advertising link, thus adjust your inking structure such that you have ball linking to loads of pages without leaks from any page containing an advertising link.

• PPP could go into a category “other news” or “asides” that has a different template
• Would the content have to appear in your RSS feed?
• Would you exclude it from appearing on your front page?