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.