Should You Use the Pay Per Post Concept for Site Promotion?
Posted by Rhiannon Louise on June 18, 2007
Filed Under Tools and Software
The concept of pay-per-post is simple – as the owner of a website, blog or online resource you put out a bid that invites professional bloggers to create a review, a buzz or a promotional piece about your particular website or service.
Bloggers that pick up your invitation and qualify to write for you based on criteria that you set - such as minimum page rank for example - then get paid by you to write about your site and they post their work on their website.
As a result of the written promotion you may stand to get anything and everything from word-of-mouth personal referral marketing to traffic for example – or from back links to potential page rank improvement maybe?
So should you use the pay per post concept for site promotion?
Well, not only is general online opinion on this point actually heavily divided, I would be so bold as to say it’s a concept that works exceptionally well for some people and not at all for others!
As far as I know http://www.PayPerPost.com was the first company to really hone this marketing concept and marry advertisers with bloggers – it was also the first company to get shot down in flames and ripped to pieces by a whole host of online voices who vilified its concept as ‘blatant advertising’ and who said the likes of Google would surely penalise sites whose owners paid for reviews - as well as those sites that accepted money to do the promotion.
Well, fortunately http://www.PayPerPost.com has actually survived the negative vibe!
For a start – yes, it is advertising - that’s pretty much the whole point guys! Just like Google adwords campaigns are advertising…
And for another thing, the reasons why Google penalise sites are not so wrapped up in who pays who for advertising, rather Google ‘penalise’ sites that blatantly abuse webmaster guidelines or which provide little or no value to web surfers. Such sites don’t do well in the search engines and additionally such sites are unlikely to benefit from the pay per post method of advertising.
Why?
Because if they are trying to pay bloggers to write a review stuffed with back links containing anchor text like ‘cheap Viagra,’ either the companies that marry advertisers and bloggers will block their attempts or the bloggers themselves will not pick up the opportunity because they know it will add no value to their site.
So, going back to the question posed – namely, should you use pay per post for site promotion? - well, if you have an excellent online resource that provides a service, that adds value or is entertaining, clever or just plain cool then why not consider pay per post?
You’ll get valuable reviews that may even surprise or inspire you, you’ll have control over who gets to write about you and even what they say (if you’re that much of a control freak!), you only pay for what you get, you’ll certainly receive traffic to your site – if only the bloggers themselves checking it out for inspiration for their post! – and in addition to all this, you will of course get good back links to your website which you can optimise based on the keywords you deem most appropriate for your site.
If on the other hand you’re running a low grade site which provides little or no benefit and all you want your back links to say is ‘for the best cheap Viagra click here’ then don’t bother! No one would pick up your ‘opportunity’ even if the moderators let it through!
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