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In the last part of the Make Money from Your Blog series, I covered the ins and outs of Commission Junction. Today’s contribution to the series covers the popular paid review program PayPerPost.

What is PayPerPost?

PayPerPost is the first popular program to offer compensation for posting specific content within a blog entry. Advertisers list opportunities they have available at a certain price with specific information required such as links and anchor text, minimum word count, and content type (e.g.: “positive only” or “buzz”). Publishers are able to accept these opportunities as long as their blogs meet certain criteria provided by the advertiser, including Alexa and Technorati rank, PageRank, and meeting blog category requirements.

What are the benefits of using PayPerPost?

Because PayPerPost was the first of this type of service, it gained popularity and is well known to advertisers. As such, it often has more opportunities available to publishers than its competitors.

Additionally, there are often opportunities available that are suitable various niches, meaning that the advertisement opportunities often result in content that is relevant to a publisher’s blog. Publishers don’t have to worry about veering off course from their blog’s focus by being selective in accepting opportunities.

PayPerPost also recently implemented a feature entitled PayPerPost Direct. PPP Direct reverses the responsibilities of publishers and advertisers in that advertisers can specifically request a publisher to perform a request at a minimum price specified by the publisher as opposed to the publisher finding advertising opportunities. Publishers can reject PPP Direct opportunities if they find the topic, request price, or anything else unacceptable.

Are there any drawbacks from using PayPerPost?

One of the drawbacks of PayPerPost is that after a post has been completed and reviewed, it must remain on the site for 30 days prior to receiving payment. The fact that it must remain on site for 30 days is not the drawback so much as the pending payment that will not be provided until that period is up.

Another drawback is that PPP Direct currently does not have a marketplace available for advertisers to find publishers. It is up to the advertiser to stumble upon a publisher’s site, whereby they can click on the “Hire Me” badge to request a sponsored post. As such, there is no major benefit of using PPP Direct over direct advertising, despite the fact that PayPerPost does take 10% of the earnings from the publisher. There is, however, speculation that PayPerPost is working on providing a marketplace, so it may simply become a matter of time before this becomes available.

So how do I get started?

After joining PayPerPost, you first need to set up your blog details. This includes specifying your blog’s name, URL, and description, selecting categories for your blog, providing tags that your blog relates to, and installing some tracking code into the footer of your blog. It sounds like a lot, but the only part that might prove to be difficult or time consuming is the tracking code installation.

Once everything is set up, finding review opportunities is a breeze. Clicking the “Open Opportunities” tab will list all opportunities. By default, all opportunities are listed whether or not you are eligible to accept them. Clicking the “Qualified Opportunities” link within the opportunities page will filter only those opportunities for which your blog meets the minimum requirements.

Clicking an opportunity will display details on it. In addition to displaying its name and category, the opportunity details screen includes the specific details that are required for a post to be accepted for the opportunity.

After an opportunity is accepted and the blog post is completed, it’s important to return to PayPerPost in order to provide the URL of the completed blog post. Without doing so, credit will not be given, and no payment will be received.

How do I track my earnings?

Earnings are displayed on the blogger dashboard after logging into PayPerPost. Included is the number of posts taken, number of posts approved or rejected, and how much you have been and will be paid.

In order to determine when payments will be received for the dollar figure under “Will Be Paid”, it’s necessary to click on the “My Posts” tab within the PayPerPost website. This page displays a table of all posts completed. Two of the columns specify the number of days until payment and payment date if a payment was already provided. This data can be used to determine when to anticipate the next payment.

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