I’ve been doing paid posts for many years now and in that time I’ve noticed that a lot of bloggers who are also doing them are going about it all wrong. While their post may be good enough to be accepted by the advertiser it’s probably not adding any value to their blog and they probably won’t be approached by the advertiser again.
Most bloggers who refuse to do paid posts do so because they feel it is unethical or because they feel they may lose their regular readers. I touched on the ethical side of it when I wrote the post called Is It Ethical For Bloggers To Do Paid Posts? That post revealed that most people thought there was nothing wrong with doing paid posts as long as certain criteria were met.
Will Paid Posts Cost You Readers
The answer to this is no it won’t, as long as you put as much effort into doing your paid posts that you do in writing your regular ones. In case you’re thinking of doing paid posts one day I thought I’d outline some of the things I do to ensure I don’t lose any of my valuable readers.
- Choose The Right Product: This is very important. Even though you may not be writing a review on the product or service you don’t want to be linking to a site that you or your readers may find objectionable.
- Provide Good Content: I’m shocked at some of the paid posts I’ve read. They are of poor quality and the bloggers usually only provide the minimum word count to fulfill their obligations. They should be putting just as much effort into a paid post as they do in any other post.
- Review Only Products You Use: Just because someone is paying you to write a review is no reason for you to bullshit your readers. Unless I have actually tried a product or service I will not accept a task that requires me to give a review of said product or service.
- Link Must Be Related To Post: I try to write the post around the product or service so that when someone clicks on the link they are not taken to some completely unrelated site. It’s not always easy to do but the it is well worth the extra effort.
- It Must Be Natural: By this I mean that your readers shouldn’t be able to tell it’s a paid post. I don’t mean that as a blogger I am trying to hide anything from my readers, which is why my disclosure policy states that all paid posts are place in the SpecialOps category. I just don’t want those paid posts to appear like sales copy or a commercial. They have to be able to retain the readers interest just like any other post on the blog
Not all advertisers expect you to actually review their product. Most of the time they merely want a link back to their site. Even so they would prefer that link to be part of a well thought out post because anything else would reflect on whatever it is they are promoting.
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After a while I expanded it offering other services and even tried other ways of monetizing it.
