I reckon it goes without saying that the amount of bloggers making a good living out of bogging via avenues such as Google Adsense or the various affiliates that they promote is quite minimal when compared to those of us who are plodding along trying to make enough to just cover our hosting and other expenses. The thing that these bloggers have over the rest of us is that they have taken the time to create a physical presence on the blogosphere, which has the added advantage of credibility when promoting affiliates, and the huge number of page views adds to their Adsense, Chitika or other PPC revenue. The question arises as to what we can do to ensure our blogs become more profitable.

The answer is a simple as doing paid posts. This is where we, as professional writers take on various tasks offered to us by advertisers who are willing to pay us to do a post advertising a product or service they are promoting. I did a post rating nine paid to post sites that act as a medium between bloggers and advertisers, something you may consider reading at a later date.

The problem with doing these sort of posts is that the almighty Google absolutely frowns on bloggers who decide to go this route and the punishment meted out to them is that they usually lose their Page Rank. It seems such a shame that we are denied a legitimate way of earning an honest income, but perhaps there are certain methods available to us that will allow us to take on paid posts without alerting Google through its sneaky spider bots. What a lot of bloggers have done in the past is to virtually stand there with their hands in the air shouting “Hey, look at me GoogleBots I’m doing paid posts, so there!” Naturally the bots do the thing they were designed for and report to their master resulting in all those bloggers getting Google Slapped.

The following are some of the steps you should take if you want to do paid posts and still keep your PR.

1. Disclosure Policy: Whilst it is something you should have you should steer away from those generic policies that are copy and pasted into your blog as well as those auto generated ones that are offered by certain websites. Brian of That’s Right I Said It fame did a post on one such service titled Your Disclosure Policy In Minutes. It’s way better to make one up using your own words than to use these prefabricated ones.
2. Sponsored Post: Many bloggers use these words to show their readers that the post is sponsored, well I reckon you are highlighting it to Google as well. Perhaps something along the lines of, “This post brought to you from our friends at so and so” would be better and changing it every now and again would also be a good idea.
3. Hire Me Badges: You’ve seen them, bloggers proudly portraying to the world that they are for hire, which is fine if you don’t mind being Google Slapped, but if you do then do not use these or those get paid to posts badges on your blog.

Ok, that’s my top three methods of laying low and not making it obvious to Google that you are doing paid posts. What are some of the methods that you use?