I just got an email from an advertiser wanting me to remove a post from September 13.

1. What would be the logic behind that?
2. Can I delete posts, and if so, how old do they need to be?

Why ask to remove the link?

Theoretically, the advertiser was walloped by Google for paid links, and is trying to correct the issue. They are now writing posties asking them to remove posts, as required to get Google to consider re-inclusion in search results.

Will Posties remove the links?

Probably. Few want to screw over their paying customers.

Still, the responses can be a bit funny. Here’s a tongue-in-cheek quip:

“*chuckle* . wonder if they would pay you to remove it Wink”

Ouch! And who is to say it’s entirely unfair?

Here’s a refusal:

[...] the say they don’t want links from blogs anymore. Well………..I’m a tough love bitty, and my post is good and I don’t delete content.

So, I guess if you pay for links in content, you may lose control!

Two other posties suggest additional evil spins on the request:

A funny/evil thing to do would be to change the links to a competitor!

That would be a smarter choice, because if I was an evil competitor, I would nicely start emailing all the posties to get rid of the post of my competitor Twisted Evil

Which prompts at least three Posties to point out that such requests should be funneled through PPP. After all, how is the Postie to verify who is asking them to remove the links?!

Presumably, PPP will figure out a procedure to deal with these novel requests. Who’d a thunk this would happen?

In the case of Google: The blogger who offers the prize could get a severe Google penalty.

In the case of PPP: A blogger will not be paid for any PPP post flanked by the “contests” post.

So, yep, PPP and Google agree! These posts are kinda-sorta “paid”, “sponsored” or “not freely given” and will be treated as such. Now, for some details!

Pay Per Post’s Reaction to Contest Posts

Recently, PayPerPost rejected a post written by Joanna, of Nanashi-inc.net. The reason? Her PPP sponsored posts was placed next to a post that contained a link to a contest for an IPOD; the link served in place of an entry fee.

The problem? The PPP TOS prohibit posting a PPP post next to any sponsored post and PPP considers these “contests entrace fee” posts sponsored.

Google’s Reaction to Contest Posts

A short while back, Dave Airey decided to run a blog contest. He offered a prize; the entrance fee for the contest was a blog post that linked to Dave’s blog.

Soon after, Dave noticed he’d suffered a severe Google penalty; Matt Cutt’s mentioned the contest when explaining the penalty.

Luckily for Dave, he was able to ask his readers to delete the links. After they did, he regained his Google rank!

Similarities!

Notice the IPOD contest run by It’s Write Now Dave Airey’s contesnt. To enter the contest, both require a blog post with a link back to the contests’ blogs.

So, it would appear that both Google and PPP consider these sorts of “contest entry” blog posts with their links to be motivated by some sort of reward, bribe, or what have you. Of course, each business responds differently.

PPP accepts sponsored posts as an entirely valid option for blogs. However, they prohibit bloggers from placing these sorts of contest posts adjacent to PPP’s clients’ posts. So, PPP’s response is to not pay the blogger for the invalid post.

In contast, Google doesn’t like sponsored posts at all. If they detect the contest, they will apply a Google penalty to the blogger who runs the contest. We don’t entirely know whether they will penalize the bloggers who enter the contest. But since Google seems to see these links as unnatural, it seems there is some risk Google might do so.

The irony

If you read the IPOD contest rules carefully, you’ll notice I just wrote a post that qualifies me to enter the contest! Would PPP consider this post sponsored? Would Google? Hmmmm….

Today, on my PR0 ranked blog, I want to ask the opposite question: Does Google PR foster a false sense of entitlement on the part of bloggers with brand new, out of the box, PR0 blogs?

Let’s look at the story that moved Wendy, which she summarized as follows:

Lizzie has a brand new blog and wanted to try and monetize it. She turned to PayPerPost as a source of revenue, only to be flatly rejected because of her lack of Google Page Rank. So, in a quest for inbound links, Lizzie found a blogger who did link exchanges :: only to find that same said blogger refused all requests from sites with a Page Rank of less than 3.

Wendy think this is a bit stingy on the part of the blogger who refused the link. Maybe so…or maybe not.

Let’s look at what Lizzie, the blogger who requested the link, really did, and think about what she might reasonably expect.

Let’s fill in the details!

Fewer than 90 days ago, Lizzie started a new blog which appears to fall in the “whatever I feel like blogging about” niche. After fewer than 90 days, and a dozen posts, she applied for PPP, which rejected that particular blog. She tells readers she was rejected because of her PR0.

Lizzy is incorrect: PPP accepts PR0 blogs. They reject blogs less than 90 days old and with excessively long gaps between posts.

However, since her goal is to monetize this brand new blog, she also concludes that she needs inbound links to improve her page rank of zero. She is correct about this — not because it’s required by PPP but because advertisers will pay more for ads and reviews on higher ranked blogs.

So, Lizzie sets out on a link hunt. Where does she go first? Apparently, not to her own three year old blog with linkage!

Lizzie tells us she has such a blog, but doesn’t name the blog. I did run a back link check at iweb tool and glanced at the blogs giving Chipped Polish backlinks. Nne seem to be written by a Lizzy and those that show images clearly don’t match her face in one of her online profiles.

So, while my backlink check isn’t thorough, it appears Lizzie may not link her own PR0 blog from her own, well established higher PR blog!

Instead, Lizzie surfs the “make money blogging” corner, and finds a blog that evidently provides instructions for being added to the blog roll. Lizzy reads the content, and concludes, to use Lizzy’s words ‘it was a little “meh”’ and proceeds to request a reciprocal sidebar link exchange from:

1. A blogger whose blog Lizzie only read because she was on a link hunt.
2. A blogger whose content Lizzie thinks is “meh”.
3. A blogger who has almost certainly never read or visited Lizzie’s blog.
4. A blogger with a vastly higher PR than Lizzie.
5. A blogger who is entirely unfamiliar with Lizzie herself and
6. A blogger who is publicly advertising her willingness to do reciprocal links exchanges for no other reason than to juice rank,
7. A blogger who, after reading Lizzie’s blog, may have visited it and decreed the content “meh”.

So, in this context, why would Lizzie expect a to get a link? Why should the PR5 blogger give her a link? At least, vis-a-vis Lizzie, the entire reason for the proposed link exchange is to juice Lizzie’s PR rank.

What Lizzie proposes is, quite frankly, an entirely economic exchange. Presumably, under these circumstances, the only reason the PR5 blogger would give Lizzie a link is if the PR5 blogger got something in exchange.

And what, precisely, would that be? A link on the sidebar of a PR0 blog of a blogger with 12 posts in the “whatever” niche who thinks your content is “meh”? That link has little current value as link juice. It probably has little ability to drive traffic. Moreover, if the PR5 blogger is engaged in loads of reciprocal link exchanges done to gain link juice only, there is the possiblity that this particular link exchange would look suspicious to Google.

Still, I guess a case could be made that a link Lizzie’s blog sidebar has future value and so should be granted.

But does it? Lizzie thinks the PR5 blog is “meh”. She is establishing a “made to monetize” blog. Space on sidebars is space where one can advertise. Will Lizzie keep the PR5 bloggers link in place should Lizzie no longer desperately needs the link juice?

We can’t know. The PR5 Blogger can’t know. So, there is little value for the PR5 blogger here.

Does Lizzie recognize the problem and up the ante and offer the PR5 blogger a link to her “meh” blog on Lizzy’s established blog with PR? It appears makes no such offer.

So, unless we think bloggers PR0 Bloggers are entitled to any and all sidebar links they request, why would we conclude the PR5 blogger is ’stingy’?

Why not conclude Lizzie has a false sense of entitlement?

Relying on information contained in Arrington’s story, posts at the PPP board, and the “candidates” clarification in comments it appears the truth is:

1. PPP didn’t abuse anyone.
    
2. The supposedly abused “declining job candidate” was not only never offered a job by PPP, he was never a job candidate.
    
3. To make it appear PPP “abused” a “job candidate”, Arrington reports false “facts” surrounding the story. If left uncorrected, these “facts” could unfairly besmirch the professional reputation of the innocent third party who had the misfortune to deal with the sois-dissant “job candidate.”
    

Pretty bad reporting. Arrington’s story isn’t just an opinion I disagree with. It isn’t just biased reporting of things that actually happened. It is an attempted hatchet job on PPP that relies on manufactured, entirely false “facts”, which could be uncovered easily.

Can I demonstrate Arrington’s “facts” are just flat out wrong?

You betcha’! Let’s look at the numerous specific details that Arrington got wrong:

1. In the character assassination category: Arrington said a head hunter, Lori Friend-Smiles (of Stratus Technology Services, LLC,) “forwarded Salberg’s email to PayPerPost VP Software Development Peter Wright”.

   Nope, this didn’t happen. Lori Friend-Smiles did not forward a Salberg’s email to anyone.

   This may seem a trivial error on Arrington’s part, but remember: Many consider a head hunter forwarding private email to a third party professional malpractice. So, to “break” this story, Arrington unfairly, and falsely besmirched Lori Smiles’s professional reputation.

   How did I unearth the truth?

   Lawrence Salberg volunteered this information in a comment posted at Techcrunch, saying “As far as I know, Lori (referred to as the ‘headhunter’ by many here) did not forward the email to PPP. I copied PPP (to their general email info box) in my response.”

   Presumably, if Mike Arrington had asked Lawrence how Peter Wright obtained the email, Mike would have “uncovered” this tid-bit of information! (But as we shall see, that would have dramatically changed Arrignton’s later accusations!)

   In any case, given the nature of most company general email info boxes, Salberg the “job candidate” basically sent an a abusive email to the general inbox at PPP, where its remarkable contents, containing personal attacks on every employee must have circulated quickly.

2. In the gross mis-characterization category: Arrington tells us Peter Wright sent an “unsolicited” email to Salberg, and that Peter’s “unsolicited” email is part of an “ongoing email string”.

   This is false in two regards. First, Peter Wright responded to an email sent by Salberg to PPP. No one considers responding email sending “unsolicited email”

   In fact, when I send email to a company’s general contact box, I hope to get an answer!

   Second… “on going email exchange”? That sure makes it sound like Peter Wright is holed up in his office, neglecting important PPP work and wasting time exchanging email with Salberg, right? That would fit right in with Mike’s constant talking claim that PPP management wastes time on silly things.

   In fact, the exchange of email was not “on going” at the time Mike published. Peter appears to have responded to Salbergs first email to PPP. Salberg then sent Peter another vitrolic email where Salberg further argues his position with prose consisting of statements like “Blah, blah, blah….” (That’s really a quote, which prefaces a rather snide paragraph.).

   Peter appears to have ignored the second email by Salberg and is continuing to ignore the man.

   When Peter did not answer, it appears that Lawrence Salberg, may have wished to find some means to continue the conversation. After all, somehow, Mr. Salberg’s email managed to come to the attention of Mike Arrington. (Though Arrington, relying on passive voice, avoids telling us who sent him the email. )

   So, the truth: The only “on going” aspect of the email exchange was that “someone” not associated with PPP was forwarding the email to Arrington!

   (Update 9/25/00: In comments, Salberg says he did not wait until Peter Wright failed to respond to his email response. He pro-actively blindcopied Arrington on his response to Peter Wright, so Arrington received it at the same time as Peter, the timestamp indicated in the PDF is 1:57 PM PDT; the meta data indicates Arrington’s post was published at 10:14 pm. )

3. Also in the gross mis-characterization category: Arrington tells us Peter Wright went “on the attack”. Oh?

   Well, I guess whether or not a response is an attack is a matter of opinion. But let’s examine the exchange, a portion of which is available here:

   In the letter Salberg zinged off to PPP, Salberg said this:

   Quite frankly, who WOULD want to work in a place like that? Only kids with no brains, no education, no self-confidence and who want to write letters home to mommy and daddy telling them about their great job (read: paycheck) at some “cool” web company”.

   And

   However, you didn’t say there [sic] were a modern day cotton-picking farm and that employees are to be viewed as the “negros” out pickin in the fields.

   Salberg’s entirely unsolicited email to PPP contains additional barbs which many would consider inflammatory.

   Peter Wright responds by defending his staff, saying:

   .. I take offense at that. We have an incredibly talented team of people here, programmers w ho have developed stunning technology the likes of which you have never seent before. You’ll see them when we release Argus in August in November. We have ex-military programmers, specialists in data forensics, published authors and speakers, highly popular open source tools authors – the list goes on and on. Smart people. Brilliant people.

   This, dear readers, is the sort of conversation Mike Arrington characterizes as Peter, of PayPerPost, “attacking” Lawrence the “engineer”.

4. In “the trying to bolster his case by elevating the credentials of the party he supports” category: Arrington characterizes Salberg as a “declining candidate”. This makes it sound as if PPP was upset because someone they evaluated and admired turned them down.

   This appears to be far from the truth.

   To be a “declining candidate”, a candidate must have an offer. The reality is: PPP never extended an offer to Salberg. But it gets better. After all: To be a “job candidate” the company must at least consider you for a position.

   Did PPP ever consider Salberg? Did they even know he existed? It appears not.

   In discussion at the Postie board, Peter Wright (aka Froogle) reveals:
   

   Also we never interviewed him, or phone screened him. He was merely pointed at the sites by a recruiter to see if he wanted them to push him here for interview. First I heard of the guy was when I got his email.

   Peter’s assessment is consistent with what we read in the email exchanges Arrington supplied with his post. In those, we read Lori Smalls, asking Salberg:
   

   “Please take a good look at a few episodes of “www.rockstartup.com” and then let me know if you would like to move forward with Pay Per Post.

   Salberg was “a candidate” in the sense that Lori, a busy, but friendly, recruiter, read PPP’s job posting, read Salberg’s resume and thought she might be able to get PPP to consider him as a candidate.

   I’m sorry, Mike, but that means Salberg was not a PPP job candidate!

5. Once more, in the the “elevating the credentials of the party he supports” category: Arrington closes by referring to Salberg as “a smart engineer” who is evidently, still in the market. He also recommends that other would do well to hire Salberg.

   Well, Salberg is not an engineer; in comments at Techcrunch, he describes himself this way: “I’m not an engineer. Just a web developer / designer very normal average guy.” At his blog, he describes himself as “The Small Business Expert”; his most recent is “Sticky Notes Finally Good for Something”.

   Of course, Mike Arrington may have this bit right: Salberg is likely still on the job market.

Lessons Mike Should Learn

Mike: It’s never professional to run a controversial story without checking the facts. It’s never professional to smear a third party professional reputation without checking the facts. It’s never professional to appear to be trying your darndest to be carrying out a hatchet job on a company that compete for your revenue stream: that is, advertising dollars.

And, if you really think Lawrence Salberg is a smart engineer, maybe you should hire him. Because after this, I doubt anyone is going to take your staffing recommendations seriously!

Ok, but now what are you going to do? After all, using the “search by category” function on the admin side of your blog helps you easily track of all your paid posts to make sure you got paid, delete if they are rejected, and edit if you are asked to do so.

But now, you can’t let the categories show on the outside of your blog.

Well, the answer is use Hide Sponsored Categories Plugin!

This plugin will:

1. Let you create and use WordPress categories for organizational purposes on the admin side of your blog while
2. Not having categories on the public visible side of your blog.

This should fulfill the PPP best practices rule because the purpose of that rule is to avoid public displaying of a category that contains a series of posts like this: Paid Post – Paid Post – Paid Post -….- Paid Post – Paid Post – Paid Post. Advertisers don’t like those.

As long as there is no such public category, no-one one cares if you have things conveniently organized on the admin side! To learn more and download the plugin, visit Hide Sponsored Categories Plugin.

Theoretically, you could backdate an offer for Pay Per Post so that it never even made it to your blog’s homepage, and the editors at Pay Per Post would probably never know, especially if your permalink structure did not include the date in it. I tried this out a few times in my old blog. If you are producing a new post each day, then you can easily backdate a post for Pay Per Post 4 days or so before your current post and it will be approximately half way down your homepage.

If you do this, PPP will ban you!

Yes, it’s true the technology exists to backdate your posts; it’s even easy to do. Just scan down the right sidebar in the Wordpress editing pane and find the “edit date” control panels. Check the box and select a date for your post. (The feature is generally used to future date posts so your blog can stay active while you are on vacation.)

However, you should never backdate a sponsored post for PPP. First, it violates PPP TOS. Not only that but:

1. Pay Per Post always checks for backdating: Currently they check manually. Eventually, it will be easy for PPP to check using Argus.
2. This trick is easy to catch: Both Pay Per Post and the advertiser know the date you filed your opp. I don’t care how clever you think you are, everyone knows you didn’t write the post before you even reserved the opp! (Anyway, online tools exist to determine when any web page first appeared on the web. These tools have nothign to do with Wordpress and PPP can use them.)
3. PPP will ban you. If you don’t believe this, watch the PPP movie! It turns out advertisers want the traffic that comes when a post appears on the top page of a blog. Go figure!

Can we fiddle with the dates at all?

Forward dating posts is entirely legitimate. Bloggers use it to space out non-time critical posts, or to fill in their blog while they are on vacation or for announcing contests or promotins. You compose your post ahead of time, set the time to a future date and then click “publish”. The post will appear on your blog only when the future date arrives.

If you do this you should read The Secret to Posting Regularly to learn learn how to ping the blog and RSS services at the right time. You want to ping when the post appears, not when you click “publish”.

Shifting dates is sometimes ok. Every now and then a blogger will re-date a post, adding a note that the post was previously published. Redating makes the post appear at the top of the blog. I used to use this for Knitting Carnival announcements because it was useful to keep the same date forever and accumulate information from previous posts.

One caution: if you are participating in something like PPP, you shouldn’t consider the re-dated posts a “fresh new” interim post. It’s not. PPP won’t let you just re-date old posts and shove them between new ones! (And yes, they can, and do, catch this.)

Final Analysis:

Don’t try to trick PPP by backdating sponsored posts to drive them off the front page. It’s against the TOS and they will catch you. It’s just not the path to making money online!

However, future dating posts can be a smart move to keep blog traffic up when you are busy with other things and can’t post regularly!

PPP Sponsored – unsponsored – PayU2Blog – Bloggerwave – Blogitive – unsponsored – PPP sponsored – unsponsored – Smorty – PayU2Blog- unsponsored – PPP sponsored.

The several back-to-back sponsored posts from any company now exclude a blog from participating in PPP.

Is this really a change?

Maybe not. I interpreted the PPP’s previous TOS, and previous discussions at the forum, to prohibited back-to-back sponsored posts from any company. However, it appears some posties believed otherwise and were posting back-to-back posts quite regularly. Clarification was required and the TOS have been rewritten to make this policy absolutely unambiguous.

Better ROI for advertisers.

In my opinion, this is great for advertisers because they will probably see:

1. More traffic: Your sponsored post is less likely to quickly roll off the front page of a blog that posts a flurry of posts containing inexpensive paid links. This means more blog visitors will see and read the post you pay for; if the post is well done, it means more traffic.
2. More relevant audience: Generally speaking, niche bloggers are better able to retain their flavor when the proportion of paid posts is low. For example, my knitting blog cannot retain a knitting audience while carrying 50% posts on insurance, gold coins, mortgages or even slenderizing treatments and remain a knitting blog. So, advertisers who picked my blog because they wanted an audience of mostly college educated women with leisure time are more likely to get what they want if I carry relatively few ads.
3. More link juice: Google and search engines are somewhat less likely to devalue the “trust” rank of a blog that shows fewer than 1 paid post out of two rather than over 75% paid posts.

In short, this will result in better returns on investment for advertisers.

Hopefully, this will also translate into better fees for the low-ad intensive blogs in PPP’s marketplace.

What about Bloggers?

Well, this will clearly cramp the style of bloggers who were running back-to-back sponsored and intended to continue. If you were planning to monetize that way, you will either need to conform to PPP’s TOS or resign from PPP. Conforming will involve either taking fewer PayU2Blog paid links or doing a additional work to crafting additional un-sponsored content to space between the PayU2Blog posts or starting a few “back-to-back sponsored posts” blogs on which to run ads from the less restrictive pay-to-post services and getting them qualified by the other services.

So, if you want to run back-to-back posts, you have some options.

For bloggers who never ran back-to-back sponsored posts, the policy clarification will have little direct impact. However, it may have an indirect impact if advertisers prefer to shop in a marketplace full of blogs containing a lower fraction of sponsored ads.

I’m guessing advertisers will prefer the low-ad blog market place. If so, we’ll advertising opportunities for a wider variety of products offered with higher fees.

Pay Per Post is now set up to reward blogs with real traffic!

Of course, in some sense PPP always rewarded blogs with traffic. However, they used Alexa to measure traffic, and it’s so bad that this blog shows more traffic than my knitting blog — which gets 10 times the traffic I get here!

But Alexa will now provide real traffic monitoring.

How? On Sunday, PPP announced Argus, a monitoring system that will:

1. Make it easier for advertisers to find suitable bloggers to carry ads and
2. Provide actual traffic data to advertisers surrounding visits, pageviews, click throughs, traffic sources.

This tool uses the javascript installed in the footers at Postie blogs.

(Knowing you can track with Javascript, I’d been hoping they were planning this. Turns out they must have been!)

Evidently, PPP will still use Alexa as a traffic indicator to supplement their data. Still, presumably, if real traffic metrics exist for blogs, advertisers will quickly turn to the more suitable measurement — which is certain to be the PPP data.

In my opinion, Argus is a great advance all around. The advantage to advertisers is obvious. Though less obvious, Argus also has great advantages for serious bloggers who wish to monetize.

Advantage to bloggers

Bloggers will also benefit because a real traffic monitoring system will:

1. Permit high bloggers real traffic to attract the higher priced opps. Previously, it was the heavily gamed “Alexa” traffic that won the higher pay.
2. Allow posites to stop wasting time creating blog rolls that they auto visit armed with “Linky” and “Alexa” Firefox tool-bar extensions.
3. Encourage posties to devote themselves to building real traffic by writing great blogs!

Great work to the Pay Per Post team! Hopefully, other companies will follow your lead and start using real data too.

After all, people surfing the web click on ads under certain circumstances which include:

1. The ad is targeted to their interest.
2. They are in an ad-clicking mood.

Read this again: Visitors click ads only if they are in an ad-clicking mood.

So why might this be a problem for you? Well, if you are working hard to monetize your blog, you may be engaging in a number of practices to boost your traffic. I know I am.

So far, that’s ok. But did you know some of the methods to boost traffic will result in low click through rates – - at least in the short run.

Mind you, the methods may result in clicks in the long run– but only if you can convert these visits into what you might call “natural” traffic.

So, what type of traffic isn’t “natural”? It’s first generation traffic that arises as a direct result of some traffic boosting methods. For example, it could be traffic from a “dofollow” list, or traffic from requesting Posties to digg your post on the PPP board.

Why “Dofollow” traffic doesn’t click.

Let me give an example of traffic that won’t generate clicks. To encourage traffic, you might have added your blog to a “DoFollow” list. I have, as you can see from the blog stats for BigBucksBlogger, visit #15 came from someone’s DoFollow list.

Frankly, I’m very happy to get that traffic.
Nevertheless, there is no point in deceiving myself into believing visitor #15 was likely to click on an ad. They probably wouldn’t because:

1. Most dofollow visitors are uninterested in ads associated with my blog niche. Period. At my knitting blog, I’m pretty darn sure practically no one visiting from the dofollow list is fascinated with knitting; these people aren’t clicking ads to buy yarn.
2. The “dofollow” visitors are not in an ad clicking mood.

The second point is actually the more important of the two.

Think about this: When people decide to use their dofollow blog rolls, they are focused on reading posts, thinking up a fairly relevant comment and dropping a link to their blog. Generally speaking, they aren’t going to do anything to distract them from the task at hand which is visiting a bunch of blogs and leaving a bunch of links.

They don’t click links in ads.

There are other sources of traffic that is fairly unlikely to convert to links: People who you asked to visit and click your Digg button. People who clicked signature links at webmaster forums; they are curious but often aren’t all that interested in buying products in your niche. (I ask you, how many at webmaster forums are interested in knitting? I’m sure they didn’t click ads!)

Should you stop trying to attract “Dofollow” traffic?

Still, there is a very good reason to stay on dofollow lists, to visit appropriate forums and to at attract traffic even if it’s non-ad-clicking traffic. The fact is, if you write good content, some of this traffic will eventually result in “natural” traffic.

How? Well, even though I skim when I visit dofollow blogs, I also bookmark the blogs that contain content that interests me.

Later, I return and read more. Believe it or not, I’ve even written whole blog posts as a result of articles I wandered across on the dofollow list. I’m sure other people using the dofollow list do the same.

This means that if you write content that interests some visitors, you will find that eventually a few of the dofollow visitors will come back. Since many of those dofollow visitors are bloggers, they may even be inspired to write a post, link your blog and leave you a trackback.

This will increase your visibility with search engines and eventually bring in “natural” traffic. When that happens, your blog will see ad-click rates rise. This is because there is a certain category of visitors who click on ads at a higher than average rate.

Search Engine Visitors Click Ads

Yes, visitors doing searches tend to click on ads. Not only are they interested in your topic, they are interested right now. After all, if they just Googled for advice on “topic X” , you can be pretty sure they are on a mission to learn more about “topic X”. That means they are fairly likely to click an ad about “topic X”.

Now, you have visitors how are in the mood to click ads and you will start to make money. And what was the secret?

However, some comments following that post seem to predict a negative turn for Pay Per Post. In particular, Allen Stern of Center Networks expressed disappointment that Ted Murphy, the CEO of Pay Per Post, doesn’t seem interested in speaking with him, and offers this advice to Mr. Murphy:

I think PPP will be hurt by the fact that the majority of their bloggers are small and very small. Eventually the larger advertisers won’t want to advertise on a stay at home moms blog with 3 visitors (2 are family) a month.

Well, I’m not convinced the majority of bloggers working with Pay Per Post are stay at home moms posting at blogs with only 3 visitors a month. My knitting blog gets roughly 800 a day. But, since I don’t know the statistics, I won’t argue that point.

Instead, I ask this: Even if the majority of PPP blogs are low traffic, why would that be a problem for PPP?

There are lots of small advertisers with small budgets who would like to advertise on the web. They may prefer to pay less than huge enterprises; this limits their advertising campaigns to blogs with smaller audiences who don’t charge much to post a review.

PPP serves this group and can make money doing so. But serving this group doesn’t mean PPP can’t also serve larger advertisers.

To attract a mix of advertisers and make a profit, all PPP needs is enough medium and high traffic blogs to carry the higher paying spots and exclude the smaller blogs from taking those opportunities.

So, no, the larger advertisers won’t advertise on a blog with very low traffic. PPP doesn’t need to persuade them to do so. PPP can capture their business by funneling the higher paying ads to higher traffic blogs by using segmentation. PPP already has some reasonably high traffic posties; likely they will attract more. They will also retain their medium and lower traffic bloggers who will be happy to fill the needs of smaller advertisers.

My guess is that serving the full range of advertisers will benefit PPP’s bottom line.