Aside from the three most well known paid-posting services (Pay Per Post, Loud Launch, Review Me) there are heaps of other companies out there waiting to pay you money to write sponsored reviews – and what’s more, you don’t need any traffic to start using them to make money blogging. If you want to maximize your opportunities, start a number of small, side-project blogs about any topic, and update them every few days for at least three months – these can turn into gold mines in no time.

Most paid-posting services require your blog to be at least three months old, and while some, like Review Me, have certain requirements with regards to traffic and rank, the smaller services aren’t so strict and you can start making money right away.

If you haven’t yet, then check out Sponsored Reviews. Getting a blog accepted is easy, as all you need is at least 10 posts of 200 words or more. Once accepted, you can browse through pages of opportunities and bid on them. Not all your bids will be accepted, but there are so many opportunities that you will find something. Bid on everything you come across that requires only 50 or 100 words. Many reviews have no blog requirements. I have blogs with no traffic or rank, and I can still get reviews accepted and make money.

Providing you’re hosting your own blog, you can sign up with Blogsvertise. What’s more, your blog only needs to be 30 days old. You write reviews of at least 75 words containing three links, and they pay you generally between $5 and $10 for each post. There are very few requirements to be met, and you can submit all your blogs. Once the tasks start rolling in, so does the money!

I’ve written about Bloggerwave before. They are still receiving mixed reviews in the blogosphere and I’m not overly keen on them yet. At the moment, I have a number of blogs with Bloggerwave, but there are still just two opportunities available, and I’m only eligible for one. You can accept the same opportunity on multiple blogs, and the payout is a flat $10. I did get paid for one previous opportunity after emailing Bloggerwave and I am waiting on another payment.

Don’t forget about Blogging Ads too. Though they take up to six weeks to approve a blog, once they do there are heaps of opportunities to take. The only thing is that the ones I’ve seen only pay $5 each. Blogs must be three-months old and cached by Google.

A new paid-posting service I came across is Smorty. Blogs should be cached in Google and Yahoo, three-months old and have at least two posts per week. You can add as many blogs as you like, and each post earns you at least $6. It’s a good introduction to making money blogging and writing sponsored reviews.

There are other services out there for paid review, but these are the ones I’ve been using on low-traffic blogs. If you want to make money online, this is as good a place to start as any.

Tags: Paid posting by Angel
6 Comments »

Blogging can be an ugly game. Those times when blogs leap up and bite their authors are unpleasant to watch, but it’s fascinating to observe the power of the blog. Never underestimate it, and never take it for granted. Maybe you’re just in this game to make money blogging, but you should never forget that blogging goes beyond simple money-making techniques.

The fired teacher

My first example of when blogs bite happened a couple of months ago to a friend of mine, a Filipina girl, living in Bangkok. She was working as an English-language teacher and had just started working for a new school. She had also been keeping a blog for a while, and she wasn’t afraid to blog about her life, sex, her inner thoughts, and so on.

One post she wrote about her sexual exploits got picked up by a fellow teacher with a grudge. This guy forwarded the blog post to people in the teaching community and it made its way back to my friend’s boss, who promptly fired my friend by email, writing that he couldn’t risk her writing about her place of work. Although she hadn’t written a single thing about her school, she was still fired for some sort of “threat” that she posed.

Lesson learned: If you’re going to cover certain taboo subject areas and be in the public eye, there is a strong case for anonymity.

The relationship nightmare

Another friend of mine, this time a journalist working in Bangkok, wrote a very controversial post about prostitution in Thailand. The rant got picked up by the local expat community and turned into a 30-page post on a popular forum, with some very heated remarks directed toward my friend.

In the end, my friend’s boyfriend, who was briefly mentioned in the original post, started being mentioned in the forum. Suffice to say, they very nearly broke up because of it. The boyfriend couldn’t understand why my friend would blog personal aspects of her life. Although my friend’s level of traffic spiked by a multiple of five and her Adsense earnings shot through the roof, she eventually removed the original post because of problems it was causing in the real world.

Lesson learned: Be wary of how much personal information you reveal, and remember that even those close to you will never really “get” why you blog. Oh, and controversy creates traffic and more money online.

Breaking the rules

Not every blogger deserves our sympathies, however. A buddy of mine who runs a couple of magazines in Bangkok recently had to sack one of his employees for posting copyrighted material belonging to one of his magazines on her personal blog. Plagiarism is never a smart move and ultimately it will always lead to a fall. Remember when I caught someone borrowing other people’s content? The person in question admitted his wrongs, but it’s still a situation to avoid.

Lesson learned: don’t steal content from anybody.

A diplomat’s disgrace

This one made front pages around the world. Ian Proud, a diplomat working for the British Embassy in Bangkok, started writing a blog for a leading English-language newspaper. He put a picture of himself on his blog and within hours he was recognized as a frequent visitor to one of Bangkok’s most notorious red light districts. This led to a number of accusations and an eventual admission that he’d used prostitutes in the past.

Needless to say, the blog was pulled and Ian Proud’s name was mud around the world.

Lesson learned: there are certain occupations that just don’t gel with personal blogging. Think about what skeletons you have in your closet before you start writing your blog.

Boy in the spotlight

My final blogging nightmare happened to me about six months ago. I wrote a tongue-in-cheek post about foreign women in Thailand. Most people took it for what it was, but there was one woman who read it and took it completely the wrong way. She left me an essay of comment and promised that she would forward my article to every publication in the UK in a bid to ruin my career because she thought I was “sexist”.

All this was in spite of numerous foreign women in Thailand actually agreeing with what I’d written. I never heard from this woman again and I don’t know if she went through with her promise, but in the end, my loyal readership got behind me to call this woman out for her silly remarks.

Lesson learned: be careful of who you write about, because it only takes one unstable individual to make your life hell.

Have you ever had a blogging nightmare?

Tags: Around the web by Angel
3 Comments »

I wasn’t enthralled to read about the millioneurowiki today. I was actually a bit stunned by the whole thing. I was even more stunned to find a glowing review of the product on Cash Quests, and I assume there will be a review to follow on John Chow.

My thoughts on this product are based purely on my initial reactions when I first came across all of this today. I’ve been a fan of the Cow since his conception, and I’ve read Cash Quests since long before they turned comments off for the first time, so this isn’t a personal dig, but I just have to ask, “Why go down this avenue?”

The milliondollarwiki has sold about 1,000 pages so far. That’s a cool $100,000 for the creator of the site. Everything about that site is hype though, and a lot of that hype comes from John Chow. As you scroll down the list of the most popular pages you see that most of them lie dormant with few page views.

Part of the problem is that people register similar pages, such as “make money online” and “making money online”. A look at the top-viewed sites reveals very few with useful content. It’s all blatant affiliate links, banners and useless stuff. It’s essentially worthless garbage.

After seeing how boring the milliondollarwiki turned out to be, I felt a sudden pang of dread when I started reading about the millioneurowiki on John Cow. I was about ready to post something along the lines of “boring” when somebody mentioned the Cash Quests review. At this point I wasn’t even sure who was behind the millioneurowiki.

I went over to Cash Quests and saw the guys over there hyping up the millioneurowiki pretty good, basing most of their evidence on how viral the milliondollarwiki went. On Cash Quests it states that Cow is behind the millioneurowiki.

I was confused as to why John Cow wrote a review of his own product as if it were somebody else behind it. It just didn’t make sense. But what really got to me was that Cash Quests was in on the game. Cash Quests is a trustworthy source of facts and knowledge, but this was almost leading the readership somewhere else. The way the review was written was so different to the attitude that they have been trying to create on Cash Quests.

Looking at the first few pages purchased on the millioneurowiki, most of them are only being used to promote Text Link Ads affiliate links. I hope that trend doesn’t continue and that Cow can correct the mistakes made by the milliondollarwiki.

When the John Chow review of this product goes live, I think it’ll be a shame because I’ve been getting sick of all these hype products and hype deals and hype websites that have inspired post after post from bloggers. It’s just not fun to read, which must reflect my vocation as a journalist rather than an entrepreneur.

People will be skeptical of the millioneurowiki because it is carbon copied from the milliondollarwiki. The Internet doesn’t need either service, but then there’s a lot the Internet doesn’t need that makes money. The millioneurowiki is relying exclusively on recreating everything the milliondollarwiki did. For the Cow, for Cash Quests, for John Chow and a select few others, this will not doubt prove lucrative, but for most people, we’ll have to wait and see.

I wish Cow all the best with this venture because he’s one of those bloggers who has always come across as a people’s blogger. Furthermore, the only reason the milliondollareuro will succeed is because of John Cow. If it were me behind this project, it would never get off the ground.

Tags: Around the web by Angel
20 Comments »