I was interviewed this morning by an editor over at Sales & Marketing Management about PayPerPost. This is the second time I’ve been interviewed about PayPerPost since I began doing paid blogging for them in July and I always enjoy talking to the media about my favorite paid blogging program. I never got a copy of the first article I was interviewed for, which was to appear in the Orlando Sentinel, so I headed over there and took a peek into their archives and was able to buy a copy of the article for under $4. (I’m wishing now I had hounded the reporter into mailing me a copy when it was published!) Anyway, here’s a copy, as it appeared in the paper on Jan 1, 2007. He interviewed me MONTHS ago so I’m not sure why it took so long. That’s why my total is off too – I’m closer to $6000 now.
Bloggers earn bucks for creating ad buzz
Orlando Sentinel – Orlando, Fla.
Author: Tim Barker, Sentinel Staff Writer
Date: Jan 1, 2007
(Copyright 2007 by The Orlando Sentinel)
During the past six months, Colleen Caldwell has blogged herself into a new set of dishes, a weeklong vacation in North Carolina and a good chunk of her family’s Christmas presents.
It’s all very simple.
The Tampa woman sits down at her computer each night and writes about various advertisers’ products, posting the entries onto one of several blogs she maintains.
Each missive is followed a few days later by a small deposit — from $4 to $15 — into her online PayPal account.
Her take for the year: nearly $3,000 and counting.
“I’m sure there are people on the Internet making more money than me,” Caldwell said. “But they’re not making it as easy as me.”
Is this free enterprise at work?
Or yet another nail in the coffin of the Internet’s credibility?
Caldwell, 30, is paid by a fledgling Orlando company taking a controversial approach to word-of-mouth, or buzz, marketing.
FTC opinion: Disclose tie-ins
PayPerPost has a stable of more than 10,000 bloggers — some are more active than others — throughout the country who essentially get paid to write about things advertisers want to promote.
Often bloggers must say nice things in order to get paid.
Until very recently, relationships to advertisers weren’t necessarily disclosed.
That changed in mid-December after the Federal Trade Commission issued an opinion on an unrelated complaint.
Critics argued that consumers are being duped by what they think are unbiased opinions given out by word-of-mouth marketers who don’t disclose they are being compensated for spreading the word.
The commission now says those relationships must be disclosed.
Violators will be handled case by case, with the potential for fines ranging from thousands to millions of dollars.
Shortly after the FTC decision, PayPerPost founder Ted Murphy said his firm was gauging its impact: “We have always strongly encouraged disclosure by our members, and we are in favor of transparency as long as it doesn’t impact blogger freedom of speech.”
Days later, the company announced a change, calling it “the second phase of its full disclosure model.”
Essentially, PayPerPost now requires all of its bloggers, videographers and podcasters to say that they are backed by advertisers.
It remains to be seen whether the change will satisfy critics.
The Word of Mouth Marketing Association, an industry trade group, has long frowned on hidden advertising relationships.
Andy Sernovitz, the association’s executive director, would not discuss the Orlando company: “What they do does not comply with the WOMMA code of ethics.”
Patrick Rooney, president of Chicago advertising firm Expand Communications, said he would urge his clients to stay away from paid blogging.
“Frankly, it’s a dangerous practice,” Rooney said.
Many successes
Still, early successes have been plentiful for the Orlando firm founded by entrepreneur Murphy — this is company No. 6 for the 30-year-old Florida State University dropout.
The company was started in late June, spun out of Murphy’s marketing agency MindComet, after he decided the idea was strong enough to support itself.
Murphy’s faith was rewarded when he quickly snagged $3 million in venture capital and moved into a downtown office.
The company employs a dozen and figures to double that within nine months.
More than 1,000 advertisers, including well-known brands Hewlett-Packard, Maxim magazine and the Speed Channel, have signed up as clients.
He even has competition — something he sees as an affirmation of his business — in the form of ReviewMe and LoudLaunch.
As for the critics, Murphy offers no apologies: “I believe in capitalism. If people want to make a buck blogging, I think they should.”
Still, he said the firm polices its ever-growing army of bloggers to make sure they are serious about the endeavor.
Sites cannot include pornographic material and must feature original content. In the end, however, he said much depends on the bloggers themselves.
“It comes down to the bloggers’ individual morals and ethics,” Murphy said. “There will be good bloggers and bad bloggers.”
Even now that disclosure is required, some industry experts question the wisdom of paying bloggers.
“I think it makes it better. It makes it honest and truthful,” said Kelly O’Keefe, the executive education director of the Adcenter at Virginia Commonwealth University. “But when you start paying people, it’s always a risky business.”
A better approach, he said, would be to treat bloggers essentially as members of the mass media, releasing information to them in the same manner.
Search-engine rankings
Yet there may be more at play here than advertisers simply trying to get bloggers to promote their wares.
Winter Haven blogging consultant Josh Hallett said a larger issue is the way advertisers are using bloggers to artificially boost themselves in Web-search engines’ rankings.
Basically, if enough people establish links between their own blogs and a particular Web site, that Web site will be ranked higher by Google.
With enough links using the same phrase, the site will pop up on the first page of results — where every advertiser wants to be — whenever someone enters that specific phrase into the search engine.
To better understand this, go to Google and type in the words “miserable failure.” The top result links to a biography of President Bush.
This little, well-known feat was accomplished by a group of bloggers who all agreed to link the words “miserable failure” to the biography site.
It’s called Googlebombing.
Hallett thinks advertisers want to use companies such as PayPerPost for similar purposes, albeit for commercial rather than political gains.
“It just takes a couple hundred people to link to a page to significantly boost your ranking,” Hallett said.
