Like most bloggers, you dream of making money from your blog one day. A sponsored blog post is a blog post which you are paid publish on your blog. It may be written by you or by the advertisers. There is no harm in publishing paid reviews as long as the review relates to your niche. In accordance with FTC regulations you should always mention that it’s a sponsored blog post, usually at the end of the post with a byline such as:
“blog post was sponsored by (Company or brand Name Here).” Even if you are not legally bound to disclose that you’ve been paid to publish a post, you should.
I wouldn’t recommend that bloggers sell sponsored blog posts for such a low figure unless they don’t have a loyal and returning readership and don’t care about losing the readers they do have.
If you have a blog or websites with a decent dressed Pagerank i.e. PR4 or 5, you may contact a review network too and get paid for writing reviews on your website. Some of these networks include PayPerPost, ReviewMe, and BlogVertise etc.
Note:-, a sponsored blog post is a personal experience recommendation from you – from a real person your readers know and trust. Don’t sell yourselves or your readers short.
Recommendations while writing paid reviews
You have worked hard on your blog, to build up a voice, and content that people enjoy reading, sharing and engaging with. Flooding your blog with articles about car insurance, the latest cheap products and that “must buy” will eventually turn off the readers you’ve worked hard to attract.
- Try to work with clients that enhance your blog and add value for your readers.
- The sole purpose of Paid reviews is to get a rich PR link from you. Sponsors don't care about your traffic
- Make sure that links within sponsored content have the “nofollow” attribute or are coded so that they are inaccessible to crawlers. This includes any links to the sponsor on the template (logos, package treatments, etc.) and any sponsor links within the actual editorial text. This applies to all forms of sponsored content, be it specially created content or regular editorial content that is given a sponsor treatment.
- Any links within sponsored content should not pass PageRank. This stemmed from the incident in which Interflora and some UK newspapers were penalized for links within advertorials. Accept only a maximum of two links pointing to the same domain when reviewing. Sponsors often insert too many links on a single review, this makes your review suspected and can give a signal to Google that you are selling links.
- Never review Casino or Gambling sites, no matter how commercial the site be.
- The Review content must be related to your niche. If you write on web developments then you can review apps or web services or web tools that are used for web development purposes but you can not review a selling cars or Real Estate business sites.
- Charge $100-$150 for a PR4 site with a review of 1000 words. These higher rates are generally paid to more established blogs with a higher Page Rank (find out yours here) and a larger audience.
Google Guidelines About Paid Links
Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways,
such as:
- Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the <a> tag
- Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file”
We recommend you avoid selling (and buying) links that pass PageRank in order to prevent loss of trust, lower rankings, or in an extreme case, removal from Google's search results.
Hope the above tips will help you better review content on your websites or blogs.
