Should you want a lively debate, just try taking the position that Pay Per Post is a legitimate revenue model for blogs - and an effective marketing vehicle for companies. This recent WSJ story by Simona Covel sparked some strong reactions from the blogging community by showcasing the success Apogee Search is having with Pay Per Post bloggers.
So is Pay Per Post wrong? One camp says yes, unilaterally. But just a year or so after its founding, 50,000 Pay Per Post bloggers have voted the other way. From a marketing perspective, wrong or right ultimately depends on what your objectives are. Pay Per Post feels like a quick fix (score a spike in organic listings, drive a little traffic and move on) as opposed to being a component of a long term social media marketing strategy. However, does that mean the unvarnished thoughts (as Jim Nail from Cymfony puts it) of bloggers can't be leveraged by marketers in a transparent and ethical way - while providing financial benefits to the blogger?
Despite its image, Pay Per Post is gathering steam and the reason is, for many individual publishers out there, the personal satisfaction they get from blogging is not always enough. The numbers tell us that many want to take their self-publishing efforts to another level and generate revenue, no matter how small. So is Pay Per Post the right path to that? Probably not. But it is proving the market is ripe for the taking.
Comments (1)
Todd—can one "take" this market without compromising the ethics of the bloggers doing the posting? I know you think not, and I agree, because the authenticity of the posting is what is important. If a blogger posts simply because they got a check (or some other form of payment), they'll burn their credibility pretty fast.
So, we agree that the authentic "unvarnished thought" needs to be aggregated somehow. And there are lots of different ways of arriving at some form of consolidation of bloggers with similar sentiments, but largely after the fact of their having agreed on something.
BuzzLogic can push the time that agreement is discovered close to the moment it happens, so the marketing problem is how do you use that initial momentum to create a movement? Ad placement may be one way, creating connections that extend shared passions is another. It's not clear to me that simply linking marketer support to blogger is enough, though it is a step in the direction you're talking about.
Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe | August 31, 2007 12:58 PM
Posted on August 31, 2007 12:58