WordPress.com: no PayPerPost!
PayPerPost is yet another way to earn from your blogs. While it’s not exactly a new idea to get a few bucks from writing about products in the guise of features or reviews, PayPerPost has set up a centralized effort where individual bloggers can get paid, even if they don’t belong to ad or blog networks.
Bloggers don’t even have to set up anything on their sites, like most contextual advertising and affiliate programs require. You simply sign up, get assignments for products or services, and then write about them (in a positive light, of course). The inherent advantage of this is you’re not limited to your choice of blog software. You don’t even have to know how to code HTML or Javascript (or at least copy-and-paste) because you just have to write. And this means you can earn even from the “closed” blogging services that don’t let you touch your layout’s code manually.
One such closed service is WordPress.com, which is probably today’s fastest-growing. It’s based on the same WordPress core popular among bloggers and probloggers for its flexibility and extensibility. However, you cannot edit your own layout, nor can you insert AdSense or other advertising code to appear on your posts. So does this mean PayPerPost is a good way to earn from your blog?
Wrong.
WordPress.com’s terms of service specifically disallows this.
The Content is not spam, and does not contain unethical or unwanted commercial content designed to drive traffic to third party sites or boost the search engine rankings of third party sites, or to further unlawful acts (such as phishing) or mislead recipients as to the source of the material (such as spoofing);
While it’s not explicit, PayPerPost has been thought of as bordering on being unethical in the blogosphere, because these days you won’t know if a blog post is actually based on experience and is an honest review, or if it was paid.
Ethics and the blogosphere—I think this deserves a whole new category or even a whole new blog altogether!
[tags]problogging, monetization, wordpress, hosted, adsense, payperpost[/tags]
