Recently, Tony of Get Swinked! asked me how I got a sponsored post for L.A. Police gear as he is a user of some of their products. This would make that particular post a great fit for him.
I picked up that opportunity through Pay Per Post, and for about 10 minutes of work I received $5.01 (or $30.06 an hour, a pleasant way to mentally frame it). For smaller blogs like the ones belonging to Tony and I, this sort of monetization is a great way to go, I think. Monetization methods such as AdSense don't tend to work well for bloggers like us because our traffic is on the low end of the spectrum. It's a lot more profitable to get paid for sponsored posting.
Pay Per Post still works to some extent, but it had built into it numerous flaws that eventually surfaced and wrecked the opportunity for a lot of bloggers, myself included. The company behind Pay Per Post, IZEA, responded by creating an evolved form of the sponsored posting opportunity they offer, SocialSpark.
What you get with SocialSpark as a blogger is essentially the same as what you would get as a member of Pay Per Post: paid blogging opportunities. There are two differences in SocialSpark that I consider to be major ones, however. The first is that Pay Per Post's sponsored links were not what are called "no follow" links, meaning search engines would pay attention to the links and use them to calculate a higher search engine rank for the site they went to. Google, the multi-billion dollar anti-American search engine company, took offense to this and slapped down all blogs using Pay Per Post to make money (that's the excuse, anyway, sort of like their excuses for why they like to insult fallen U.S. troops - all crap). The second key difference is that SocialSpark has a queuing system for accepting paid post opportunities - you can "get in line" and wait for an opportunity to open up that is at present all taken up by other posters. Pay Per Post has no such system in place and it rapidly became a vicious free-for-all where only people who were camped out on their computers and hitting the refresh button every second could get opportunities.
I've been a member of SocialSpark since April and so far I've made a few bucks with it (as you can see from my profile, you also get a chance to tell others a little more about yourself which can help to attract other paid posting opportunities). Assuming I stick to my present regular blogging streak and increase my traffic some, the income from this source should increase (and I'd really like it to because half of everything I make with paid posts goes into my Forex account and becomes part of my passive income stream). It's a pretty easy and enjoyable way to make good money... sort of like what I just did with this post, which at $9.00 for 15 minutes of typing works out to $36.00 per hour. Feel like trying it yet?
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