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There have been some interesting articles this week on the issue of whether blogs should carry paid advertising and sponsored links, this is a debate that has been running for a while ever since Google asked bloggers and webmasters to report any paid links that they saw on other websites or blogs. Obviously they did not realise that this could be a surefire sneaky way to sabotage a competitor’s website if you were both trying to rank highly for the same keywords.

My feeling is that Google set up their search engine results and page ranking systems in a way that they chose, and if users of the internet can make that system work for them in a legitimate way to boost their rankings, then fair play to them. Most of the bloggers who carry paid links on their sites are friendly people who are happy to share information and knowledge on search engine optimization. Many of them also give away Wordpress plugins that can help make other bloggers’ sites more search engine friendly.

The other point about the whole paid links issue is that it has created a whole new economic sector comprising paid links agencies who market the posting assignments on behalf of advertisers and the bloggers who write the posts, and make an income, mostly working from home, as a result. There are millions of people trying to make money online, and there are numerous scams trying to take their money. Think about the paid to surf scandal which culminated with the Stormpay and 12DailyPro scam in February 2006. The paid to post sector offers the same group of individuals an ethical and creative way to earn money from home. The types of bloggers in this niche are often students, stay at home parents and those who have been laid off from their lifelong careers (like me) with plenty of time and energy who need to make money online from home. Some bloggers state openly that they are working to pay off their debts. Many of the advertisers are also trying to get established with worthwhile websites and they are happy to pay for backlinks to their websites.

I would be happier if there were fewer posting opportunities from loan consolidation sites and credit card companies, since they are often directly responsible for the financial problems faced by the paid bloggers. As long as those are high paying keywords, however, those opportunities are going to appear at the paid to post sites.

When I talk about paid links, remember this is a world away from the spam sites that are simply stuffed with keywords using Black Hat SEO methods. These sites are useless to readers and it is very annoying when they appear in search results. There is a system for reporting these sites, but Google asks for quite a lot of information to flag them up and to be frank I have not got the time. Before declaring a crusade against paid links, maybe the search engines could put some effort into removing the spammy sites from their indexes?

Anyway, back to my original idea for posting this article. My post listing the
Top 10 Paid to Post Sites for Blogs was published in the blog carnivals at successpart2.com and blogmecash.com this week, and I am very grateful to the authors, Jon and Satish, for editing the magazines. The trouble with being in a blog carnival - for me - is that I then start reading the other articles on different ways to blog for money. All the articles in the ezines were well targeted on the topic of ‘how to make money blogging’ and away I go, following links to interesting articles. So this is how I ended up at a blog called the Internet Cashflow Guy, because he had posted an article similar to mine, titled Earnings for August.

But of course I saw other interesting stories on the blog, and the article that caught my eye concerned the subject of paid links, which started my brain off on the subject - and here we are. I have probably spent a useful hour looking at other bloggers’ ideas for increasing blogging income, and I have written a blog post on my favourite topic - how to blog for money - as well.