The Lady Programmer

I’ve done a series of posts about paid blogging sites. I hope you did not miss any of these past posts:

• Earn by Doing Paid Reviews with PayPerPost
• Make Money Doing Paid Reviews with SponsoredReviews
• SocialSpark: A Paid Review Site with a Social Networking Twist 
• Other Sites That Lets You Earn Money From Blogging 

All of these cover how a blogger can earn from simply doing paid posts. Of course, these are not the only ways to earn from blogs. There are also other means like affiliate marketing, ad networks like Google Adsense and selling links. The last post on other sites that lets you earn money from blogging simply covers other paid review sites.

Disadvantage of Page Rank Loss

One downside to accepting paid reviews is that these blogs are prone to Google pagerank loss. To be accurate, Google is NOT against all paid reviews; Google penalizes links that have no “rel=nofollow” code. So far, SocialSpark is the only place where I can fully retain pagerank while doing sponsored posts, because their posts always require the use of “rel=nofollow” code.

I had been a firsthand witness of this. I was doing paid posts with SocialSpark then I suddenly hit PR3. Now I’m back to zero because I had accepted “dofollow” paid posts.

Matt Cutts, a high ranked employee of Google, had approved the way things are SocialSpark. Don’t believe me? You can read all about it in this IZEA post.

Unfortunately, props was not given to PPP. I guess everyone knows the issue about PPP bloggers getting spanked by Google. I strongly believe that PPP bloggers are not the only ones that get affected but any blogger that does sponsored posts with no “rel=nofollow” code on links.

I was catching some new opportunities in SocialSpark just the other day and I suddenly noticed that all the props that I gained in my profile dropped to zero. I checked other profiles too – even the bloggers with the most friends got zero props in their profile.

When I checked the IZEA forums it seemed that everyone’s props had been reset barely a week ago. Just like what had been discussed in one of their forum threads, I just could not repeat the effort of getting to everyone in SocialSpark to redo all the props as well as regain these props too.

Even the SocialSpark code of conduct stated their props/drops etiquette. It mentioned about serial prop seekers getting reprimanded. Even bad comments that sound like “propped you, hope you’d prop me back” are now being removed. UPDATE: Customer Love can break your heart by removing if you try to add too many friends at one time, solicit props just like above and put a comment that puts out a slot request for the advertiser to write an opportunity. These are grounds for having one’s account suspended, as this blogger had experienced.

photo credit: mommyof9 (SXC)

I think props and drops are great, but I do not think it would affect one’s ability to get some opportunities from SocialSpark. Getting a good traffic and having a good IZEA rank is still the top choice of advertisers for screening out opportunities.