It went well for a while. I made a few hundred dollars during the year and it did pay some of the bills but I learned that my affiliation with them would impact my google page rank. See how I have no page rank as of the date I wrote this post?

I did research on paid posts, page rank, learned stuff, formed my opinions and decided to try sticking it out with PayPerPost since they seemed like they were working to bring in advertisers who weren’t looking for blogs with page rank since hardly any PayPerPost bloggers had page rank anymore.

Also PayPerPost was making claims that they were working to clean out the junk blogs and imporve the quality of bloggers using their service. One thing I noticed a ton of was fellow bloggers on PayPerPost who weren’t managing quality blogs, they were just creating blog so that they could take opportunities and to make money. Their blogs were not targeting any audience or providing any real benefit to anyone but the advertisers who were paying them for nofollow free links which is unethical in paid post advertising (in my opinion).

Plus my own blog’s readers and traffic had really grown a ton and to me the quality and target audience of PayPerPost’s paid opportunities just wasn’t worth tarnishing my blog or annoying my readers anymore. Sure when you get like 20 hits a day it doesn’t matter if you take a paid post for a sheistey (sp?) dating site but when your daily traffic is over 300 hits it is a different story.

So here’s to you my 50+ regular readers and my 200+ readers who arrive here via google everyday, you helped me grow and stuck with me through the process. I’ve kicked PayPerPost to the curb and will continue striving to provide some real quality content to the web to benefit you!

Now I am looking at other ways to monetize this blog. I’ve already got adsense going and amazon referrals and I would love to get on with BlogHer but they aren’t taking new publishers right now… So I’ll just focus my money making efforts in other areas like on helium.com and also on these two pages I’ve created (Alternative Health Zone and Alternative Birthing Zone).

I love to stay busy! Got any blog monitization tips, traffic improving ideas or questions about all this for me?

—————-

Update: 8pm 1/26/2009

We are forecasted for some severe winter weather according to N’s station’s dooms-day weather coverage. Apparently we are going to be getting some inches of snow (big freaking deal!!)…

The real worry is about freezing rain/ ice storms that could leave many without power. No power means no internet I think our gas heat and stove will still work unless ice storms can take out natural gas supply too… Hmm. It seems like forecasters and people in general just freak out over nothing weather wise here. We’ll see if the ice storm happens though.

If you are weather curious you can see a current video of our conditions here. I have a few scheduled posts so you wont notice a lack of content here if we do loose power but you can check my twitter page to see if I am alive or not. Also our current weather forcast is here. Wanna take bets of weather or not the ice will happen? Better yet go place your baby weight bet here!

The post I can't sit idle, I am always working on something… appeared first on Updates from Ryder Family Farm.

Payperpost is a great way for bloggers to get paid for writing but questions have been raised about whether or not they are asking you to break google’s “passing page rank” rules. Some payperpost writers claim that using “rel=nofollow” in the html for sponsored links is against the payperpost terms of service. Not using it will surely impact your page rank and may even get your sites removed from google so what decision will you make? Which one is more ethical? Are you looking to make money or to provide helpful content to web users, do you have to choose one or the other?
I thought the goal of payperpost was to create internet “buzz” for advertisers and to refer readers to opportunities that were relevant and useful to the target audience. I didn’t think payperpost was a round-about way for advertisers to buy page rank and optimal search engine placement.

Yes, I know that many people are saying that google page rank means nothing anymore and that they are “a soft monopoly” that is loosing respect and creditability over all this. I am just not sure if I believe it just yet. Google is my preferred search engine and they do have many users who believe their results are the best, besides I do get over half of my traffic from their search results!

I guess it all goes back to what we believe is the best type of search results. Do you like your results to be free of paid results and do you think paid results are often irrelevant, do you care? Do you think that advertisers who pay for publicity should also benefit from preferred search engine placement?

Shouldn’t their be a way for the small businesses and the “great content” producers to get into the search engines without having to pay and arm and a leg for publicity? What are your thoughts about all this and where do you think the coin will fall?

Their are some great debates going on about the google/ payperpost saga that you can read about on the payperpost forums. This is a very controversial topic and each blogger has to decide which way they will go.

Additionally, any site owner that chooses to place advertisements on their site for personal gain should consider the pros and cons very carefully! For more reading on the paid links/ page rank issue check out these sites:

• Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings
• Matt Cutts on text links and pagerank
• Why paid links in the search results can be bad
• Information about buying and selling links that pass PageRank
• Paid Links To Manipulate PageRank

The post Payperpost, Google, page rank, paid links and the debate. appeared first on Updates from Ryder Family Farm.