Note this post is from March 2007. There are no sponsored posts on Plain Jane Mom.

On March 1st, 2007 I started an experiment to try writing posts for Pay Per Post and ReviewMe — go ahead and read Part 1 and Part 2 of my notes on it if you haven’t already.

I don’t have anything especially enlightening to report on my time doing sponsored posts. It turned out to be very simple. The pro: they pay you. The cons: you have intrusive ads on your blog, and it can be hard to find high paying posts that aren’t about payday lenders, online poker sites or other folks I won’t do business with.

A tidy summary for you

During the month of March I did 44 posts for Pay Per Post and I earned $1,039.25. In the first 9 days of April I did 3 for PPP and earned $108.85. I also did one post for ReviewMe and one for someone who contacted me directly which each earned $50. I’ll do the math for you: $1,248.10 in 5 weeks.

(Note that I had also signed up with SponsoredReviews, but the dealings I had with them in email revealed them to be, frankly, kind of snooty! I thought it was hilarious that they were acting like they were better than others given the business they’re in, but I digress.)

Behind the curtain

I know that there are some bloggers who think of their paid posts as part of their blog, but I am not one of those bloggers. For me, paid posts were 30 days of premium advertising on my site. Each of my posts had “This is a sponsored post” as the first paragraph.

None of my paid posts ever appeared in my RSS feed, so people weren’t getting constantly pinged that I had a new post only to discover it was an ad. Plus the sites I allow to re-purpose my content (9rules, MayasMom, Technorati…) weren’t cluttered with ads either.

Then what?

After a post has been up for 30 days (a PayPerPost requirement) I delete it. But the big question is “Was it worth it?” And the answer is “yes, but…” The “but” is that it was worth it to me to do it for just the 5 weeks or so. I wouldn’t do it long-term. I earned enough to justify going to the BlogHer conference this summer, and for that I am grateful, but I’m not interested in continuing with sponsored posts as a long-term project. Just to close the loop, I’ll be deleting my accounts with PPP and ReviewMe as soon as I get my final payments from them, and my SponsoredReviews account is already gone.

Thus ends the great PJM Sponsored Post Experiment of 2007. I made some money and learned from the inside what all the fuss is about with paid posts. Please return your seat backs to their upright and locked position. You freaks in the back row who have gotten too drunk to walk will be escorted off by security. Prepare for the cavity search.

Note this post is from March 2007. There are no sponsored posts on Plain Jane Mom.

As you know, on March 1st, 2007 I started writing sponsored posts for PayPerPost.com, and I am now at about the half-way point of my one month experiment. (Read the first post on this topic to get caught up.) I’ll be honest: I’m on the fence about it, and it is really, really easy to say why. Pro: I have made very good money. Con: lots of ads on my blog. (Today PPP asked me to make a change to the way I was displaying the posts on my site.)

After evaluating the past couple of weeks I’m going to make a couple of changes to what I do.

• First of all, I’m going to remove the other ads I have on this site. There’s one pre-paid from a company I really like that will stay up for another month, but after that I won’t take new sidebar ads.
• I have already been skipping PPP posts that pay under a certain amount, and now I am going to raise that threshold. This will mean fewer PPP posts on my site.

And now for the big question: How much have I made so far? That’s an interesting question without a simple answer. I’ll explain how it works.

After you sign up with PPP you check their site to see what posts (called “opportunities” or “opps”) are available right then. If you see something that you qualify for (by subject matter, pagerank, alexa score, and / or technorati rank) you click it to “reserve” it for an hour.

You have up to an hour to write the post, post it on your site, and submit the link back to your PPP account. At that point you just wait. Some time during the next 2 weeks or so you’ll get an email saying that your post has been reviewed and approved for payment. (I’ve not yet had a post rejected, but that can also happen.)

30 days after you first submitted your post you get paid via PayPal. Since I have only been doing this for 16 days I haven’t gotten payments yet, but I have had a number of my posts approved. I do worry, though, about posts getting rejected, but I’ll just have to wait and see if that happens.

Anyway, back to the question of how much I have made. In 16 days I have done 33 posts, and if all these posts get approved I will have made $630. Each post takes me much less than the allotted hour to complete, so that’s a pretty good return on my time. The question is, do I have a price? And is it a thousand dollars a month? I’ll get back to you in April.

(This was not a sponsored post.)

Note this post is from March 2007. There are no sponsored posts on Plain Jane Mom.

(Update: Check out my mid-point report from March 16th, 2007.)

This is not a sponsored post.

So you’ll probably have noticed that I have “Sponsored Posts” on my site these days. Yep, it’s true. Some might say I’ve crossed over to the dark side. And I know for sure some of you out there are shaking your wagging-finger at me.

“Bad blogger, bad blogger! Polluting the Blogosphere! Blog Whore!”

I’m not going to debate the correctness of getting paid to post reviews of companies or products, but I do want to be really open about it. I’m not hanging my head in shame and hiding in a corner. I’m trying an experiment that will hopefully help my family’s financial situation.

I’m giving it a month and then I’ll see where I stand. My criteria for success:

• Making a decent amount of money. I can’t say what that is in absolute numbers as it has to compensate me for my time writing the paid posts. At the end of the month I’ll look at the money earned and weigh that against the time and any aggravation in the process.
• Not pissing off my readers. Do you hate what I’m doing? Are you going to stomp off in a huff and stop reading my blog? Leave a comment on your way out so I know that’s what happened.

You’ll always know right away when you’re looking at a post I’ve gotten paid for — the first sentence will be “This is a sponsored post.” Let me know if I’ve become a whore. If so, I’ll need to get new clothes.