11 replies to this topic

[jammin' Jake]

Hi folks - I read an article the other day in the Wall Street Journal about the growing trend of Pay Per Post advertising. For those of you not familiar (as I had never heard of it previously) this practice involves paying a number of bloggers to review your site/service/product and write a short review (good or bad) for a fee to the blogger.

My understanding with FCC regs is that these must be announced as advertisements or paid reviews.

The WSJ article touted this as a cheap and excellent way to get your site/service/product out there in the online community as well as a way to build incoming links and improve rankings.

Personally it seems a little sleezy to me and could well diminish the credibility of one's brand, but I thought that I would check with you fine folks to see if anyone is familiar with this practice or has even used services such as PayPerPost.com

Thoughts? Comments? Suggestsion?

here is a link to the WSJ article:
http://online.wsj.co...ml?mod=rss_free

[nethy]

Without giving it to much thought, aprogramerism comes to mind. The devil is in the details. Depends how it is done. Sometimes I'm sure that there would be a useful and tasteful model.

One devil that come to mind from the article is search engine spam.

[roxyyo]

I wouldn't take my SEO advice from the Wall St. Journal...

Jammin Jake I agree with you that this is not great for branding. What could happen is these posts start ranking for your site/product/service names in Google, and because these posts have to disclose the sponsorship, you could look a bit goofy. It could get you more exposure, depending on your targeted sites. A $400 post on JohnChow.com is probably going to send you much better traffic if you're a tech-related site than if you get joe-newbie to review-you for $10.

Another issue is "footprint" that these links are easy for SE's to detect, and could these links be discounted. SEOmoz has a great little post about how the search engines are handling these links (they're not doing anything about them at this time even though they frown upon paid links) http://www.seomoz.or...erpost-services

So for now these links might just give you an SEO boost, but of course that could change as fast as the SE's change their mind or find a better way of handling this.

[roxyyo]

Sounds like Google has cracked down on Pay Per Post services with many bloggers taking Page Rank hits.

[Deverill]

Indeed.

It was funny last month when our marketing folks gave us the quarterly dog-and-pony about the Pay Per Post.
them - "You'll see that you have 5 good performers, all higher than PR3"
me - "Uh, the top one is PR0 according to the Google toolbar."
me - "and so's the next one..."
me - "and the next one..."
them - "Well, uh, yeah, you see, they HAD PR3 or higher when you paid them for the link but Google just did an algorithm update on the 28th"
me - "Yeah, whatever."
them - "But look, you have 3200+ links to you using link:yoursite.com"
me - "Uhm, but if you do +oursite.+com -site:oursite.com" it becomes 700-ish."
them - "huh? <<I repeat it>> uhm, well, uh, ah, ..."

They weren't having a good day that day since I've come on staff here. lol

Too bad I'm a programmer and not the decision maker!

But the bottom line is even the smoke blowers are starting to rethink the PPP model it seems and the rest of us know the house of cards has started to topple.

[http://www.DebSpecs.com]

Very interesting concept, this Pay Per Post. For one, can these blogger give you a bad review? That would be tragic, especially for online business. People can still be very wary of buying from online companies they've never heard of. A bad blog review would scare a prospect away.

Other than that, the concept walks strange line between advertising and publicity. In the early search engine days, i remember being horrified that people could actually pay their way to the first page on sponsored links. But now that i'm in the business, i do use pay per click. Also, sometimes when you advertise in a magnazine, they'll also do a "story" on you about how great your products are. And it'll be a real feature, not an ad. Really, they're just trying to woo you for future ads.

Hmm. Well sounds like it's not such a good idea anyway from the other repliies, so i'll stay away unless i notice my competitors thriving on it:)

:)DebSpecs

[Alan Perkins]

Matt Cutts' response, and a mega-comments thread, are here:

http://www.mattcutts...t-pass-pagerank

[qwerty]

There was also a recent story about Pay Per Post attempting to branch out into viral marketing, but if you read the comments after the story, it becomes somewhat unclear whether they were involved at all. It's an amusing story, nevertheless.

[Bruce]

I have used ReviewMe not PayPerPost (yet) and I think it's alright as long the blogger gives an honest opinion.

[Jill]

Hi Bruce, yes, of course it's okay. But okay and whether Google will want to count the links as a vote is another story.

Everyone certainly has a right to post about any other site they want to post about, whether or not they get paid for it.

[jagrmeister721]

We tried it in a campaign about six months back. The platform may have changed (though I haven't heard that it has), but at the time, while you can specify the nature of the site that you wanted to have do a write-up, once a site-owner actually signed up for your Post, you could not veto. So there was no selection process or weeding out sites we might not want to be associated with. And the filters they give you are not specific enough for that purpose.

[nethy]

Interesting cross-over from TV ads:

Advertisers and networks are hedging their bets. The scare of set top boxes allowing viewers to skip ad-breaks is encouraging em' to pursue other avenues for sticking logos in front of eyeballs.
Speed: micro ads blasted for 5-10 seconds without warning.
Stealth: Product placement .
Force: Sponsorships & such. Including brands actually making their own tv shows.

The stealth side is the wild card. Discreet product placement is currently only very small compared to 'normal ads' (I think its about 100m / 80b, but don't quote me). But it may be a rival within a few years. Starbucks & Dell in particular are (I think) doing some serious playing around. Word is the Autos are going to start some serious test runs too.

Take into account the value of web 2.0ish grassroot product promotion and the power starting to be wielded by bloggers and other web personalities, you come up with a pretty good case for major use of PPP by the big-buck advertisers.

Remember "Search advertising is great, but you can't advertise Coca Cola on Search." The big brands (and budgets) are still locked out for the most part.