Making money with a blog
In this long article written in French and published by InternetActu.net, Cyril Fiévet describes several ways to make a little money with a blog. The tools he mentions are mainly for individual bloggers, even if Google AdSense is used by lots of companies. Anyway, Cyril doesn’t write that some companies are hiring bloggers for decent salaries (read “100,000 dollars per year to blog?“). Finally, here is a new way to earn some money with your blog, which is described by the Boston Globe in “For a fee, some blogs boost firms.” In the U.S., ad agencies are giving bloggers small amounts of cash (5 dollars for example) to promote products or services. And most of them don’t even disclose the fact they’re paid to praise these products.
Here are the opening paragraphs of the Boston Globe article.
Jeff Cutler has never purchased anything from Dot Flowers, but you might think otherwise, reading the Hingham resident’s blog.
“No more driving to the corner to buy flowers and hand-deliver them,” he wrote on his Web page. “Nope. Now I go online to places like Dot Flowers.com and 1-800-Flowers. I like Dot a little better just because of the personal touch.”
Dot Flowers’s ad agency paid Cutler $5 this spring to promote the florist and put a link to its website on his blog, or online journal, short for web log. Cutler, who does not disclose the payment on his blog, is one of more than 2,000 bloggers whom marketer USWeb enlisted to hawk products and services. That helped the nascent florist double its sales in the first three months and shoot up near the top of Google’s search list, according to USWeb.
And here are some explanations from USWeb.
The more companies can get bloggers to link to their websites, the higher their sites will appear on Google’s search list. Google ranks its listings, in part, on how many Web pages link to a website. So paying $5 to a few thousand bloggers is a small price for companies such as Dot Flowers to move up closer to the first page of results in a Google search.
“We try to be as ethical as possible,” said Ed Shull, chief executive at USWeb, the ad agency that pays bloggers to post about Dot Flowers and other companies. “In our opinion, paying bloggers is no different than Tiger Woods getting money to wear the Nike logo.”
So what do you think? If you were approached by an ad agency offering you 5 euros to promote a product, would you do it? And would you write that you’re paid to write about this product?
