Foreign Perspectives

Unless you’re very quick, you’ll be able to see the brand new PPP Direct logo on the sidebar of the blog today.

What is it? Well, it’s a way for people to pick a specific blog and get the author to write a post for them. In fact, I wrote the very first of those on Tuesday but I didn’t know it then. What happened was that someone picked out the post which I’d written on Rennes le Chateau and the Da Vinci Code and asked me to put a link to their site on it. This worked perfectly for them in that they’d a large post completely relevant to their product and perfectly for me in that all I needed to do was to add a clickable link into an existing post.

In the past, the way things worked was that bloggers generally picked out offers on the PPP site which were broadly relevant to their own content, wrote a post for that and picked up the payment. The snag is that there aren’t always offers specifically relevant to niche blogs and, even when there are, it’s easy to miss them unless you check the site every day. For instance, you’d have seen something about the Co-Op here today which fitted very neatly into our finance series but all the slots were gone by the time I saw it.

PPP Direct works from the other end by letting advertisers choose a blog or even a post that’s relevant to their product and make them an offer.

The other big plus point is that the commission payments are a whole lot lower this way around.

Why don’t I just use the Wordpress Bankroll plugin? Well, it’s been there for a week or so but the advertiser that sponsored the post this week didn’t use it because they already have an account with another PPP outfit and they don’t need to trust me to actually write something before they pay up so they used PPP instead. So, no, PPP Direct isn’t a completely new facility but it does make it that bit easier to get paid to blog and, I think, it’ll produce sponsored posts genuinely within the normal stream of posts which is good for the advertisers, good for the readers and good for the blogs themselves.

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