My company have been using payperpost a lot laely, spending thousands on promotions. We have actually been paying a fair price for bloggers and they jump all over it. We're fairly certain, come the next pagerank update, ours is going to go northwards and we have also seen an increase of sales in the last month. We've seen an increase of 5k revenue in the last month as a result of us using payperpost and slightly increasing the pay out on our affiliate program. Pay a fair amount and you'll get a fair amount in return. I would only suggest doing this though if your company has a good sized budget for advertizing. If not, then arguably there are better places to spend your money. Just my 2 cents.
Well a fair amount totally depends on what you are looking for. If you just want backlinks, then you don't want their post to be more than 100 words really, and thus you would pay less. But if you're looking to get high pr sites, or sites with high traffic, you'll have to pay a premium. So the more words in the post you want, the more you're going to have to be willing to pay and the higher the traffic or pagerank, the more you will pay. Some PR6 blogs will not accept a post opportunity under $50. We have posted opportunities for $20 for high pagerank sites for less than 200 words and they were snapped up by people. What I am saying here is, don't expect to pay a few dollars per link unless you want low traffic and pr sites to be linking to you. Be looking more towards the 10, 15 dollars and above price points. Another service you may be interested in is socialspark.com. They are owned and ran by the same people who created payperpost. I think payperpost has also recently got another round of funding wort 6 million dollars which tells you the business has got something to it. We've been spending a bit of time and money on payperpost and have found that it hashad a positive effect on our business in particular in relation to our search engine rankings. Payperpost blogs are controversial or at least have been over the last couple of years, hence why there is often a lot of negativity associated with the process. A lot of the time this negativity comes from the people who do not have a wealth of experience with the system. If I can be of any further help, feel free to reply or send me a PM.
AMAC08, thank you for the thoughtful reply. I am less interested in PR or SEO results for the particular campaign that I have in mind and am more interested in generating qualified traffic to my website (yet to be created.) Of course, the ability to target specific types of blogs would be critical to success, I believe. Do you have any thoughts on targeting blogs for a particular market?
In my honesty opinion, if you want to target specific niche blogs, sign up as an advertiser at Reviewme.com. The reason for this is you choose which blogs you want based on their traffic, niche and page rank etc. You can search for blogs based on keywords. Some of the blogs charge anywhere from 500-6000 dollars, but some are as cheap as 20 or 40 dollars. We've used this service, and paid around 500 dollars for a post from a top blog in our niche. The person gave a negative review, the actual blogger didn't write the post (it was an assistant of theirs) threw in one or two half positives and that was it. We got a few clicks, one or two sales, but nothing anywhere near what we spent on the campaign. And I stress that was one of the top blogs in the niche. With payperpost, the disadvantage is that anyone who meets the rough criteria can take you up on the opportunity that you post. We found that a lot of the blogs posting and taking us up on the opportunity were very generic blogs, talking about anything and everything. Real, true old school blogs ran by people who wanted to make a little cash on the side by writing posts about products. So in terms of targeted trafffic, payperpost is not the best really. Its a tight rope. If it were me, I MIGHT be tempted based on what I have seen to contact three or four of the top blogs over a number of weeks and get them to write about my site one at a time. This wouldn't guarantee huge results, and you'd need to be confident enough in your product for it to get a good review from the top bloggers (who often have a huge ego the size of their rss subscription list!). If you are going to spend 100's and 1000's of dollars on this kind of campaign, and you're looking to get direct targeted traffic, then I would say advertise via the Google content network. Be VERY specific about where your ads show up though (if you don't know what I mean or how to do this, PM me and I'll explain better). If you're looking to create a buzz and generate traffic, then I would recommend mobilizing your own affiliate sales force. I don't know what your business is, but you might think about using a product launch model to get a big buzz and lots of targeted traffic. I am biased though as I am an affiliate manager. If you don't know what I mean by product launch approach, or want a little advise on that as well, again, feel free to PM me. You could always go the classic route and use article marketing, coupled with some article syndication using a service like articlemarketingautomation.com. That kind of approach is usually good for seo and direct targeted traffic. I guess we found PayPerPost very useful for seo, and also useful for driving SOME traffic. Our product we promoted for though was very mainstream. But it seemed like a nice affordable way to give us a push up the search engines and also help establish our brand in the marketplace. I guess thats how I would sum up our experience with this kind of service.
I actually want to add to the above to answer your question a little better. In terms of targetting specific blogs, use Google's blog search or normal search to find blogs in your niche. Use services like quantcast.com to get a feel of their traffic and demographics and then contact the blogger directly. They might give you a better deal if you contact them directly as they won't lose money to a third party running a marketplace for this kind of thing. You could also establish a good working relationship with them and run contests related to your product on their blog. Again, this is where an affiliate program MIGHT come in handy. Also, if a blog has sponsors or banner ads on, its pretty likely if you get in touch personally and ask for it, they will do a sponsored review of your product if you pay a price that works for you and them. Of course, this is just our opinion (and mine) and it comes from a few months of recent experience in this. You might test something else and find that works better for you, but if you don't have the resources to run tests like this, I hope you found some of what I said useful,
amac08, thanks again for the detailed reply. I think that you have cleared up many of the questions that I have had and, quite frankly, it does not sound like blogs are what I am looking for with this campaign. Your assistance has been invaluable. Thank you.
No problem. In terms of blogs and creating a buzz, I would say direct contact with blog owners would be the best line to follow, or affiliate marketing. Affiliates can do a lot of what you're looking for, for free, until they make a sale of course.
In conversation with my boss. But looking through the blogosphere, I think their last round of funding came in 2007 and that was 7 million. I can check the source if you like. Their company Izea seems to be launching new services though and appears to be doing well.
AMAC08, thanks again for all of the input. I tried affiliate marketing before with an admittely much weaker product than what I hope to have in a month or two and it did not go wel. But I am open to looking at it again. Any recommendations as to which affiliate programs are worth considering?
No problem jrbiz. It depends what your product is, and I sense a reluctance for you to give more details away on it which is well advised and very understandable. It all depends on what your market it is, what the product is etc. This will helpm determine what solutions you use. You have to be able to find big affiliates and little affiliates already working in your market and industry and then give them something a little extra to get them onboard. It really is an art form. You have to sell the affiliate program just as much, if not more than the product itself. There is software which helps you find all of this as well, or you could use some simple techniques to look for these affiliates. You could host your own solution on your servers and depending on what product you are using, this might be your best option. However, if the product is an information product, then clickbank and paydotcom would be my frist stop (a third party hosted solution) as they have an army of affiliates looking for your opportunity. You're still going to have to locate and contact affiliates yourself either way, and attract affiliates to your program. It can be very involved depending on the size of your launch. If you want to go in depth on that, just give me a PM and I'll send you my skype. I won't charge anything for it and it'll be a chance for us to have a better dialogue about it.
In relation to what you were talking about earlier though, there is nothing wrong getting in direct contact with blog owners and the like, but remember, often they are bloggers, not business people, marketers or big money earners. Some times when a good opportunity stares them in the face, they don't trust it, or just cannot be bothered to work for the opportunity at all. It can be an uphill battle, but some times you can strike it big.
Thanks, it's just that the general consesnus among most of the PPP posties seems to be that they are very much on their way out. I have several high ranked blogs in the system and am lucky to make a few dollars a day with them the last few months -- most others are in the same boat http://boards.izea.com/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=13208