As you know, I’ve been doing reviews of paid to blog programs. However, sometimes you just want the lowdown on what you get paid and how much you have to write. That’s what I’ve provided in my guest post on PiggyBankPie. It’s called: Ten Paid To Blog Programs At A Glance.

I’ve been blogging for PayU2Blog for some time now and this is the biggie. The payouts are at the low end – $5 a post – but the work is regular and plentiful, and no blogger could ask for more. When I started blogging with PayU2Blog, I got all my opps by email once a week and I had about a week to do them. Now, there’s a more sophisticated system. Opportunities are generally added to your online account once or twice a week and the information includes a deadline date.

One of the features that sets PayU2Blog apart from the rest is that most opportunities are approved on the spot. You type in the link, hit submit and bingo – that counts as a completed post. If there is a problem with completion (sometimes the system doesn’t recognise perfectly good links) then a manual review will pick them up. I have been paid for every single post I have done for PayU2Blog and it adds up to quite a bit.

This is another blogger friendly company. Display a logo on your blog and you can be entered into a $100 prize draw. This isn’t pie in the sky – I won the draw once and got $100 for doing absolutely nothing. There’s a forum where bloggers can meet and chat and there’s a messaging system in your account panel so that you can send messages if you need to. The guys at PayU2Blog always respond within a short time.

There’s not much more to say about PayU2Blog except that signup is easy and that they accept most indexed blogs. I get as many opps for my Blogger blogs as for my hosted ones. In fact, I usually get upwards of 10 opps a week and have made hundreds with this company. If you’re looking for regular blogging income, then PayU2Blog is certainly worth considering.

The Linky Love Army is a blogger friendly paid to blog army. Forgive me for sounding like I’ve got the rose tinted specs on, but I am impressed with the way they work with bloggers. Ok, they’ve got an improbable name, which is probably why most people call them the LLA, but the name comes out of the wedge blogging concept. The idea is that when bloggers review products and services, they also link to other bloggers who have done the same and those bloggers benefit from more traffic. In the LLA, being at the thin end of the wedge is a good thing, because you’ll get more blogs linking to you.

That aside, it works like many other paid to blog companies. You login to the bloggers’ interface, which is very plain. Click on ‘view missions’ and you will see which blogging jobs are available. Click on ‘view’ next to each mission to see what links you need to include (mostly, there are three different links, one to another blog, and two to a company) and how much you will earn. Write your post at the specified length, submit the URL using the link at the bottom of the mission details and you’re done.

What you earn depends on their assessment of your blog. I have several blogs with them and for my last mission, pay ranged between $5.50 and $10 for posts on the same topic. As with other paid to blog companies, each post must be unique.

What I like about the LLA is:

• they are quick to approve your blogs and they explain the reasons for rejection in a nice way. Adding blogs is very easy and you can input relevant keywords so that you get missions that suit your blog
• they pay fast – I did two missions on Friday and was paid on Saturday
• they respond to emails – I asked about not getting missions, got a nice reply and found four new missions when I logged in
• they have a referral program for blogger signups and posts
• they keep coming up with new ways for bloggers to earn money
• they are blogger friendly – I know I said it before, but it’s worth repeating

The Army speak doesn’t do much for me, but that’s only a personal niggle. Apart from that, I have found the LLA to be a great company to deal with – and they’re not even paying me to say that.

I signed up with Sponsored Reviews a long time ago but it’s been so long that I thought I should see how it works again before looking at this paid to blog company. So I logged into my account and added this blog to it. I don’t know if I’ll accept any reviews but I wanted to test the process.

The Offer

Sponsored Reviews pays you for reviews of at least 50 words with at least one link to the advertiser. These must be live for at least 30 days. You must disclose the sponsorship unless the advertiser forbids it, though how you do that is up to you.

Adding Your Blog

Once you have signed up with the site, which doesn’t take long, adding your blog is a two step process. First, you add your URL, ticking to show that your blog meets the requirements. It must be a live blog, with at least 10 substantial posts and must not be a community blog. It must also have a 3 to 1 ratio of non paid to paid content.

Next, you can put your blog in a category. There are several categories, but some people might find it difficult to pigeonhole their blog. I put this blog in the Business category, as my blog is more about the business of writing than creative writing. You can add a title, description and keywords, press enter and your blog is added. Each blog gets its own public page which lists the ranking, description and review price.

Setting A Price

The price you can charge for reviews depends on your link popularity (according to Yahoo search, and your Technorati and Alexa ranking). This blog ranks 3 out of a possible five. The suggested price is in a range set by Sponsored Reviews. In this case, they suggest anywhere from $20 to $100, though for well known and high ranking blogs, this figure could go as high as $1,000, according to them. Sponsored Reviews takes 35 per cent of the asking price, so you need to set review prices carefully. That said, I earned $9.75 for the first review I did, at a time when others were paying $5.

The Dashboard

Logging in takes you to a dashboard which shows you jobs waiting for you to approve and those in progress, gives reports on the jobs you have bid for, provides tutorials (useful for new bloggers), articles and messages and has a feed from the Sponsored Review blog. It’s just as well I logged in for this review, because that’s how I found out that you can now get email notifications of suitable opportunities. You just enable it in the ‘My Account’ tab and add the categories you want to be notified about.

The next tab after your home page takes you to the ‘find advertisers’ interface. You can search for opportunities via the search box, click on a tag, or just browse the lists of the latest opportunities. The lists contain a word count, a link to more information about the opportunity and a pay range. This varies considerably. On one opportunity I saw the advertiser wanted to pay $10 for a 300 word review. Since I can get $5 for a 60 word post with other companies, this didn’t seem like a great deal. However, there are others that will make any blogger happy.

Choosing A Blogging Opportunity

Clicking on an opportunity title gives you more information, including the website and the type of review wanted. There may be requirements about the tone and the advertiser may also ask for specific links. Finally, there’s a description of the resource you will be reviewing. On the right, there’s a column where you can set a bid between the minimum and maximum. There’s also a drop down box which lists your blogs and the maximum you can bid on each blog. Then you submit your bid to the advertiser and wait for approval.

This is the part I like least, because you can’t tell how long it will take for an advertiser to look at your bid. I have had three bids accepted and several more rejected, but it took weeks and in one case months to find out about the rejections.Once your bid has been accepted you have a week to write the review.

Getting Paid

I can’t recall any problems with payment. I completed the reviews and was paid with no problems within 14 days of completing the reviews. Payment is by Paypal. You can see your review history and payment details in a sub menu of the ‘My Account’ tab.

Sponsored Reviews has lots of opportunities and you can earn a decent amount even on a newish blog. I like the fact that you get to choose your opportunities, and doing this review has reminded me that I should visit the site more often. It’s also worth reading their blog, as there are some great resources there for bloggers. An affiliate program is also in the works, which will mean more chances for bloggers to earn.

Smorty is another paid to blog site. It works much like the others. You sign up, which is pretty easy, submit a blog and wait for it to be approved. The approval process is pretty quick. When I first signed up with Smorty it took just over two weeks to get a blog approved. When I added my latest blog it took about a week.

To qualify for Smorty you must have a blog that’s more than three months old and indexed by Google and Yahoo. The blog must be active and not have too many duplicate posts. If a blog is rejected you can resubmit it if you fix the problems. With Smorty, you can add as many blogs as you like.

Once you’re signed up, you login on the home page. When you login, you need to click a little button that says that you’re a blogger rather than an advertiser. I find it a minor annoyance, but I guess it only takes a second. Once in, there’s a very tidy green and black dashboard with panels for your posting record, your earnings, pending tasks and new opportunities. I have to say I love this interface. It is easy to see all the important information at a glance, unlike the dashboards of some of the other blog advertising companies.

Smorty emails you notifications of pending tasks, but the email doesn’t not mean that you automatically get that task. Instead, they notify everyone who fits the bill and you get to login and take one of the opportunities. There are usually lots available, so if you’re quick you could really clean up. Just click on the ‘accept’ link to take a task and then you have three days to complete it. After that it expires and you can’t get it back.

Each post must be between 150 and 400 words long and must contain only one outbound link. Once you have written a post you get paid quickly. Advertisers have five days to dispute the post but this hasn’t happened to me yet. Smorty advises you to write your own opinion, but warns that negative opinions are more likely to be disputed. For my first post, I got paid within a week, which is much quicker than most other companies.

Smorty also has an affiliate program for encouraging people to advertise on blogs, though I haven’t joined that yet. (Update: I joined in November 2007).

Overall, I give Smorty a thumbs up. I think most bloggers will find it easy to use and the number of opportunities available seems to be increasing. It’s another good way to blog for money.

It may seem premature of me to review BloggingAds when I’ve only signed up today, but you see, I’ve used the company before.

This was about 18 months ago, when paid to blog companies were just getting going so it never really got very far. I went to a web page, signed up and got an email asking which blogs were available for the service. I added all the blogs I had at the time (by email) and soon received my first assignments.

They were very easy. You had the choice of two sets of preworded ads or creating your own post around a link, and the pay was pretty decent at anywhere from $7 upward. As this was a couple of dollars more than the going rate at the time, posting ads for BloggingAds looked like an attractive proposition.

I did two, maybe three assignments for them and then it fizzled out. By then I was in the throes of organising a relocation, so I sent an email asking if they were still live and was told they’d be in touch. I never heard from them again. No skin off my nose, since I was earning money from some of the other paid to blog companies.

Anyway, since I was doing this series of reviews, I decided to visit their site again. There’s a whole lot more info than there was before and signing up is pretty straightforward. (I tried using my old details, but no go ) Then I tried adding my Writing Lab blog which has a PR of 4. I put in the title, URL and selected the categories I was interested in. (This is a good feature, which some of the other blogging sites lack).

However, I have hit a snag straight away. They say my blog isn’t cached, which it is and has been for a couple of years, so I can’t add it. I had more luck with one of my Blogger blogs but no luck with Communati. I don’t plan to do that kind of advertising on this blog, so I haven’t even tried.

So, consider this a partial review of BloggingAds. There’s plenty of useful information on the site, and it’s all clearly signposted. The company pays by Paypal, and when I did some ads for them before, they paid on acceptance, which was very nice indeed. These days, they pay weekly, with a minimum payment threshold of $5.

I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.

It’s been several months since I wrote about ReviewMe. At the time, it was quite a new site and I based my review on what I knew to that point. Like other paid to blog sites, you submit your blog (a maximum of six blogs are allowed for the ReviewMe marketplace). You may also submit blogs to the advertiser market place (there are no limits on the number of blogs there, as far as I can see.)

With the ReviewMe marketplace, your blog is assigned a dollar value based on its ranking. This is turn is based on Alexa and Technorati rankings and the number of RSS subscribers you have. This is great if your blog has been around for a while and is immensely popular. This blog, which is new, does not qualify for the ReviewMe marketplace in spite of hundreds of unique visitors – go figure. You get half of the dollar value per review. When I joined ReviewMe, my Writing Lab blog was given a value of $40, which meant I got $20 for each of the three reviews I completed. It’s now valued at $60, so I will get $30 if I ever get another review opportunity.

If you look at the popular tags interface in ReviewMe, you will find that business, technology, entertainment and web development blogs are popular, as well as blogs about blogging. Blogs about writing are definitely second tier. This is why I haven’t had many review offers.

If you’re in the ReviewMe marketplace, you can earn by doing paid reviews or advertorials. In the advertiser marketplace, you can do ten campaigns a month, and what you earn depends on available offers. I haven’t had any, so I wouldn’t know. Finally, you can earn money as a ReviewMe affiliate, but the program is for signing up advertisers rather than bloggers.

What I like about ReviewMe is that it’s easy to add your blog and you know immediately whether it’s been accepted or rejected. I also like the fact that they email you when someone wants to buy a review. This saves me time because I don’t have to login and check. ReviewMe offers a pretty decent rate of pay compared to some paid to blog sites, and they want you to disclose that it’s a paid review and write in your own voice. I can honestly say that the reviews I have done for ReviewMe have been fun.

Bottom line – it can’t hurt to sign up. Your first review is likely to be of ReviewMe itself, so that’s an easy $20 or so, even if you don’t qualify for any offers after that.

I signed up for Loudlaunch having had a recommendation from a friend. It took several weeks for my first blog to be approved, and some time more to get others added. Loudlaunch reviews every blog before acceptance. While I was waiting for that, I happily earned some pocket change with programs such as Blogsvertise and Blogitive.

Unlike some of the other paid to blog sites, Loudlaunch seems to have its own campaigns based on press releases from advertisers (this is similar to Blogitive’s approach). I have never seen any of its campaigns on any other site. Pay for them is around $5 each. What’s good about Loudlaunch is that they send an update when there’s a new campaign that you might be interested in. You go to the site and you can see details of the campaign and payout in a neat little table.

I should say now that I haven’t made a dime from Loudlaunch. That’s probably my own fault. Sometimes the campaign notifications come in when I’m doing other things and by the time I get to them, there are no spots left. Sometimes the campaign doesn’t interest me and I just leave it alone. Compared to the other sites, Loudlaunch seems to have relatively few opportunities to post. They are also quite picky about the blogs they accept, so getting to the point of being able to post something could take a long time.

Now, I’m sure some people have made money from Loudlaunch. Since the spots are always gone, someone must be doing those posts. I’m not ruling out doing Loudlaunch posts in the future. Some of them are for causes you can really get behind, like better water and other environmentally friendly topics. They also say that bloggers are free to voice their own opinions about the advertisers’ products or services:

One of the corner-stone principles of the LoudLaunch network is that the bloggers should and must remain true to themselves, their blog, and their audience.

In the meantime, I’ll probably continue to concentrate on the paid to blog companies that provide a lot of opportunities. There’s more to choose from and it’s easier to earn. If you’ve used Loudlaunch successfully, I’d love to hear from you about how it’s gone.

No review of paid blogging sites would be complete without a look at PayPerPost. I’ll admit to having a love hate relationship with the site at first. That’s probably because their site took aeons to load and when I got there, I didn’t find many qualified opportunities. It was an exercise in frustration for a while.

But that has changed, up to a point. The site loads quickly and there are more available opportunities. Best of all, they are colour coded so that you know what’s available and what’s not. Pay Per Post offers one of the best opportunities for making large amounts of money. Some of the bloggers there have made thousands. My earnings are more modest, but I only do PPP posts occasionally.

When I started doing paid posts, Pay Per Post offered the best revenue potential of any of the sites. Yes, there are a few opportunities that pay $5 (which seems to be the baseline for this kind of writing), but there were also plenty of opportunities that paid $18, as well as a few that paid more than $100. I never seemed to logon at the right times to catch the occasional $1,000 video blogging opps, but I’m sure those that did were very happy. Check out the Big Green section when you login to see the current highest paying opportunities or go green when you check out what the top earners have made.

As if that weren’t enough, Pay Per Post has other opportunities for bloggers to earn. You earn from referrals, you earn when someone signs up and reviews your post and you earn through PPP Direct if someone requests a review. The ‘review my post’ system is a bit strange. I’m still waiting for payment on reviews that were done months ago and there’s no way for me to find out why they are still pending.

Opportunities pay out approximately one month after the post has been approved, but approval can take a while. So you might do a post today and it might be two months before you see the cash. On the other hand if advertisers pay up early, then you might be paid in a couple of weeks.

PPP has a disclosure policy which applies to most of the postings you do for them. This means either including the information in the body of the post or putting a badge at the end of the post. I don’t have a problem with that, though some people do.

My only beef with PPP is that it doesn’t like my Blogger blogs and it has rejected this one because the posts from its old home are still in Google’s cache – it’s a duplicate content penalty. While I’m waiting to resolve that (I’ve explained that this blog has moved to a new home) I can still earn with PPP Direct.

In general, I give PPP the thumbs up. It hasn’t worked perfectly for me, but I think it’s still worth persisting with.

Blogsvertise is one of my favourite paid to blog programs. Although it started small, and there were very few opportunities, it has provided a steady, if tiny, income stream for the past year or so. One of the reasons why I like Blogsvertise is because their system makes it very easy.

First, you get an email with details of the links required. You need to do a post of two to three paragraphs with three links. Any client requests are included in the email. It also includes a link to click on when you have completed your post, and you can do that without logging into your account.

You have about five days to complete the post, then you get an automatic email reminder if you haven’t done it. You can also log into your account and turn down any offers you don’t feel comfortable with.

Blogsvertise appears to accept most blogs and although you won’t get huge numbers of offers, you’ll probably get enough to suit most people. This week I’ve had three, which is a good week. Payment per post varies between $5 and $10.

I like Blogsvertise because there is no pressure to do more offers than you can handle, or to blog about topics that don’t suit you. The emails work better for me than having to login and check to see if there is anything waiting. Payment is about a month after you do an offer, but they haven’t rejected any of my posts (I use Blogsvertise on four of my other blogs). In terms of ease of use, this is my top pick, though there are other areas where different paid to blog companies score better.