If you have a personal network of 20-30 blogs, and at $5 a post, you could do something with that.

If you’ve a blog with a personal branding focus, then I don’t think you’d want to dilute your content quality by doing too much paid stuff, even at $20 or $30 a post.

At the end of the day, each of us will have to make a calculation of our return on paid posting versus working on our own product or service or affiliate campaign.

We’ll see if PPP takes a ride on the cluetrain and embraces the constructive (yes, constructive) criticism they’ve received. The idea is not horrible, but their implementation at this point is exactly that.

Some in advertising would say there isn’t good or bad publicity. There’s just publicity.

I think you have a balanced view of paid posting, on the other hand there are some bloggers who blog solely for the purpose of paid blogging and you can see these blogs with unrelated content, and generally poor writing. It’s these segment which gives blogging a bad name, and gives mainstream media ammunition to call blogging a cacophony of amateur content (which perpetuates endless rounds of namecalling between serious bloggers and oldline media).

I’d signed up with a paid posting company and their requirement was that you had to use the designated anchor text and some of their provided material. Apart from that, there wasn’t an implicit stipulation that you’d need to be positive about the product.

What you mentioned about opportunistic posting is something worth looking at (once you’ve balanced it against the time spent shortlising and looking at the product, it may not be good time leverage in my opinion).

Still, it’s good for bloggers to have more access to monetization options, compared to before.

Here is the final kicker, a few days later Aaron linked through from his seobook blog to my review, sending me back as much traffic or potentially more than I had given him.

The post was totally relevant to my blog, and I have even been complemented on the disclosure I used, which was probably a little more than I will probably do in future for such posts, but I am sticking to stuff that is highly relevant.

Here is a link to the post for reference
http://andybeard.eu/2006/12/search-engine-glossary.html

It also helps that I have a clear disclosure policy for my site, and that is included in every post, even the RSS feed using a plugin I had someone write for me.

Btw, as far as I know you won’t find any paid post program where you can post just pure paid posts, and blogs normally have to be well established, with regular normal posts to qualify.

I have questioned whether $10 per post is worth it for many bloggers for long-term income, but if it is $30+ and just a bonus… more like them nudging you to post about something relevant, from which you can still earn something else, I can’t see the problem.

One good thing about ReviewMe, they pay on time. In fact I was paid just 15 days after my review which is better than most affiliate networks.

And the whole blogosphere was abuzz with hateful words about Microsoft’s strategy. And even though MS was pretty clear about the fact that bloggers are completely free to write crap and give the laptop away to their community – the MS haters still had a field day.

Personally, I have no problem with PPP posts. Different bloggers have their own reasons to blog – if they want to make money for stuff they agree with, then they should be allowed.

I’m sure that as this industry matures, we’ll see a lot of interesting changes. Many interesting technology startups will prefer this over Pay Per Click and Pay Per Lead marketing. And this has the advantages that Press Releases have (longetivity … and the multiplier effect).

5 Paid bloggers —> 5000 readers —> 50 Unpaid bloggers

At the end of the day, many bloggers promote affiliate products too … This isn’t any different.

You might not always have that choice.
If you’re being paid to advertise something, you can’t very well be 100% honest, or even if the offers said you could do anything you wanted to, if you were honest/negative (depending on your point of view) and if you had to even factor these in, it’s merely going to handicap your blogging. Which would make the entire exercise potentially more trouble than it’s worth.

In theory, it could seem workable.

The reality is quite different.

However, the reality of the situation is that you’d more often be getting offers for viagra/levitra or opportunities to enrol for distance learning courses for car repair. Which don’t seem appealing to me.

Apple’s iPods already do very well, and I’d doubt that such offers come up regularly.

If they did, I’d say for every Apple offer, you’d have another 100 offers to blog about content that isn’t anywhere as exciting.

Hence, you’d eventually be selling your soul…

For example, if I have a blog about technology, and Apple posts an opportunity up on PPP to review the iPod, either positively or negatively, I don’t see the problem with me posting my opinions about it, especially if I love it or hate it already, and may have even posted about it in the future. The key in my opinion is relevancy and maintaining your integrity, but the entire concept of paid blog posts I have no problem with.