Pay-per-post: the next play for lazy marketers?
October 13th, 2006Today’s TechCrunch mentioned two new players in the pay-per-post arena, CreamAid and ReviewMe. I’m not quite sure that CreamAid is really the same as PayPerPost, though the whole royalty-for-posting idea is there. With so much of the blogosphere as spamblogs already, how does pay-per-post effect the trust factor of bloggers? Since PayPerPost already has people willing to sell their blogs for cash, I think the trust level suffers. Of course, there will always be a market for a service like this because there will always be marketers unwilling to really delve deep into learning how to really connect with customers. But really think about it — people already have such a low trust of advertising in any form, they ignore banner ads, get Tivos to bypass commercials and get creative to avoid being sold to. Soon enough, they will learn to tune out these fake blog posts too. Hey, sounds like a great new service, a way to strip those out.
The most important thing to remember about your customers — if they are even reading blogs — is they don’t want hype. Hype is the easy way out that will negatively impact your customers and prospects. People look to web resources for information, so give them information, leave the hype on the cutting room floor. If you want to make an impact in the blogosphere, there are simply better ways to do it then paying bloggers to write fake praises.
I think you’re missing one of the bigger advantages of a PayPerPost campaign here - SEO (search engine optimization).
Leaving aside any debate over how ethical it is to pay someone to write about your product/service, you really can’t begin to think that you’ll get a ton of buzz and generate a lot of consumer interaction with this service (yet) because the bloggers who pick up the stories aren’t generally that well read. They’re not popular enough to send your visits sky high.
What you do get out of it is a link with a targeted keyword phrase that is worth it’s weight in gold. For a couple hundred bucks you can put your website on the first page of Google results for your chosen keyword phrase.
THAT is why this is so important for marketers to realize. For no other reason than that, I would consider running a campaign or two on PPP.
Am I a lazy marketer because of it? No more so than the “hard working” marketer that hires an SEO firm to launch them to higher search engine rankings.