Have You Seen This Bogus Blog-For-Pay Offer?

Carol Tice

Freelance Writers: Have You Seen This Bogus Blog-For-Pay Offer? Makealivingwriting.comIt’s always flattering when your blogging work attracts prospective clients who’d like to pay you to blog. But I’ve discovered not all paid-blogging offers are what they seem.

Here’s the tale of one disturbing little encounter I had recently, which shows it pays to keep your wits about you when people offer to pay you to blog:

I got an email from a guy — let’s call him Darius — out of the blue, from a site I’d never heard of, which aggregates a lot of different content links. Let’s call it His-Top-Blogs.com. He’d seen my blogging work for one of my bigger clients, and was interested in hiring me. The exchange went like this. Darius first wrote me:

“I’d like to write articles on His-Top-Blogs and then submit them to your networks, or if that’s not possible, include a link to His-Top-Blogs in your articles. Not sure how much that is, because I have never done it before. What is your rate?”

I responded that I didn’t have any situation where I would want to republish content from his site on my own or any of my client’s sites. And that I get at least $100 a post to write for clients. I got this response:

I can pay you $100 an article, as long as you include at least one link to His-Top-Blogs. The question is where would you submit the articles? Can you add it to [the  blog of the major magazine you write for]?

Well, now. This is what we call a double-pay opportunity. In case that was opaque, Darius was proposing I write for pay for my usual clients…and then he would also pay me another $100 a post for each entry! All I had to do was oh, just casually drop a mention of — and most importantly, a link to — his website into each and every story I write.

In other words, he was asking me to be a sellout. A secret, paid shill for his site. A stealth backlinker.

Darius was hoping that without disclosing the fact that he’d hired me, I’d start creating backlinks for him on high-profile sites where I blog.

Instead of writing posts based on actual reporting, research, and my own knowledge of what’s truly valuable and groundbreaking in my subjects, I could simply make all the stories be about Darius’s site to make a little extra money.

I could forget all the journalistic credibility I’d spent two decades building and make a little quick cash pretending this junk-content linkbait site was something valuable and noteworthy.

Can you guess what I told him?

“I’m not getting into a pay-for-backlinks agreement,” I wrote him. “It would compromise the journalistic ethics of what I’m creating for clients such as [major magazine]. I probably wouldn’t be working for them very long if I did something like this with their posts.”

I never heard a peep from Darius again. No doubt he moved on to asking other reporter/bloggers if they would be his stealth link pimps. Here’s hoping he didn’t find any takers.

I’m sure I could have made a nice chunk of change doing what he asked — at first. Until somebody figured it out, and I got fired from all my paid-blogging jobs.

For anyone who’s not aware, if you have a paid relationship with any source, you have to disclose it immediately to your client. You can’t ever pretend to “report” on a company that is paying you to say they’re great.

But plenty of desperate would-be Web entrepreneurs out there don’t know these rules, nor do they care. It’s up to you to act ethically to keep building the most important asset you have as a writer and reporter — your reputation. It can be hard to say “no” when you need the money…but this is one type of blogging-for-pay offer you’ll want to avoid.

Top 5 AI Writing Tools: Pros And Cons For Creative Writers

AI writing tools have taken the world by storm and are a large topic of debate. Whether you are eager about this new stage of writing capabilities, worried about your own work, or concerned over the ethical implications of AI writing tools, writing by artificial...

3 Paid Advertising Options To Monetize Your Website

If you have a popular website, you have probably thought about using paid advertising on your site. Out of all the ways to monetize your website, paid advertising is one of the easiest options, since you just need to paste the code or however it is set up and you are...