One of the easiest ways to get paid to blog is to get a free account at a community blog site, such as Today.com.

How Do I Get Paid To Blog At Today.Com?

To get your own blog at Today.com, you’ll be required to fill out a form which contains your contact information, title for your blog, your preferred URL, and a short description of the blog you wish to write. You can only have one blog hosted on Today.com, so make sure that you consider carefully what you’d like to write about there.

Today.com will check over your application, and, assuming that your proposed blog is suitable, approve your application.

Today.com’s blogs are set up on a WordPress platform. They have their own preferred templates, plugins, and set up the advertising themselves. There is very little that you can do to customize your Today.com blog aside from changing the colors and replacing the header. You can add your own blogroll, and make a few other changes to the sidebars, but you can not place your own advertising, affiliate links, etc onto your Today.com blog.

How Much Does Today.Com Pay?

You make money blogging at Today.com by posting interesting posts to your blog that are designed to draw traffic. Today.com pays $2 for every 1000 page views for the first month, and that rate can change month to month after the first month based on how your blog performs for them. If you get a lot of traffic that clicks ads or buys advertising spots, you may get a nice, high pay rate. If you don’t drive much traffic, or your traffic is worthless monetarily, you may have your pay rate reduced.

There doesn’t seem to be any information on the Today.com website that says what the pay rate is after that first month, how high it can go, or how low it can go.  However, there are ways to supplement your Today.com pay rate.

Today offers its own affiliate programs that you can promote. You write a post promoting the affiliate products, and any products sold through your link, you’ll get 50% of the commission. I’ve heard that Today.com pays $1 per post that you write with their affiliate links in, depending on whether they approve of the post, but I can’t find any solid information on that.

When Does Today.Com Pay?

Today.com pays on the 10th of each month (in general), but they only pay once your account reaches $50 in earnings. If you are working on the $2 per 1000 page views  pay scale, that means that you’ll have to have 25,000 page views before you get paid. Take an average of 50 page views a day (common for personal blogs), and you’ll get a pay check every 500 days.  That’s actually more than most personal blogs bring in, so even if you’re not determined to make millions, it might make it worth your while to start a blog on Today.com rather than on other free platforms, such as blogger or wordpress.com.

About The Today.Com Blogging Scam:

There are a number of people that hold that Today.com is a scam. They actually have good reason for their grievances, but I believe that the issues that are being claimed as a scam were not intentional.

The Today.com scam, or so it’s called comes about because when Today.com was launched, they offered bloggers $5 a post plus page views. This is by no means considered high pay for professional bloggers, which is what Today advertised for. However, with the page views, and the possibility of pay being changed upward, many professional freelance writers signed up and spent considerable time building up their Today.com blogs. A month later, their pay was slashed.

Some blogs were now earning $2 a post plus page views, some were now earning $1 per post plus page views, some were down to simply page views. I think I heard of a few freelance bloggers who remained at $5 per post or more, but it’s been some time since there was discussion of this.

Today.com was labled as a scam. This is common practice among scammers, to dangle a carrot, so to speak, to get their content written, and then claim that the content is not up to snuff and refuse to pay the full amount. I can’t fault the professional writers who felt this way. However, I believe that Today.com was well intentioned. They wanted to pay their bloggers, but realized too late that their monetization model was flawed.

I remember threads in freelance writer forums about this issue, and I remember some talk about angry threads in the Today.com forum being deleted or closed. This simply fueled the flames, but I understand why they would choose to do so.

The only reason that I can really consider Today.com a scam, is because despite the fact that they don’t have a straight pay rule (paid a flat amount per post, paid no matter how small the earnings), they still refer to their blogs as “freelance writing jobs”. They list their blog platform in freelance writing lists, advertise it as such, and their sign up page is labled as a freelance writing job. This is distinctly misleading, though I believe unintentional.

However, in my opinion, a professional would carefully look over all of their information before signing up, it’s only someone new to getting paid to blog that might mistake Today as a legitimate freelance writing job. That is the only point where I’m willing to call Today.com scam, though, again, I believe that it’s well intentioned.

Personal Today.com Review:

I signed up for a Today.com blog account about 2 weeks ago. I set about with a very, very small niche that doesn’t seem to have any competition at all. I was lucky to get a good link from a more powerful blog also hosted on Today.com, so it was indexed almost immediately, and began garnering search traffic right away.

I started with 4-10 page views a day, and this week I’m at about 25 page views a day. My sum total earnings at this point is $0.34. That’s a long way to $50.

At this rate, it would be about 3 years before I hit payout, but I have not tried using their affiliate product links yet, as I’m concentrating on writing enough posts to give my referrer his bonus for my sign up (30 posts within 30 days).

I know that my niche is not easily monetized, so putting this blog on my own website and throwing ads at it would not likely garner me much money anyway, so getting paid for page views is the best way for me to go. My goal for this site isn’t even to make much money on its own, it’s actually being built to support a more easily monetized site that I already own on my own domain.

I haven’t even crossed my first Today.com review yet, so I’ll have to update this when I find what my new pay rate will be.

If you’re interested in signing up for a Today.com blog account, this link will take you to the sign up page. Otherwise, please explore the rest of Make Money Online Reality.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 24th, 2009 at 1:57 am and is filed under Make Money Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.