A Twitter friend recently asked me how to get paid to blog. I ended up sending her 4 or 5 DMs filled to the limit with information. I still felt as though there was so much more to tell her about getting paid to blog, and yet, I’d already sent 4 DMs!

So, now I’m covering all the basics of what I know on how to get paid to blog all in one, easily linkable spot. I’m aiming for single tweet info, here! As I add more detailed information to individual posts, I’ll link from here to those posts to give you all the information that I can.

How To Get Paid To Blog:

There are several ways that one can get paid to blog.

1. You could get paid to blog professionally as the blogger for one specific company. This would be a regular J-O-B, but has all the benefits of a regular job, and yet is a bit more enjoyable.

The easiest way to get paid to blog for a particular company would be if you are already an employee there and know all the ins and outs of the company and its product. At this point, you simply need to convince your boss that the company needs a blog, and then wow them with all of your knowledge on blogging.  Of course, if the company already has a professional blogger, this won’t be quite as simple.

2. You could get paid to blog as a freelance blogger. In this case, your goal would be to have multiple companies that you blog for. Sometimes companies search out professional bloggers (I’ll show you where to find these blogging jobs below), and sometimes you can convince companies to hire you.

An important first step when planning to become a freelance blogger is to either start a blog of your own that you write as though it were a professional blog (stories about your cat usually won’t help you here) or to offer to write a company’s blog for free for a certain amount of time (say 1-3 months) to be used as a sample for potential clients.

Blogging, even when you’re paid to blog, is a highly personal act, and a company will want to know that your style works for them.

Where To Find Blogging Jobs:

If you want to get paid to blog, you’ll need to find blogging jobs. As I said above, you may be able to get hired to blog for one company, or you’ll want to go freelance.

Luckily, as a freelancer, there are a lot of blogging jobs available.  Here are some of the best places to find blogging jobs:

Freelance Writing Jobs: FWJ is a (usually) daily blog with listings of freelance writing work that has been gathered from across the web. In addition to all of the jobs they find (and cull out the low pay positions), sometimes clients will contact them directly to have their gigs listed to Freelance Writing Jobs exclusively.  A lot of these freelance writing jobs are blogging jobs.

ProBlogger Job Board: Darren Rowse AKA ProBlogger instituted this job board as a place for people to advertise blogging jobs. There’s always quite a few blogging jobs listed here, though sometimes a scam or two will pop up. Darren is quick to remove those as soon as he’s notified about them, but you’ll still need to be careful, especially of new opportunities. This is also where all of B5 Media’s blogging job openings are listed.

Craigslist: Craigslist may be scam city when it comes to finding a blogging job, but it also seems to have the most opportunities around. It’ll take a lot of searching to find something, but every legitimate blogging job adds to your resume, and one good blogging job that lasts is well worth the effort. Be wary of anyone who says things like “should be quick work for someone who’s knowledgeable on the subject” or “this is a start up”. Those generally mean that they expect free labor, or labor that’s so cheap it may as well be free.  And if you’re not up to culling through the thousands of ads that pop up every day, Craigslist is one of the sources that Freelance Writing Jobs (see above) culls through every day.

Of course, there are many more places to find blogging jobs, but those are the best sources in my opinion, or one stop (or two stop) shopping.

Freelance Writing Bidding Sites:

You can often find blogging jobs on freelance writing bidding sites.

What this means, is that the jobs are listed, but instead of simply responding to an ad as you would on Craigslist, you actually put in a bid price. For example, the ad may say “Wanted: Professional Organic Manure Writer/Blogger” with the stipulation that they want 3, 400 word articles every week on organic manure.  You decide what you would charge to do the job, any experience you bring to the position, and anything else that’s relevant.  For example, say you charge $0.05 a word for keyword articles, and you have a part time job in a nursery.  You would then bid something like $60 a week, or $20 per article, or just give them your per word rate (follow the client’s instructions- if they say to tell them your weekly rate, that’s the rate you give them), and let them know that as a worker in a nursery you know all about organic manure including all the top brands and what makes them unique (actually give examples if you’re trying to wow them), and then list your experience as a blogger if it’s relevant (have been blogging professionally since Al Gore invented the internet, etc).

Among the most popular of these bidding sites are:

RentACoder: Despite the name, Rent A Coder has quite a few freelance writing jobs available, including blogging jobs.

iFreelance: I don’t know as much about iFreelance, but I know an SEO firm who uses them regularly to find writers, and I know several freelance writers who get the majority of their jobs there. The best part of iFreelance, in my opinion, is that you can set up a free profile.

GetAFreelancer: Get A Freelancer or GAF is another popular bidding site. Like RentACoder (see above), GAF focuses on freelance coders, but also has a decent amount of freelance writing jobs and freelance blogging jobs. But because there is no “writing” section, you’ll find most of these listed under “Data Entry” and “Copywriting” and sometimes under “SEO”.

eLance: Despite a bit of controversy over eLance’s price structure last year, it still remains one of the most popular freelance bidding sites on the internet, at least among clients. Many people who now get paid to blog professionally got their start at eLance, though may have moved on to steadier work since then.

How To Make Money Blogging:

Even with all of the blogging jobs that are available, you may decide that you would rather make money blogging by blogging for yourself.

There are a number of ways to do this. You could become an affiliate marketer, a niche blog builder, write on community sites that pay per page views, take pay per post opportunities on your own personal blog, sell links, or build a following and create ebooks and other products to sell to your followers.

More information on some of these will be coming at a later date, but here’s information on the simpler options right now.

Paid To Blog Community Sites:

A paid to blog community site generally works one of two ways. 1.) they pay you for page views to your blog, or 2.) they display AdSense or other advertising for you and pay you for the clicks.

An example of the first type of paid to blog community sites is Today.com, which pays you per number of page views. They also have affiliate products that you can add the links to your blog and earn a portion of the commission. The pay is low, but guaranteed, unlike the other kind of paid to blog communities. (for more information on Today.com, follow the above link)

An example of the second kind of paid to blog communities would be Communati.com, which rotates your AdSense links with its own. Your ads show up the majority of the time, but there’s no guarantee that anyone will click your ads, let alone click any of the ads at all.

In both cases, you can make money, but it may not be much. However, if you’re new to blogging, they’re a great way to get started as you not only don’t have to worry about setting up and maintaining your blog, but you get paid as you learn, and become part of a community that can help you break that learning curve faster than you would on your own.

Pay Per Post Opportunities:

There are a lot of paid to post sites out there, and there seem to be more every day!  A pay per post company basically works as a mediator between advertisers and bloggers. The advertiser puts up an ad asking for a post of a certain number of words, about a certain subject, that pays a certain amount of cash for you to write the post on your own personal blog. They will also require a certain number of links of which they will provide you with.

For example: Advertiser A wants a 200 word post that contains 3 links about doowhistles. Blogger B has a personal blog that qualifies (based on traffic, page rank, or some other system), and takes the opportunity. Blogger B then writes a 200+ word post on Blogger B’s own blog on the subject of doowhistles, inserts the links, and submits the post to the Pay Per Post company. The company approves the post, and a month later, the blogger’s account is credited with the offered amount of pay.

PayPerPost: PPP is one of the most popular of the paid to post websites. While the offers have lowered in pay, they seem to have increased in opportunity. Click the link to find out more. (Note: I’ve written another post on getting paid for blog posting with PayPerPost- just click the link)

Smorty: Smorty tends to pay a bit higher than PayPerPost, but doesn’t have the same number of available opportunities. Still, when I was first learning to get paid to blog, I signed up with anyone and everyone, and Smorty was one of my favorites.

Blogsvertise: I liked Blogsvertise’s layout for finding posting opportunities, but, again, the opps were never as plentiful as at PPP, though they were usually simpler (instead of looking at the advertiser’s website, Blogsvertise usually had press releases right below the opp) and paid better.

LoudLaunch: LoudLaunch pays decently, but their layout is awkward for choosing an opportunity, and since you can’t reserve an opp, you can spend an hour crafting a great post, only to find that they’ve all been fulfilled before you could submit your own.

ReviewMe: By far and away, ReviewMe has the highest pay to post opportunities. The lowest ReviewMe pays is $20 for a post. The only difficulty here is that they’re quite picky about who is admitted to their program. But, nothing ventured, nothing gained. It never hurts to apply.

I’ve also used Blogitive and Bloggerwave. The first I never had much luck with. The second never had many opportunities, but the pay was good, and the owners were super helpful. One of their updates lost my login information, but not only did they work quickly to rectify the situation, but they paid me a bonus for my trouble!

Get Paid To Blog With Niche and Affiliate Marketing Blogs:

If you know even a little about how to rank well on search engines (or, if you happen to luck into it often), you may want to consider starting one or more blogs with the purpose of making money.

Google, Yahoo, and MSN all have their own forms of advertising that you can sign up for, and Chitika and a few others have similar forms of advertising (they show appropriate ads to the subject you’re writing about).

Or, you can pick a few appropriate stores or products to display on your site. Commission Junction, ClickBank, and Pepperjam, among others, all offer plenty of products and advertisers to choose from (note: ClickBank is e-books and other downloadable products). Using these methods, you make money when someone clicks from your link and purchases an item. Amazon and eBay each have their own affiliate programs that can be quite lucrative, and Build A Niche Store exists to sort of auto-build an eBay affiliate store. I’ve had quite a bit of success with them, but you still have to provide content if you want your eBay affiliate store to get indexed well.

The quickest way to learn about how to make money blogging on a niche site is to follow that link to Griz’s blogger blog. On the right hand side, about 3/4 of the way down, you’ll see links under the section “Make Money Blogging”. It’s a set of 5 articles that will jumpstart your niche knowlege like no other free resource can. And more than most paid information.

If you want to get paid to blog for other people, and you’ve exhausted all of the resources here, feel free to visit my Freelance Writers For Hire directory blog and sign up to be a featured freelancer. Please follow the instructions found there for the best chance of success.

If you’ve found this post on how to get paid to blog and where to find blogging jobs useful, please check out the rest of Make Money Online Reality.

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.

If you want to get paid to blog, the easiest way to start is with PayPerPost.

The way Pay Per Post works is, you have to have a blog that is written in English, and is older than 90 days. You submit your blog to Pay Per Post for approval, and, once approved, you’ll be given a piece of code that has to be inserted into your blog’s HTML (don’t worry, PayPerPost will tell you how).

Once PayPerPost has accepted your blog and they’ve identified that your code is active, you’ll be able to view their marketplace.

When I first joined Pay Per Post, the minimum offers were around $4-5 per post for even the lowest ranked blogs (new blogs with a Google page rank of 0- PR0). When I had a PR3, I often got offers between $10-18 per post, and occasionally there were offers higher than that. However, with the change in the economy and advertising, PayPerPost’s marketplace has offers as low as $0.67. However, if your blog has at least a PR2, the offers are around $5 per post again. (Update- My personal blog is back to a PR3, but the top offers are around $9 at the moment)

You’ll need to read the Terms of Service at PayPerPost before you get started, but really, if you want to get paid to blog, there’s no easier way. Pay Per Post is more accepting than many other paid post services, and minimum word counts are usually 50, 100, or 200 words per post. To put that into perspective, this post has just over 270 words at this point.

The available opportunities to get paid to blog on PayPerPost’s marketplace will show up in white or green backgrounds. The opportunities with the gray background are opps that you qualified for, but have already been taken. The Pay Per Post oportunites with the pink background are opportunities that you don’t qualify for. If you click them, a window will pop up explaining why you don’t qualify.

Advertisers at PayPerPost are able to specify what they want- a minimum page rank, particular blogging platforms (MySpace is most often excluded, and blogger/blogspot is often excluded as well- a self hosted domain name is best), or a minimum tack rating. The tack rating is PayPerPost’s own rating system where advertisers that you’ve written for before have rated you. Very rarely will you be excluded for not having a tack rating, because most advertisers won’t rate you. They just want the links.

Any posts that you write for PayPerPost must stay live and unedited for a minimum of 1 year after the post has been approved. This is why I mostly recommend Pay Per Post and other get paid to blog companies for people who have a personal blog, rather than a blog that’s intended to bring in search traffic and advertising revenue. As a social blog, most of your readers won’t mind the occasional advertisement, particularly when branded with your own personality and style. (I have one friend who writes her PPP posts so well, that it reads exactly like her regular posts until you see the links).

Pay Per Post lets you take up to 3 posting opportunities a day, and up to 4 link only opportunities. They used to require at least one non-paid post in between paid posts, but I can’t find any information on that now. It’s quite possible that they’ve done away with that. You also can use other get paid to blog companies in addition to PayPerPost. In theory, you could make a decent living doing this, but there are only limited opportunities, and if your page rank goes down because of the number of paid posts you do, the good opportunities can dry up completely.

I recommend PayPerPost for people who have been blogging a while (at least 3 months) and want to get paid to blog on their own personal blog. It’s a nice way to make some pocket money, and if you’re in dire need for extra cash, taking all available opps for a week or two should give you a nice pay check. PayPerPost has always paid me on time, and the only time my paid post opportunity was turned down, it was because my page rank changed in between reserving the opp and submitting it for approval. Simply a case of bad timing.

Plus, if it’s your goal to eventually become a full time blogger, the paid posts teach you a little about learning to use keywords, linking strategies, discipline (if you’re getting paid to blog, you’re not going to wander off half way through the post), and if you do them well enough, could even be used as samples when applying for freelance blogging jobs.

If you enjoyed this article on getting paid for blog posts with PayPerPost, please click the button/link on the left and give it a try, or explore the rest of Make Money Online Reality for more tips and advice.