Why I Hate Your Paid Reviews
I’ve been wanting to get something off my chest for a while now, but just hadn’t figured out which blog to put it on. I do, after all, get paid to blog on all four blogs these days so whichever one I pick for this subject is bound to get slammed with comments calling me a hypocrite. Should I share the traffic (and the hate), or should I keep it all here where the word “Venom” pretty much warns people what they’re in store for?
Ultimately I decided to explain myself here at EV for one reason and one reason only: it has the highest traffic. With luck, I’ll get this message out to a larger number of people also doing paid blogging and quite possibly someone might just get the point and fix their crappy writing.
So here’s the message to 90% of folks doing paid blogging: You suck.
You suck wind loudly, you suck in ways that words cannot describe. You suck because you believe that you don’t, and most of all you suck because you think people actually care what you have to say about a product, site or service.
They do not.
No matter how the companies that handle the transaction may categorize the tasks assigned to you, the advertisers do NOT believe that your glowing, kiss-ass review of a product or service you haven’t even tried (or won’t use, don’t need or can’t afford) will convince the thirty friends and fellow bloggers — most of whom are also getting paid to write about the same damn site — to suddenly discover a need for whatever it is they’re selling.
And before you go calling me egotistical for saying that you suck, consider this: how freaking egotistical are YOU to believe that some company with the funds to hire umpteen bloggers at $15 a piece wants YOU to take time out of your busy schedule of blogging about what color your baby’s spit-up was today or how adorable it was when your cat’s Christmas tinsel-laced hairball looked like the star of Bethlehem just so you can give your opinion of something you’ve never even tried?!
Advertisers, like the boys that I dated in high school, are only interested in one thing. Thank goodness it’s not the same thing. Advertisers don’t want the key that unlocks your chastity belt, they just want the keywords that will get the entry you write for them to show up high in search queries relevant to their product, site or service.
Keywords, people. That’s what’s in those nifty little links that pay for lattes, that take a dent out of your credit card bills, that allow you to say “I’m earning a living from my blog!” They are also, incidentally, the very reason why Google slashed the PR of blogs that receive compensation for writing those entries. It wasn’t personal: it was just about protecting search results.
But you’ve kept on blogging for hire anyway, haven’t you? You’ve got guts. You don’t care about PR. You’re determined to have a good blog and, by gosh, you’re going to keep reviewing your little heart out no matter what Google says, aren’t you?
Well here’s a tip: STOP SUCKING.
Stop writing reviews that sound like Marketing 101 blurbs. Stop trying to act as salesmen and -women trying to pawn off various products to your readers. Stop it, stop it, STOP IT.
Your first duty is to your readers. Entertain them. Inform them, yes, but entertain them in the process.
Luckily, if you let go of your delusions that your job is to actually review stuff, you can do both in the process.
Remember: advertisers want their stuff to come up in relevant search queries. You can make that happen and entertain your readers at the same time.
Got a paid assignment to write about something difficult like PEO companies? Sure, you could dash off a paragraph about how they act as second employers, essentially, handling the mundane tasks of managing human resources and payrolls that small businesses find so burdensome to deal with.
OR you could write about how the rising cost of health care is crippling Mom & Pop businesses and hamstringing the entrepreneur. How small businesses generate the majority of jobs for younger workers, older workers and women but are often unable to offer their employees health insurance because they don’t take advantage of the group rates they could get through staff leasing.
Which would you prefer to read at someone else’s blog: a dry and uninformed yet glowing one paragraph “review” written by someone who doesn’t, won’t and can’t afford to work with a staff leasing company, or one that might be a bit longer and better researched but explains how doctors lease student nurses as employees but might bill them out as regular nursing care at a higher rate?
Which one really tells your reader more information?
Which one really is more likely to result in a “hit” for the advertiser?
If you can’t figure out that answer, I’ll give you a hint: it’s not your crappy one paragraph review of a service that you don’t even understand, much less have helped your readers to understand, either.
Oh, and while I’m at it, let me just take a swing at those of you who INSIST on marking every one of the entries for which you’ve been compensated as something for which you’ve received dirty lucre. Get off your high horse. If you keep writing as you have been, everyone already knows you’re getting paid for it. So stop underestimating the intelligence of your readers.
Some of you claim it’s “deceitful” to get paid for an entry without labeling it as such. Know what? It’s more deceitful to invite readers to peruse entires in which you’ve invested so little time that they read like advertisements written by 6th graders. It’s more deceitful to write a terse, “just the facts, ma’am” review and take someone’s money in exchange. It’s more deceitful to hold yourself out as a blogger then foist upon your readers nothing but dry, soulless, uninteresting pablum just so you can make a buck.
Your “hey, I’m getting paid to write this” blogs suck.
YOU have the power to change that.
STOP SUCKING.
(Oh, and in case you’re wondering, yes I did get paid to write this review. So there.)
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Right On!
Karen’s last blog post..Did You Search For These?
This is why you are the Queen Bee of paid blogging, m’dear. Some of us aspire to such greatness but damn — it just isn’t possible.
**This is a sponsored comment.
(Okay, so I make myself laugh at least)
jae’s last blog post..Alvin!
Jae, I’ll pay you back for the moral support by picking up the tab whenever we do manage to get together for cocktails.
As long as YOU promise to drive us home.
I can’t find the entries, but I do distinctly remember when you started your paid blogging gigs that you clearly distinguished your sponsored posts from your regular ones. In fact, I remember that that term was “non-negotiable,” or something like that.
I did kinda wonder why you quit doing that. In the end, though, it doesn’t matter a whit… the sponsored blog entries are still easily recognizable to me, and they’re always entertaining in any case.
In summation: “Right on.”
Ben’s last blog post..The death of the Netscape browser
Ben, I stopped doing it because I realized I was ultimately screwing advertisers over. I try now to deliver something interesting to readers while ALSO doing something that helps advertisers AND my wallet.
Thanks, all, for letting me know that I’m not failing readers. My $2195 income from last month kind of lets me know the advertisers are OK with it, too.
You are seriously my hero, VK! Hardcore! I need to start each day reading you!
Lisa Marie Mary’s last blog post..Christmas ROCKS at our house!
Honey, I’m just a cranky middle-aged lady who is sick and tired of spending hours each day paging through crap that I wouldn’t allow my homeschooled son to turn in as a “complete assignment”.
Also, I’m tired of being lumped in with folks who write crap for money when they’re not writing crap about their baby’s vomit.
Now you know why I don’t do paid posts…
My writing is marginal at best - trying to work in a paid link would make it suck even worse than it already does. LOL.
From one cranky middle-aged lady to another (Is 49 middle-aged?), Bravo!
Marisa’s last blog post..Ready For The New Year
I’m banking that 40 is. At least that’s how I feel. As far as I’m concerned, I kept everything upright and tight until my 39th birthday. Now I’m enjoying letting gravity take its toll.
Mmmmm…. Toll.
Toll house.
Tollhouse cookies.
No wonder I’m a Chubby Mommy, eh?
Gee, my blog sucks and I don’t even get paid for it.
And when I do recommend a product (because I love it and want others to know about it), I often make sure to point out that I am not getting paid for it because the post usually does sound like an advertisement written by a 6th grader.
Been There Blogged that, but glad to see the sentiment growing.
Entertainment is the key. IMHO
Oh….I am guilty of sucking with paid posts. But I only plan on working for one company this year, if they keep me on. I tend to do better when I can just integrate keywords into my blog posts as opposed to trying to ‘review’ something I just don’t understand or care about, and don’t have the time to really sit and try to figure out how to best serve it up.
Devilish Southern Belle’s last blog post..I guess
Kate tell us how you really feel lol
Remember me? I’m the paid blogger you love to hate.
Honestly, I did it your way for the first couple of months but then I went to the forums to see what the advertisers were saying… I read things like “review means review; I don’t want a post about your Aunt Sally’s problems, I want to read about my product…” More than once or twice. So, I changed the way I wrote to try to be more accommodating to them.
Now I’m wrong again. [The first time was because I labeled my paid posts.]
Kate, I take everything you say seriously, since you obviously are good at what you do and since you are the person who inspired me to do paid reviews. It just SUCKS to be told that I SUCK.
pam’s last blog post..Thank you for your prayers!
Pam, don’t take this the wrong way, but you weren’t on my mind when I wrote that.
Can you tell me where I could find that forum?
Yeah, I got all egotistical on you, eh? It struck a nerve because I don’t even like to read what I’m writing!
It’s the PPP boards here: http://boards.payperpost.com/
pam’s last blog post..I suck
I’d been reading the PPP boards when you left your last comment. I can’t find one that expresses the “review means review” sentiment. Well, I think there might’ve been one… but that was from a Postie who’d signed up to get reviews of his site from fellow Posties.
Interestingly, his blog happened to have been one of the ones that I WAS thinking about when I wrote this, so I don’t give much credence to his opinion about what constitutes a good paid post.
Hire standards…
I tend to pay attention when Venomous Kate speaks on the question of blogging for bucks, since (1) she makes decent bucks at it and (2) she understands the dynamics of blogdom as well as anyone I read regularly. So……
Okay, I hope I’m not overly sucky. I try really hard to make my paid posts still sound like me. I will admit, however, that some sucky posts sneak in there now and then.
I read several other bloggers who do the paid blogging thing, and some of them do suck.
I don’t think you read me, so I don’t think you’re calling me out for my suckage!
wRitErsbLock’s last blog post..it wasn’t a completely wasted day
I actually do read you now and then. Until I find a Firefox addon newsreader that I actually like, I doubt I’ll be reading anyone for a while. My old newsreader has crashed my computer for the LAST time. I can’t stand it.
Good ad, rant and post in general. It’s really hard for me not to sound like I’m writing an ad because, well, I’m an advertising copywriter. That kind of writing has no place in a blog.
I open each sponsored link with “This is a paid post” so my regular readers will skip it. Plus, I’d hate for somebody to go have plastic surgery somewhere on the basis of my recommendation when I don’t know whether the surgeon even finished high school. I try to throw in a little caveat emptor in my posts. (After a life of writing ads and PR pieces that sometimes work, I do have some scruples. Holy Cow! What if somebody BELIEVES me?)
Thanks for ditching the number thing, it wasn’t letting me in. Hmmm…
Just as five year olds learn the life skills necessary to become teenagers, cat puke blogging teaches the skills necessary to convey information in the written form. Embrace the suck and it will abate.
I hope it’s not me either. Like wRitErsbLock, I try to write paid posts as I do regular posts, but what I deem a sucky one does sneak in once in a while.
You are the Queen of paid posting, VK. This is an awesome post, and even if I don’t consider myself one of the sucky ones, it will push me to do better so that I don’t become one of the sucky ones. Unless I am one of the sucky ones, then there’s just no hope for me!
Amanda’s last blog post..This kid’ll be a star someday!
Oops! I didn’t mean to say “scruples” as though if you don’t have a “Warning: Paid Post. Do Not Read or Believe Anything That Follows” you are somehow unscrupulous. I worry about things in general, and on the off chance that one of my six readers would actually get lap-band surgery or invest in Nigeria based on my advice, I don’t want to be held accountable.
In the past, when I have commented that your posts were very gracefully crafted ads, it was entirely with envy and admiration, from one writer to another. It’s really hard to do what you do, and I respect you for it. (And I’ve got some serious blog-income-coveting going on here, too. You used to have a “make money blogging” page. Last time I used that booksmark, it wasn’t there anymore. Please — we love your free and paid advice.)
If it’s not the color of the vomit, it’s the size of the chunks. Yes, I completely agree with you! I’ve had to stop reading some blogs because they’ve become so bad. Of course, I’m hoping that it isn’t my posts that motivated your excellent, spot-on entry about blog quality.
In reference to newsreaders: I’ve set up my netvibes account with their news reader widget. So far, it has done a great job at organizing and making blogs easy to read … much better than any of the Firefox add-ons that I’ve tried or Google’s reader.
Ron’s last blog post..Christmas Thought
I love your blogs. I just found all of them this weekend, and I am hooked.
Your post was amazing. I have been doing Paid Posts, but have been unhappy as I have lost my voice (assuming I ever had one on my blog). I have been thinking long and hard about what to do to my blog and your post helped. I am revamping it so that I can get back to my obnoxious and *witchy roots. I think we bloggers get so obsessed with getting money, that we forget to quality is so much better than quantity. Thank you so much for this. Thank you so much!
Kristina Brooke’s last blog post..Not Again
You hurt my feelings and made me cry.
To be honest though, the reason most paid reviews suck is quite simply because most blogs suck. Whenever I surf through blogging networks to find new blogs, I am utterly amazed at the crap that’s out there. Compounding the issue even more is the fact that some of the more shrewd bloggers create a dozen blogs or so they can circumvent the posting limits for sponsored posts, and since they’re writing a flurry of content with no other purpose than to fulfill the bare minimum requirement of the advertiser, you can imagine what this does to the quality of the blog, especially when they’re not even a good writer to begin with. :-X
Wahhhhtthafack? YOU GET PAID FOR THIS?
Didn’t MY ASS miss the stupid boat YET AGAIN? (Forget it, it’s rhetorically obvious.)
Damn DAMN DAMN!
All this after finding out the typing service I’ve been working for is CUTTING MY RATE. Cheapass bastards. For now, they’ve got me over a barrel. FOR. NOW.
Two grand a month? Damn, girlie. That’s nice scratch for tellin’ it like it is.
Linc, you want a hankie? I have a pretty damask one with a nice little rose embroidered on one corner. I’m reasonably certain it’s clean.
No, seriously, I know what you mean about the multiple blog thing. Running four definitely drains my brain, but as tempting as it gets to add on a few more just to make more dosh I’d be embarrassed to churn out the crap you and I have seen elsewhere.
Margi, didn’t you see that entry a while back when I said I was going to start doing sponsored posts?
I’m sure I saw it, Kate. I also am sure that due to hormonal fluctuations, I can’t retain anything other than my Social Security number and on certain days, even THAT is not exactly clear.
Sorry.
No worries. If you want a list of places to sign up with let me know and I’ll email ‘em to ya. Of course, you’d have to do a public blog at that point.
Kate, when you e-mail Margi, copy me on the places to sign up, etc. Thanks!
Done!
Awesome! If there is such a thing as previous lives or soul mates, I think you are mine.
Nah, you’re far too nice of a man for me to have spent a previous lifetime busting your balls.
I try to follow your mantre and in fact find it easier to post when I do…but sometimes I have NO clue how to get the post in and then I have sucky posts. But I try! 2Gs? Nice woman! Congrats!
Edited to add: and look one of my sucky posts comes up in Comment Luv…gah I suck! LOL
Trish’s last blog post..KooKoo for KooKoo Bear Kids
Those weird ones are the toughest, aren’t they? They make me pull my hair out, too.