Writing Paid Entries With Value

This site covers how to start a blog, build traffic and make money blogging. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

In the time that it took you to brush your teeth this morning, roughly 120 new blogs were launched. By this time tomorrow, another 86,400 will have joined the fold. There’s a new blog born every second, and you can bet the overwhelming majority of new bloggers would jump at the chance to earn money at it.

That means all of those new bloggers are your future competitors: not just for paid gigs but for traffic as well. So how do you compete? You’ve got to focus on increasing your traffic and the only real way to do this on a sustainable basis is by providing good, quality content even when you’re writing paid entries.

This is actually easier than it sounds. It all boils down to promising your readers that you’re about to inform or entertain them, and then doing just that. Here’s how:

1. Spark a readers’ interest. Your headline and first paragraph of a paid entry need to grab a readers’ attention and convince them the entry will somehow inform or entertain them. Some bloggers try to do this with a clever headline that ultimately has little to do with the actual entry. Big mistake. If you can’t convey to a reader in your headline and first few sentences why they should keep reading, they’re going to skim that entry or, worse yet, click on to the next blog.

2. Identify a problem. Every advertiser has a product designed to solve some problem. For example, a travel site that’s hired you to write about its deals is seeking to help people make travel plans. A garage flooring product hides oil stains. A casino site provides entertainment. To make your paid content relevant to readers you need to know — and identify — the problem the advertiser is trying to address, then illustrate that problem for your readers so they can identify with it.

3. Explain the solution. Once you’ve described the problem in a way that the reader can identify with, you need to quickly explain how the advertiser’s product or service can solve it. This, unfortunately, is where too many paid entries go overboard by writing paragraph after paragraph raving about the product. That’s a mistake. The bulk of your entry, in fact, should be identifying the problem for the reader: priming them, if you will, to be interested in what the advertiser has to offer.

4. Provide your opinion. This is what separates paid blog entries from advertisements which, as everyone knows, are hardly objective. Do you believe the advertisers’ product is a better solution than their competitor’s to the problem you’ve identified? Telling your readers why you feel that way helps ensure them that you aren’t just raving about a product without having done your own research. Have you identified weaknesses in the product? Chances are your readers have, too, so go ahead and acknowledge them. This is your chance to reassert your credibility so your readers know that, even if you’re writing a paid entry, you’re still looking out for them.

5. Stand by your words. For some reason many bloggers insist on filing paid entries in a category marked “sponsored” or “paid” to let readers know they received money in exchange for their entry. They feel, for whatever reason, that putting such a disclaimer somehow emphasizes their honesty when, in fact, it does just the opposite. Having written an entry in which you’ve conveyed your personal opinion and then marking it as paid says only one thing: your opinion is for sale.

If you’ve taken the time to craft good content then convey that to your readers by including it with the other entries that you’ve also taken time to write. Anything less shows that even you don’t believe your paid entries are of value to your readers.

And if you don’t believe that, then why should they?

Subscribe to Feed

---

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 at 10:48 am and is filed under Make Money Blogging, Starting a blog (Blogging 101). Both comments and pings are currently closed.

---

Tagged in: Make Money Blogging | making money | paid blogging | paid reviews | quality content

More like this:

• None Found

4 Comments

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.