Robyn certainly echoes the sentiments of bloggers who’re focused on building a brand.

In case you’re not familiar with paid posting, it works like this:

A company contracts a paid posting service provider to get bloggers to blog about their company, product or service. Usually, the stipulation is that the post must contain a backlink to the company. Bloggers may be required to post pre-written (usually positive-slanted) content and there may be safeguards to ensure they don’t post any negativity about the subject.

Payment for a single post varies, typically ranging from $10-20, and going up to $100 or even more (though that might involve making a video clip, posting it to YouTube and featuring it on your blog).

I’d signed up with some of the paid posting networks and wasn’t too thrilled. Perhaps the industry is still in it’s infancy, but the paid assignments offered to me included pharmaceutical and university sponsors. Neither of which fit into my readers needs or wants.

I was however, tempted to create a throwaway blogger account and set up a blog, explicitly for posting paid content. After all, the service provider didn’t seem particularly concerned about metrics like traffic or PageRank.

In the end, I did a calculation of the value of my time and it just didn’t seem worth it.

The time spent not just posting the content, but shortlisting appropriate offers, thinking up possible angles and developing interesting content (ie caring for your readers interests), just didn’t seem to be worth it, even at $20 a post.

Sure, the sponsored post might bring some additional traffic to your blog, but would it be targeted traffic?
Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s wonderful that bloggers are getting more options beyond the typical adsense, banner and text link ads. It just seems that paid content is still in its infancy and bloggers who excessive publish ‘too much’ paid content might earn the moniker of a ‘paid.blog.whore’. ‘Too much’ being a subjective measure.

It’s great that blogger are getting more blog monetization options as blogging’s marketing potential is realized by corporate America. At the same time, bloggers who get too blinded by the cash, will end up alienating their own readers and doing damage to their personal brand.

There’s already a blogger backlash against paid content posting. The question is how far it’ll go.

What are your thoughts about paid posting?