Earn Money and Get Free Content for Your Blog

I stumbled upon a new way to make some cash with your blog (actually, it stumbled into me). I received an email in reference to one of my content sites. The email was from an online store that is closely related to my site. He stated that if I was willing to host an article with links to his site, I would be compensated.

I replied to the email just to see what he was going to propose. It turns out that he was willing to pay me $25 to host an original article on my site. The article would have no more than two in-context links that point back to his online store.

After a little digging around and chatting with some friends, I learned that this kind of offer isn’t that rare. In fact, it’s pretty common for people to submit articles with links pointing back to their website. It’s a bit of SEO trickery that I hadn’t seen until now.

If you’re new to SEO (search engine optimization), you might wonder just why in the world someone would bother paying me so that they can give me free content. At first glance, it looks like a win-win for me and nothing to be gained for the other guy. Well, it is a bit of a win for me; I’m walking away from the offer with a little cash and content for my site. But the other guy is getting something too. Depending on the kind of sites he chooses to make these offers with, he’s actually the one getting a great deal.[ad name=”250×250″]

So, let’s look at what the other guy is gaining. In the article that he’s providing for me, there will be two text links that point to his site. If I post this article, I’m telling the search engines, “when these keywords (in the link) are involved, the site I’m linking to is more of an authority than me.” So, you can see that if he gets several sites to host his articles with the links, especially those sites that already appear in the top results of a web search, his site will gain substantial favor with the search engines. This means that when someone searches for a related keyword, his site is more likely to appear near the top, which means he’ll get more traffic, which means he’ll probably see a boost in sales.

Suddenly, this $25 offer doesn’t have so much appeal, does it? Well, yes and no. Money is money and if you’ve got a relatively young site with a low page rank, you might as well go ahead and accept the offer. You can always take that $25 and hire a writer of your own. If you’re lucky, you can hire someone to write two smallish articles for you. If you do, you’ve actually gotten three articles for $25 (or for free, however you want to look at it), a deal any day of the week. Remember, content is king. The more content you push out, the more traffic you’ll see down the road.

If you’ve got a well established site with a decent page rank and plenty of unique visits per day, you should probably decline an offer such as this. If this is the case, you’re probably already making money with your website and $25 is a waste of your time… not to mention that you’d be giving some link love to a potential competitor.

I’m interested if anyone else out there has ever come across offers such as these. If so, I’d really appreciate some comments on the subject!