I’ve been in the blogging world for quite some time now. Blogs initially started as a medium to express ones thoughts/opinion about self or people or issues around, but over a period of time, there has been a huge paradigm shift. Blogs are not personal any more, bloggers have been bitten by the make money bug and almost everyone seems to blog for money, I’m no exception.
Blog advertising has grown into a multi million dollar business overnight. Bloggers advertise on their blogs and get some commission every time one of their visitors clicks on those ads. Chetan wrote a review about smorty.com, a service which acts as a middle man between the advertisers and the bloggers. I was curious to test it myself, so I went ahead and registered with them and did try them out.Â
Smorty has a very simple user interface which makes it a breeze to start working. They say that they pay you directly to your paypal account, which means you do not have to wait for any cheques or bank transfers.
Once you register with smorty, you submit the site on which you would wish to write reviews. A human editor does a back ground check about your website, to ensure that the advertisers are getting maximum benefit (afterall they are the back bone of this whole system, as they are the ones who pay). Once reviewed you will be notified if the blog has been accepted or not. If accepted, then you can start right away, by logging into your account and see if you have any new offers.Â
As soon as I logged in, I was surprised to see 4 offers waiting for me. Good signs. Once in there, you have the rights to select what you want to write about. Choose who you want to review, visit that website and you can write honest reviews about that site. They have a small catch here, which says you need to link back to the site you are reviewing. Well this is where the advertisers are benefited. They get 3 or more links pointing back to their site and if you know SEO, then you’ll understand the importance of links pointing back to any site.
Overall a win-win situation, where the blogger and the advertiser both are benefited, bloggers get paid to blog and advertisers get a link back.