The Ethics of Writing Sponsored Posts & Getting Paid to Blog

The ethics of sponsored posts and/ or paid links often get overlooked and ignored by the average blogger. If you are currently making money blogging or if you plan to you will need to learn about these ethics at one time or another and you can choose to learn now or you can wait until you're a penalized for an "unethical practice".

The first thing you need to think about is your disclosure policy. Many of the companies that bring paid advertisers to you will require some form of a disclosure on your site or blog. Disclosing is the ethical/ honest way to write sponsored posts and stay out of trouble. Reports have stated that the FTC is considering taking action against word-of-mouth marketers, this includes bloggers. Disclosing is as easy as simply writing something like "this post brought to you by" or you can publish a site wide disclosure stating you accept payment from advertisers for posts.

The next thing to consider is how remain in the good graces of the search engines while writing your sponsored posts. Google encourages webmasters "to pay very close attention to the "Quality Guidelines," which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index or otherwise penalized." It is really important that you read and understand these guidelines.

One specific blogger tactic that is currently causing bloggers/ webmasters grief is the "nofollow" practices in paid posts. Google describes that some advertisers attempt to "buy PageRank" by having bloggers link to them within their posts, some advertisers even specify that "nofollow" should not be used. It is specifically stated google that "buying links to improve PageRank violates our quality guidelines." This is something that can negatively impact both the advertiser and the blogger who accepted payment for the questionable post.

Balance is also something writers/ bloggers have to consider. Blogs that are chocked full of nothing but advertisements are often viewed as "spam" and readers seldom read these. Finding balance between your revenue generating posts and your content packed posts is crucial if you want to get and keep readers. Furthermore, paid posts and links that are off topic or that just show up randomly throughout the blog can disrupt the balance of the blog and deter readers.

If you are really serious about getting paid for your writing and you intend to grow your blog and increase value ethically it is important to stay on top of the new trends/ practices and to be educated about the ethics of them. Many blogs, forums and articles exist that can help you stay in the know, you just need to stay on top of them.