Web2.0: PayPerPost.com

When you launch a new website, you're hopeful that traffic will start flowing to your website. Unfortunately, most people quickly discover that there isn't an easy way to open the flood gates. To really generate traffic, you have to be an expert at all the online marketing tricks, able to make adjustments quickly (and often), and one step ahead of your competition. This is a challenge for web professionals and nearly impossible for the average business owner.

We launched GroupLoop.com just over two months ago, and we were very pleased to generate a large amount of buzz from the Web2.0 blogging community. This generated a substantial amount of traffic to our homepage and helped us generate over 1000 users in a short period of time.

But what can you do if this doesn't happen? How can the average business owner get people to "talk" about your new product?

Enter PayPerPost.com, a new controversial service where you can pay bloggers to talk about you. It's controversial because blogs aren't supposed to contain paid content. Blogs are supposed to be about "journalism", right? Well, I put them to the test to see if this new service is worth your time.

You start by signing up as an advertiser, and depositing money into your account. I began with the minimum amount, just $20. On average, you must compensate each blogger at least $5 to write a post about your product or service. This seemed quite reasonable to me, as it can often take a half hour to an hour to write a blog post.

Once I had my account created, I was able to create an "opportunity" for bloggers to write about. This was a simple process where I told them about my requirements:

1) They had to display my logo, which I uploaded.
2) They had to write at least 50 words.
3) They had to provide a link to GroupLoop.com.
4) They had to test-drive GroupLoop with a free account.
5) The post should be a "review" of our service.
6) They were free to speak positively or negatively about our service.

The last point is where some of the controversy about PayPerPost.com is created. I could have required that the bloggers only say positive things about our service. One would hope that a blogger would ignore opportunities that go against their morals, but you never know what one might do for $5.

So what happened in our test? The results were surprising to me. Since we only deposited $20 we were able to get three "posts" (once PayPerPost added a small premium and a $5 setup fee). I was impressed with the quality of the three posts we received from our bloggers. After all, these guys spent a considerable amount of time and only received $5 in compensation.

The first blogger wrote a lengthy review and even offered suggestions on improvement to our service. It was well thought out and it was obvious that he had spent a considerable amount of time reviewing our website. To be honest, we actually agreed with some of his suggestions and probably will implement them in a future release.

The second blogger wrote a shorter post about "Getting Groups Online" and had generally favorable things to say. The final blogger also demonstrated that the he had taken some time to consider our product and write something meaningful.

While these three bloggers did write positive posts about GroupLoop, I don't expect too many signups from these posts. In the first day (usually the most popular), these blog posts received just over 100 views and generated very few visits to our homepage.

On the contrary, the "free" buzz we received came from popular blog sites like EmilyChang.com and DownloadSquad.com which have the ability to generate thousands of visitors to our website in a matter of hours. Nevertheless, these three "paid" posts do contain a link back to our homepage, which will add value to our Google PageRank over the long run.

All in all, it's hard to argue that our $20 wasn't well spent. We received three reviews of our website, valuable product feedback, three links back to our homepage, and additional exposure about our product. If you're on a shoestring budget, that's very affordable marketing.

Filed in: CWS, rochester, controversy,payperpost, PPP