Recently there has been a storm surrounding the newest and most innovative way to make money through blogging, paid posts. I have been standing by and watching these events unfold, and made some observation that I now want to share with you.

Right now from what I’ve been able to comprehend, there are three dominating services on the scene. PayPerPost, ReviewMe and Sponsored Reviews. While the two latter focus on buying and selling reviews, the overall concept is the same for all three services, pay for posts at blogs. I am signed up at all three, and have so far managed to get some insight into these services.

From a blogger’s point of view, these services are innovative and can be quite lucrative if you manage to snatch the right opportunities. The problem I’ve encountered however, is that there aren’t any “right opportunities”. ReviewMe doesn’t even have an option to make an offer to the buyers, so unless you have a highly visible and popular blog, you’re not likely to have much success with it. The other two rectifiy this, and let you browse potential advertisers, and find the ones that you think might be interesting for your blog’s readers. From what I have seen though, the bulk of the buyers focus mainly on things that hardly anyone would be interested in, such as morgage rates and other less interesting subjects.

Sponsored Reviews did have some potential in the beginning however, with quite a few decent offers, but now it seems to have dwindled down a bit, and most of the public opportunities will be completely uninteresting for most people, and shouldn’t be an option for most bloggers out there.

I don’t blame the advertisers however. When I tried out Sponsored Reviews myself with Bloggst, and posted a public opportunity about Bloggst for everyone to view, I got at least 15 offers within the first ten minutes, and they just kept coming. I had to take it off after not too long. This shows that bloggers are starved for some “decent” opportunities, and I think that if any of these services are serious about what they do, they should put some time into finding quality advertisers. There is no shortage of quality blogs available, but there needs to be more quality advertisers and opportunities that can actually be of some interest to the blog readers.

Overall I think that the idea behind these services is great, and it is a nice way for bloggers to earn some money. Unfortunately, unless the norm switches around a bit, and advertisers that offer something that readers might actually be interested in jumps on board, we are in danger of seeing too many blogs littered with paid posts about stuff that nobody really cares about. This is a lose-lose situation for both bloggers and readers, and hopefully it will change in the near future.