Welcome to Something for Nothing

Anyone that has read my blog for any time knows that I’ve been apart of PayPerPost since the very beginning. I still like to mention that I was the 61st person to join PayPerPost. I currently don’t do that much PayPerPost, but that doesn’t mean I’ve lost my interest in the company and what they’re doing. So, of course I was interested in posting about PayPerPost v4.0.

PayPerPost really transformed blogging for me. They took something I was just doing for fun and turned that fun into a viable part time job for me. When I first started PayPerPost, I was very skeptical I was going to be paid. A few years later, I know the founder of PayPerPost, Ted, quite well and owe a ton to PayPerPost for making me the blogger I am today.

What most people don’t understand about PayPerPost is that it gave me two things I needed as a blogger:
1. Motivation
2. Community

Motivation
PayPerPost provided me with tremendous motivation to blog. I could just see the dollar signs. I went from blogging once every blue moon to posting 6-12 times a day. I’m sure my wife wondered what came over me. Luckily, thanks to PayPerPost I was able to tell me wife how much money I’d made on the site. I was completely motivated by making a little extra cash blogging. No, I couldn’t quit my job, but it gave me (and my wife) motivation to blogging.

What’s really interesting about this motivation is that as I started posting more and more my traffic shot through the roof. At one point I passed Scobleizer on Wordpress.com and was listed as the #1 Wordpress.com blog. There’s no way I would have even broke the list of top 100 Wordpress.com blogs if it weren’t for PayPerPost.

Community
PayPerPost also provided a great community around an exciting new startup. Every week new features were launched. I got a chance to be quoted in SmartMoney Magazine, we did town hall meetings, we watched videos, I met hundreds of other bloggers and most important, I learned a ton of new things about blogging and promoting my blog. (yes, I know that’s a run on sentence)

Each of those things the PayPerPost community offered I’ve since taken and created a small enterprise of blogs. What was once some nice date money has with the same amount of effort become a significant part of my income.

New PayPerPost
Now many might be asking what this has to do with the alpha launch of PayPerPost v4.0. It has everything to do with it. The launch of the new version of PayPerPost has the strong potential to do the things I listed above for other bloggers.

The reality is that the early days of PayPerPost were really simple. There were paid opportunities which you took and wrote about. In one case, I literally took an existing post I’d done and pasted in the PayPerPost code and got paid. Over time, PayPerPost started adding layer and layer of bureaucracy to the process. You could only do so many posts over so long in between certain posts if you had posted within this period of time and not shorter than this period of time and not if the cow jumped over the moon. Yeah, there were so many rules to follow that it took a part time job just to keep up with the rules. Then, when your post was rejected for one of those rules it completely killed your morale.

I’m really happy to say that the PayPerPost v4.0 seems to have gone back to the old days of PayPerPost. I’d describe it as PayPerPost doing everything it can to just get out of the way of bloggers and advertisers. It’s like Reagan did during the de-regulation era of government. PayPerPost v4.0 has deregulated the market for paid blogging. They’re providing a platform for advertisers and bloggers to do what they do best.

We still have to see what the market is going to do. Are advertisers going to flock to this new platform? Will the new platform get overrun by “trolls”? All of this will be seen as it starts to grow, but I know I’m excited to see how it goes.

Note: I’m told if you leave a comment on this post, then you can get an Alpha key. So leave a comment and I’ll do what I can to get you an alpha key to the new PayPerPost.