Monday
Apr302012
How NOT to Make Money Online: 10 Ways Bloggers Get Paid That Don't Actually Get Them Paid
Monday, April 30, 2012
A company's size and fame, the positive message of their campaign, or your love of their products might make a company's attention more enticing, and it might even make not getting paid by them seem better than not getting paid by someone else, but not getting paid is not getting paid is not getting paid. If a company approaches you because you have an audience and skills that they value, the expectation of free labour is an affront to what you bring to the table.
Because you generally can't barter for your living space, food, and utilities, the following items do not count as proper payment for the use of your time, skills, readership, and social media following if they are not also accompanied by a decent paycheck:
I pulled all of the above from my own experiences. It's true. I've been offered a veritable smorgasbord of incentives such as pictures of cat toys, coupons for paper, chapstick, and my favourite, as one who both cannot have and does not want children, a book on potty-training. If I took advantage of all of these fabulous opportunities, I could work all day to live in the cardboard box from the coffee machine they sent me that I can't afford to plug in.
And you? What fabulous opportunities have you been offered?
Because you generally can't barter for your living space, food, and utilities, the following items do not count as proper payment for the use of your time, skills, readership, and social media following if they are not also accompanied by a decent paycheck:
#1: Self-satisfaction
You can find enough self-satisfaction doing volunteer work or donating to the food bank without dedicating your time and skills for free to spreading the word about a company's water purifier or their vitamin-enriched jams, no matter how much you believe in the product ethos. If they're trying to manipulate you into free work with an appeal to your personal ethics, you should question the ethics of their PR tactics.#2: Product pictures
Strange but true fact: PR companies send bloggers pictures of products with the offer to send even more pictures of products if they write about them. Ooh! Coloured pixels organized to look like images of meal replacement bars! We all know that pictures of products we don't own will keep us warm when we can't pay the heating bills, right?#3: Products
It depends on the product in question, but if a company offers you something akin to a notepad or soap for dedicated weblog space — let alone the use of your time, skills, and readership — they are looking for suckers, and they think you might be one. Your platform is worth far more than a ten-dollar water bottle, let alone the work and time you put in to promote it.#4: Event tickets
As with products, it depends on the event in question, but once you work out the food, travel, and other costs associated with going to the event, you are often poorer than you were before you traded your skills for a mid-afternoon advance screening of a mediocre film or a luncheon paired with a thinly-veiled sales pitch for a blender.#5: Coupons
The coupons a company offers as payment are usually for that company's merchandise, which means that, in order to redeem their so-called payment, you have to give them money for a product that they likely spent less than the coupon discount to produce. So, now you've not only done work for them for no actual cash, but you've also basically paid them for the pleasure of doing so. The coupons-for-work deal is often a shady bait-and-switch that not only sells you the product but also gets you to work and advertise for them for the low, low cost of nothing whatsoever in your bank account.#6: Links back to your weblog
If a company promises you a link back to your weblog in exchange for your work, be suspicious. If their website actually gets enough traffic that an appreciable number of their visitors would find and click on your link there, then you have to wonder why their own site isn't generating enough revenue so that they can afford to pay you for their space on yours. Chances are that if it benefits them so much to have you link to them, their traffic is not so great.#7: Giveaway traffic
A giveaway of an electric toothbrush or what-have-you will win you some extra traffic for a few days, but that's usually where it ends. A company gets free use of your time, skills, and readership while you get to write, host, link to, and promote their product across your social media networks for little more than a brief rush of one-time visitors and zero cash in hand to compensate you for your labour. Even if the company does give you product to keep, take note of how much that product is worth compared to your hours of work, the skills you bring to the job, and the value of handing over your social network connections to share the company's message.#8: Exposure
Exposure to who? Where? To how many? For how long? They could write your name in tiny print on a bathroom wall in Poughkeepsie and call it exposure. Exposure usually amounts to a bare mention on their website, if you're lucky, and you have to wonder how much exposure their website actually gets if they need to get space on yours for free.#9: Future work
Don't let a company's offer of possible future employment lure you into agreeing to do free work for them now. If a company won't honour your contributions appropriately now, then they've given you no reason to believe that they will remunerate you appropriately in the future. Heck, they haven't even given you reason to believe that they respect your time and work in the first place since they valued it at all of zero dollars.#10: Good references
Any reference given based on your willingness to work for less than peanuts is a reference which comes with the assumption that you will work for cheap or free again. Not only will employment based on that reference often come with the expectation of cheap labour, but your work will be treated with less respect, because you get what you pay for, right? Act cheap, and you'll be treated accordingly.I pulled all of the above from my own experiences. It's true. I've been offered a veritable smorgasbord of incentives such as pictures of cat toys, coupons for paper, chapstick, and my favourite, as one who both cannot have and does not want children, a book on potty-training. If I took advantage of all of these fabulous opportunities, I could work all day to live in the cardboard box from the coffee machine they sent me that I can't afford to plug in.
And you? What fabulous opportunities have you been offered?
Reader Comments (30)
Wait? I can get vitamin-enriched jams for free?
The "payment" that irks me the most is the chance to win something. I need to spend my time and energy into writing a post for the company that is being promoted for the *CHANCE* to win one of 4 (or however many) gift cards? Um, no thanks.
Last summer companies kept offering me coupons for their wienies. Needless to say I turned them down. I have a perfectly good wienie of my own.
Yeah, this: "PR companies send bloggers pictures of products with the offer to send even more pictures of products if they write about them. Ooh! Coloured pixels organized to look like images of meal replacement bars!"
Some of the other things are fun (trips, free stuffs) are nice to get (please send me more!), but the emails offering to send more pictures to use in posts to promote their stuff FOR FREE is just idiotic.
Now, how about a book on potty training your cats? (I secretly want to do that; my husband will have no part of it. Luckily he does 99% of the cat box cleaning.)
Excellent points, and you can usually tell the quality of the 'work' by the pitch you were sent.
I do giveaways about twice a year, only in partnership with companies I respect and trust, and more as a thank you to my readers and community for putting up with me all these years. It's true, they do not equal a sustained increase in traffic, and you're kidding yourself if you think the temporary inflated numbers have to do with your amazing talent as a blogger ;)
The pictures. YES.
Oooh. You'll send me even more hi-res images if I want? It's my lucky day!
That one drives me CRAZY.
A giveaway request for a movie so bad no one would want the DVD. A request to build a separate blog page on my site to run a dating service ad in exchange for the whopping sum of $135 a year.
Although this is great advice for seasoned bloggers with good traffic, someone with low traffic to their website has to be careful. When I first started out blogging a PR firm contacted me to do a free review on my site in exchange for product. I did not get paid but I chose to work with them to establish a relationship with them. That was a year ago. The traffic on my site has grown dramatically in the past year and I recently completed two projects for that exact same PR firm and got paid $200.00 for each campaign. You can also negotiate. I get contacted regularly for $25.00 or $50.00 campaigns which I won't do. Instead of deleting those emails I send them my rate sheets and I will either get one of two answers. They will choose to pay me at my asking price or they will let me know they do not have the budget for this particular project but will contact me when they have a project with a larger budget.
I don't blog to make money, never have. For me it has always been therapy and building connections. Lately I have been using it also as platform to build exposure for my children's poems/stories series. I have been approached with things like this, but for the most part never took them up on it because it wasn't the purpose of my blog. But I would like to monetize my writing, especially now that I am doing it regularly. So I appreciate your advice here.
I was once offered a turd on a stick. Figuratively.
People die from exposure. GADS.
@jchevais Ha!
This post is EXCELLENT. I was just offered a pair of seamless socks in exchange for a post with a long list of ways I must promote said post and company. So hard to turn that one down.
Seriously though, I've had a really hard time with how ridiculous some of the pitches are lately. This past month was Autism Awareness month and I can't tell you how many for-profit companies wanted me to write for them for free because I have a child with autism. When I gave them my rates they all tried to make me feel guilty for not wanting to spread the word and appreciating the link back. I was torn between the need to spread the message and the amount of time I do not have available to work for free. So thanks for making me feel better.
Again, excellent post.
Last year I got a 'Lucky Charm' beach towel in the mail by entering a pin code online. For a second I thought about going back to the store to buy ten more boxes of cereal ... when the towel arrived, I was so excited I blogged about it.
No one's ever contacted me with an offer for blogging. I have really bad grammar.
I agree. I recently had a company find my blog and email me to ask if I'd write a post about their product (or even just post an article they had written). Their first emails were very vague; I had to keep asking them questions to get more information out of them. I finally offered to do a product review (after checking out their company and deciding that they had product I was really interested in) and was told that they couldn't offer compensation or product reviews for links. What? I told them no, though I referred them to a business program that connects businesses with bloggers. I later saw that they were working with this company, offering a product review in exchange for the post. I found it rather amusing, but at least they finally did give something in exchange for the advertising. They had a really nice website so I had a hard time believing that they couldn't pay for ad space.
Hilarious. Loved this post. So true too.
I don't have a blog--well I have a Tumblr site which I refuse to call a blog--but after reading your list I think it can also be good advice for contract work and internships. I've just retired from the regular work-force and so I'm dismayed at this idea that people should volunteer their time at organizations to get work experience or in the hopes they'll get offered a permanent position. Especially people just out of university with little job experience who are easily taken advantage of in my opinion. Basically don't under value yourself and don't apologize for wanting to get what your worth.
I think that I'm just going to start using the "good exposure" model in everyday life. I'll offer the grocery store to carry their bags in exchange for free food. Because the exposure will be good for them. Win-win.
This post seriously makes me want to just quit blogging altogether. Not that what you wrote isn't great. It's just I do product reviews and giveaways and for what? Nothing. None of us know how much to ask for and when to ask in lieu of compensation. I want to get paid to write. That's how it started, a love for writing. Now I'm blogging about shampoo and face cream, sure it's cool. I get products for free, some I would never be able to afford on my own. Am I sucker? I guess I am. Thanks for helping me come out of the closet, now I just want to go back in there in hide LOL
Jodi Shaw, don't run and hide!
This medium is still relatively new, especially when it butts up against an old offline entity like marketing, and so we're all feeling our way around trying to figure out how all this works. You're doing okay if you're getting things you want out of it, and I get your frustration over not knowing when to ask and for how much. No one really knows. Hopefully, we'll get there.
I've done a few post-for-product things because they were offering me products I use anyway and therefore did not need to buy if they provided them for me for free in exchange for a post. Like allergy meds. They are expensive. So if they want to give me a bunch of them, works for me!
I've had a couple of dumb ones, though, like giving away a credit to an online store I (and I assume, my readers) had no interest in. Uh, what's in it for me? No thank you. I'm not that huge/famous of a blogger, so I don't get many, but 80% of them are lame and deleted instantly.
Links back to your weblog that's what I like most on this honest article you are not a layer to are telling the truth thanks.
The one that gets me is 'would you like to blog for us. we'll link back to you' . So, I've NEVER gotten one single read or hit to either of my blogs from a 'free' blog post I shared. Not One. I don't do giveaways, too much work. And, I'll write a post for a product if I want it anyways. Otherwise, no way, jose.
Love, love, love this. And the comments. Especially after sitting down to weed through my email this morning. It's an epidemic.
A Diva Cup. On my mostly-food blog. An appeal to my "you're eco-friendly, aren't you? Trying to save the planet?" ethos. NEVER MIND I haven't had a period in two years and won't for another 18 months thanks to two pregnancies very close together and associated breastfeeding. All for no compensation, not even a free Diva Cup for my menstruating readers. I think you'd like the email I sent back refusing their ridiculous offer.
I offered to review a new compact camera. It is worth around $300. I received it today. With a return courier slip.
I don't think so. A car, I might review for a test drive, but not a $300 camera.
It's also a problem in the music community. Venues offer the chance to perform in exchange for "exposure"... and then get cranky when you don't fill the place with your friends.
Thank you for this post! I just found you today as I was researching the possibility of making money from my blog. I've done a couple product reviews but I want to move away from that and actually work with sponsors. You've definitely given me something to think about.
I'm always getting "offers" to download this or that app in exchange for me reviewing it on my blog. I'm sorry, but in what world does your 2 dollar app even remotely entice me to spend hours trying it out, and then boring my readers with it? Um....no thanks.