OK, as you have all seen, I’ve been cross-posting blog posts from ustravel.today.com to over here for about a month. Why, you might ask, have I been (a) posting almost daily about a topic (life on the road) that I’ve failed thus far to post about here much? And why so many danged posts? And why did I just go through and shorten a bunch of them to link back?
The answer is because Today.com is paying me to blog. Yes, they are paying me to post regularly about life on the road. And it’s not small potatoes, either. While many bloggers are happy to get $2 PPM, I’m getting $1 per day that I post, plus $2 PPM (that’s $2 per 1000 visitors).
Now, it’s true that they only guarantee that payment rate for the first month, but hey– last month I made $53 from blogging over there, and this month looks like it’ll be close to it again. There’s a pretty good group of folks in the Forums over there, and there are other opportunities that crop up from time to time as well, contests, and so forth.
So, anyway, if you’d like to get paid to blog about stuff you’d talk about anyway (less navel-gazing than I usually post, I’m afraid), sign up here and get started. After a month or two, if you really hate it, you could always quit.
The fine print: You don’t get to put your own ads or commercial content up. No Amazon affiliate links, nothing. It’s great if you want to be financially motivated to post and solicit traffic without having to worry so much about whether or not your affiliates and advertisers are happy. It also means no duplicating– I learned today that my cross-posts need to be truncated with a link back, rather than simply posted up, as they don’t want cross-posting to or from the today.com blog. You also can’t install any plugins or themes; in fact, the customizations available for your blog are very limited. Think of it like a formerly-free LiveJournal account.
In the interest of full disclosure: yes, I get a small commission for everyone who signs up from this link. No, it’s not enough to go to Starbucks. Yes, I still think it’s a good platform with a good community behind it.