Why Bloggers Shouldn’t be Paid
I’ve recently heard so many bloggers, especially those covering topics on entertainment, whining about individuals, especially artists, requesting for “free promotion”. What this means is bloggers expect content providers to pay them before they get their content online. Their shortsightedness is only a reflection of the general shortsightedness of most content providers who make or try making money online using the traditional sales mechanism of pay-and-I-supply. Online money making through content creation doesn’t do well that way — unless you’re not the one actually creating the content (you’re a social network, for example). Here’s why:
First and most important, traffic and Search Engine Optimization are what get you cash online, not direct payments. Now what’s this SEO thingy? And how does it make one money? Simply put, SEO means you try to get as many people as possible to visit your website by showing up first when they search for stuff on Google, Bing, YouTube and other search engines. Asking content providers to pay you is a shot in the leg in this regard. Some of the best ways through which you rank highly on search engines — and which these shortsighted bloggers ignore — is by generating a lot of content, by getting quality links to that content and by having that content spread around the web. Ask for payment and you get less and less content — not everyone can “afford” a badly-worded article on a blog which they can even create freely; less content means less people linking to your website; it also means your content doesn’t get propagated around the web, for everyone you write something about has the tendency to share it on as many platforms as possible, and such shares, especially from popular folks, generate much reactions and views. You’re missing out on all these!
But wait, bloggers are out to make money right? How does this SEO thingy get them cash? I wrote an article on how to make money online through blogging and when you go through it, you’d realize that a blogger who gets paid $10 for an article once gains less than one who generates $0.5 per week for that article over the period of eternity. Let’s say you integrate only Google AdSense on your site and you get 20,000 visits to an article in a month for 6 months; $0.5 a week might be a very tiny estimate to what income you can generate through maximizing on SEO. We’ve seen that asking for payment minimizes SEO, and you can’t make such eternal earnings without good SEO.
Secondly, content. This goes in line with SEO. Search engines are smart enough to detect unauthentic, poorly-worded and duplicated content; humans are equally smart. Asking for payment means you’ll publish content provided by those who pay you, and it’s not always easy verifying that content or even changing it after oiling your mouth with mullah. Doing your own research and creating content eliminates all these risks. Penalties go with such risks, least of which come from search engines. Such penalties could even extend to legal ones. Yes, countless bloggers have been sued! Worse still, when you get a reputation as a blogger with fake or unverified information, people start avoiding your blog.
Lastly, blogger reputation. What I mean here is bloggers are beginning to paint a bad image of themselves. Blogging was supposed to be the online equivalent of news and article publication on magazines, journals and newspapers. These mediums are very much trusted. Blogging hasn’t replaced them in many ways; definitely not in the authenticity of publications. The more bloggers let everyone know that they have to pay to get articles published, the more everyone gets the impression that articles on blogs aren’t objective. This kills the blogging activity in general. A blogger who collects cash to write an article on, say a politician, could as well have the article dictated to them by that politician.
It will help all bloggers to know that they’re killing themselves by demanding cash for “promotion”. If you want to promote an artist and get paid for it, why not insert their graphic within one of the advertisement slots on your blog? That’s what newspapers do, and they make some hell of cash out of it! What’s more, those artists would never come to you for promotion if your blog doesn’t get many hits, and asking for cash to blog about them is a vicious cycle of making your blog get less and less hits.