I’m really new to all this “get paid to blog” stuff but this on-going tussle between the almighty Google and PayPerPost is really interesting. It has all the makings of a great movie like drama, action, suspense, mystery and, at times, comedy too. Now, if they can just translate all of it into film then I’m sure it’s going to be a box-office hit.

In PayPerPost’s bid to defy Google and to protect their bloggers they’ll be introducing a nofollow option for their advertisers.

By weeks end we will roll out a new No-follow option for advertisers in PayPerPost. No-follow has always been something that advertisers could specifically ask for, now we have made it as easy as clicking a button. Bloggers that are more comfortable with no-follow sponsored posts should hopefully see more and more opportunities over time.

My question now is, since it’s an option, would advertisers use it? If they do then great for posties or bloggers because Google will stay off their backs. It is common knowledge that advertisers don’t only pay for the ad, they also pay for the pagerank passing link on the postie’s blog which really ticks Google off.

The nofollow option is a great idea but I guess we’ll just have to wait and see if advertisers adopt it.

Recently, I signed up with SponsoredReviews.com and the first thing I noticed after submitting a blog is that they don’t have pagerank in their list of metrics used to gauge a website or blog’s value. They use Technorati, Alexa and Link Popularity. There is no Pagerank.

Does this mean that advertisers doesn’t need to rely on Pagerank all the time? Does it also mean that bloggers doesn’t really need Pagerank to earn from blogging? I guess for advertisers, if Google continues to penalize bloggers by dropping pagerank then using pagerank as a gauge or metric would be useless, right? Hmmm… I guess it depends on the advertiser. If the advertiser is in it for pagerank then pagerank would be important but if the advertiser is in it for traffic and promotion then pagerank wouldn’t be important because a site can have a low pagerank but still have a high traffic rate. For bloggers, not relying on pagerank means a continuous steady flow of income from blogging but they’ll have to do a lot of extra work to get traffic in specially those blogs that get their traffic from Google.

Well, if SponsoredReviews.com doesn’t rely on pagerank but instead uses alternatives like Alexa, Technorati and Link Popularity then I guess other paid-2-blog sites can drop pagerank and use alternatives too. Once these sites stop using pagerank as a metric then I guess Google will stop (hopefully) targeting them.

This is what I’ve noticed with SponsoredReviews.com when I submitted a blog. They could be using pagerank in their evaluation of blogs behind the scenes but on the front end they clearly didn’t indicate it so I’ll safely assume that they are not using it all.

Well, it’s all over the blogosphere. It seems that Google is out to get all bloggers or blogs that are paid to post reviews, etc. and they have started with PayPerPost.

In a post by Duncan Riley at TechCrunch, he said that “Google has commenced punishing PayPerPost bloggers by completely removing their page rank”. Ouch! Completely removed? As in 0 Page Rank!!! That got to hurt!

Anyway, Smorty has offered some useful tips for bloggers.

To prevent any future loss of page rank due to this issue you can take the following steps:

1. Remove all sponsored post tags on each of your posts. Google can follow these tags to determine if you are being paid for posts.
2. Remove any PayPerPost tags on your posts for “hire me” and “review me”. Any general affiliate banners are fine to keep.

I guess following these tips won’t hurt specially if it will save our blog from Google’s wrath!

Do you own a blog? If you do then did you know that you can make money from blogging about things that interest you? Yes you can through a program or service called paid to blog. Websites that offer this service seeks bloggers to blog about their advertiser’s product, service, business or website and they pay bloggers to do it.

Here are some of these get paid to blog sites:

• PayPerPost - Get paid for blogging. Write about web sites, products, services, and companies and earn cash for providing your opinion and valuable feedback to advertisers. Disclosure required.
• Smorty - Make money from your blog by writing opinion articles about available advertiser campaigns. Opportunities are sent directly to your personal admin panel and email account.
  Turn your daily blog updates into money. Between 5 and 20 minutes of writing sends money directly to your PayPal account after posts are approved. Apply with multiple blogs to write more opinions and receive more payments. Get paid to blog weekly
• ReviewMe - Bloggers get paid to review products and services on your site. You control what you review.
• BloggingAds - Paying bloggers money to advertise on their blog sites.
• Blogitive - Earn money with every posting. Get paid weekly via Paypal. No advertising required, just your opinions. Only post the stories that interest you. Create multiple blogs to earn more. Does not conflict with ad campaigns on your site
• SponsoredReview - Earn cash by writing honest reviews about our advertiser’s products and services. Write reviews in your own tone and style, and gear them to your audience’s interest.

Bookmark this page! This list will be updated!

Update: The Lord of the Internet, Google, is currently waging a massive war against these paid-to-blog programs. Blogs that are found or reported to Lord Google are being stripped down of their pagerank rendering these blogs valueless in terms of link value.

i-TONG is powered by Wordpress. In fact, all of my blogs are powered by Wordpress and if you are a Wordpress user then I’m sure you are familiar with Plugins. Plugins extend the capabilities of Wordpress by adding new features to it and as a Wordpress user, I’m always looking for cool plugins to add to my blogs. Plugins that enhance my blog’s usability.

Below is a list of cool plugins that I’m using with my blogs:

• About Me widget - Adds an “About Me” widget to your sidebar. By Samuel Devol
• Add Your Own Headers - This plugin allows you to add tags to the header of an individual page or post such as keywords/descriptions, custom meta tags, external style sheet links, or embedded style tags. You no longer need to use conditional statements or separate templates just to change something like a background image, text style, etc.
• Ad Rotator - Displays an advertisement (which is randomly selected from a group of advertisements specified in a text file) at your chosen location. Tested on WordPress 1.5 & 2.x. Should work with earlier and later versions (future and past proofed). It can also be used with other CMS systems or anywhere where PHP is supported. By Angsuman Chakraborty
• Another Wordpress Meta Plugin - This plugin allows you to specify META information, that is keywords and descriptions, for your posts and pages. Additional META keywords are derived from your categories.
• Arkayne Widget - The Arkayne Plug-in displays a list of related articles at the bottom each blogs. The widget can be visually blended into your blog using the WorPress admin interface. Each page gets statistics like conversion rates, clicks, hits, and reader velocity. By Paul Kenjora
• Blog_LinkIt is a free simple plugin for WordPress or Drupal 5 to automatically convert text from your posts and pages into links from a central list of links. This makes it easy to add value your site but maximizing links to other sites and keeping them consistent throughout your site. By DCoda Ltd.
• Brian’s Threaded Comments - Brian’s Threaded Comments is a threaded comments plugin for WordPress. By Brian Meidell
• Contact Form ][ - Contact Form ][ is a drop-in form that allows site visitors to contact you. It can be implemented easily (via QuickTags) within any post or page. By Chip Cuccio
• Contextual Related Posts - Show last 5 contextually related posts on single blog posts, increase exposure By Mark Ghosh (LaughingLizard)
• Daiko's YouTube Widget - Finally Daiko’s YouTube Widget is ready for you YouTube bloggers. It displays a pre-defined number of YouTube videos as thumbnail images and plays them in a pop-up ThickBox window or my very own VideoPlayer Widget (included and integrated). This gives you the power and flexibility to play your favourite YouTube videos on your site in the format you desire. y Rune Fjellheim
• Digg This - Digg this wordpress plugin is a plugin that detects incoming links from Digg.com to your wordpress post and automatically display a link back to the digg post, for people to digg your story. By Aviran Mordo
• DoFollow - Selectively disable the “nofollow” tagging for comments. By Kimmo Suominen
• Exec-PHP - The Exec-PHP plugin executes <?php ?> code in your posts, pages and text widgets. By Sören Weber
• FeedBurner FeedSmith - Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. By FeedBurner.
• Flexi Pages Widget - Flexi Pages Widget is a highly configurable widget to list pages and sub-pages in WordPress sidebar. User friendly widget control comes with plenty of options. ‘Flexi Pages’ widget can be used as an alternative to the default WordPress ‘Pages’ widget. By Srini G
• If You Liked That ~ plugin - Following the content of a post, this plugin inserts links to a user selectable number of other posts in the same category as the main post. By bochgoch
• Lightbox JS v2.2 Plugin - Wordpress plugin used to overlay images on the current page into neat Javascript-powered overlay popups. Lightbox JS v2.0 by Lokesh Dhakar. By Peppe Argento
• MightyAdsense - Keep your adsense code & output it in posts. By mightyhitter
• MyAvatars - This plugin allows you to add MyBlogLog.com avatars to Wordpress comments. By Andrea Micheloni & Napolux
• Optimal Title - Mirrors the function of wp_title() exactly, but moves the position of the ’separator’ to after the title rather than before. By Aaron Schaefer
• Really Simple Sitemap - Adds a really simple sitemap to your Wordpress blog. Add to any page or post and the site map will be added there. By Dominic Foster
• Subscribe Remind - Give your readers a little remindet to subscribe to your blog’s feed at the end of each post. By Trevor Fitzgerald
• Subscribe To Comments - Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry. Based on version 1 from Scriptygoddess By Mark Jaquith
• Top Commentators Widget - Adds a sidebar widget to show the top commentators in your WP site. Adapted from Show Top Commentators plugin. By Lorna Timbah
• WordPress.com Stats - Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key. By Andy Skelton
• WordPress Database Backup - On-demand backup of your WordPress database. By Austin Matzko
• Wordpress Video Plugin - A filter for WordPress that displays videos from myvideo.de, youtube.com, google video, Stage6, Brightcove, Aniboom, 123video.nl, MyspaceTV, Yahoo! Video, Veoh, Wandeo, Glumbert, Gametrailers, Gamevideos, LiveLeak, sevenload.de, clipfish.de, break.com, Metacafe, dailymotion.com, Vimeo, videotube, blip.tv, revver, IFILM, Tu.tv, grouper, Cellfish.com, Sumo.tv, Last.fm…others coming soon. Modified by Oliver Wunder By Oliver Wunder
• WP-EMail - Allows people to recommand/send your WordPress blog’s post/page to a friend. By Lester 'GaMerZ' Chan
• WP-Footnotes - Allows a user to easily add footnotes to a post. By Simon Elvery
• WP-Links - WP Links allows you to put your links on your blog. It can be implemented on a page or a post. By Andrei Cipu
• WP-Polls - Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. You can easily include a poll into your WordPress’s blog post/page. WP-Polls is extremely customizable via templates and css styles and there are tons of options for you to choose to ensure that WP-Polls runs the way you wanted. It now supports multiple selection of answers. By Lester 'GaMerZ' Chan
• WP-PostRatings - Adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s post/page. By Lester 'GaMerZ' Chan
• WP-PostViews - Enables you to display how many times a post/page had been viewed. It will not count registered member views, but that can be changed easily. By Lester 'GaMerZ' Chan
• WP-UserOnline - Enable you to display how many users are online on your Wordpress blog with detailed statistics of where they are and who there are(Members/Guests/Search Bots). By Lester 'GaMerZ' Chan
• Youtube Brackets - Insert YouTube videos in post using [brackets] method. Enables YouTube blogging to standalone wordpress setups. By Robert Buzink + Mike Thompson

All of the above listed Wordpress Plugins works with Wordpress 2.3.1. I have a few of them installed here and most, if not all, of them are installed at Kabalyero.com