The release has been made and a new version of PayPerPost.com is now available for you all to explore.
There are a number of big new features in this release, the biggest being PayPerPost Direct. We’ve had a number of people ask whether it’s possible for advertisers to directly approach Posties to get them to write special blog posts. PPP Direct makes that happen. In a nutshell, you simply specify the minimum amount you want to be paid for these Direct opportunities and stick a widget on your blog. When an advertiser finds your blog and decides they’d like you to write something they just click on the badge attached to the widget and make you an offer.
We’ve built a full negotiation and transaction auditing system into the PPP Direct engine as well so that Posties and advertisers can really hash out all the details of a post together, without any involvement from PayPerPost.
Why should you install PPP Direct?
Keep more of the money you have earned.
If you are using ReviewMe or any competitors services you know that they charge between 50-100% markup on your post, while we charge 35% for our self service model. While I still think 100% markup by our competitors is absolutely ridiculous, there is justification in a markup for making the facilitating the review, match making, customer service processes, tax report and financial processing, those things have real costs.
What I take issue with is the badges these guys have bloggers put on their blogs. They take as much as half of your money for doing very little. If an advertiser is clicking on your badge on your blog you should be keeping the majority of the money, no giving it to someone else.
PPP Direct cuts out the middleman (including ourselves) in transactions that are driven by your blog. You can still participate in ours and others marketplace programs if you want to, but it doesn’t make any sense to pay so much when you are generating the advertiser lead. PPP Direct only charges a 10% service fee, and nearly 5% of that is PayPal and Credit Card Fees.
Think about it.
You have two badges on your site, both for $200. An Advertiser clicks one of them and you make $100 and the blog marketplace makes $100. They click the PPP Direct badge and you make $200 and the blog marketplace makes $20. Why would you ever want to take less money? Why would the advertiser want to give half to the blog marketplace? With PPP Direct the advertiser gets more bang for their buck and you make more money.
Security
Sure, you could try to deal directly with advertisers on your own. You could list your email address for anyone to contact and spam you. But how do you do the transaction? Do you do the blog post first and hope you get paid? Or do you think you can convince an advertiser to send payment before you have done a post? I can tell you that as a blogger and an advertiser I wouldn’t want to be on either side of that transaction.. sounds very messy and I could get taken on for a ride. For such as small fee I would rather know that I am going to get paid as a blogger and get my post as an advertiser. We provide a level of security for both parties that the transaction will be completed in a manner that makes buyer and seller happy.
Ease of Use
Our widget makes the entire process fast and easy for both parties, particularly advertisers. Advertisers can use their credit cards and don’t need to go through the painful PayPal process. They can also access their existing PPP account balance to easily make purchases.
Tax Reporting
If you are accepting payment for Posts you need to report that income to Uncle Sam or risk the wrath of the IRS. Every PPP Direct offer is accounted for in your year end tax statement from PPP.
Marketing
We are building a directory of PPP Direct bloggers and will be promoting those that have adopted the technology in the meantime. PPP Direct will ultimately mean more Opps for quality bloggers.
On to the other features…
Another new feature is Bans and Benches. Now users have the option to ‘bench’ each other. This makes it easy for an advertiser to exclude bloggers from their opps for a period of time, and conversely makes it simple for a Postie to remove a certain advertiser temporarily. It’s just another way to make sure all sides of the marketplace have the most efficient way of contacting and retaining the other.
Post Reservations has long been a concern, and we’ve got a definitive solution in place at long last. A Postie can click on Take to take an opportunity and hold the opportunity for a period of time while they make their post. In the past with the sheer volume of users we have, there have been an annoying number of instances where people thought they had an opp reserved, spent time making their post, and then got told that all slots on the opportunity had been filled. That shouldn’t happen now. Without going into technical details, the new solution is much more elegant, simple and effective and you won’t see that particular error message any more. Better yet, to celebrate, we’ve increased the reservation time to a whopping 6 hours.
In the run up to PostieCon, as it was, we provided an ability for posties to contribute their opp fees to a PostieCon savings bank. Since PostieCon is now a free event, we’ve removed this savings feature and all those of you who saved your post fees towards PostieCon will soon find those funds paid out to you.
Finally, as I mentioned in an earlier post, we’ve removed Technorati rankings from the system. Technorati is changing the way they rank blogs and it doesn’t really fit with what we’re trying to do any more. So, for the time being at least, Technorati scores and segmentation based on Technorati rank has been removed.
