You may have noticed that I have been running the Buy Me a Beer plug-in for the last little while, and well, it hasn’t exactly been the most lucrative venture I have attempted. In fact, up until yesterday, I did not receive a single beer from any of the 100 or so RSS subscribers nor did I receive a beer from any random visitors who found Beyond the Rhetoric through a search engine. That changed last night.

buymeabeer1.jpg

You might know venture capitalist Dan Rua from his affiliation with PayPerPost, a blog marketing service that pairs bloggers (they call them “posties”) with paid advertisers so that said bloggers can publish sponsored posts on their websites. In exchange, the team at PayPerPost takes a small commission for providing the middle-man service. It’s a great system for blogs who don’t have all that much traffic, and thus, cannot make that much money through Google Adsense, AuctionAds, Kontera, and other (CPC, CPM, and CPA-based) ad networks like them.

Well, Dan was nice enough to buy me a beer for three bucks. He’s the first (and I hope he won’t be the last). Interestingly, the booze that he provided was not fully out of the goodness of his heart. Oh no. Just like nearly everyone else on the Internet, Mr. Rua had ulterior motives. As I mentioned above, Dan has a vested interest in PayPerPost and in a separate email, he was encouraging me to try PayPerPost Direct, the direct (if you’ll pardon the pun) competitor to ReviewMe. Here’s his message:

I saw your speedlink post tonight and appreciate your reference to PayPerPost as one you’d recommend. Dosh did a good job summarizing them all.

Give the PPP Direct widget a try for awhile to see how it works for you. Heck, try it side-by-side your other badges and see which gives you the best results. At your currently advertised price of $50, you would pocket $50 with PPP Direct and fee to advertiser would be $5. An even better win/win, you can offer a lower price with PPP Direct like $40, resulting in more reviews but you pocket $40 instead of $25 per review. No-brainer?

If you do try it, I’d love any feedback you can share on the widget…

Take care Michael!

I haven’t really decided what I’m going to do about this situation, but what I might end up doing is removing the ReviewMe “buddy” icon from the sidebar completely. No, I’m not going to replace him with a PayPerPost Direct widget. Instead, I could try plunking both of them in my official advertise here page. This way, any potential advertiser will have a choice. I’ll probably include some sort of link to my contact page as well, in case they want to do a private ad sale.

What do you think? Should I pick just one or allow them to compete with one another on my site?

PPP Direct     

Perhaps one of the most ironic things of all is that this post is a paid post. I know I said that I’d avoid post offers sponsored by PPP itself, but I thought I’d give them another chance, given that I apparently have Dan Rua on my side. I’m not promoting or advertising PayPerPost, per se, but I figured because I was going to write a post about me getting my first beer, I might as well get paid for it too. It’s only ten bucks, but that’s enough for a couple more beers. 😈

Thanks again, Dan Rua, for the beer. I’m going to enjoy this.