Tong Sampah Blogs
From what I’ve read as feedback on Google’s PR demotion, local bloggers are bravely defiant of Google and are continuing their paid posts and selling text links. 5xmom and Adesblog comes to mind. These people have balls!!
My question is this:
Do you write paid posts on your primary blog?
A blog loses it’s appeal when it’s filled with sponsored or paid reviews. For example you don’t expect to go to a tech blog (eg: LiewCF.com) and start finding posts on mortgages, loans and credit card promos. I know because I’ve made this mistake before and lost my readers. I had to migrate my ‘quality’ content to a new site without PR and sacrificed the main site. I was lucky to be able to keep most of my readers. Kept the traffic. Lost the PR. Overall it was a messy affair.
So is it a good idea to leave your main blog untouched and earn without using paid posts?
I’ve seen the common ’strategy’ to create ‘tong sampah’ blogs with just enough PR to grab decent posts and make money from them. Is it ethical? Of course those blogs are sacrificial lambs as Google will kill them in the next Google PR update 
Anybody out there successfully ‘blended’ the paid posts with your own content and still manage to keep your readers?
Related Links:
Problogger : Paid Reviews - Have You Written Them on your Blog?
Popularity: 57% [?]
I don't know any of the names you mentioned
November 2nd, 2007 at 9:20 am
The main idea advertisers advertise on your blogs are because they want your readers. It’s a grey area, but then I would say bloggers who operate tong sampah blogs with no regards to nothing else but merely make money is infringing on the únethetical’ side. That’s just my take.
Paid posts people always declare they are not ashame of doing paid posts. This is where they should put the money where their mouth is.
If you are not ashame of your paid posts and meant every word you write, why the fear of isolating your regular readers? PP bloggers should be able to seamlessly integrate their paid oontents into their usual ones, right?
November 2nd, 2007 at 9:23 am
I’m a newbie to this “making money online” thingy as I’d only started to do some paid posts. My PR was 4 before I started and it’s now 3. I guessed I’ll be concerned if it drops to 1 or zero!
Usually I get few comments on my site but the number of hits are more or less the same (around a hundred a day). I’ll stop monetizing my blog if ppl stop dropping by my site because of this. I’ll just wait and see how it goes …
November 2nd, 2007 at 9:47 am
that’s why i created a mix blog that have many categories like ohmyweird.com. i’m not and never losing my readers because they know what to find in my blog.
“So it’s a good idea to leave your main blog untouched and earn without using paid posts.” <—that’s right like what i did for my post-buzz.com.
but in a certain condition, you still can make money from your main blog (because i have many categories) like my ohmyweird.com. my most big adsense contribution actually came from this blog compared to the rest 7 blogs that i have.
November 3rd, 2007 at 9:54 am
So I guess there are 2 extremes to this.
One is to make maximum profits without regards to ethics. Keep on creating tong sampah blogs and create a whole new type of spam blogs selling links in the form of blog articles.
The other is to try to keep your integrity and take sponsored posts preferably with full disclosure to your readers and write reviews that are closely related to your site.
November 3rd, 2007 at 12:09 pm
It seems google is adopting forceful loyality programme. Those who are going out or looking for new ways of revenue are being penalised. So now there are going to be hard options, either to worry about the PR or to continue with text link ads resulting in cash. Some who are earning well with the text link ads will not bother about it much.
November 3rd, 2007 at 11:37 pm
For Google to crack down on paid posts as you suggest greatly increases their chance of facing anti-trust legal action in the US. I doubt they’ll do any more than what they’ve done.
I don’t see paid posts being any different from a company taking out a full page ad in a print magazine or newspaper. There shouldn’t be any penalty or stigma attached to it.
November 4th, 2007 at 3:56 am
“Anybody out there successfully ‘blended’ the paid posts with your own content and still manage to keep your readers?”
In my own humble opinion, I do. I believe you don’t need to have that kind of phobia if you know how to write to blend your posts seamlessly. There might be some indications of paid posts here and there but always have good readable interim posts. All you need to do is strike a good balance and don’t be greedy. All my blogs went up in the recent PR updates. There are too many misleading information and opinions in the blogosphere so one has to weigh things properly with a rational mind and have some common sense.
November 5th, 2007 at 3:10 pm
I’m trying to blend posts on my main blog - I try to write a paid post plus a real post at the same time and publish them one after the other so my readers have something good to read. I think I did OK with the mortgages and Australian election one!
November 6th, 2007 at 7:28 pm
my advice is “don’t spam the Internet with useless content”
November 6th, 2007 at 9:02 pm
IZEA aka PPP recently announced that they’ll be more stringent and they are going after these ‘tong sampah’ blogs by not only looking at interim posts but also at the blog overall. That should reduce the number of people creating blogs purely just to for writing paid posts.
It’s interesting to read from the announcement that PPP is also encouraging people to ‘blend’ the posts in as much as possible.
November 17th, 2007 at 5:28 am
Helen: You’re right with your reasoning.