A junior standing BS Agriculture student of UP Los Baños, Vincent Glenn “Vince” Lasay is one of the many teens who spend a considerable amount of time connected to the internet. His difference from most of them is that he earns money by blogging online.
He says that writing is not really his talent. It just so happened that during his Christmas vacation in Davao last December 2008, a friend, who was then earning from blogging, recommended that he try this income generating activity. Eager to gain extra income, he registered a blog account with wordpress.com and registered to a websites that link bloggers with advertisers.
There are various blogger-advertiser linking websites available such as smorty.com, payu2blog.com, sponsoredreviews.com, blogvertise.com, reviewme.com, buyblogreviews.com, bloggerwave.com and so on. These sites usually review your blog before approving your application for the job. This process could take quite some time. In Vince’s case, it was two months. When these linking websites decide that your blog is qualified to advertise, your registration is approved and assignments or blogging opportunities are available for your viewing whenever you log in to their website.
Assignments range from a variety of categories such as clothes, credit cards, pills, and software, to name a few. They are free of form with no strict rules in grammar usage. Their usual requirements involve a certain number of words, a few keywords that must appear on the blog and links. The required number of words usually ranges from 60 to 150 words. Vince says that this is not bad considering that they are given ample time of 24 hours to 2 weeks to complete an assignment. He adds that creating links does not also require technical HTML knowledge. All you have to do is to copy a word or group of words and this will be the linked text.
After completing an assignment, you post what is required of you in your blog site and submit a completion form available on the blogger-advertiser link sites. The adviser of these sites has the option to approve or decline your work. If he is pleased with your blog, you get paid. The amount you get paid varies depending on the fixed amount posted on the list of assignments you chose from or from the granted payment bid. When a blogger has to bid for the amount he will get paid, the price usually depends on his page rank. His page rank is determined by the number of people who view his site.
Payment is made online through paypal.com. This site acts as a mediator between the blogger-advertiser linking sites, your major Philippine bank account and you, the blogger. Paypal is like a cyberbank where the advertisers deposit your earned money to and where you can withdraw your earnings and send it to your Philippine bank account for physical withdrawal of cash.
Vince says, “The good thing about this raket is that you get paid in US dollars so when you convert your earnings to Philippine peso, you are actually earning a lot for a person who actually enjoys blogging anyway.” The lowest amount for an assignment is 5 dollars while the highest can go up to a thousand dollars. So far, he discloses that the biggest amount he was paid for a blog post is 298 dollars.
After establishing how a blogger earns with his hobby, one might ask what the rationale behind this raket is. Why do advertisers get so much trouble just to be advertised? Vince explains that this is because of page rank, particularly Google Page Rank. For example, when you search for a certain word in Google Search such as the word “laptop”, the site listing is according to rank. The ranking of these sites is influenced by the number of links and number of views available on various web sites. He says this is where paid blogging comes in. As bloggers, their main role as bloggers is to create links for the advertisers in their websites so as to promote traffic. The greater the traffic, the more links there are to the advertiser’s site, the higher the site’s page rank will be.
On an ending note, Vince encourages the youth who are hooked on the internet to try to make their hobby into an income generating activity. “Try blogging!” he says. He promises that with just 20 minutes per day to post a blog for an advertiser and considerable time management skills, one can mix work, fun and academics.
