Sumolabs

The past year has given rise to a number of services that offer advertisers the ability to pay bloggers to post about certain products or services. While there was initially quite a backlash by the blogging community over issues such as disclosure and forced-positive reviews, other companies have sprung up to make the service more ethical and transparent.

With traditional marketing failing, many advertisers are turning to bloggers, who have been proven to deliver excellent results through 'pseudo word of mouth marketing'.

PayPerPost.com, and ReviewMe.com are two of the most prominent players in this field.

PayPerPost.com, requires bloggers to disclose their relationship with PayPerPost advertisers and advise their readers of any sponsored content via a disclosure policy or on a per post basis. This policy came after allot of negative press for PayPerPost.com, which was the result of their older policy of demanding that bloggers did NOT expose the paid post, and that reviews had to be positive.

ReviewMe.com, has never forced bloggers to write positive reviews, but encourages constructive criticism. In addition, they have a policy of full disclosure of paid posts. Requesting reviews for products generally starts at $40US and climbs steeply for more popular blogs.

In any profitable industry, there will naturally be a saturation of entrants looking to get a piece of the pie. It seems like every month a new Pay Per Post service launches.

Consider sponsoredreviews.com, a pay per post service that is currently undergoing beta testing. In order to try and differentiate itself, sponsoredreviews.com is attempting to compete by lower transaction fees, and cites a number of other features. The reality is, that new sites can't really offer any features that competitors ReviewMe.com and PayPerPost.com couldn't create themselves. The success of new entrants to this industry, will largely be determined by the quality and number of Advertisers it can bring to the table.

Regardless of whomever the industry leader is, the pay per post model is clearly a trend that is not going away and will only gain momentum.

A word of caution to bloggers, must be careful to balance their traditional posting and pay per posts, otherwise they risk losing their audience and their credibility.