chang*

i believe that many people start blogging for the sake of expressing themselves and sharing their thoughts and opinions with others. for the typical blogger, there will come a point in which making money off their efforts become feasible. this is done mainly through advertisements or by writing reviews of products. the former is more commonly an option for sites that see a great deal of traffic. this leaves the smaller sites with paid reviews. and this is where services such as smorty come into the picture.

smorty is a service connecting advertisers with bloggers, which will allow bloggers to blog for money. advertisers can pay bloggers to write opinion posts with links back to the advertisers site. while there are those who feel that the presence of money automatically decreases the credibility of the reviews, there is absolutely no obligation on the part of bloggers to write glowing reviews about products or services that they do not feel deserve praise.

even though getting paid for blogging has become a community accepted practice, i believe that the amount of revenue generating content should not outweigh original content. truth is, a blogger who stops delivering quality content will see readership plummet. so there is in a sense a ‘built in mechanism’ preventing bloggers from turning their site into absolute money spinners without any value to the readers.

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