But seriously though, can anyone confirm the whole payment deal?

Thank you.

-Saurabh

Posts reporting somebody else’s article, with a comment and a link can be done in 5 minutes.

I guess that in the end it is a mixture, and the cost/benefit turns on the average time.

Matt

Money is one thing, self-esteem and selling your soul is another.

Way, way, way too many “you shalls” and “you shall nots” not to mention the discrepancy between your “pay” and what that network appears to bring in from Adsense alone.

I gave up that “work my butt off to make someone else rich” mentality a long time ago – Thank God!

In terms of the numbers that WIN appears to be offering, they actually seem pretty much within the range of what I’m seeing elsewhere, at least for those types of blogs. If you compare it to what someone like Darren can produce at 20-24 posts per day, extrapolate the $500/month for 4 posts/day, you’re actually looking at $2500-$3000 per month. Not bad for working at home in your pajamas.

The thing that bothers me about the purported WIN contract was the exclusivity clause. That I would have some issues with.

It’s not so much how much you get paid per post, but how long it takes.

For example, a website I am paid to write for, I am paid to do only one feature per week of around 700 words or more. Sometimes I have written twice that, depending on the article. I probably average around 1000 words.

Now, those articles can take me anywhere from 1&1/2 hours up to 6 hours or more. So when you look at it my hourly rate fluctuates wildly. Sometimes it’s pittance, sometimes it’s nice.

If I was being paid $4 per post on Weblogs, and I could write 4 an hour as Darren suggests, that’s a fairly healthy hourly rate of $16. But if I was writing 1000 words per post, it would probably work out to about $2 per hour.

125 posts per month could be as little as 30 or so hours or roughly the equivalent of one day per week. Would you work a part-time job of one day a week for $500 per month?

More importantly, that particular weblog is on a high-paying topic. Some of WIN’s weblogs are very specific niche topics that certainly couldn’t make that level of income on their own.

If you’re willing to run a business and devote your time to it, and wait for a year or two for the real money to start trickling in, you’re better off on your own. I think most of WIN’s bloggers just want to write and get paid rather than run a business, and it works for them.

I’d also suspect that Weblogs Inc would have some sort of an incentive scheme whereby the $4 per post might well increase over time as they build their blog. I think $500 per month is decent for a new blog with no established traffic – especially if they are going to have more than one author per blog.

If you look at some of their blogs their traffic levels are pretty low so its always a bit of a risk to start a new one up.

Also there are some side benefits of blogging for Weblogs Inc – it’d be good for the resume, good for building profile, good for learning the trade.

On the downside is that at the end of your time with them you’ve got no content to show for it – Weblogs Inc retains that.

All in all I wouldn’t consider signing up with them – but then I’m in the lucky position of already having an established income from blogging. Just my 2 cents worth.

But $4.00 an entry is just sweat-shop rates and soon or later it must begin to impact on the quality of the blogs and when that happens readers will begin to drift away.

To make a decent living at those rates, you’d need to make 2,000 posts a month – or around 8 every hour of a forty hour week. That doesn’t leave much time for quality, does it?

Pure rip off, slave labor. Work for yourself.

Of course, when our sites are small, this makes perfect sense –third party ad programs are easy to implement (even on low traffic sites) and provide quick cash.

But when sites start to be really successful, people don’t seem to make the paradigm shift to “I can sell at least some ad space myself.”

Perhaps they think it’s too hard, but companies like adspeed.com offer banner-server solutions starting at $10 per month. This lets you serve and monitor banner ad rotations on your site, without giving a huge cut to “the man.” Finding advertisers is as simple as posting some clever “advertise here” links on your site, or a banner, or a well-worded “I’m looking for advertisers” post.

There. My slightly off-topic two cents.