Does Blogitive really pay you for links in your blog entries?

Dave, I've bumped into a new service that claims to pay you for simply adding specific links to your weblog entries, which seems like a darn easy way to make some money as a blogger. The service is called Blogitive and I'm just wondering if it's legit or not?

Dave's Answer:

I hadn't heard of this service so I checked out the link and found that, yes indeed, Blogitive offers to pay you for links in your weblogs. The problem is, the payment is miserably low.

Let me step you through the backend and you'll see what I'm talking about.

First off, sign up, get approved, then you'll see a set of "offers" that you can opt to subscribe to or not:

You can see the entire program here in a nutshell: if you're willing to add the phrase "marine electronics" to your blog and make sure that points to the URL they specify, they'll pay you a whopping $5.00.

That's not $5 per month or per ad per month, that's for the lifetime of the advert and you need to commit to leaving the link live for at least a year:

Accept an offer and you'll get to see all the details and also have a chance to enter the "permalink" for the relevant blog entry:

So, theoretically, if I were to include the phrase "American Eagle Gold Coins" in this weblog entry and make sure that it points back to Monex.com, I could earn a quick and easy $5.00.

The price is outrageously low for even the most trivial and uninteresting of weblogs, but more importantly, this is a potentially dangerous game for Blogitive and all of its advertisers and publishers, because what they're really doing here is gaming the search engines. The words that you use to link to another site are considered very important for calculating search results, so obviously Monex wants to be easily found when people search for "american eagle gold coins".

While I'm not saying it will happen, I think it's worth being aware that for a payment of $5.00 you are potentially risking your own search engine ranking by participating in this program. If Google somehow caught you, for example, it could theoretically ban your own weblog from the search engine results, or certainly penalize your site, causing you to get less traffic, the exact opposite of what any blogger seeks.

So that's the scoop. Blogitive is an interesting idea, but with terrible payouts and an (admittedly small) potential to get you in trouble for gaming or scamming the search engines, it's not a program that I would recommend to anyone.

Hope that helps!

Tip: If you are comfortable joining a link service of this nature and have a weblog with at least a PageRank of five, drop me a note and I'll introduce you to a far more lucrative alternative.

Categorized: Blogs and RSS Feeds (Article 6373, Written by Dave Taylor)
Tagged: blog advertising, blogitive, seo
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Comments

Thanks for the heads up Dave. I'm enjoying your site.

Posted by: Rose DesRochers at March 29, 2006 8:55 PM

Thanks for the sage advice! I really never thought about it as tricking search engines, although now that I think about it - how true! I have officially bookmarked your site. You made some very good points about this company and companies like this as a whole. As a new blogger who is trying to learn all I can about making money while blogging, I need all the help I can get. THANKS AGAIN!

Posted by: Elizabeth at April 2, 2006 11:28 AM

OMG! I never thought about that. I've made a bit of money from them, but I hadn't considered I'd be risking my own search engine ranking by doing so. I wonder if their new method of having bloggers refer to web releases makes any difference?

Posted by: Sharon at May 8, 2006 4:44 AM

Actually, from what I understand such methods are considered "white hat" by google - as long as your site is actually relevant to "american eagle gold coins."

Posted by: Jerry Legeyt at November 11, 2006 12:51 PM

I signed up for a blogitive account 5 days ago and they claim it takes 48 hours for accounts to be activated or rejected, this makes me very leary of them at this point and especially since I sent them an email to ask the status of my account just yesterday and they have not even replies, are there any honest and reputable sites out there that do actually pay a blogger ?

Posted by: Breezie at May 16, 2007 4:43 PM

But i really have a doubt,generally considering payperpost or blogsvertise or reviewme etc....will ask the same i think? because they give us an anchor text and ask us to link it to their email. So what is the problem only with this blogsvertise? Every paid to blogging site tells that its a must to add an text to the URL. So in this what is the problem with bidvertiser?

Posted by: nithin at September 8, 2007 11:35 AM

Interesting, but it sounds so suspect. What's to stop a flock of bloggers from, instead of jeopardizing their regular blogs, making new crappy blogs to make dozens of three sentence posts that are meaningless except to put an AD in? It looks like you mean they offer a flat fee for any blog whether it's a 1,000 visitor a day blog or a .0007 visitor a day blog? I wonder what kind of filter they have for their approval. Is it based off of traffic screening, web visibility, anything like that? I wouldn't get into it personally.

Posted by: JD from hoeno.blogspot.com at March 18, 2008 11:28 PM

can you suggest an alternative for some of us relatively "lower ranked" bloggers? i got a PR3.

Posted by: Sadek Jake at September 7, 2008 4:14 PM

I have a unique blog and was about to sign up for blogitive. Fortunately, my instinct dictated that I do bits of research, then I found your site in the SE result. I changed my mind after I read about this information from your site. I Couldn't risk the consequences you mentioned. Thanks for the info. I'll bookmark your page.

Posted by: Vance Madelo at January 29, 2009 3:12 AM

THEY NEVER PAY YOU AND THE CUSTOMER SERVICE SUCKS....STAY AWAY!!!!!!!

Posted by: Blogitive Sucks at February 6, 2011 2:19 PM

I have something to say, now that you mention it, but ...

I do have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but first I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a cup of coffee!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!