Can I make money blogging with CREAMaid?

Dave's Answer:

I've been curious about this service too, so I went ahead and joined up to see how it worked. I wrote a posting on my Blogger account about an experience I had a while back at McDonald's, to meet the criteria of a specific promotion. I started out by going to the CREAMaid site and seeing this:

Okay, I can write about McDonald's. I clicked on that and up popped their nifty widget:

At the bottom of the widget, I clicked on "Click Here to Participate" and here's what I learned:

Now I switched over to my Blogger account and wrote a new blog entry that fit the criteria. Following along with the steps noted in the widget, I then entered my email address (though it was darn confusing that it said "you're done with your blog posting, now enter your address for payment" even though I hadn't yet been able to discover how to add the all-important CREAMaid widget to my posting. No worries, turns out that they just have a few steps out of order.

Next up I have to indicate what kind of blog tool or site I'm using:

Even though I'm blogging about McDonald's on Blogger, I'll opt for the second choice because the widget - as you'll see in a minute - is far less invasive. It shows me a small text box right in the widget itself that contains the necessary code to include in my blog entry to get credit with their network:

and the source in that tiny box? Here ya go:

The end result is in the middle of the blog entry itself:

Quite inoffensive, actually. Much less invasive than the fancy widget.

Not more than a few minutes later I received an email message from CREAMaid:

---

Your post "The impact of McDonald's Drive-thru..." has been successfully submitted to the Conversation: "Share your McDonald's Experience!"

From now on, you can earn $2 referral fee each time a visitor of your site participates through your post's widget and gets selected.

Also, we will let you know if the Conversation starter selects your post.

The RSS for the Conversation "Share your McDonald's Experience!" is "http://www.creamaid.com/rss.html?sid=1000000022". You can receive the selected posts by adding this to your RSS reader.

---

It took less than twelve hours to get an email from CREAMaid that my blog entry was approved and, yes, I received a $10 payment.

---

Congratulations!
Your post "The impact of McDonald's Drive-thru..." has been invited to appear on the Conversation: "Share your McDonald's Experience!" Your post will be syndicated to the widgets included inside each of the participating posts. Also, you will receive $10 as royalty payment via PayPal.

You can claim your money RIGHT NOW by accessing the following page...

---

And rather to my surprise:

Hmmm... I saw this message on the 13th of October and it references clearing things up by the 7th. So maybe I won't get paid, and maybe I will...

So that's my experience. Should you do it? Well, I don't know that I would have written about McDonald's without the desire to tap into this offer, but at least there was no requirement to write something positive and $10 is a fair payout compared to the $0.03/click sort of revenue stream most folk see from Google AdSense and the like.

On the other hand, there's no requirement or even recommendation that you should disclose that your post is sponsored or influenced by the ad campaign, and that's a serious problem in my book. You should make your own conclusions about the ethics of having this on your blog, however. Two more sites to check out if you're really interested in this sort of avenue are ReviewMe.com and PayPerPost.com.

---

Update: Apparently someone at CREAMaid is paying attention: They just pushed through the transaction, albeit to the wrong Paypal account, but I did get a receipt for a "Royalty payment from CREAMaid" for $10.00 via Paypal from "Creamaid Co., Ltd.", capri@creamaid.com.