I’m a bit irate over something that recently happened in the blogging community. I have a friend who blogs for money, for some of the same places I blog for. Unlike myself, she relies on her income from blogging to pay her bills and feed her daughter. Her blog was being hosted by someone else, and while she had thought about switching to her own host, she didn’t want to lose PR & Alexa ranking. Recently, she made a post, regarding some advice she had received from her pediatrician, dealing with her daughter’s anxiety.

After that post, she had to take a trip, driving, to go to her grandmother’s funeral. When she got home, she found out that her blog had been suspended for two weeks, because her host didn’t like the post about her daughter’s doctor & the advice he gave her. She has no access to it, she cannot copy her files to move them, and she has payment due on a number of posts she made a month ago. She can’t collect that money, because the posts have to go through a final approval first & her blog is gone.

The host won’t reply to her email, and she apparently won’t listen to reason. Nowhere in her terms of service does it state that shehas final approval of blog content and that she will suspend accounts if she doesn’t appprove of the content. I’m so angry at the injustice of the whole situation and that she’s losing income over someone’s pigheaded mistake. Anyway, she had to start all over, so go check her out at Girly Things & One Clear Dot, she’s just starting out, but she’s a great blogger & I know you’ll like what you see!

I spent almost a year building my blog on blogspot, building up my PR & Alexa, trying to make a dent in our family’s finances in my own way. I did manage to do that, most of the time. I’m sure that I lost a few readers in the beginning, while I was trying to find a good mix between my regular, every day posts & what I was being paid to write about. Some of them came back eventually & I thank them for their patience.

I’m a point where I’m having to make a decision about where I want to go in the pay-to-blog world. I know that I will stay with PayU2Blog, they’re an awesome company and a great bunch of people.

It’s Pay Per Post I’m having a hard time with. I don’t agree with many of their practices. I don’t like that they use the art of distraction much more than they ever try to solve anything. They talk about the next big thing instead of fixing what’s wrong. That’s not a solid business practice. I have been asked, time & again, by their oh-so-perfect advertisers to compromise my ethics when I write a post for them, at times asking me to lie or not disclose that the post is sponsored. That’s never going to happen. I’m an honest & ethical person. I have children to whom I’m an example, I have taught them that lying is wrong. Yes, the money is nice, but there are things about their payment procedures that bother me, too. I hate waiting sometime 28 days for a post I have made for them to be approved, worrying that it will be rejected and I won’t be paid on day 30 & the post will have been for free. I hate waiting 30 days from each post. Quite frankly, there are much morehonest ways for me to earn money.

I think I’ve made my decision.