I’d written earlier about Pay Per Post, and how you could get paid to write blog posts. In that post I mentioned that your blog had to be online and active for about three months before Pay Per Post would consider you.
There’s one other factor that is important for being able to take advantage of opportunity of Pay Per Post, and that’s your blog’s page rank (PR).
Your blog’s PR is a measure of how popular your blog is, as measured by how many other websites link to it. Just like in high school, the more popular your friends, the more popular you are. So being linked to by a high PR site is better than a low PR site.
To see what the PR of a particular site or web page is, go to Blog Flux’s Page Rank Calculator and enter the address of the site or page. A PR of 3 is more or less normal, a PR of 5 means the site’s fairly popular, and 6 or 7 is yet more popular, up to 10 being the absolute best.
Also just like in high school, if your friends are unpopular, so are you. If you link to a site that is banned by Google for some reason, you’ll get a PR deduction. Generally sites are banned by Google for engaging in underhanded search engine optimization practices.In Pay Per Post, some opportunities will require a certain PR. The highest requirement I’ve seen is 3. You may already be there if you’ve been writing the blog for a while and have other people linking to you.
To book your PR, you need to get links from high PR sites. The easiest ones to get links from are directories. Their reason for being is to link to other web sites. Some directories require reciprocal links (meaning you have to link back to them from your blog). Reciprocal links are not as beneficial to PR as one way links, so stick to the directories that do not require reciprocal links.
In general, you’ll find that directories are PR 5 or 6. Higher level directories do exist, with the Open Directory Project the king with a PR of 9. Here’s a useful list of free and paid directories with good PR. And here’s a list of ultra high PR sites. If you have connections or are creative, you might be able to get a link on one of the biggies.
Now I said that reciprocal links weren’t as good as one way links. But a reciprocal link from a high enough PR site will still help. The Free Site, for example, is a PR 8 site that requires reciprocal links. You won’t get as much benefit from it as a one way link from a PR 8 site, but it’ll probably do more than a one way link from a PR 5 site.
Also try to get links from other websites and blogs that cover topics similar to your blog. Links from relevant high PR sites can boost your PR quite a bit.
Lastly, PR is not updated instantly! Google generally updates PR for sites once a quarter, with the last update having just been in April, 2007. So you have a few months to work on getting links in order to be ready for the next PR update. Or if you haven’t started your blog yet, you can start it now, and after the next PR update you should be ready to sign up with Pay Per Post.
So get out there and get links!