A buzz without the sting?

There have been a whole host of services aiming to promote various things on blogs, none of which I have ever bothered with. Timmy has posted about a new one, ebuzzing (an invitation to which I received yesterday).

Now, your humble Devil has been utterly uninterested in signing up for PayPerPost and other such services. For starters, I do not wish to post useless crap on The Kitchen. Second, I have no interest in writing 500 words of tedious boilerplate about the latest sofa repair shop to open in Ozlesworth's Bottom (that's a real place name, by the way. It's in Gloucestershire, if I recall correctly). Further, I have no interest in writing such things for $5 (which translates into about £2.50 at present). It all seemed a bit like hard work and tedious, under-paid work at that.

Timmy seems to have made a bob or two out of this kind of advertorial, but he's a methodical gentleman (and also good at squeezing the last dollar from those employing him); your humble Devil is a polemicist and finds it difficult to write the blog without something to fire him up. Plus, of course, I have always tried to maintain the integrity of The Kitchen.

So, I have, as I said, avoided such schemes. Until ebuzzing. ebuzzing lets you choose the campaigns that you promote; so you can both choose things that you are enthusiastic and write about that product or service in your own inimitable style: in fact, ebuzzing insist on it.

They also insist that you put in a rel="nofollow" link in too, to stop the search bots. In other words, it's about paying a blogger to promote goods and services because the blog's readers might like them, not because ebuzzing are trying to rig Google.

ebuzzing also insist that their logo appears on any post that is paid for so that you, dear reader, can immediately see that your humble Devil is whoreing himself out for cash.

But how much cash, eh? Well, they pay a minimum of £10 an article. That seems like decent value to me. Plus, of course, you can set your own prices so that if advertisers come looking for you and want something special... well... you can decide what it's worth.

So, given that very few people have sold their souls and even a Devil must eat, you may well see a number of posts with that wee logo at the top, depending how it goes. But believe me, I will choose stuff that interests me, in the hope that you may be similarly fired up.

Now, I wonder if any of those Advertisers are wanting me to help sell several hundred yards of stout rope and a scaffold...