What do you think of doing paid reviews and being straight forward on all ends, like also mentioning in detail in your paid post the negative aspects of a product or a service you are reviewing? That way maybe all aspects of a product can be covered or focused on, and readers can get more balanced reviews.

Andrew, thanks for the explanation. I agree; so many bloggers out there simply want to make money, that even many prominent bloggers have very little or no useful stuff to show or share, and yet they still keep focusing more on how to make money instead of actually coming up with something useful for the readers.

I think many people think about Google and earning money, and maybe majority of such people start to write about things that will bring in money, and not things they are passionate about. It is very easy to say “I’m passionate about blogging“, but blogging includes being useful to readers, providing fair and equal value back to readers, and focusing on the task instead of outcomes like money, among many other things.

An excellent point about the “30 seconds….Google search.” Many people, however, try to simply get higher ranking without providing much useful information. I am surprised that people are focusing more on improving their content based on site traffic and search engine traffic, and not on whether or not the content itself is good enough or not using other measuring tools such as relevancy and passion for a certain topic or message.

Thanks again Andrew. This should help me write a bit better posts in the future, knowing what others thing and how others actually put theories like yours into practice, like on your blog.

The problem is that there are far too many who aren’t and think they can make money easily by doing nothing new or original, or by offering little more than any other blog out there. I understand where they may be coming from, and many I think are simply inexperienced or naive, the others though I have no time for.

In between the two there is a very important line: the line between aiming to create a good blog and aiming to earn money. I blogged for money once, and wasn’t happy about turning to the dark side of that line. My thoughts about topics started to be driven by popularity, not by engagement, or my own interest. I started to consider what would draw in the Googlers, and what would generate higher paying adverts, and that is when I knew it was time to stop.

So basically I think if you have a product worth paying for then why not get paid for it. If you don’t, if you offer nothing I can’t find in 30 seconds with a second Google search, then why should you?

What is your view on blogs or bloggers who probably do not earn much income, or any, in the offline world and depend solely on their blogs to make money, like blogs revolving around selling snippets of code or even blogs that talk about coding and related topics?

I like that: enjoying blogging and then focusing on making money through it.

For as long as I enjoy, I’ll keep doing it! blogging that is, money comes second hehe

I will mail you some scanned images of the money, and you can print them. Does that sound good? That can then be a good example of I-was-arrested-for-using-printed-money-from-my-home-printer, no?