Recently there has been a lot of discussion regarding paying for blog posts as a means of advertising. In the summer of this year, PayPerPost, a new web startup that allows bloggers to earn by making posts about company’s products or services, was launched. Since its launch over 4 months ago, the site has created a rift in the online blogging community between those who think paying for blog posts is ethical, and those who think not.

Many argue that their service is not ethical since bloggers do not disclose that they were paid for the post. Others argue that it is the blogger’s individual right to choose whether or not they want to display advertisements in the method of a post and whether or not they want to disclose that they were paid for the post. We will stay out of the politics of the issue and instead focus on how this service has sparked interest in “Paying for Blog Posts” as a primary way of monetizing weblogs.

Over the past few months, many new web startups such as ReviewMe have followed the PayPerPost model, but created their own variations. ReviewMe allows advertisers to choose certain blogs to advertise on, while PayPerPost allows bloggers to choose which “opportunities” they want to blog about.

PayPerPost recently reported that they have earned over $100,000 since their launch and that tens of thousands of posts have been made using their network. This and the fact that they recently received $3 Million in VC Funding should lead to a great increase in the “paying for blog post” market of web advertising over the next few years. The industry is definitely one to keep a close eye on.

YouTube made major headlines earlier this month when Google bought the video giant for $1.65 billion. A web site worth that much money must be something. Here we are going to talk about how you can use YouTube, and other popular video sharing web sites, to promote your web site and increase traffic. Videos on the Internet are becoming very popular these days, and the success of YouTube and other video web sites illustrates that people are indeed looking for web sites that have some video content. This in turn presents an inexpensive yet effective advertising opportunity to help you increase traffic to your web site.

The concept is quite simple. Create a video that is interesting and something that people would find entertaining enough to leave YouTube and visit your web site. This can be done by having some sort of cliffhanger at the end of the video, or cutting the video in the middle and displaying a message that reads: “For the rest of this video, visit MySite.com.” - Make sure that you remember to include a quick blurb about your web site in the video itself. Then upload the video to video sharing web sites. There are over 1 million videos uploaded to YouTube daily and only the select few that happen to get the most views, move up to the home page of the “Most Popular” list. You can get people to view your video by visiting popular forums where users are looking for videos, like the eBaum’s World forums, and post a link to your YouTube video. You can also submit your video to web sites such as Fark and Digg and hope for the best. If you get enough views, you will have millions of people watching your video, and with that many people viewing your video, you are bound to get at least a few thousand unique visitors.

If you are a webmaster, you probably have heard of Digg.com, the massively popular social networking web site that attracts thousands of unique visitors each day. The web site has users who promote or “digg” stories, and those that are most popular get on the homepage. Getting on the home page of Digg is huge and can do wonders for your web site and the traffic it gets. It is estimated that the #1 spot on Digg will get upwards of 10,000 unique visitors within an hour. Many of these visitors may check back frequently and help get your new web site or blog of the ground and running.

Obviously, it is very hard to get a site on the home page of Digg. According to the founders, there are currently over 2,000 stories being posted a day and only 40 of them will ever make the homepage. However, that does not stop webmasters and bloggers from submitting their stories in a glimpse of hope for making the front page at one of the top-100 Alexa ranking web sites.

Digg’s story ranking algorithm takes into account a number of factors, including number of votes (called “diggs”), number of vetos (called “buries”), time of day when the story was submitted, and digg user history, etc. Some avid digg users submit their stories in a specific day of the week (e.g., Friday day time) when the average front page diggs are known to be the fewest, and thus attempt to beat the odds of getting the front page spotlight.

Buying, selling or trading diggs is against the web site’s policies and will often result in account termination and possibly even legal action, so this is a route you do not want to take. To get a lot of diggs, you need to find someone with a popular web site or forum to link to your story. As more and more people see it, it will get more diggs, and be likely to rank higher. Eventually it will make it to the homepage. The amount or traffic/exposure you will get will be astounding. It may even take down your server with the amount of traffic it delivers within an hour or two. So take that into consideration before you click submit button for your story! :)

According to TechCrunch, Google is in talks with YouTube, finalizing an acquisition deal that would put YouTube in the hands of Google for a mere $1.6 billion dollars. So why would either party be interested in such a deal?

Google has about $10 billion in cash on hand, while YouTube has significantly less, and is quickly burning through its stash with extrodinarily high bandwidth bills each month. YouTube also has a massive audience that Google’s advertisers would l-o-v-e to tap into via AdWords. Such advertising would also significantly increase profits for Google, as well as investor confidence in the company.

Other reasons for Google’s interest YouTube include wanting to keep it out the hand’s of its competitors, who have expressed interest in acquiring the company in the not-so-distant past. Viacom, News Corp., Yahoo, and Microsoft are all said to be interested in YouTube.

Google already has a video service, dubbed “Google Video,” which ranks third amongst the major online video services. It is unclear if this acquisition occurred, whether Google Video and YouTube would meld together into one, or remain seperate entities.

Neither Google or YouTube has confirmed or denied the rumors. The rumors apparently came from a reliable, undisclosed source close who contacted Michael Arrington of TechCrunch fame.

One of the things webmasters try to do with very little success is to acquire high quality back links from web sites with a .gov or .edu extension. Getting links from these types of sites is very difficult because only reputable government or education organizations can register a .gov or .edu domain name, and these organizations tend to link to other equally reputable web sites. Hence, the quality of those backlinks from .gov and .edu are likely to be higher than that of those links from other regular web sites.

There is a debate on whether search engines actually award more value to back links coming from .gov or .edu web sites in terms of page rank and search engine rankings. Recently Matt Cutts from Google released a comment about .gov and .edu back links, and indicated that there is no preferential treatment for those back links currently done by Google.

Due to their high credibility, still many webmasters try to come up with ideas on how to acquire back links belonging to .gov and .edu domains. These reputable web sites hardly ever sell links, and when they do sell them, you can expect to pay upwards of $100 or $200 per month per link and even more if the page rank of such a web site is high or the site receives a lot of traffic.

There is one way to get .edu and .gov links relatively easily and quickly at no cost. This is through forum signatures. There are many .edu and .gov web forums that just about anybody can sign up at. All you have to do is to register at one of these many forums hosted in .gov and .edu domains and make a few (non-spammy) posts. Then put a link in your signature that goes to your web sites and you instantly have multiple back links to your sites from a .gov or .edu web site. This is one legitimate way to get links from all regulated extensions where not everybody can register a domain name.