Financial Dreck

If you’re interested in why many of the blogs you read have some strange and useless posts, the following query I received about my blog might enlighten you:

“How much would it be for an article placement with a do-follow link to a leading finance/forex site in the main content area of a new article, taking into account the 3 points below:

• We will get the content written. The content will be of excellent quality and will fit the topic/nature of your site.
• The article is not marked as sponsored and will stay on the site permanently even if it rolls over into the archives.
• We will pay you via Paypal once the article is live.”

The sender wants to place an ad on my blog disguised as an actual article. I wouldn’t have to write anything and I get to name a price. The purpose of the placed article would be to improve the target site’s Google PageRank (that’s what the “do-follow” means) and to steer traffic to the site. Another condition is that I cannot alert my readers that the article is “sponsored,” which seems like lying to me.

I find the promise that the “content” will be of “excellent quality” amusing. People who think of articles as “content” are similar to the people in the book-publishing business who think of books as white bricks. I’m quite confident that the article would be grammatically correct and written well enough that my readers would have to waste some time figuring out that the article was drivel.

I won’t say I don’t have a price because that’s obviously not true. A million dollars would certainly do it. Fortunately for the quality of my blog, the amount I’d be willing to accept is orders of magnitude higher than the amount they’re willing to pay.

Another minor reason this stuff is easy for me to ignore is that I’ve had nothing but trouble with Paypal. Every time I try to pay for something they block the payment until I re-verify my account in some new way. I still have a few hundred dollars in a PayPal account that I can only spend in payments of less than $70 at a time.

So, if I won’t take sponsored articles, why do I write this blog? It’s not exactly altruism. I do like helping people, but I also like a chance to express my opinions. The main thing that I’ve got out of this blog is that I now know how to invest my money for very low cost in terms of both dollars and time. Through a combination of my efforts and useful feedback from readers I now know how to pay rock-bottom fees and don’t have to pay much attention to my investments.