There are three words you should never utter consecutively if you hope to have bloggers promote your company, products, or services. Those three words are: pay per post. If you’re not familiar with the pay-per-post model that’s great. In fact, stop reading this post. It’s better that you don’t know about it so you don’t get any ideas that might tempt you down this road.

A pay-per-post promotion model is simply hiring bloggers to write about your company. For example, if my company came out with a new line of fruit scented highlighters and I was a pay-per-post kind of guy, I would want the top highlighter enthusiast blogs to talk about these sweet smelling markers. I would contact these bloggers and pay them to blog a glowing report about the highlighters. It’s a simple transaction. I pay, they post. Just like advertising…but therein lies the problem.

Why It’s Bad
Pay-per-post is a really bad idea at many levels, but my biggest issue with it is that it completely undermines the trust economy of blogs. Good blogs, and the bloggers themselves, are trusted by their readers. They provide content that has value. That content carries with it a sense of authenticity and credibility because it wasn’t paid for.

Pay-per-post, then, is the “sweep the leg Johnny” tactic to getting blog readers to find out about your company. It’s a seemingly quick and easy way to drive traffic to your website and it just so happens to violate about everything good about blogs.

Blogs were (and still are) built on knowing that people are sharing their own personal and biased opinions about things. When bloggers start accepting money to blog about products, and then don’t disclose this information, they are selling out their own credibility. When bloggers sell out their own credibility, it brings down anyone associated with them. The readers lose trust in the blogger, the blogger loses readers and influence, the advertiser loses the blogger, and the advertiser is viewed negatively for trying to sneak their way into some positive blog coverage.

More specifically, here are three things pay-per-post does:

1. It promotes laziness within organizations that want bloggers to talk about them. To these lazy companies, it’s the perfect promotional model because they get the exposure they want without actually creating content worthy of a genuine conversation. I understand the seduction here but it just cuts against the grain of all that makes blogs work legitimately for you when you do it right.
2. It discredits legitimate bloggers who know how to talk about products without hiding their biases. If more bloggers participate in pay-per-post schemes and continue to be found out, it will raise the suspicion of readers of all blogs. I personally don’t think we’re anywhere close to this yet but it gives us a glimpse of the slippery slope we find if this gains traction.
3. It discredits legitimate social media marketers who know how to engage bloggers the right way. Social media marketers and PR professionals who do their homework should have the chance to talk to bloggers and try to raise awareness for the company or cause. The good ones do their homework by being familiar and active with the blogs that influence the same people they hope to reach. They know how to pitch bloggers correctly and when to back off. They know the rules.

The bottom line is that you really can’t afford to participate in a pay-per-post business model. You have too much to lose in the form of trust and credibility if you’re found out. Instead, work on creating content that bloggers can’t help but talk about. Create the best product, service, or event in your field so you couldn’t stop the discussion about it if you tried. That’s the way blogs and other social media tools will work for you. It takes longer, but it will hold up. It’s kind of like building a brick house verses the straw house or stick house. Just ask the pigs. They’ll help you out.

I’ve always heard you can be the best by learning from the best, so if you want to learn one thing the world’s most popular bloggers have in common it’s that they post frequently. Very frequently.

According to the recent Technorati State of the Blogosphere report, 92% or the top 100 bloggers post at least twice a day. 87% of the bloggers ranked between 101-600 post at least twice a day, and 78% of the remaining top 5,000 bloggers worldwide post at least twice a day. It would seem that if you want to greatly increase the chances of growing your blog it’s time to get posting. Here’s the breakdown according to Technorati:

One thing to keep in mind here is that in many of these cases the blogs represented have more than one contributor. Also, many of the top 100 blogs, for instance, have entire business models built around them. They’re valuable properties and they have the resources (and need) to feed the blog. It’s their full time job.

I recommend people who are starting out blogging to post a minimum of once a week. For some people, even that seems impossible with everything else going on. Personally, I try for three posts a week and employ my meal verses snack ratio with those three posts (one meal, two snacks).

I’ve seen the benefits of blogging in many ways both personal and professional and my goal is not to be one of the top 5,000 bloggers in the world. Unless that’s your goal, don’t let this bother if you feel like you’re falling short. Instead, learn from what they’re doing. This has challenged me to consider whether or not I should post more than my three per week average. Whether you change your current post frequency or not, one thing we can take away from this is that if you need to give your blog a boost you very well may need to start blogging more often.

The latest episode of The New Mediology is now available. Nathan and I talked about how to be a great blogger. You can listen to it online or via iTunes. Here’s a synopsis of what we talked about on the show:

How To Be A Great Blogger

First, think less about how to do blogging and more about what it takes to actually be a blogger. To get started you want to get some key terms right. These terms include:

• Blog: A single web presence that includes multiple posts. Don’t say you “just posted a blog.” You just wrote a blog post but didn’t “post a blog.”
• Post: Individual entries on a blog.
• Hyperlink: Words or phrases linked to other sites, blogs, etc.
• Blogroll: List of blogs typically found on either the left or right-hand side of a blog. Only link to blogs. Don’t link to non-blog websites on your blogroll.
• Embed: Code found typically for audio or video files that is added to your blog so people can watch and/or listen on your blog without going to the audio or video site to engage the media. Basically, if you’ve ever watched a YouTube video on a site or blog other than YouTube, you just saw the embed stuff at work.

The number one thing to remember for being a great blogger is that great bloggers create great content. Fair bloggers create fair content and bad bloggers create bad content. To start creating great content (content that has value to the people reading your blog) start with the Old McDonald method of creating good content:

• E- Entertain
• I - Inspire
• E - Educate
• I - Inform
• O - Outrage

You also need to determine your weekly post frequency. How many times a week can you consistently create good content? Every blogger needs to determine how many posts they can create each week and keep the blog up at that pace. Bloggers should also consider what their meal to snack ratio is in their weekly blog posts.

A few other things to think about:

• Default to shorter posts…something in 400 words or less.
• Create multiple points of entry. Create subheads, bullet points, numbered lists, etc. that can hook a person scanning the post to begin reading your post.
• Put more emphasis on the post titles. The best titles succinctly summarize your entire post.
• Respond to comments on your blog to show that you’re engaged in the conversation.
• Start commenting on other people’s blogs, particularly if you find someone talking about you, your organization, or something that directly ties back to your particular blog comment.

The bottom line: Focus on creating really, really, really good content.