Will somebody please tell me why the relatively easy money always comes at the cost of your soul?

So I just learned from another WordPress blog about some sites who will pay me money for writing, and just the way it’s supposed to do barely a week after barely escaping a scam operation, my paranoia kicked in. And this is the Nellie Stockdale paranoia that I learned from my grandmother, which is founded on the premise that I don’t need to know jack about a threat to know that it’s a threat. Hanging around to learn about it may give it just the time it needs to kill me. There are millions of ways I can stupid myself into an early grave, and I have to find them all and keep myself far away from them.

So you can imagine the alarm bells that must’ve gone off when I found out there were advertising businesses out there who will pay me money to write about their clients’ products in my blog. I found out from another WordPress blog that there are sites out there like PayPerPost, CreamAid, and 451 Press.

Now the jury is still out for CreamAid and 451 Press—I haven’t even begun to research those two—but what I’ve read in Wikipedia and other places about PayPerPost is not good. It all boils down to going there and being paired with an advertiser who wants to advertise in the text of your blog. The advertiser will then pay you for a review of your product or service there. TechCrunch.com likens it to the payola in the music industry, except that this time the FCC and state attorney generals will be more powerless to control it.

But I did submit an application to 451 Press. That was probably one of those mistakes, one of those ways to kill myself to which I am inexorably drawn. Maybe in about another day or two I’ll know how much trouble I’m in.