The big news over at PayPerPost this week is PPP Direct. Instead of cruising the marketplace over at PayPerPost, trying to find a post that will work for your blog, bloggers can be approached directly by an advertiser who came across their blog, and liked it. Whereas ReviewMe charges a 50% markup, and other paid-to-blog companies charge 35%, PayPerPost charges only a 10% fee for this service. PayPerPost has put together a great video overview of their new PPP direct here. (Hmm..who IS that blogger? She’s so cute!)

My first question was, why should I do this, instead of just inviting advertisers to email me directly? What benefit is it to me to allow PayPerPost to collect a 10% fee for the transaction? I’ve been blogging for 4 years (not at this domain) and I have had advertisers contact me directly in that time period. So why should I divert them through PayPerPost first? Well, one reason is that PayPerPost can act as an escrow company. Eh, not such a big deal for me, because I always get payment in advance, but it might provide an additional level of comfort to the advertiser who doesn’t know me personally.

The money paid to you will be reported to the IRS…well, I’m not too excited about that either. So again, not really a benefit to me.

I do like that an advertiser who already has money in his PayPerPost account can use that balance to pay me, and that I get paid quickly - in fact, I don’t have to wait the 30 days as required by other PayPerPost blog entries.

Here’s the main reason I’m interested in PPP Direct:

Marketing - We are building a directory of PPP Direct bloggers and will be promoting those that have adopted the technology in the meantime. PPP Direct will ultimately mean more Opps for quality bloggers.

I’m all about keeping up with the technology and trends so that I can remain on the top of my game, and make myself and my blogs as attractive as possible to advertisers. I’m not sure that I have a ton of potential advertisers reading this blog, but I like know that if there are advertisers out there, they know they can request a blog entry from me specifically, instead of just creating an opp and having 5 random bloggers respond. I’d like to see this promoted as an option from within PayPerPost, so that an advertiser can find me there and request a review, even if he’s never come across my blog before (similar to what Sponsored Reviews does, I suppose?)

That said, I still love the regular marketplace on PayPerPost and don’t plan to stop using it anytime soon!