Product placement is getting more subtle, and you can do it yourself.
A company called PayPerPost will pay bloggers to write articles about particular topics and link to particular advertisers’ sites.
I hereby promise that Status-Q will never stoop so low!
Toni Schneider signed up and reported back. Extract:
I opened an account, scanned their offers from advertisers and picked one more or less at random. It was from a site called WeddingStrategies. They offered me $10 for writing a blog post about them with at least 300 words. Their instructions included “title needs to include keyword wedding or weddings, PR3 please, no business blogs, no mention of PayPerPost.” That last bit certainly was revealing.
‘PR3’, in case you don’t know (I didn’t) is a measure of your popularity on Google’s Page Rank algorithm. You can check it here. This blog is PR6, I gather – perhaps I should be trying to profit from that!