Fleeing The Social Scene

So more and more often I’m seeing the plugin for paypal donations. The one that says “If you liked this post, buy me (insert food item here)”. Now I’ve heard people loving the plugin, and others hating it. If you sit and think about this plugin, it could easily be a great tool for “low money earners,” but you need to use it correctly. The only way this plugin will work is if you are generating high quality content. Yes, the content needs to draw traffic but also it needs to engage the reader and make them feel compelled to do something. Comments are free. Anyone can read your blog and post a comment.

If you want your readers to buy you a beer, or lunch, or a coffee or whatever, you need to go the extra mile. It’s quite obvious because of two reasons:

Your content has to be good enough that your reader is willing to leave your site, go to a PayPal page and pay you.
You have to trust that your content was so good once your reader has left your site, they will pay you at that PayPal page, and come back to your site!

Now for low earners this helps because well every penny counts, lets be honest. Something that readers need to realize is that if they’ve gotten to that PayPal page more often than not (unless the blogger has set prices for his beer) the amount of money you give is left blank. That’s for the giver to fill in. Let’s not be stingy, if you’ve made it to someone’s PayPal page you’ve at least half committed to giving them something, now do you have any cash laying around in your PayPal account? It may not be much, but if more people see a great post, and the blogger offers that buy them something and you’ve got a space 79 cents in your PayPal account, or $1.38, why not give it away? After all with your payment of (you filled that one in) , you are helping to feed some blogger in the blogosphere.