PPP gives me a PFO

I've reached the end of the line with PayPerPost.

I made about $50 through sponsored posts since signing up with PPP earlier this year. The opportunities were great in the beginning, but like many other bloggers, my Google PageRank plummeted to zero once the search engine spotted my sponsored scribing.

After that, the opportunities pretty much dried up to nothing. I've had no sponsored posts for at least a couple of months.

Izea, the internet marketing company behind PayPerPost and Socialspark, sent me a survey yesterday asking for my thoughts about how to improve the network. Within hours of filling it out (with largely positive marks and a few criticisms of the system), they sent me this message:

As you know, we work really hard to make sure the blogs in our network are of the highest quality. So, you may have heard that we're enforcing stricter controls for blogs submitted to the PayPerPost network. Unfortunately, your blog ('Big Ass Superstar') does not meet our standards for overall quality and will no longer be able to be used for accepting marketplace opportunities.

A post at the Izea web site explains it clearly. The decision is firm. There's no avenue for appeal. I can't say "Hey, I think you missed something," or "Huh?" or even try to get the blog approved again. Dude, you're fired, and don't try to call us back about it.

Eh, it's a bit of a smack-in-the-face, but it's no big loss at this point. The blog is what it is. The advertisers liked it enough to pay me. PPP liked it enough to approve it in the first place. You guys like it enough to read it. And according to Google Analytics, searchers dig it enough that I'm still bringing in about 2900 unique visitors a month.

The little bit of extra money was nice, but that's that. Onward and upward!