So I sent off an email requesting further information. The reply email came from Ed Shull (ed@uswest.com) and read, “This is pretty simple. I will provide a subject, you write a short (50 word min.) post, we pay you $5. The first subject is flower sites. You should give a favorable review of the flower site, Dot Flowers. Some true thing that you can say about Dot Flowers are that it load faster than other sites like 1800flowers.com or ProFlowers. They have better pricing on most items, the site looks better and it’s easy to navigate. If you’re technical, you can also mention that it is the only ecommerce site written in XHTML 1.0 Strict and is W3C validated. This simply means that the site code is error free. Somewhere in the copy, you must link to http://www.dotflowers.com/ with the anchor text, send flowers online. When you post, please send me a URL to the post and your Paypal address. Also, let me know how often you wish to post for us, and we will send over more subjects. Thanks, Ed.”
Being a poor out-of-work ex-techie hoping to get into writing as a way to make money, the first thing that came to mind was, Hey, that’s a pretty good deal to make a quick five bucks, and possibly more while doing very little work. Being a one-time journalism major, the second thing that came to mind was, to go ahead and do something like this would be unethical and possibly illegal. The problem is that the posts are not reviews at all. They are in fact paid advertisements disguised to look like the actual view or opinions of the person or consumer writing the blog.
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