While I’ve never been a full-time professional marketer, I have been involved in enough small campaigns to know that it’s really rare to get an overwhelming response from any single type of marketing. If a direct mail campaign, either snailmail or email, nets a 1% return, for example, that’s considered good.

So, while I knew that paid blogging could work for me as a blogger – after all, I determine how many posts I want to make, and on which topics – I wasn’t certain how it would work for advertisers.

Last year, I wrote a series of pieces about paid advertising from the prospective advertiser’s point of view, so I knew a little about click-through rates (CTR) and that there are different kinds of payment for such things. Some advertisers pay for impressions, while others pay for actions, for example. But ultimately, it’s click-throughs – the number of people who actually follow a link, and then browse or buy – that matter.

When I read an article in the PayPerPost blog about the average ctr from sponsored posts being more than 10.5%, I was seriously impressed. That’s up to ten times better than the average Google AdWords result after all.

To me, as a blogger, this number means that writing these posts isn’t just lucrative, but actually useful as a means of advertising.
To me, as an advertiser, which role I sometimes have to take for my work, it assures me that when we place a paid blog post, it’s advertising money well spent.

10.5%.
Wow.

Paid blogging works.