After reading a recent blog comment, I’ve decided to give WritingUp.com (aff) a try.

The principle is simple:

• Sign up for a free blog.
• Enter your Google AdSense publisher ID.
• Start writing.
• Have your ads displayed half of the time on your own blog (the site owners get the other half)
• Referring other people will get your AdSense ads shown 10% of the time on their site.

My initial thoughts to this are as follows:

• There seems to be a great community atmosphere going on here, with people writing and commenting.
• The AdSense ads are not well-blended – they appear to be the default blue and green – maybe the owners know something I don’t and they get more clicks that way. Placement is OK, but colouring isn’t.
• I have some concern with having the AdSense ads displayed on the pages of people you refer – what if they write about something banned by Google and you lose your account because of it?
• There’s a point system that I don’t yet fully understand.
• You can have a signature automatically attached to any comments you make on other people’s blogs in the system.
• You’re free to link out to any of your own sites (as well as others, of course) so whilst blatant self-promotion might be frowned upon, you can do some linking to your own projects.
• You might not become as rich as some of the blurb suggests, but you may be able to use the service to leverage some influence and make a name for yourself – and you could have some fun and meet some new people whatever happens.

I’m going to give it a go and see how it works out. I won’t be dedicating a large amount of time to it initially, but I’ll let you know how it goes.

If you want to try it (and possibly help me out a little), sign up here (it’s free)