Whether you choose to do them or not, there’s no denying that receiving payment for a blog post is a good way to boost your income a little bit, especially around this time of year. But what happens when you don’t receive the payment you agreed on?
First – and this is probably something you learn in hindsight, but hopefully this post will save you that annoyance! – agree the payment terms before the work is done. The standard terms for most work done (no matter what the work is or what industry you’re in) is 30 days (see gov.uk for more details on this!) – something to be aware of if you don’t discuss the terms!
Most companies who pay for sponsored posts will be SEO agencies, and as such will pay you quite quickly (and typically by PayPal so you see the money straight away instead of waiting 3 days for a BACS payment) – they want to you recommend working with them to your blogger friends. If a company was slow to pay, word spreads fast in blogging communities, and the company might find that they’re being turned down a lot more.
However, if it is over a week since your post went up (and after you’ve informed your contact – don’t rely on them to be paying attention to your blog! Informing them when a post is up also means you can confirm your payment details, and check that the post is up exactly as requested, so there’s no reason from your side for payment to be delayed), give your contact a polite poke to remind them. The people who are actually sending out the payments might not have been asked to send the payment to you, or might only send payments on a certain day of the week. Your contact might not even realise that you haven’t had the payment!
If, after a gentle reminder, you still haven’t heard about payment, then it’s time to get a little more formal. Email your contact to inform them that if you haven’t received payment within a certain time period (which is up to you, of course), then the post will be removed. That’s usually enough to get things moving again – there’s a reason they asked for the post to go up on your blog!
If after all this, you’re still waiting for payment, then you may want to take some legal advice – but in our experience, it’s pretty unlikely that you’ll need to go any further.
