Comments on: What’s so bad about paid posts?

By: Paid Blog Endorsments and Writing Professionally

Paid Blog Endorsments and Writing Professionally — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 18:36:05 +0000

[...] Applesassy is thinking about paid blog endorsements and writing professionally.

By: Kelley Bell

Kelley Bell — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 15:44:32 +0000

When I was a kid, marketers gave a way free t-shirts and hats to anyone willing to be a walking billboard for their product.

Today, my daughter begs to BUY t-shirts with big company logos scralled across the front. (Abercrombe and Hollister are the favorites in her school.) Something is wrong with that.

Consumers want REAL reviews and opinion. Marketers want an easy way to BUY reviews, and bloggers just want to EARN a buck or two for their hard work and *valuable* skills.

The problem is some bloggers will be willing to sell out and post disingenious reviews for money, and if the blogosphere calls them out on it and the culture of paid posts becomes taboo, marketers and moneybloggers will find ways to hide their relationships.

If we support the power of an individual blogger (Like Chris B. for instance) to do the occassional paid post, we keep power in the hands of the people. If we don’t, then the process will go underground, and the honest voices will not be heard, or rewarded.

I think disclosure is the key. I LOVE the Thesis Wordpress Theme by Chris Pearson. So I joined his affiliate program and have his ad on my site. I intend to write a review on it after I have worked with it for a few more weeks. I trusted the brand enough to buy it because of the review Chris B. wrote. That review was from a real user, and that’s exactly the reason I trusted it too.

If the bloggers do this right, we could put an end to advertising as we now know it. Product marketers will be forced to listen to their customers and improve their offerings in order to earn the trust of blog reviewers.

That puts the market in control of the consumer, and gives bloggers like me a way to earn some money by sharing my experiences. I like that.

P.S. I love the design of your site. I noticed it’s a Chris Pearson Theme. (That’s a free endorsment btw.)

By: Cynthia

Cynthia — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 00:44:42 +0000

I do paid posts… though not as many as I used to. Mainly to support my dog habit. I don’t mind them.. but of course I wouldn’t, since I do them myself. And I’ve even found some interesting things through them!

By: Paid to Post « Andrew Miller

Paid to Post « Andrew Miller — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 19:08:08 +0000

[...] he knows about marketing but whatever, that’s another issue all-together. Local

By: Dawn

Dawn — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 15:56:05 +0000

This is actually a very old, ongoing debate. I was working on a blogger database in maybe early 2006? It was called Get Them Blogging and grew out of the occasional help I gave Mother Talk (they were one of the first to do blog book tours for PR folks at publishing houses). Anyway, it was going to be this minor little project with a database of bloggers willing to do reviews in exchange for samples. I’m one person so I was keeping it small (I think I had 175 blogs in the database). But reviewme.com launched the week before I was set to launch and they were more than one person with angel funds AND they paid for reviews, which was a place I wasn’t willing to go. Trust me, I watched the blogosphere light up around THAT! And getthemblogging.com never did make an ounce of money. This was coming hot on the heels of pay-per-post slashing and burning through the internet.

My take is that any paid for posts should be clearly labeled as such. (I think any solicited reviews — paid or otherwise — should be labeled as such.) I also think that the blogosphere is so diverse that likely there’s room for different bloggers to do it differently.

On the marketing end, I think marketing and PR people need to get more clever about how they do things but they’re (understandably) scared. They need to be smarter, more targeted and more creative. and their online marketing efforts need to be focused on more than just getting face time.