Behind the Screen

I updated my policies

Jun 16, 2010 Blogging

I just updated my PR and Advertising policy page for the first time in almost a year.  It was long overdue.  While there’s nothing new in there that I haven’t been saying for the past year in emails to PR and brand reps, I felt it was time to get it all down in one place.  I find myself explaining the same things over and over, and hopefully having a clearer policy right there on my blog will clear some things up.

PR people have things really hard right now because we bloggers are all making our own rules, so hopefully by giving them some guidance as to what I’m willing to do or not do on my own blog, I can cut down on the back-and-forth that I go through daily when people want me to do things that I’m just not interested in doing, and they don’t understand why.  I mean sure, it might seem like a small request to just tweet something out or write a short post about a product, but multiply that by dozens of requests a day, and I have to draw the line somewhere.  The line’s location is simple: it’s in one place if it’s a product that I’m interested in, and it can move over slightly if you pay me, but no amount of money will move the line to “I have no interest in this product but I’ll write about it on SelfishMom.com anyway and whistle as I skip to the bank and cash my check.”  That’s really hard for a lot of people to believe.

There are so many different ways to get a product onto a blog or in a twitter stream, there’s a solution that will work for most products (and for me), whether it’s a review or a sponsored post or straight-up advertising.  The last thing I want to do is leave a PR rep unhappy after dealing with me, but if the expectation is that I will simply write about whatever they throw my way, then there’s not much I can do.

Tags: advertising, brands, PR

Credibility vs Cash

Jun 11, 2010 Blogging

Happy Dance

Whenever I sell an ad I do a little happy dance in my head.  It always seems like free money to me, since all I have to do in exchange for it is upload a jpeg and put in a few lines of html.  It’s easy to forget the two years of work that went into making a blog that someone felt was worthy enough to advertise on.  But it did take work.

I’m always reluctant to take responsibility for what I put on my blog in the first year or so.  It was like a drunken freshman year where I was just having fun and not studying at all, and making out with just about any brand guy that showed me a little attention.  I had no idea what I was doing.  I’m not claiming to know now either, but at least now I think a lot harder about what I put my name on.  The change basically happened when I decided to try to make money as a writer and blogger, to treat this as a business rather than a hobby.  From the moment I started my blog I never lied in a review and I always disclosed compensation, but I was very loose with what I would talk about.  I didn’t quite get that simply by talking about a product, no matter what I said, I was giving it credibility: an SEO boost, a name that a PR person could put on a list as having written about it.

Yes, I’m sounding rather big-headed right now: “I deigned to mention your lowly product on my blog, and now it belittles me.  I’m too important for you”  But from where I sit, that’s what it can start to feel like, no matter how obnoxious it sounds.  Everybody wants a piece of you.  And my blog is tiny.  I can’t imagine what A-list bloggers have to slog through.

Sponsored Posts

In my last post I talked about the obligations involved (or not) with talking about products. But an area that I’m still trying to get a handle on is sponsored posts.

Making a significant amount of money blogging is very difficult (yes, I know, thank you Captain Obvious).  I’m at a point where I’m kind-of making decent money because of my blog, but not actually on my blog.  One wouldn’t be happening without the other – the paid writing jobs that I’ve gotten, the consulting jobs, the appearance fees, none of those would have happened if not for SelfishMom.com.  So if I never make another penny on SelfishMom.com, it would still be worth keeping up (plus I genuinely like doing it).  But the more opportunities that come from my blog, the more important it is to make sure that I have complete integrity when it comes to my blog.

Integrity

That word, integrity, means different things to different people.  To many people I have absolutely no integrity because I review products that I get for free (and I keep them too, yes I do).  But for me, integrity means honesty and openness about relationships and whether I receive compensation.  So earlier today, I was doing my mental happy dance while nailing down the final terms of an ad sale, when I got a request from the advertiser to also write a review of the product, with links to the product’s home page, and then the links in the ad would point to my review of the product.  I had no problem with this since I really like the product, and sent along my rates and terms for a sponsored post.

The response I got back was that the post would mean more and be more powerful if it was not a sponsored post, if it was just a review that I did on my own.  Well, of course it would be!  But it would also be complete crap.  Every word would be true, but there’s little chance that I’d be writing a post about it if I weren’t getting paid, because I have a huge backlog of other things to write about.

Ah, but I would be getting paid – I’d be getting the advertising deal.  Ick.  This was my response:

I agree that it would come across as more effective for my readers if I did a non-sponsored write up and review (despite the fact that I would still disclose that XXXXXXXX was advertising directly on SelfishMom.com), but that post would go so far to the back of the line that it would probably be at least a couple of months before I got to it.  I write first about topics that I have a burning desire to write about, then topics that I’m paid to write about (whether on my site or somewhere else), then topics where I have some sort of ongoing relationship with the company, then anything else that’s left over.  And it’s been quite a while since I got to the leftover stuff.

Anything I would write in a sponsored post would be 100% honest – the fact that it’s sponsored merely means that it gets written about at all.  My blog is definitely a business, and I do work hard to make money with it, but the reason that it works at all is that anything I’m not being paid to write about is something that I’m genuinely interested in discussing.  I’d be trading your site’s credibility for mine.

That was six hours ago and after a morning of rapid-fire negotiations, I haven’t heard a word back.  I can understand losing the sponsored post – the advertiser is right, no matter how much you claim that it’s your own opinion, sponsored posts seem tainted – but I think I probably lost the ad sale too.  Oh well.  Other ads will come along.  Once you lose credibility, it’s gone for good.

I’ve done a couple of posts where the post itself was sponsored by a product but I wasn’t writing about the product.  It was more like “This post is brought to you by XXX.”  But so far brands just aren’t willing to say that they paid me to talk directly about their product.  I wonder if there will ever come a time when sponsored posts will be acceptable.  For those of us who like working with brands, it seems like there are some big opportunities being missed.

UPDATE: It looks like things are going to work out after all: I’ll be writing about something that I like, the sponsor will be getting an honest and enthusiastic write-up, and I can pay a bill or two.  I’m really encouraged by this, and I hope I can help turn the tide of what people think of Sponsored Posts.  With an almost endless number of subjects to write about, Sponsored Posts can be a really great way to cut through the noise and get your product out there.

Originally posted on Behind the Screen, a part of SelfishMom.com. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information. Amy also blogs at Filming In Brooklyn and the NYC Moms Blog.

Tags: advertising, sponsored posts