Should you charge companies to promote their new products in your blogs?

Some companies seem to be getting a lot of free exposure on blogs that promote products launched by companies. For example, the recently launched Nokia product was mentioned in many technology blogs that gave Nokia big boost in sales. They atttributed this partly to the many blogs that gave the product free marketing, so to speak.

 

If you have an extremely high traffic blog, then I would charge to mention products, but otherwise they aren't going to be willing to pay.

 

Well if you don't mention the new product 1000 other blogs will and you look like the one who is out of the loop.

So it seems that it is a win-win to mention these new products.

I guess you wanna learn from this and create your own product that will get mentioned in other peoples blogs. That is where the money is.

 

I totally agree

 

If you're in a situation that you have enough loyal (perhaps repeating) readers and you're a well-respected figure in the online product reviews scene you probably already know that, and you've been approached by the companies.

If not, start with building your reputation and writing decent, honest product reviews - And wait to be approached. Don't push it too much, in my opinion.

Good luck though ;-)

 

The only problem I have with this is that if you "start with building your reputation and writing decent, honest product reviews," you can destroy your reputation just as quickly by allowing what are essentially advertisers to interfere with journalistic integrity. If you're that trusted, and have that big of an audience, you should work to maintain that. Otherwise it looks like you're being paid to say good things, even if you really do mean it, and people can't trust your reviews. If you do opt to do that, make sure they're very clearly labeled as advertisements, advertorials, sponsored reviews, etc. But there are other ways to monetize a site.

Jenn

 

Here is a possible solution. Give a detailed review of the latest gizmo but at the end compare it to something else and show its weak points, and then also find other things wrong with it. Be cynical and critical from a consumer's viewpoint. That way it makes you look like a good reviewer and might make some other blogs look like fibbing paid advertisers.