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Paid Blogging: What’s the Problem? Is it Ethical?
By admin | October 23, 2009
SEO Politics of the Internet - I’ll pay you to vote for me! What’s all the hoopla about paid blogging? Is it good for business? Is it ethical? Should it be policed by the Big Brother of the Internet, Google? Lots of ideas and opinions are running around as how to view paid blogging. Here’s a quick rundown as we look at the pros and cons of compensating bloggers to review products and services.
Pros
- Positive Influence: Positive reviews can influence opinion of your product or service - This can be good or bad (see cons)
- Encourages reader response - this depends on the popularity and trustworthiness of the blog(ger). A popular blog that receives hundreds of hits a day and has garnered enough interest from its readers will create a buzz in the local blog community which can lead to…
- Viral Marketing – Increased exposure on one blog leads to another blog through word of mouth (or is that fingers?), back links and more discussion which leads to…
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and increased exposure throughout the Internet. The more other bloggers pick up on the review or story, the more exposure you’ll receive with the Search Engines like Google, Yahoo! Bing and others, which leads to more exposure – good publicity.
Frankly, the current search engine business model is based on a pay-per-click (ppc) paid inclusion so paid blogging fits. So, how can there be anything ethically wrong with paid blogging?
Cons
- Ethically is it in the gray area? Can a paid blogger be trusted to provide an objective review of the product? Should an honest blogger base their review on their experience and not what the company paying for the review wants?
- Write this! The majority of paid bloggers are not told directly what to write - of course they will be influenced by the fact they are being provided free products to test on their own or compensated monetarily.
- Can readers expect an objective review? Because the whole point is to get an opinion of a product before you buy it yourself
- Negative Publicity: What if the product doesn’t live up to the blogger’s hype? The product received a glowing review, yet it doesn’t function up to that level. If enough customers who buy the product based on the blogger’s recommendation don’t agree with how good that product is, not only will the blogger’s reputation suffer, so will the product’s sales and the company that manufactured it.
- Big Brother is Watching: Google says it is currently working to prevent their search engines from recognizing paid blogs. Is that possible? If at some point it is, could your product be black listed by Google? Is paid blogging truly a black hat tool?
Conclusion Paid blogging is no different than lobbying politicians, just on a different level. I don’t see our current government model going away any sooner than paying writers to write about products and services - particularly if the current search engine model promotes paid inclusion. Besides, it’s been done for years in the print world, should it be any different online? Consider paid blogging the advertorial of the Internet.
Topics: Blogging, Branding Strategy, Copywriting, Freelance Copywriter, Marketing, Online Marketing, Social Media |