It has been a couple of times that people asked me about my rules for sponsored blogging. You know, when someone gives you something and wants you to blog about it. I think it would be good to expose my thought about this into a blog post.</p
First, I will give the marketing/PR people, one trick, for free. Do at least a bit of research on the blogger you want to reach. It could be only to look at the Twitter bio, or read one or two blog posts to get an idea of what he likes. It’s not a lot of effort, and that will ensure you that you connect with the right target. If you contact me about your new product for hair, you fail! If you contact me for Geek stuffs, gadget, computers, music, movies… you have the right target and a lot more chances that I’ll say yes. That’s been said, let’s check the prerequisites and the rules (read here “If you want to contact me about your product, company, project… read this before) that I have:
THE prerequisites
- It needs to be a win-win situation. If you only want me to promote your product, it’s gonna be no. I am a blogger, not some kind of cheap labor!
- If you are a new company or a non-profit organization, and you are doing awesome stuff, forget the prerequisites #1.
THE rules
- I’m the kind of guy who loves to get free stuff (huh, who don’t like this!?), so I won’t be upset if you approach me for a sponsored blog post.
- I will tell my readers, in the blog post about your stuff, that you gave me something. It’s not something that will change what I’ll write, but I want people to know it, so they won’t think that I’m saying that you are so awesome because you secretly gave me something.
- I have the right to tell what I want and this includes that your product, movie or gadget sucks. Oh and don’t avoid any bloggers because of this: you want people to say the truth, but I could write a blog post just on this subject.
Conclusion
Target the right people and you’ll probably succeed. I’m the first one to say that it’s really important to include the bloggers in your strategy, but like anything else in life, there is nothing free (or not too much). That doesn’t mean I want a paycheck, it’s just that I need to benefit from our relationship. I hope this will help people understand the basic and help other bloggers to create your own rules and prerequisites. Do you accept sponsored blog post? Do you have some rules that you follow? What do you think about this?
Image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/wcouch/2268610556/
