Integrity with Sponsored Posts
This is a money making blog. (Well, almost. We still haven’t broken even yet, but we will…)
The purpose of this blog is to, well, make money. When we visit other money-making blogs, we always read the content with a grain of salt, especially when the blog refers us to buy a certain product. (If you’re in the biz, you can recognize an affiliate link when you see one.)
So, even though we’re on an adventure to make money, we still try to maintain our integrity. We look for affiliate products that we feel good about. We disclose our sponsored posts. At least, we used to…
We just signed up with Smorty and published our first non-disclosed sponsored post with them on April 1. April Fools Day seemed appropriate as perhaps this is a foolish move because Google is slapping down blogs for having sponsored posts. (But we’ve made over $80 from sponsored posts. Our Google AdSense income from this blog specifically is practically nothing. So, we decided to risk getting a Page Rank of 0 when we accepted PayPerPost jobs.)
Smorty encourages you to get around the PageRank slap by hiding the fact that these are sponsored posts. You don’t disclose a Smorty sponsored post. In fact, you are not allowed to…
Posts must not be placed in a “Smorty” or “Sponsored Posts” category, all posts must be listed under a relevant category to the topic of the post. (Source: Smorty Rules)
Smorty also suggests the following to prevent you from receiving a Google slap on your Page Rank:
1. Remove all sponsored post tags on each of your posts. Search engines can follow these tags to determine if you are being paid for posts.
2. Remove any other tags like “hire me” and “review me”. Any general affiliate banners are fine to keep.
Fine. Our compromise was to go to add a disclosure page on our blog. (You can get one in under a minute from www.disclosurepolicy.org)
Why is it important to have integrity when you’re on a mission to make money? On a personal note, I think it’s important to be able to look at yourself in the mirror. From a financial perspective, I think preselling with integrity leads to larger commissions. Either way, we’re trying to make money with a conscious.
Bottom Line: Starting from April 1, not all of our sponsored posts are disclosed. But we added a disclosure policy stating something to that effect.
Question: Does integrity matter when you are trying to make money blogging? What about all those scraper sites that steal content?
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April 3rd, 2008 at 7:33 am
I think integrity matters, I think it does get you better results in the long run, depending on what type of blog or site you run. If you are trying to build a connection with your readers, you have a responsability towards them aswell, screw that connection once by forgetting about your integrity and trying to take advantage of them at their expense and it will have an affect on your future relationship with them.
People aren´t stupid and they surely don´t want to be treated as such.
I know I have had my issues with integrity and like you said, people do start recognizing affiliate links. On the other hand, does it matter that much to click on an affiliate link, if it comes from a person you respect?
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