Danny Sullivan’s Search Engine Land is a must-read for all search marketers. Like many others, I look to the site for the latest news and insight into everything search.
And, like many others who blog, I appreciate the fact that the site isn’t a charity and looks to stay in the black via ad dollars. Hey, you can’t save the world if you can’t pay the rent, right? But I was surprised to see an entire blog post the other day that was an ad: SPONSOR MESSAGE: Attract more customers to your web site.
What the - ?!?! Isn’t that going a bit far? Maybe …
After downing an Earl Grey, I got to thinking about my own posts touting Cheezhead sponsors. And I’ve seen others do the same. That didn’t seem so bad. Then, my boy Martoneee, soon thereafter, put up a post promoting a $100 Yahoo! ad credit (spend $1,000 first though). He works for Y!, but that seemed OK to me too. Plus, practically every blog with a job posting promotes them in posts.
Bottom line: I’ll still read SEL (Hey, that almost spells “sell.” How ironic.) religiously. They gotta do what they gotta do, and with all the free knowledge they drop on me daily, I can put up with a few relevant, pretty unobtrusive ads. (Just no social security numbers, OK guys?)
Not saying I’m going to drop a bunch of sponsored posts on Cheezhead, but I’m a lot less opposed to it now. I mean, this is America!
December 6th, 2007 at 7:52 pm
We do two sponsored post per week, I believe, with no plans to massively ramp them up. It’s a tiny percentage of the tons of editorial posts we put out in the feed; they’re clearly marked, and we also toss in nofollow to keep everything cool. So far, no one’s complained — so like you say, hope you find they’re a pretty unobtrusive way for the site to be supported.
December 7th, 2007 at 11:22 am
It looks like this is becoming more popular…and it only makes sense. Bloggers attract a specific type of audience and being able to get your message to those people is worth a lot of money. We’ve actually launched a new service specifically for allowing companies to market their job openings via sponsored blog entries. I actually have a blog entry that outlines the new program which you can navigate to from our website.
We’d love to get recruiters feedback on the idea of being able to market their tech jobs on Tech blogs, their marketing jobs on marketing blogs, etc.
Regards,
Mike
December 7th, 2007 at 4:53 pm
I read this Wednesday and then today coming into work I was listening to the morning radio hosts, and all of a sudden they started talking about how great Dunkin’ Donuts are and how the one girl is going to get it for her holiday parties, etc. I think sponsored blog posts are similar in that way to those radio host pitches they do every so often in between the actual ad spots.
December 7th, 2007 at 6:37 pm
Those radio hosts never tell you that they’re advertising though. The web is in general much more open about whether a pitch is sponsored or not.
December 10th, 2007 at 12:37 pm
At least it’s completely disclosed and nofollowed. Although it may annoy you, at least they’re not trying to trick anyone. Plenty of people are doing paid reviews without any disclosure or participating in paid link programs that try to trick Google into thinking the sites are actually earning links…