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A few days ago, I received an email from a blogger, X, and I thought I’d share her dilemma with you. I’ve edited the message below for clarity and to protect the mentioned identities.
Hey Tine,
I’m very new with dealing with PR companies. I have some successful collaborations in the sense of being sent products to review. However, when it comes to guest posts/sponsored posts, it gets a bit more confusing. A PR person for brand Y contacted me asking if I wanted to ‘collaborate’ by posting some of their content or writing some to put on my blog. I don’t want to just post a generic article, so I’d have to take the time to write an article including brand Y that was both relevant and interesting. So, as they said nothing about any kind of compensation, I tried to ask in the most delicate way whether there would be any monetary compensation or a product to try so I could be sure of my endorsement.
I got an email back saying essentially that due to new Google guidelines, a sponsored post would cause both my blog and their company to be penalised in search engine results. They pasted this part of the Google guidelines: http://puu.sh/2QtF5.jpg.
Here’s my problem: Is this a legitimate thing I should do without any charge, or as a small blog, am I being shamelessly used to promote their content for free? Part of me feels as though I should go with the sponsored post without any compensation because I don’t want to appear uncooperative with PR. But I don’t want to sell myself short or promote something that might not interest my readers for no gain to anyone but their company.
I replied with a lengthy email and a lot of it was my ranting at how irked I was at the situation. The new blogger was being taken advantage of by the PR who either knew what was going on but didn’t give her the full picture of what Google does or didn’t know what can be done around it.
After some deliberation and permission from blogger X, I decided to make a Bloggie Wednesday topic out of it. Some of you may have heard of Google penalising websites that sell links and write sponsored posts by knocking their page ranking right out the window. If you accept and write sponsored content for your blog, what does this mean for you? Does this mean that you should no longer be writing any more sponsored posts from now on and remove all of them to protect your blog from being penalised by Google?
This is what I told blogger X. Just so you know, she did tell me what brand Y was and it’s not a small business. It’s a big one.
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