Sponsored Blogs

Sponsored posts are nothing new although the tactic always raises a fair amount of controversy. It gets prickly when bloggers themselves write about their personal experience with a product (usually balanced) in exchange for compensation -this can be viewed as advertorial. This is nothing new. Magazines and newspapers have run advertorials for years, and radio stations run promotions where the DJ gets involved. What is new is that on many blog sites the editor and publisher are the same individual. There are no hard church/state boundaries as there are with other media. Sponsored conversations work best when you integrate tactics across the spectrum somewhere between this advertising and PR matrix: As long as you are transparent about your motivation to blog, you should have no problems.