Generate publicity by paying bloggers to post about your company?

by David Mullings

I currently write for a marketing blog here in the USA and I recently started to research a newer development in the blogging arena for a couple stories. It came to the surface in late 2006 – paying bloggers to post about a company, product or service.

Sites like Payperpost, Blogsvertise and Smorty allow bloggers to sign up and get paid to post and allow companies to connect with bloggers of their choice. At first I felt that this was a bad idea but I have a different view now because of my own experience in trying to generate publicity and links for our website.

A company often hires a PR firm to get publicity but if you cannot hire one, your options are limited. If you could get a decent blogger to post about your firm, it would be beneficial, but how do you get a blogger to do that? Well instead of searching for relevant blogs, you can now signup with one of these sites and evaluate the blogs in a central location.

The key reason I am not as wary is that most of these sites do not allow an ‘advertiser’ to force a blogger to write a positive review. I have signed up as both an advertiser and publisher to test the services and will report the results soon. I do believe that as long as bloggers are only being paid to post their honest opinion, there is no problem and it is no different from paying a person to be part of a focus group.

Using these services helps in three ways:

(1) Reduced time to find relevant blogs that can benefit your business

(2) Easier to get bloggers to talk about your venture

(3) Building relevant external links to your site that can help your Google Page rank

Am I concerned about companies that try to force positive posts? Of course, but I think that public perception is crucial to a brand and no blogger wants to be known as a ‘paid evangelist’ because it hurts credibility.

Besides, we all know that companies already pay for ‘positive press’ in mainstream media and it has never prevented negative press so why would the blogosphere be any different?

Would you pay a blogger to review venture without requiring a positive post?