Professional Ethics of Product Review Bloggers

Today we thought we would discuss some professional ethics you need to have if you want to be a reputable product review blogger. These days…many people are getting into reviewing products and then blogging about those reviews so it is very important that you represent your blog and the product review business in a Professional and Ethical manner.

While many reviewers join various pitch sites where companies will actually pitch to the members to review their products, there are some of us who like to do research and work on our own to find new companies who have never done this type of marketing to participate on our blogs.

When Chris and I started the Two Classy Chics blog, we knew we wanted to be different. We wanted to work with companies who have never tried this type of marketing and contact them ourselves with our press/media kit and pitch our services to them. Do we belong to a few pitch sites? Yes we do…however, you will notice that at least 75% or more of our reviews and giveaways are not affiliated with any type of pitch site. We set aside a minimum of 10 hours every week and pitch companies ourselves.

With that said, it is a little discouraging when other review bloggers come over to our blog to just swipe our sponsors and advertisers for their own sites. What we don’t understand is why others are not putting in the time and work of finding their own sponsors like we do. Yes…it takes a lot of hard work and it is time consuming work…but it really isn’t fair to review bloggers who do their own company research and pitching to have other review bloggers come over and swipe their sponsors and contact them for sponsorships on their own blogs. We can honestly say that we do not cruise other blogs to swipe their sponsors, so why do it to us?

We have many product reviewer friends and many of them come over and enter our giveaways and we welcome that! We also visit their blogs and enter their giveaways because it’s a great way to show support for one another. However, it is really unprofessional and unethical to just cruise product review blogs to swipe sponsors & advertisers and never participate on that blog at all. And entering a giveaway just for the purpose of contacting that sponsor is not cool either.

Honestly, there are hundreds of thousands of businesses on the web that would welcome a review of their product line. We do not have to be hitting the same sponsors over and over and run the risk of burning out that sponsor, especially with the amount of people getting into reviewing products now. This niche has grown immensely in the past few years and it is scary to think how many requests sponsors must get on a daily basis.

So our product reviewer tip for this week is that if you want to review products on your blog you really should not swipe other blogger’s sponsors. This is hard work, it is time consuming but it is really rewarding to help a company market their products online. If you want to be taken seriously then you really should do your own company searches for products you and your readers will be interested in and contact them on your own instead of swiping others.

Shelly & Chris