These days when you do a search for product review blog or mommy review blog you will find hundreds, if not thousands of bloggers who are now writing reviews for several large and small companies and that is fabulous if those bloggers are doing it the correct way.
When I say the correct way…what I really mean is that to set yourself and your blog apart from all of the hundreds of other blogs you need to spend your time pitching companies and brands yourself. By doing your own marketing, you are targeting products that you enjoy and want to use. If you want to keep your blog focus on organic items, or kids items, then you can do that. By stealing leads from others whether it is by facebook, tweets, feed or actually coming to the blog and literally swiping the leads, you are doing your professionalism a disservice as well as your ethics. Others do see and know who is marketing what item. We know who swipes stuff and who looks for unique items.
In other words, it is unprofessional to cruise other review blogs and sit there and contact all of their sponsors after those blog owners spent countless hours hunting down new companies to participate on their blog. You really need to “put in the hard work” and find companies on your own and spend less time cruising competing blogs and stealing their sponsors. Make sense?
Look at it this way, if you are entering giveaways the last thing you want to see is the same giveaways on 50+ blogs. Those who enter our giveaways and read our reviews want to see variety. It is okay to see cross-over reviews & giveaways all running at the same time on several blogs but really…readers don’t want to read about the same product on 50+ blogs all in the same month. Like I said, there needs to be variety.
In addition, about 70% of the companies who are sponsoring reviews and giveaways on blogs don’t have unlimited budgets where they can sponsor on 50+ blogs at a time and many of these companies have complained to us that they got “hammered” with over 100+ requests for sponsorship on other blogger’s blogs after participating on our blog for the first time. Seriously, that is not fair to waste their “employees” time sifting through gobs and gobs of sponsorship requests. When contacting companies to come sponsor on your blog after seeing them on another blog, you really need to stop and consider is this a large BRAND company that can handle 100+ requests a day coming in? Or…is this a small company or work at home mother sponsoring this review/giveaway?
Obviously…small companies can’t handle that many requests and many are being turned off to this type of marketing due to being inundated with too many blogger requests.
We all love reviewing products and hosting giveaways on our blogs as well as helping companies large and small promote their products online. However, running around and cruising fellow review/giveaway blogs and then contacting ALL of that blog’s sponsors to come sponsor on your blog is just plain wrong. If reputable and professional review bloggers are putting in the marketing work…you should too! And if you think that sponsors don’t see what you do, you are wrong!
We hope you all enjoy the reviews and giveaways we bring to you here on the Two Classy Chic’s Blog and we hope you will continue to visit our blog, read our reviews and enter our giveaways. With that said, if you are here to just hammer out sponsorship requests to the companies that participate on our blog we suggest you do your own work and move on! Your reputation is showing and for those that think its funny or do it out of spite, you are only hurting yourself, but that is your choice.
It is very important that those who work with these companies to help them market their products always remain professional and do this type of work in an ethical and professional manner. We know that 98% of reviewers are totally ethical and do an awesome job. What is sad is the other 2% that make us all look bad in the eyes of the public and the sponsors. Help do your part to keep this a viable business for everyone involved.
THANK YOU SO MUCH for this post. I receive several review requests in a day and it’s hard to filter and go through each of them but I can “read” through their emails who are professionals and who are not.
It’s a pleasure working with Two Classy Chics 🙂
All the best!
Renz
elitedresses.com
exactly!
The good reviewers need to band together and “out” those who are scamming these companies! Let me tell you why…those “few” bad seeds who are doing this unethically are indeed affecting all of us who do this the “right” way because after these reviewers do a piss poor job for that company some companies will actually stop doing this type of marketing.
So to those bloggers who think this issue doesn’t involve you or pertain to you…you are wrong. Those who are doing this unethically are indeed affecting you!
one of the 2 gals who is stalking our blog (and other blogs) is slapping up reviews (numerous a day) and is doing so within 2-3 hours of receiving the products in her mailbox. She is not using them and her reviews sound ridiculous & it shows. Furthermore she never posts an original photo with her reviews & that is probally because she is selling the products or giving them away because NO ONE can effectively try out a skincare product and write a review an hour later and even on the same day write 2-3 more skincare reviews & post those. We found out that…that particular reviewer posts everything she gets in the mail the same day she gets them.
I do know that same companies have caught her doing this and they are not happy about it.
Angela, Thank you very much for speaking out and leaving your comments here on this post. This problem is way out of control especially with 2 particular bloggers who are doing this to several other blogs and I do know that some people are aware of what these 2 bloggers are doing but are afraid to speak up.
I co-own 2 PR blogs…the Two Classy Chics and the Shakin N Bakin foodie blog and I am really tired of sponsors coming to us complaining about bloggers swamping them with requests to sponsor on their blogs within 1-2 days of us posting a review and/or giveaway for that company.
Furthermore, we have confronted both bloggers about this because several companies have showed us the emails that they received from these 2 ladies so that is one way we know who they are. In addition, we have site trackers on our blog & we can see when they come, how long they are here, which posts they read and how they leave our blog. Then within minutes these 2 ladies fire off emails to our sponsors asking them to sponsor on their blog. One of these ladies even had enough nerve to tell the sponsor “she” would do a better job. Well, that sponsor didn’t appreciate her ethics and turned her down.
What amazes me the most is that after confronting these 2 ladies that they still come to our blog (almost daily) and still email her sponsors. We do know for a FACT that they are doing this to several other blogs. It is just a shame!!!