Ethical Behavior of Product Review Bloggers 101
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.