Paid Blogging Disclosures Are Not The Same As Client Blogging
The Federal Trade Commission is examining whether the federal government wants to regulate blog posts where the author receives some sort of compensation. You see this often on television. A celebrity pitching a product or service identifies that they are being paid for their efforts. You won’t see it on a commercial, of course, since the relationship is obvious.
Meanwhile, ProBlogger, one of this industry’s true celebrity writers took the issue a step further. Darren Rowse polled his readership and received over 1,700 responses from bloggers about whether they had written a blog for pay. The news — and make no mistake about ProBlogger being smart enough to create timely news — is that 23% of his respondents said they had written for pay.
The even cooler approach? ProBlogger asked the same thing of readers in 2007. That time, 34% of respondents said they had written a paid blog entry. A tip o’ the hat to a group smart enough to make news because anyone, not just Silver Beacon, needs to cite ProBlogger when quoting their data. The process is very similar to our ABCs of SEO monthly column tracking Google’s Suggest feature. Like ProBlogger, we report on that news and track it over time.
There is one more distinction worth noting about the FTC’s actions.
Nearly everyone does something for money. We happen to blog for money too. Our clients in various industries (automotive, music and just about anything else you can think of) hire us to create online content for them. We do that as part of their team, usually as a partner, not a vendor. In some cases, we post directly to the blog with our byline. In others, we drop a post in draft mode, and the company decides when to press the publish button.
That is not the kind of blogging the FTC is talking about. They’re talking about me using this space to tell you how I use this awesome denture cream and why you should too without disclosing that the denture cream folks gave me some money and free product. That’s shilling. What we do for our clients is not even ghost-writing, but simple block and tackle content creation. Doing that is fun. Selling denture cream might be fun too, I guess, but like anything else, disclosure is a great policy.
Or you can be one of the 23% about to learn how to maintain a business model in the face of impending legislation.
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