Comments on: Getting PR on Blogs

By: What Is The Difference Between Offline and Online PR? : PR In Your Pajamas

What Is The Difference Between Offline and Online PR? : PR In Your Pajamas — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 09:11:12 +0000

[...] pitching a blogger, they usually don’t have an editorial calendar so make sure you are familiar with the type of [...]

By: Elena

Elena — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 00:51:13 +0000

Hi there, FTC guidelines that came into effect this year state that “material connections” (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers – connections that consumers would not expect – must be disclosed. These examples address what constitutes an endorsement when the message is conveyed by bloggers or other “word-of-mouth” marketers.

In other words, you would have to disclose your relationship to the vendor. I’ve seen many bloggers put a disclosure statement on their blog, something to the effect of “I may get paid to promote some of the services and products you read about here.”

If you want to learn more about the FTC guidelines, here’s a link for you http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2009/10/endortest.shtm

By: L Montpetit

L Montpetit — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 18:09:18 +0000

If an influential blogger with a very specific market niche is looking to monetize their blog, what do you think about charging for advertorials for products?

By: Blog PR by Elena Verlee

Blog PR by Elena Verlee — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 01:02:01 +0000

[...] reading Elena’s great post here… Share and [...]

By: Elena

Elena — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 20:40:54 +0000

I think the thing to remember about a blog’s statistics – is they are just one tool to measure whether the blog is right for you.

Bloggers are great about helping each other out, so why not pitch a profile about yourself, that indirectly brings exposure to your product? Lots of mom blogs are looking for profiles.

Also, perhaps instead of pitching your product for a ‘review’, ask that it’s featured as a cool or new product. In my PR in Your Pajamas ebook I tell readers NOT to send out a product but instead send out good photos that illustrate how the product is used. This saves money and when I had my own product-based company, we were able to obtain lots of media coverage this way.

I’ve found that you need a mixed approach in terms of publicity to generate sales – we tended to get more sales from PRINT or traditional media like magazines or newspapers, but more hits to our site from blogs. Blogs can generate buzz pretty quickly but it can take months to get into a magazine or paper which is why working with both helps build an overall momentum.

By: Catherine Choi

Catherine Choi — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:27:14 +0000

I have had both great and not-so-great responses with publicity through blogs. THe thing I find difficult is how to assess whether the blog has the kind of exposure that I am looking for,as my product is expensive and I cannot afford to send a free bag out to each blog who requests one.

I usually check out the traffic stats on Compete, do a Google ranking search, and also look on Alexa. But even with that, there were a number of blogs who checked out really well on all these pointers, claimed to have 20K plus visitors a month the their site, and so I would make the investment to send them free product for review and forget getting any sales out of it, I didn’t even get 10 visits to my site! I couldn’t understand this – and it has happened a few times! (Of course the opposite has happened as well.)

Any thoughts on how this could be happening? Is it solely that lack of interest in my product that would cause such a thing to happen? Is there a better way to research the stats on a blog?

Thanks very much for your post!