Don’t You Just Hate Sponsored Posts? What About Sponsored Blogs?
I do. And that’s because they make the world look cluttered. Imagine my disgust when, checking out a few favorite personal blogs, I realized all their latest posts were about rhinoplasty, botox, hair transplant, real estate agents in San Diego, liposuction and whatnot. And I hear these people only pay a couple of bucks per post—with the sponsored links of course. Sure, some people put in their paid links in the context of relevant posts. But others do it just plain wrong—the whole post is about the sponsored topic.
Heck, sometimes it feels that their blogs have turned entirely into sponsored blogs.
I don’t want my feed reader to get cluttered with posts about all that junk, so I usually just unsubscribe the first sign of having sponsored posts right on the blog post title. And I don’t have the patience of weeding through pages and pages of sponsored articles until I get to some relevant (i.e., non-sponsored) content. I’m okay with those links appearing discreetly within relevant posts. At least I get to read content with sense.
In my opinion, the purpose of sponsored links, anyway, is for link-building, so as long as the link URL and anchor text are there, the sponsors are happy. I don’t think anybody is still gullible enough these days to mistake those sponsored write-ups for honest to goodness blog posts by the author. We should be way past that.
A sign that a blog is going downhill is if it continually spews out sponsored post after sponsored post, again usually with the sponsored listing eating up the whole post.
Bloggers, consider the tradeoff when writing these posts! Is your credibility worth the couple of bucks per post that they pay you? I don’t think so.
What do you think?