How much does your bog standard company pay its marketing department these days? If it's more than 15p a week, they're getting ripped off. In fact, if you're a managing director of a company which has a marketing department, and in a meeting they come up with some new fangled suggestion such as 'Let's use blogs to spread the word'... sack them now, and let's spend that 15p on a pack of biscuits for the people who actually put thought into their job.
I say this because chances are, they spend their days emailing bloggers at random - like myself, a 24 year old from London (that's right, the one in the United Kingdom), who writes about me and my London stuff, or you and your awful trainers. So let's recap, this is a UK blog, with (stat counter says) mostly UK readers and mostly a UK, 24 yr old kind of theme. No ads. No promotions (unless its a really, really good freebie)
Asking me to promote something that has absolutely no relevance to any of these things is like asking an untrained monkey to sing a Lady GaGa song: utterly pointless, unlikely to happen and does no favours for anyone involved. Least of all the poor, poor monkey who'd have to listen to that vomit-inducing bile in the first place.
Oh, god - I hate Lady GaGa almost as much as Fearne Cotton.
It used to be just the odd fellow blogger, or online sex / furniture shops wanting my interior design expertise and "feedback". But lately, there's been a few legit, normal companies, American companies for the most part, wanting me to devote an entire post (one that would normally contain me whinging about my hangover) to their washing powder. For this, me and my readers get $2 off (does that include postage to the UK?) and "some cute little Snuggle bear widgets you can pop onto your blog to share with your readers ". Aww. Schnuggle wuggle. And I know you'd love all that.
This mass marketing strategy baffles and worries me in equal measure. When it's all a bit random, when it's clearly a case of "grab these email addresses, fire off some emails, tell 'em what a savvy blogger they are, and bingo, let's sell some washing powder"...I just think: there are a lot of unemployed people about, yet clearly the culling process has not yet extended to the buffoons in marketing.
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11 comments:
Here! Here! Everyone knows that using a blog to promote product is a passé waste of time. TWITTER is the way to go!
Do your nostrils flair when you get angry?
Blogging - PAH! Get with the times. Join the masses of spam artists following 10,000 people on twitter in the vain hope that they'll follow them back, and get to read some of their deliciously interesting tweets - containing only links to ...the same...website.
(Yes, and so do my mums. Runs in the family)
By the way, I'm not saying using blogs to spread the word doesn't work - it does - but asking the WRONG bloggers to spread the word is the bit me got beeeeeeef wiv.
Ahaha, I wonder what brought you to their attention... maybe they got confused with getting wasted to getting washing.
I hate blogs overrun with ads, but then again I saw somewhere that someone was getting £50 a month from adsense. Whether there was any room left for posts I don't know.
Plus, if you ever need £1.36 off american washing powder you now know where to go.
I used to use Adsense on my old blog. I earned a total of $5.62. Which is still held with Adsense as they only pay you when you've earned $1,000,000 (perhaps a slight exaggeration, but I am sure you get my point).
As for that request by a washing powder company - my hat goes off to you! I can only assume that, as I have not received such a request, this is cos your blog must be the proper platform to launch such a clean and wholesome product. Whereas my blog is far too dirty and crammed to the girth with arseholes (literal and otherwise).
I'll hold off on corporate sponsorship until I get a call from Grey Goose or Manolo Blahnik.....awww, who am I kidding, I'd shill herpes cream on my blog to make a dollar.
I believe the reason you get random unrelated 'marketing oppurtunities' is due to the whole search engine optimisation thingy. No one knows the secret Google sauce exactly, but one thing for sure is that incoming links from other sites is one of the most important things to get your site up that google page.
As blogs have a fair lot of incoming links too (other peoples blog rolls etc) then they are regarded as a relatively 'important / reputable' site, so lots of lots of links to this washing powder from blogs will boosts the chances of this appearing on the early pages in google when you type 'washing powder', or whatever other related keywords their trying to target.
So the company itself isn't looking for you to try and sell to your readers... In fact they most likely don't give two hoots what you write about their product... they just purely want your incoming link!
Sorry to disappoint.
Miss M - Yeah, not sure where they manage to put any writing - their readers must be bloody loyal to put up with all that advertisement gumpf.
MOT - If you need to freshen up with a snuggey wuggly bear and some $2 coupons, I have the web address if you're interested. Who clicks on ads on websites anyway?
Meghan - Mmmm, alcohol samples - that's what I'm talking about. I'm all for that. And some shoes. Mmmmm yeah.
James - Ah! That explains it. Still, it's not like I'm going to put a link up for them anyway. Fear not, my head has now returned to its normal size.
I must be really behind the times as I always thought that it was sex that sold........
It always worked when I was in construction; only the best calenders from suppliers went up in our Portacabins (until our comapny went PC and banned them all:-(
So you wouldn't write a post promoting my latest album?
AFC - Can't beat boobs when it comes to spreading news of a product. Fact.
Gaga - Only if you promised to supply me with replacement ears and brain afterwards? If that's cool - Let's talk.
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