I literally stumbled across this idea a while back and I’m curious about the buzz effect it actually has for advertisers and if, when incorporated into a word of mouth marketing campaign, it really works.
The idea is to connect customers to advertisers and build traffic to the advertiser’s site. So, in effect, if you wanted to drive customers to your storefront you would select from a pool of well-respected bloggers who post regularly on topics of interest to your customers from one of the following resources:
- PayPerPost.com
- ReviewMe.com
- And the (not quite ready yet) LoudLaunch.com
Then you pay them – anywhere from $60 - $250 per post based on the popularity of the blogger, blog ranking in the blogsphere/search engines and traffic coming into the blog. Pricing, of course, varies depending on the promotional vehicle you are using. PayPerPost begins at $10 per post. ReviewMe begins at $60 per post. And LoudLaunch, well, we are still waiting…
This is a relatively new phenomenon with PayPerPost (the first of its kind) launching just this past summer. The kicker is that it runs contrary to what hard-core bloggers hold near and dear to their hearts – truth, honesty and transparency.
In essence, by opting to participate and be listed among the pool of bloggers, they are selling their readership. This is a big can of worms. However, when looked at from a marketing perspective, it could be effective…notice I said “could.” I’m not totally convinced.
So, I decided to take this concept for a little spin.
I signed up as an advertiser and began to peruse the list of bloggers in ReviewMe.com to see if any were a fit for the marketing of a particular product I had in mind – an eBook (you can check it out here). I was pleased to see that there is a scoring/rating system and it made sense that the better, more respected, higher trafficked blogs had higher fees than say the new blog on the block.
Since the book offers an affiliate program, and I want to reach affiliate sellers, I chose to focus on marketing that aspect for my trial. I did a search for blogs with the term "affiliate marketing." Most of the blogs that came up were marketing blogs where a post or two had been made about affiliate marketing.
Then I came across one of my favorites…Dave Taylor’s blog. Now, he doesn’t hide the fact that he makes a decent living off blogging and adsense and I’m definitely not finding fault with him or anyone else who does this. Might even do it myself one day. However, I have to say I was a bit bummed. I felt betrayed, sold out and disheartened.
While I know he is most likely hit up regularly to blog about products and services and I don’t fault anyone trying to make a living…still, there was something just not right about it. I wondered if I could trust him to offer up “real” information. How would I know his words weren’t purchased by some advertising guy wanting to sell a product to me? His credibility took a bit of a nosedive.
But then the marketing wonk inside me took over…I mean, let’s think about this for a minute…if I want him or any other blogger in the network to give me a positive review about this eBook, I can just PAY him to do it? And, all those lovely people looking for information served up from Dave Taylor who hang on his very last word will think it’s grand and (hopefully) be compelled to purchase the book?
As any good blogger would, Dave wrote a post about it here detailing some of the pros and cons.
Hmmmmm…I’m going to try it, just to see what happens. After all, this is all about running a test, looking at word of mouth, measuring how it spreads across social areas on the web…
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I recently used loudlaunch.com as a supplementary marketing effort for my recent Playstation 3 console giveaway. It seemed a great way to potentially announce your campaign to the blogosphere. There are serious problems in the way Loudlaunch.com operates and any advertiser thinking about using the service should be aware. First off you cannot specify what blogs or category of blog that will post on your subject. As a result while the individual posts are solid, the blogs target audience might not be a match for what you are looking for. As you cannot control who may or may not post on your subject. Worse yet your money may go to support terrorism! This has happened to me and my promotion for Earlymiser. A blog call Israel Watch (I REFUSE to link to them) which openly advocates the destruction of Israel and the Jews chose to blog about my PS3 promotion. I find it astounding that my advertising dollars are being spent supporting anti-semitic rantings. More importantly who knows what group is behind the site Israel Watch? I find the views on the site deeply disturbing and I didn’t authorize the post. So the brand of my comparison shopping site is at risk. Can you imagine how I felt about the situation? Worst yet Loudlaunch.com doesn’t have a customer service number and their whois is protected by Domains By Proxy. I have fired off several emails but haven’t gotten a response. Why does Loudlaunch support terrorists?
If you use Loudlaunch, there’s a good chance your brand or site will be featured on a hate site. Don’t do it.
Update:I have spoken with Phil at Loudlaunch who informed me
“This blog is being removed from our approved bloggers list and will not be able to post ever again. The person that approved it was viewing statistics and did not pick up on the political undertones which are not appropriate for our advertisers. Apologies.”
to which I said, “Not a lot of fracking confidence in your “reviewers”. Missed the whole destruction of Israel thing huh? Yeah well it was the whole point of the blog.”
Loudlaunch is issuing me a credit for the campaign. Thanx. Spend $100 testing something and do thousands of dollars of damage to your brand. This after I was told the following by Chris over there before I started my campaign.
“Thanks for signing up as an advertiser. We appreciate your business. I spoke with Phil today about your online conversation. Let me quickly give you a bit more information about the way we rank our bloggers and how they are paid for blogging on your campaign.
Our model is simple: we pay bloggers based on the expected exposure/ traffic that they can bring our advertisers. To do this, we rank our bloggers based on Technorati stats, Alexa stats, and a personal review of the blog. Therefore, there is no exact model to publish.However, based on your feedback and suggestions, we will add some additional instructions or tips on our site that help better explain how this works.
One final note. You can check any bloggers stats, who has posted on your campaign, by entering their information in technorati.com or alexa.com. We could have an all day conversation about how to interpret those stats, but in general, they are used as guidelines along with a physical review of the site to determine their rank or payment per post.”
Now thanx to Loudlaunch all the Israeli hating/Hamas supporting terrorists know about my Playstation 3 promotion. How much personal attention could they have paid to the blog? I went to it and it took me all of 30 seconds to determine it was an anti-semitic hate site. Un ‘frackin’ believable. Clearly no “physical review” took place. Avoid Loudlaunch.