An Experiment

I'm going to be trying something new here for a while. Every now and then, I'll be writing a sponsored post for cash. There's a company called PayPerPost that offers to hook up bloggers with advertisers and what they call "opportunities."

Some people see a terrible ethical dilemma with this; I don't. Sure, we look back now and think the Flintstones were awful people for advertising Winston cigarettes, but radio talk show hosts do the same thing even today. Rush Limbaugh rhapsodizes over the Sleep Number Bed and Paul Harvey is cuckoo for Citracal. And you know they're not doing all those spots for free (and don't you dare say anything bad about Paul Harvey).

But here's the bargain and the promise: from time to time, I'll include a post for which I hope to receive monetary compensation (I don't get paid until after the post has been reviewed and approved). But I won't be making such posts indiscriminately. I don't plan to get rich off these things, just earn a little beer money here and there. So I will only post about opportunities that interest me, and I will always identify these posts, in case you want to skip them, with a lead-in of "P-Three-Oh sez:" and a link back to this post so you'll know the deal.

Cool? Let's try it out:

P-Three-Oh sez:

One of the main concerns involved with this type of advertising is that folks won't disclose the fact that they have received compensation for the posts. They're worried about perceptions of blogger payola. So there's a group called Disclosurepolicy.org that will auto-generate disclosure policy boilerplate text based on your answers to a few questions. The text it generates is clunky and dry, but that just makes it sound more legal. You can use it verbatim or as a template to write your own.

Here's mine:

This policy is valid from 21 November 2006

This blog is a personal blog written and edited by me. For questions about this blog, please contact tonyfrazier62@cox.net.

This blog accepts forms of cash advertising, sponsorship, paid insertions or other forms of compensation.

This blog abides by word of mouth marketing standards. We believe in honesty of relationship, opinion and identity. The compensation received may influence the advertising content, topics or posts made in this blog. That content, advertising space or post will be clearly identified as paid or sponsored content.

The owner(s) of this blog is compensated to provide opinion on products, services, websites and various other topics. Even though the owner(s) of this blog receives compensation for our posts or advertisements, we always give our honest opinions, findings, beliefs, or experiences on those topics or products. The views and opinions expressed on this blog are purely the bloggers' own. Any product claim, statistic, quote or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer, provider or party in question.

To get your own policy, go to http://www.disclosurepolicy.org