If you’ve blogged for even a few months, you’ve most likely already been contacted by a website (or many) that are offering you an amazing deal. In exchange for giving them all of your content, they will let you link to them. Sounds pretty good huh? What? No? Not really? Then why is that blogger after blogger is sucked into these “partnerships” that really boil down to giving away your value for free?
It’s all about the sales pitch.
Last year I was contacted by a little start up called Uptake. They had selected me (woo hoo!) to be one of their Top 100 Travel Experts. Actually I was a bit flattered at the time, especially when I saw the other names on the list. Travel gurus that I admired, friends that I had known for years, and colleagues I was proud to be listed with. Then the emails started. I was “encouraged” to add one of their buttons to my side bar. A little button that linked to them and stated I was a “travel expert”. Immediately I considered the ad revenue I would be losing… I charge for ad space on my sidebar, why would I give that away for free? Soon I got reminder emails, assuming I had forgotten to add the link and pressing me to do so now. I ignored it.
A few months later it was pointed out to me that they were scraping my RSS feed and republishing it on their site. They were getting listed in the search engines for my content! In exchange for naming me a so-called “travel expert” they thought I owed them all of my content and a link to their site. It’s a great business model for them, but absolutely worthless for me.
It’s not just the start ups.
Lonely Planet will happily use your content (and that of 11,000 other bloggers) for free. They share adsense revenue, but they don’t block the search engines from indexing your content as theirs. What does that mean? From my experience, I’ve seen certain sites rank lower in the search results than Lonely Planet — for their own content. Think about that. You’re lending your content to LP, in the hopes of getting some traffic, but there is a chance — and maybe it won’t happen to you — that your content will be moved down in Google by Lonely Plant.
Recently, I was contacted by a website started by Zen Habits, called The Daily Brainstorm, a collaboration of inspiration bloggers, hoping to drive traffic to each others sites by having an excerpt of our posts gathered together on this site (with a link back to the full post). Three months later, the marketing manager writes me:
Participating as a contributor for The Daily Brainstorm is a highly sought after affiliation, and we hope you view it as positive element in the marketing and growth of your own blog. Including the logo/link on your blog is a requirement for continued participation as a contributor.
Please post the link on your home page by Monday, November 1. We will assume that you do not wish to continue as a contributor if you choose not to post the link (or if you don’t contact us before that date).
So basically, link to me or die. No thank you for your free content. No happy to work with you, but could you do me a favor. Just a simple demand. Give me a link that is worth, maybe $25-$75/mo depending on the size of your blog, and in exchange, I’ll continue to benefit from your free content.
Three ways to woo bloggers into giving away stuff for free:
1. Flatter them.
2. Leverage your brand.
3. Use the bait and switch.
At the end of the day, we all know these partnerships are not really benefiting us. Sometimes just being asked feels so good, we’re willing to over look the blantant attempts to get something for free.
The next time this happens to you? Just say no. I promise you’re not missing out on a thing — except perhaps, building someone else’s business for free.
You’re right, it’s downright unethical and bloggers’ individual content needs to be protected. It’s one thing for someone to scrape an RSS for their fake blog, it’s another to actually outrank the original blogger in Google and effectively steal their traffic too. Both practices should be made illegal. I advise any blogger to whom this happens to contact the owners of the offending site. If it’s one of those fake blogs with no contact address/#, there are still ways of getting in touch and pursuing them if they fail to cooperate.