So admittedly, I am somewhat shameless in my self promotion and I am good with that. Very early on in my career I learned the value of self promotion from former NYS Assemblyman Sam Colman. Mr. Colman’s office would put out press releases nearly every day-and almost any subject. The why when I asked Mr. Colman one day, “If I’m not out promoting myself, no one is.”
As I think it’s the case with most bloggers, I get a couple of email contacts per week from people looking for promotion-the ask is for me to do a product review. Usually it’s a mobile app or website, sometimes it’s a physical product and randomly (based on time, level of effort and personal interest) I will agree.
Lately though, I’ve been asked to do reviews for a couple of dating/hook up type websites. I have some history working with dating sites (I consulted for one when I left CBS last year) but that’s not very well-known.
Generally, this blog gets good traffic and is well targeted so it is appealing for certain brands.
While I am not sure I want to spend a lot of time reviewing dating websites (a subject for, I another blog post) I guarantee I am not spending money to review your site or your product. The inner journalist in me will not accept money for writing a review. But the pragmatist in me will not expend money (and time) to review your product either.
And this is the shameless behavior.
I ask people to download my book-but I don’t offer a coupon. I ask my friends (people I know directly) to write me up a review as well. I hope everyone writes a review for my book.
But I’ve never even considered sending out blind emails to a blog owner and giving them a link to my book, asking them for money and then saying please give me a nice review. That’s can’t be the business model for some of these sites, can it? It certainly does not seem sustainable and seems like it would be a waste of human bandwidth to send out those emails.
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