Corporate Marketing Hits the Mom Blogs

Joan Conde of Mamacita passed this along: when she got an email notifying her that she’d been named a “Top 100 Mom Blogger,” she was excited. And then she started looking at the email more closely.

I was excited, I work hard on my blog. Of course I want to win an award.

But Mama didn’t raise no fool. I took a second look: I realized that the email had been cut and pasted using two fonts. The actual name of my blog wasn’t mentioned in the body of the email and the link provided wasn’t active. Very unprofessional. Curious, I pasted the link myself and followed it where I discovered “Mother’s Day Central.”

Turns out, my so-called “award” did not come from an actual organization, as implied in the email. There is no information on the site about an organization or its staff at all. There is not even a “contact” link. The site did direct me, however, to sites offering flowers, jewelry, etc. “Mothers Day Central” proved to be nothing more than a link farm. Our recognition was provided by a non-existent organization, via a site that would likely disappear right after Mother’s Day.The object of the “award” became clear: to create sales for the site owner. Posting a link to the awarding “organization” is just free advertising for Mother’s Day Central.

Respect Your Mama

Adding to my ire is the fact that the link sites all offer affiliate partnerships which any blogger can enroll in and possibly profit from. For the unitiated, this means that for every sale made through a click through from your site, you can receive a percentage.

Thus the awards provide free advertising for site owner and search engine marketer, Daniel Kovach. He runs a also runs a link farm on blogging. Here is a link to an article he wrote on search engine marketing vs. television advertising for the Super Bowl.

Mr. Kovach’s very simple, cynical approach was to “reward” moms in order to make money from their considerable audiences. And the blogs, which include “Dooce,” represent millions of readers. The inherent lack of respect evidenced in this manipulative marketing scheme insults bloggers and their readers. Women are no strangers to obvious, even cheesy marketing gimics. But this award is pure exploitation.

It was probably inevitable that marketers would start trying to exploit blog audiences (even if they’re not willing to pay ad rates comparable to what they pay for print publications with similar circulation numbers). And we have a lot of readers. The mom blogs have millions of readers, and feminist blogs do, too. Feministe had an average of over 100,000 hits a day last month, which is not only far more than the daily average when I started here just over a year ago, it’s nearly twice as much as the real live newspaper I wrote for right out of college. And we’re not the biggest, or only, feminist blog out there.

I don’t handle the business end of the blog, but Jill keeps us advised on what happens with the ad revenue and whatnot. But it does bug me that people are out there looking to exploit bloggers — who are pretty much all amateurs — and their audiences in a way that they wouldn’t do with traditional media outlets.