Blogging authenticity and sponsors

Ifyou have a popular blog, and someone offers you a huge amount of money to write about a product they offer, as if it was something you had stumbled upon by yourself, would you do it?

On Gademode.dk we were recently approached by Carat – the biggest media bureau in Denmark. They wanted to do a collaboration with us, becoming part of a new campaign for Bianco Footwear (Bianco.com). They asked us to come up with an idea. We discussed their proposal and agreed that we were interested in a collaboration. Nevertheless, we didn’t feel comfortable to do anything that did not feel sincere. Therefore we developed a personal working concept.

This is not about being idealistic and naive

This is not about being idealistic and naive. Of course it’s nice to earn money through blogging. If one however compromises the authenticity of your blog, you might lose some  of your followers and readers. Therefore our credo: Keeping it authentic, for us is a long term business strategy.

Keeping it authentic is thus simply a long term business strategy

Therefore, our idea was a three-way-deal: Bianco would pay us to create a series of articles on our site – ‘premium content’ that we wouldn’t normally have the time to write. Bianco has no influence on the actual content, except that we agreed that it should be about shoes in general. Since Bianco pays for it, we can give it out to our users for free. In this way, it not just us, benefitting economically from advertisement and Bianco benefitting from exposure on our site, our users also get something they otherwise wouldn’t get.