I found out about Business2Blogger a few months ago, and signed up as a “blogger” to learn more about what the service is all about. I’ve also been considering trying out their service as a “business”, so when I noticed that my friend Rosalie Gale from Unanimous Craft had set up a business campaign, I contacted her to see if she’d write up a review of the experience once it was over. Below is her personal story of how a campaign on Business2Blogger works. Thanks for sharing this with us Rosalie!
Business2Blogger is – I believe – a relatively new service (their website says 186 campaigns have been completed in 2010). The basic idea is that if you are a business, you can sign up for an account and send out a campaign request to bloggers. You offer them something in return for blogging about whatever it is you want them to blog about. And if you are a blogger, you can sign up and then get emails that list the current paid blogging opportunities from businesses.
Both kinds of accounts have different levels of membership.
As a blogger, you can sign up for a “Basic Status” account or you can sign up for a “Preferred Status” account. As a Preferred status member, you get the emails about potential paid blogging opportunities four hours earlier than the Basic status members. The only thing required of you as a Preferred status member is that you must either post a banner or button on your blog – or write a blog post about Business2Blogger.
As a business, you can sign up for a free account and send out one campaign (a request for bloggers) per month. You receive contact information for 10 bloggers who said they would be interested in blogging about your topic. You can then pay $50 to obtain information about the ten most highly trafficked blogs who were interested in your campaign request.
I signed up for a Basic Status blogger account and a Business account.
My Business Campaign:
I sent out a request for bloggers to create lists on Unanimous Craft of their favorite indie business resources. They were free to choose the topic of the list. Then, I asked them to write a blog post about their list and the chosen resources. I offered one month of advertising in exchange for writing the blog post which – at the time – had a value of $20.
Then, I waited for quite some time. The same day that I had given up on ever hearing back, I received an email letting me know that people were interested in my campaign after all. Yay! I went to the website and got the contact information for 10 randomly selected people who indicated they were interested in creating a list on Unanimous Craft and writing a blog about it. I decided to contact all 10 bloggers, even though some of their sites didn’t really match the theme of Unanimous Craft. Of the 10, I heard back from 3 bloggers who seemed genuinely excited about the project. All three of them fulfilled the request:
List: Getting Over White Wall Syndrome
Blog post: http://www.suchcoolstuff.net/2010/07/unanimous-craft.html
List: My Favorite Places for Fun, Educational Items
Blog: Get 2 Scrappin’
List: Fort Worth’s Five Most Fabulous Etsy Artists Mommies Love
Blog: http://www.onemamasdailydrama.com/
I contacted Business2Blogger to see if they would allow me to get the contact info for the 10 bloggers with the highest traffic to facilitate this review, but I never heard back from them.
This month, I sent out an identical request for bloggers in a second campaign. I got a response back from Business2Blogger that the ad I was offering wasn’t enough compensation for the bloggers and that they like to have a minimum of $15 value. I wrote back and explained that ads on my site are $20/month and then I received an email asking me to resubmit my campaign – which I did.
I just got a notice that my campaign request was accepted and will go out in an email to bloggers on August 3rd.
My Blogger Account
I signed up for my blogger account at the Basic status member a couple of weeks ago and haven’t received any notices about paid blogging opportunities as of yet. I assume that I’ll get a notice on August 3rd when my campaign request is scheduled to go out. I may consider moving up to the Preferred status account once I participate in some of the campaigns as a blogger but I didn’t want to promote their service by adding an ad on my blog before I try it out.
Summary
In short, I think this could be a popular service and I like to see any way that bloggers and small businesses can receive compensation for what they do. I do, however, think that Business2Blogger has a few wrinkles to iron out in the smoothness of the service and response to customer emails. On a scale of 1-10, I would give them about a 6 right now.
I do like the tone of the website. It is written in a semi-sarcastic very casual manner that I particularly enjoy. As I said above though, they need to work on being responsive to emails. If you have a casual, personal tone to your emails and website content, you need to spend the extra effort to make your actual interactions casual and personal too.
Another concern is that the majority of campaign requests will be for bloggers to review products in exchange for samples. There is nothing wrong with this — as long as the receipt of compensation doesn’t cloud a bloggers judgment when reviewing the item. I hope Business2Blogger has a plan in place to ensure that they don’t get a reputation for being a service where businesses can pay for positive reviews of products.
All that said, I signed up for a second business campaign and I plan to offer up my blogging services once I get some opportunities in the mail — so I was satisfied enough with the process to go another round.
Rosalie Gale is a waterproof Shower Art maker, stand-up comedian and blogger who is currently obsessed with German board games, Bikram yoga and embroidery. She runs bARTer Sauce, an experiment in trading for art and odd objects, and she also launched Unanimous Craft – a directory of resources for Indie Business.
