Genius:
Ed Shull, of US Web, is a self proclaimed marketing genius. I am not. As an online marketer I do follow links though...

Following the Links:
It all gets a bit circular, but Nick W points at Gray Wolf and Gray Hat News, who points at Blog Herald, who points at Boston.com's story about bloggers taking cash for endorsements.

There are some blog shill posts from around October, but news of this shill technique started to spread about a month ago. While it was going on for about a half year, it only took about a month from discovery to major news media coverage. Viral Negative Marketing:
Writers get paid to write, so that is nothing new, but these blogs were writing fake endorsements of products they have never tried. Yes, all good marketing has some amount of a fib to it, but more than getting paid for fake endorsements these people were getting paid to link to a site. A low cost distributed link buying scheme with a negative viral buzz.

Cutting Corners:
When you buy a directory listing you are buying the human review and the link, but their is nothing deceitful about placing your site in a directory. Many blogs have strong link profiles, and instead of trying to build the site up in a natural manner, US Web decided to promote Dot Flowers by paying random bloggers $5 each to shill for the flower site.

I have friends in the online flower business, who also are aggressive marketers, but they have never used blogger shills to promote their products. Why? Maybe they are not marketing geniuses. Or...

Blogging 101:
There are five or six fundamental things most any online marketer should know about blogs:

• they are viral

• information spreads quickly
• they often house opinionated voices
• it is easy to track patterns
• while the concept might be founded in b/s, many bloggers pride their writing and the whole blog idea around authenticity
• nobody likes to feel deceived

A Smarter Way to Market to Bloggers:
Not too long ago I also thought about buying blog links on the cheap, but I was going to do it in a manner that tracked how far or how many countries the money went to, in a way that made it look like there was also some ulterior motive besides just gaining links. There are many easy ways to disguise the true goals, lower the risk, and make the idea harder to replicate.

Creating an ulterior motive which is well aligned with your brand makes the idea even more compelling. A currency trading, insurance, or travel website could create many cheap & fun marketing ideas. A flower site should be able to come up with many ideas as well.

How to Market a Flower Site to Bloggers:
Smart marketers might go through one at a time, and do things like offer certain bloggers free flowers for mothers day, or send them free flowers on their birthday, or blog anniversary.

They might even send that person permission to order free flowers for a couple friends who blog (think how Gmail spread).

Cost vs Reward:
Odds are if you did something like that:

• the cost would be greater; and

• the growth would be slower

but:

• it would be harder for others to reproduce;

• the risk would be lower; and
• you would likely get honest positive viral marketing that provided long term results.

Imagine how many free links you would get if you were the first flower company to make the Blogger Bouquet^TM.

You could also pay a well known blogger & designer to design your site so that they profile your site and show it off to others.

Short Term Strategies:
People with short term goals, or stupid / lazy / short sighted marketers might not think out the long term results of their marketing strategy.

They might go to a large classifieds website, such as Craigslist, and post they are willing to give bloggers $5 to shill for thier clients, as Boston.com noted:

The more companies can get bloggers to link to their websites, the higher their sites will appear on Google's search list. Google ranks its listings, in part, on how many Web pages link to a website. So paying $5 to a few thousand bloggers is a small price for companies such as Dot Flowers to move up closer to the first page of results in a Google search.

For that reason, some advertisers joke that blog actually is an acronym for "better listing on Google."

Google and Fast Cheap SEO:
The problem with a technique being so blatent is that Google might not like it. An unsaid fundamental rule of SEO is that if you are using somewhat deceptive SEO techniques that get your techniques and your clients sites featured in major news media you are probably in error.

As the disconnect between cost and effect increases and as media coverage increases there is a greater chance that search engines will want to penalize or discount an SEO technique.

Does Anyone Claim to be an Unethical Marketer?

"We try to be as ethical as possible," said Ed Shull, chief executive at USWeb, the ad agency that pays bloggers to post about Dot Flowers and other companies.

"In our opinion, paying bloggers is no different than Tiger Woods getting money to wear the Nike logo."

I bet your clients are hoping Google agrees with you.

Although those blog posts might be ethical, even after reviewing the posts, you found nothing wrong with people making shill posts about the death of the Pope to sell funeral flowers? And trying to used the racist top ranked Jew site as an excuse to market your services?

Then again, that blogger needed $20 and they are also interested in injet cartridges and think you are a marketing genius Ed.

Other Bloggers Fond of Dot Flowers / US Web:
http://www.birddogdigital.com/blog/2005/04/flower-shop-on-my-treo-650.ht...
http://www.shaunshull.com/blog/selling-flowers-online
http://www.jeffcutler.com/blog.html
http://www.salsman.net/mainblog/C1167117989/
http://psychjourney_blogs.typepad.com/mike_chen/
http://www.mikechenwriting.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=50
http://www.unmatchedstyle.com/gallery/dot_flowers.php
http://www.cssdrive.com/index.php/main/galleryitem/dot_flowers/
http://watcher.modblog.net/
http://www.shaunshull.com/
http://billyhallowell.blogspot.com/2005/04/want-some-flowers.html
http://blog.stephenw.net/2005/04/great-new-flower-service.html
http://www.stylegala.com/archive/almost_200409.htm
http://www.pixelgangster.de/20040922
http://spiralgirl.blogspot.com/2005/04/flowers.html
http://www.wittmannwebweaving.com/archives/2005/01/13/apple-excitement-i...

Pricing Blog Posts by PageRank:
Some bloggers are even suggesting they should be paid based on their PageRank:

I like this idea that they give bloggers a choice of subjects to blog on. But I think they ought to pay on a different scale instead of a flat fee. Maybe pay by scale of traffic or page rank? Otherwise it wouldn’t attract the arguably more valuable high-profile bloggers.

You gotta love that :)

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