One of the biggest pet peeves I have is the whole perception of bloggers like myself, is that we get stuff for “free” and/or that’s the only reason that we do what we do.
Even more so are the people that only talk to me when they see me post something that I got to review and /or got for a perk/ at a review conference,etc to be like
Oh em gees, you go that for free! I want one too, share your contact info with me.
which comes with the hidden message:
I know I haven’t talked to you in 5 years but you’d surely want to hook me up too right? I am too lazy to look into this on my own but since you have contacts you’d be more than happy to share them, because nichole you are just too sweet and a pushover to say no right?
WRONG. WRONG. WRONG. Seriously if you aren’t going to talk to me about anything else unfriend me and walk away.
Let me just say: it’s not like I threw up a blog, and started getting paid post/reviews the next day
Having a blog is work. I have been blogging since before it was blogging. I have only been reviewing for 2 years. and even though I have got many things to review it’s not easy. Do you know how many pitches I have pitched and never heard back from? or even worse the people who are extremely nit picky and /or rude and will send you mean emails back that will hurt your feelings and make you wonder if it is worth keep going on with? Or the neurotic PR people that you encounter that want outlandish and crazy things that make you wonder what they are smoking?
You have to have pretty high numbers now a days when it comes to reviewing. Used to be you could just be starting out and do pretty well. now a days people want you to have a domain, want you to have PR and low alexa and increasingly they want you to have a minimum of 500 followers on FB and twitter.
I just got back from reviewers retreat. I have only posted one picture of my swag ..a very blurry iphone pic took in the early hours of the morning, and i have had no less than 5 people saying oh wow how’d you get this for free, and how can i get it for free too?
In the case of the review swag, I feel like I paid for it. I paid to go to a conference and to stay at hotel for 3 days and 2 nights and I paid for my conference pass. It wasn’t really free in my mind. I also will end up blogging about individual items and taking more pictures and further promoting these companies. therefore, again I will be “working” in a sense to get the word out there that hey these companies are awesome and sponsored whatever item for me at a review conference so maybe you should check them out because of that. (and by no means am I saying I didn’t appreciate my swag. because I did. I do. It rocks..and I will be writing more about it later. not because I HAVE to but because I want to!)
When I get an item to straight out review, I work because I come up with a pitch for that company, I work out negotiations on receiving the item and then I further negotiate when it comes to doing a giveaway as well. I use the item and then I take notes and come up with in depth things to say about it. I explore on many angles and sit down and formulate in depth and very long posts about the item. Then, in the case of a giveaway I promote even further and so on.
In the case of Klout perks..yeah.. they are freebies. but freebies I have gotten because they see that I am influential on a topic. so if I hadn’t put in work I wouldn’t be getting the item!
The only things I really can say are free are samples. like for example the target beauty bags and things like that. .. because I don’t do anything to get them except fill out a form.
I write this post..and I will probably add to it and write more in the future… because I am honestly fed up with the image that some bloggers have gave to the review community in the fact that they request items that they don’t need, and that they don’t even want just to say that they got the item..and in a lot of cases they probably did it more than one or two times and maybe even didn’t write a blog post. They are the ones that paved the way , and in a sense have made it more difficult for those of us who are serious and want to put in the work and don’t want just another “free” item.
Wow. This turned into a bigger post than I thought, and I don’t think i’m near finished but i’m going to let this simmer for a while…if you agree with me have comments, etc please leave them!
[…] This was a hard one for me to come up with! I really like this post that I wrote last year, and I am thinking about updating it as well I don’t really “get stuff for free”, it’s called review, ie I work for it! […]