In the past five years or so, blogs have become money making machines for some people. So much so that people have started jumping on the blog bandwagon just to make money.
I am not one of those people.
I started this blog off originally as part of an application for Weddingbee (a compilation of bride-to-be bloggers) and when I didn’t make the cut I still decided to continue blogging because I liked it so much. Needless to say, profitability was never something that I cared about.
As the blog grew during writing my wedding recaps, I decided to start taking it more seriously and took the plunge into moving everything over to a self-hosted wordpress site. It allowed me more flexibility and greater options for the layout of the blog and its contents. Unfortunately that flexibility also came with a price. I now had to (and still have to) pay for monthly hosting fees, which while they are pretty nominal still make this a less than cheap hobby.
Since moving to wordpress, I have gotten inundated with requests from companies to do paid sponsored posts (which means a company pays a blogger to write about the company’s product on the blogger’s blog in return for a small fee). Since blogging has become so profitable, these kinds of offers are being pursued even by some major fortune 500 companies (a true testament to the power of bloggers).
While the money would be nice, after a lot of consideration, I have decided not to pursue these opportunities for several reasons. First of all, I never want my readers to feel as though I’m writing just to make a buck. I start this blog off as a way to pay it forward to other brides since I had benefited so much from wedding blogs myself. It almost felt unfair not to contribute. I don’t want to muddle that initial sweet intention with paid content. Second of all, you guys come here to read about me and my experiences, not the experiences someone paid me to write. The idea of having a company tell me what topic to write about seems incredibly counter intuitive to the purpose of this blog—expressing myself in a uncensored way. Finally, I never want to be considered a sellout. I want to write about a product because I like it and because I think it would benefit other people—not because I was getting paid to. I never want you as my readers to feel like I’m being less than honest with you. I just couldn’t justify making a quick buck if it was to the detriment of my integrity and reliability—two qualities I hold in high esteem.
So to maintain my integrity and my beliefs, I just wanted to let you all know that I will never be featuring a sponsored post on here. I am open to have sponsors pay for ads n the side of my blog but I want my content to be my content.
So no offense to those of you who do sponsored posts, this is just a decision I’ve made for myself and my blog. And that’s the great part about blogs—we can choose to make them whatever we want. And I am choose to protect this baby of mine.
Are you surprised to know that companies pay bloggers to write sponsored posts?
