Today in Women’s Wear Daily an article titled Marketing’s New Rage: Brands Sponsoring Influential Bloggers by Cate Corcran talked about the changing landscape of retail marketing in the blogging community. Banner ads have been lucrative for some bloggers in the past, but today, companies engage bloggers in many different ways, such as design collaborations, sponsored posts, and guest blogging. In the early days, it was relatively easy to get bloggers to do things for free, but as blogs gain traffic and influence demand makes it impossible to justify the volume of work it takes to work with companies without compensation.
The article quotes, me, Jennine Jacob as founder of IFB, along with Jessica Schroeder of What I Wore, Jane Aldridge of Sea of Shoes. It’ll be interesting to see how this trend grows, I know from experience things are a lot different today than they were even six months ago. Which is great for the new fashion blogger wishing to make a career, when I started, my goals were to have comments on my posts! And that was three years ago!
You need a subscription to WWD (it’s well worth the investment) to read the full article, but here is one snippet of one of my quotes in the article.
Payments and gifts must always be disclosed, per the new FTC rules. [Jennine] Jacob contended that it is unfair to single out bloggers when glossy fashion magazines do the same thing, but fully supports the principle. Recently, she was moved to write and post a manifesto on the topic, called the “IFB Fair Compensation Manifesto.” It can be summed up as: If you are going to do advertising, identify it, and get paid for it.
“We don’t want blogging to evolve into this thing where bloggers are so starstruck by brands that they lose all objectivity — then they’re not the great thing people came to them for in first place,” she said. “Freebies may be OK, but we can’t just work for freebies and try to pass off promotional things as editorial content because it’s not fair to readers, ourselves or the companies.”
If you’d like to learn more about monetizing your blog and growing your influence, be sure to register for the IFB Evolving Influence Conference happening on September 9th.
Awesome. Look how far we have come!! Thanks to your constant support of fashion bloggers, we have made some amazing accomplishments. Looking forward to even more success <3