Marketing on blogs

A Romanian online gift shop launched 2 days ago a campaign named “Blog this!” The main idea is to write an article on your blog which follows the rules: - the article must contain a link to Christmas Gifts category - the article must not look like and advertisement, but cannot be strongly negative nor defaming - after you publish the article send them an email with the link - the publisher must have at least 10 articles in his blog It’s a win-win situation. The problem is that one side wins more, other side less, exponentially less… This type of advertising can be included in the broadly defined guerrilla marketing, with some viral parts, also similar with a stealth campaign, buzz marketing & co (use of social networking – blogs, the prize – I doubt the actually paid for the ads they are offering, maybe it’s a joint-venture campaign )… The goal is obvious: achieve a better visibility for a category, create a buzz, get inboud links (from >100 blogs, with the condition to be indexed by google), increase number of visitors on the website, basicly promote the store using "word-of-mouth" and buzz. The effect: - in 2 days they got 27 winners ( and all the good or bad content and inbound links) - some good “Gossip” and buzz from Radu Ionescu, Zoso, Tudor Mateescu, Blogoree Blog and others It is nice to analyze the effect of the campaign in January 2007, maybe they will publish some figures… or not. At leat check google to see how many inbound links they got and from where, and position in google for some keywords (Christmas gifts :D ), number of visitors, referrals. What can I say more? it’s a campaign, and from the figures point of view I believe it is a profitable one. Moral and profit are not in the same league.