We received an interesting email this week from an American advertising agency:
“I may have contacted you in the past, but wanted to reach out again to inquire about the possibility of advertising on your blog in the form of sponsored guest posts.
Either I can have content written or you can write content that is relevant to your audience and helps to promote our client’s service. We then pay for that post and the opportunity to have exposure to your readers.”
We have politely declined the offer. We are not going to have advertisers influencing or controlling what we write….. any more than we would have advertisers influencing what we say in the council chamber.
If we write something positive about a company it’s because one of us wants to write that. (Often in our ‘community leadership’ role to give some publicity to a local business). We don’t accept ‘freebies’ either for writing stuff, they are against the whole ethos of the code of conduct for councillors.