Commercial Marketing
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Hi, I am a writer, broadcaster and producer. I am a freelance and do not run any company. I am not an inc. or a ltd. or anything that consitutes that I am trading as a company. Am I able to use my blog to market myself? Let’s say that designed a vanity or biographical blog which contained examples of my work, my work history, and a contact email, at what point does a vanity/self-biographical blog become a commercial marketing blog? Remember that I do not run a company, I am a freelance. I did search the TOS and the words “commercial” and “marketing” are not included, this is in reference to someone recently writing “commercial marketing is not permitted” in a post here.
There must be a million other examples where the line between a biographical/resume/fan-site blog and commercial blog will be very hard to draw. I could be an artist with a blog which contains scanned examples of my work .. “email me for commissions”, or I could be a singer or musician, a film-maker, web designer, cartoonist, fashion writer, successful freelance business analyst with a hot resume .. the list must be endless. At what point is a site about yourself considered commercial marketing?
Can someone clear this up for me please.
Thanks very much,
Bernie. -
Your best bet is to send in a note to staff support explaining exactly what you want to do and asking if this conforms to the TOS. It sounds fine to me, but I’m not the one whose opinion matters.
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Well yes of course, but I thought it would be good to have a thread here about how freelancers can or cannot blog about themsleves, to help many others, who I’m sure must be curious. So to keep that info private would be a waste. Maybe the TOS could be amended to include a statement about this topic. At the moment I cannot find anything about it.
And in any case, what could possibly be wrong with using a blog to advertise?
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<i>Well yes of course, but I thought it would be good to have a thread here about how freelancers can or cannot blog about themsleves, to help many others, who I’m sure must be curious. So to keep that info private would be a waste. Maybe the TOS could be amended to include a statement about this topic. At the moment I cannot find anything about it.</i>
I believe the TOS are deliberately kept in very general terms to allow staff to use their discretion in these cases. So I suggest that you contact them giving as much information as you can about your particular needs. If you want to post their response here, that would be great.
<i>And in any case, what could possibly be wrong with using a blog to advertise? </i>
Well, nothing in principle, but WP.com have stated that they don’t want blogs hosted by them for free to be used for that. If you want to advertise, you’ll have to go elsewhere.
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Our primary concerns are with:
* Banner ads
* Sponsored/paid posts (PayPerPost and similar)
* Sponsored/paid links
* Blogs used to game the search enginesOne link to your employer or business in your sidebar or about page is fine. A resume on your about page or similar is fine. We’d consider “email me for commissions” as roughly equivalent to a link to your business. If the whole blog is geared up for selling your product or services, we’ll take a much more critical view of it than if it’s just a good blog that people might actually want to read.
Regarding writers: some of the “freelance writers” we hear from are the “buy my free e-book and make a zillion dollars as a freelance writer” MLM crowd (and I don’t mean to suggest Bernie is one of those, I haven’t seen his blog). We don’t take kindly to such blogs.
Some guaranteed ways to get the attention of the TOS staff include (but aren’t limited to):
* Making many blogs that link to your own site (or a commercial site that is paying you for links, or a squidoo lens or technorati page that indirectly links to your sites)
* Creating blogs full of “how to” content that links to your commercial site from every article (SEO/ppc/make a zillion dollars with adsense people, I’m looking at you)
* Creating blogs full of “expert” content that is duplicated on sites that pay the authors for publishing articles (with links to associatedcontent, ezinearticles etc, whether the author is you or someone else)
* Creating blogs full of “self help” content that just happens to recommend your own product in every article
* Creating blogs full of content cribbed from Wikipedia that links to a squidoo lens or technorati page that just happens to be full of links to your sites
* Using dozens of tags or irrelevant tags in ways that annoy other bloggersSorry that we’re a bit reluctant to make positive statements about what is allowed, but unfortunately the SEO and spammer crowd are very good at learning how to stay just within the rules (they hold seminars on how to do it. Seriously). I realize that’s not very helpful for legit bloggers and writers, but that’s the price of keeping WordPress.com relatively free of spam and full of quality content.
As a rule of thumb: if your primary reasons for making a blog are things like “search engine rankings”, “keyword placement”, “CPM”, “lead generation” and so on, you are likely to find WordPress.com a hostile place.
If your primary reason for making a blog is something like “I like to write”, “I’m a blogger”, “I want people to hear what I have to say” or something like that, welcome to WordPress.com.
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I appreciate the reply tellyworth.
Let me say staright away that I have absolutely no underhand uses for my blog, like linking to search sites, paid links, paid posts or any of that ilk. My blog is purely professional.
Here is exactly where I’m coming from. I am a published print magazine feature journalist and published author. I am also a radio presenter (broadcaster), voice-over artist, and radio producer. I am a media creative. I am freelance. No company. I think the coolest way to have a website today is to have a blog. Hosting and design of blogs is also simple and quick. On my blog I will have very short MP3 demos of my live radio shows, voice-over work and production (I love the MP3 players here at WordPress!). I will also list a resume, have a few photos and a contact email addy. That’s it.
If my blog can also inspire others into my fields of work, attract new friends in the same or related fields, then these would be a huge bonus. If with my blog I can join a WordPress club or network of fellow WP bloggers who also work in the media (if such communities exist or are planned) etc. etc., then great too.
Honorable but professional intentions only.
Can I do this at WordPress?
Bernie.
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@ tsp, amen to that. I’ve been teaching freelancers to use Blogspot/Blogger instead of WP.com for exactly this reason, fear of ToS breaches.
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Bernie, I am sure tellyworth will answer you back, but if I am reading your post and his post correctly, it looks like it should be fine. Once again though, better wait for staff to respond again.
Trent
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Rigth now and for the next five to ten years, the offline traditional media is making the cross-over to the internet. To the professional freelancers the blog is the most pro-looking way to get a website, with an easy learning curve and no html web design and hosting hassles to worry about. To traditional media people the blog looks like a professionally-designed newspaper with TV and audio. It’s really attractive. It looks like a professional could be taken seriously with a blog .. shame about the word ‘blog’ though to be honest, it sound really cheap and tacky, almost childlike actually, maybe someone could give blogs the respectable name it deserves one day. So the traditional Press people love it, writers love the look, the TV and film people are loving it, and the bands and radio people must think they’re in heaven with a promo tool that is all once a press release, a video, and an album.
And this is where definitions and lines must surely be re-drawn. Blogs started life as online diaries of text written by university types and software developers, now, blogs are becoming the complete, heavenly media package I have described. A poet can now recite his poetry beside his own poem, a painter can add a piece of music to acompany a slide-show of his work, and for media freelancers it is the ultimate resume. If I were WP, I would probably be wetting myself at the business opportunities with all this (and I’m only talkikg about Media .. there’s a whole lot of professions out there). If we have to pay for the privilege of having a blog, then I would gladly pay. But I think that to pay just for the sake of a principle would give me a headache. The theme templates would contain designs suitable for my field, there would also be a community of people just like me, and a few other perks like a WP sweatshirt with collars, buttons and cufflinks. So maybe it’s worth planning ahead for this type of expansion. You have the foundation: the blog, a professional-looking website that’s attractive to professionals and freelancers .. and next companies.
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Well yes, but the question is, should you be at this PARTICULAR blogging platform or not. You can have a WordPress blog on an independent server with none of the restrictions of a WP.com blog. Or you could register with a different blog provider.
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Well that’s your question, not my question. My question is whether a freelancer can use a free WP blog to promote himself, and WP’s explaination of the decision, if they want to give one, should contain a clear definition of the distinction between a “blog about yourself” and one that crosses the commercial marketing threshold.
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bernie: if I understand you correctly I think we’d be fine with that, within the limitations I wrote above.
I guess the key question to ask yourself is: will this be a blog that’s just an advertising brochure, or is it something that people might actually want to read and come back to? The latter is what we like to see on WordPress.com. If it’s the former, you might want to consider a self-hosted WordPress.org blog instead.
Provided you don’t have many dubious blogs and you’re not way over the line, the worst case scenario is that we’ll ask you to contact us to discuss the issue and fix any problems that we see.
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I think my blog will be a bit of both. I will discover all the things that are possible with a blog, and my original purpose may well be broadened into exciting new areas. I would like to see how much I can do with the .com, learn the WP way, and if further down the line a .org blog suits me better then I will do that.
Thanks very much for responding,
Bernie.I’ll leave it open if I may in case anybody else has thoughts on this topic.
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