I’ve had a few opportunites drop by my email box in regards to MusicReviewZone.com. Some fall into the category of providing content for backlinks to being sent music CDs for review, or advertising related.

Each time someone from another company has approached me I’ve tried to weigh up the offer and decide how best to proceed based on my site’s progression and growth, not just to grab the offer because – well … hell – it’s an offer!

I find it incredibly important to put due dilligence into offers. Are they right for my site? Will it help the site grow? What does the company making the offer want to achieve? Any ramifications?

I recently had an offer from a leading UK tabloid newspaper. They wanted to send me their breaking news stories so that I could publish them on my site. They wanted full disclosure of the articles origin through backlinks. So – for every article of theirs that I posted on my site, I would say "written by <link to newspapers website here>".

It was clear that they wanted to broaden their readership in other countries as well as improve their SEO by deeplinking.

I thought the idea would be great for my site as well as theirs. I only had a couple of questions:

1. If, for any reason, the arrangement is terminated – can you give any assurances that your company will not seek to have all previously published articles removed from my site?
2. Is this a short-term or long term offer?

The reasoning behind these questions should be pretty clear. I didn’t want to post all of their articles and build my site only to have it decimated when they demanded that I remove all of their content. That would make my site look pretty bad, right?

The reason for the second question was to guage whether or not I would be upping my daily post count on a short or long term basis. Ideally I wanted a long term offer. A short term offer would only help my site – short term – and after the offer expired, I’d be dropping back down to the 3 posts that I have published each day.

When I asked these questions – I was attempting to solidify the offer with proper details. I have yet to hear back from the company. That was over a week ago.

In a vain attempt to rescue the deal, I emailed my contact again a few days ago – but still – nothing.

I am now not sure what their mindset is – you know – why they have seemingly bailed. When I mentioned assurances about the previously published posts – did they freak and think "LEGAL"? When I asked them if it was a long-term offer did they think I was second guessing them?

So – I am left wondering if my protectionism scared them away. In protecting my own assets have I come across as being more business and less blogger?

What do you think?

Categories: Experience, MusicReviewZone.com, My Sites

I recently submitted my post on Integrating RSS feeds into your website… to Digg and Reddit in order to gauge the response and potential traffic flow that can be generated by doing this.

Submitting the post to Reddit went off without a hitch – I signed up and submitted the post. Simple. Digg on the other hand threw a little gotcha into the mix – which did indeed … get me.

Read the rest of this entry »

Categories: Experience