I would strongly recommend against doing that. If you want to be on blogs and you want to pay for it, you can put ads through blog advertising networks.

Directly paying bloggers for politics for the purpose of them voting for you and campaigning for you can leave a bad taste in the mouth.

If ever this does happen, I think the blogger should at least put a disclosure statement in his site.

I’d recommend having the Politician invite bloggers over for coffee sessions though No strings attached.

-Carlo

Let say I am running for political office and I ask you as a consultant, would you also recommend that I spend money and pay bloggers to promote me as a brand?

- Ed

The same can be said for bloggers who put ad networks or adsense on their blogs. In fact, adsense is “worse” because the blogger has minimal control what comes up there.

Personally I don’t see anything wrong with it as long as the blogger puts a disclosure on the post or on the ad that it’s sponsored by a particular company.

Ultimately it depends on the the blogger and the company if they can reach a win-win agreement.

Cheers,
Carlo

If I am getting this right, you’re suggesting companies to incentivize (in short, pay money) bloggers will promote their products and services will a call-to-action?

Isn’t this tactic somewhat unethical? It’s positive reinforcement but will prevent a blogger from promoting a product/service that sucks just to make money?

- Ruby

What’s important is that you give the blogger something to work with so he/she has a call-to-action in the post. In this case you can strike a deal with the blogger so that he gets a referral fee for each applicant that gets hired. Process would be something like:

1. Blogger posts job opening on his/her blog, asks applicants to e-mail resume with his referral code.

2. Your company gets the resumes and screens them accordingly.

3. Those that get hired through referrals will get tagged. You pay the blogger his fee.

Of course you can fine tune this and tweak this some more since this is just something that came to my mind while reading your comment.

Hope this helps!