How do you feel about bloggers marketing products?

Its natural to surf the web for reviews on products you are interested in buying to find out the good, the bad, the ugly. In fact, its smart! But how do you feel about bloggers marketing products to you? Bloggers have quickly become a hot spot for PR reps to get the word out in front of a consumer, especially a mom consumer, and offer up great products and reviews to put that companies name in front of your eyes. I know I get asked daily to talk about a variety of things (and btw, I turn down most of it unless I feel like it will benefit  my visitor in some way).

For the blogger, we get the  feeling of acting like Santa Clause and giving away some cool stuff to our users as a thankyou for coming by and being a part of our community. As the company, it gets direct interaction with the people, in a medium that commercials and magazine ads just cant provide. And Ill be honest, it makes us here feel slightly ‘cool’ to offer up a product that  we, ourselves, cant afford to buy. Some products we giveaway, we are contacted over, and some, we seek out for reasons. MomDot carries a variety of PR pushed products, Mom Owned business pushed products, and products we wanted to fill a need for in our contests.

Now here at MomDot, we prefer to focus on smaller companies and mom owned companies. We do our best to fill our contests and interviews with moms that are trying to make it. In fact, MomDot was started on the premise that all people should come together to cross promote each other. As an online business owner myself, I was always seeking out a way to share my product with consumers, and I was asking bloggers to do it. I actually wanted a place where a mom doesnt have to give up a review in order to have us share the page (hence the interviews). We always leave that completly up to the mom if she wants a review, but do not require it to give her front page eyes. Its our goal to direct you to a new product, a new blogger, a new friendship or something that fits your needs that you never thought of. Its not our goal to push Walmart, Target, and KFC, kwim?

But how do you feel about Moms blogging about things like Dole? Dole for example gave us a nice $100 prize to give out to a lucky winner and I just couldn’t resist it.  I use Dole. We actually buy Dole Fruit cups. I wasn’t lying when I say my daughter eats them every day. I know that my grocery bill is high and I wanted to pass that awesome prize on to someone that needs it. But then I started to wonder…….am I selling out?

Am I doing the very thing that I didn’t want to do? I don’t get anything OUT of running these types of PR contests. They don’t pay me, I don’t get free products, any traffic I get is from us  working our butts off to list the contests out and is not necessarily the traffic I am looking for. Am I being USED? OMG! I could be….in fact, I am sorta working contracted here with no pay. Or is it me using them?

So are blog contests and reviews an epidemic that has gone rampid on the net?  Are blogs nothing more then big advertisements? OR are bloggers just filling a natural need that people need to know what to buy, so why not give it to them? Almost every blog I have been to has run a contest or review in the past 30 days (or is trying to get into it). The net is also full of mommy bloggers running reviews from Mom Central, Team Mom, RoleMommy and a variety of other companies set up to drive up google rankings for the links they are pushing.  Somedays I am unsure what the real reviews are versus the “take our product and love it online” reviews.

Have we gone to far to push the product? Has the blogging community sold out to get a free shirt or an affiliate buck at the end of the day?

You tell me.