I was recently contacted about accepting a site sponsor, and I agreed… Our first official sponsor is… Bizrate.com! On the left sidebar, there are links to barbecue and grilling specific links on the Bizrate.com site.
Please help me in welcoming Bizrate.com as a sponsor by clicking on their links! It’s a great place to find ratings and great prices on grilling and barbecue equipment!
My first visit to your blog (via Eggbeater), and both this post and your earlier post about peri-peri sauce raise interesting issues that I have been considering as well. I’ve been offered many products to sample, because I write a product-focused blog, and I’m cautious about accepting and, occasionally, blogging about those products. I think full disclosure, as you have done, is the key. I’m also considering more commercial sponsorship, but haven’t quite resolved how I might do that. Please let us know how you find your experience with BizRate. Thanks.
Lydia,
I’ve thought through some of those issues myself. My “links” are different from my “sponsored links”. With Nando’s Peri-Peri, there wasn’t even a request for a review; I honestly just like it so much, I wanted to write a review on it. I don’t think it’s dishonest to accept an item to review, as long as the sender knows that the review will be unbiased; if it’s a bad review, be ready to accept that. I wrote a review of a local barbecue restaurant, and I didn’t give them perfect scores on several things, but they were happy to have the review, and I think they appreciated the honesty.
I will say that anything I write on here will be pretty much unbiased. I won’t accept a sponsor that I can’t say favorable things about… That starts getting into integrity issues.
Thanks for talking the time to comment!
Curt