Paid to blog

Here we go, I signed the contract and faxed it away, now I am paid to blog about their product by a company named Marqui. For somebody this means that I gave up my freedom, others will not invite me or accept my invitation anymore.

I don't think that this should be considered such a big issue.

I have always been paid to blog. When I blog about the products that my own company develops, I'm paid by my company. When google publishes ads on my blog according to what I write I'm paid by google. When I write about products of my customers, I'm paid by my customers. And this is always been very clear, just look at the banners on both sides of this text.

Of course, the big difference lays in the way I'm paid: signing the contract I agreed to write at least a post per week about Marqui's product, a CMS (CMS in this case means Communication Management System, and we'll learn in the next weeks if it's simply marketing hype or something really new ;-).

I think that I have been hired by Marc Canter, who created this Marqui and bloggers program, because I have been developing internet publishing tools for the last 5 years, because I have some readers, because he knows that I wouldn't lie to them about a product I really don't like and, of course, because we are old friends.

I think my integrity as a blogger is important, but most of all I believe in the blogosphere: I have received more than enough evidence of how much smarter than me my readers are, it would be totally stupid trying to cheat them writing faked praises for a product, it would be against my interests and Marqui's.

Actually, I think that the cool thing about this idea is exactly the fact that Marqui is trying to plug into the bloggers community trough us, Marqui bloggers, in order to gain feedback about their work. They will have to learn how to deal with a lot of big egos but if they will listen with an open mind they will win a lot.

Anyway, I will try to keep things clear by framing all Marqui related posts with a custom style like the one you are seeing for this post and add the disclaimer below for RSS readers.

It's going to be fun, enojoy the ride.

Disclaimer: I'm paid by Marqui to blog about their products