Beware the Free Blogging Sites

Marketing guys love blogs. "Blog this, blog that, blog your way to business success." Everyone wants a blog.

Best part is they're easy to setup. Fill in a few questions, make some basic graphic choices and then just start blogging stuff up. Easy peasy.

Even better than best is...they're free. That's right. MSN Spaces, Blogger, even MySpace--and there's plenty more. They're completely free. Just sign up and deal with a banner ad or two and that's all it'll cost you.

Okay enough fluff. That's the sales spiel that most of us hear and believe. But as loyal reader Kiltak discovered, it's not always that way. Kiltak is the proud owner of the excellently named Geeks Are Sexy blog. It's well written by guys who know what they're talking about and--most important--often link back to my blogs.

Predictably, they've become steadily more popular. More and more readers until one day, Kiltak tried logging onto his blog, only to discover that Blogspot seemed to have deleted his blog. No warning.

As expected, Kiltak sent a few salty emails and voice calls to the Blogspot folks, basically asking "What the @#$%?!?"

Sadly, it took them some time to figure out what he was talking about, but when they did the explanation went like this: The traffic going to Geeks Are Sexy as well as its content had risen to a level where Blogger decided it might be a possible source of 'spam' blogging. When that happens, it sticks the blog into a quarantine of sorts until they figure out what's what. Meanwhile the blogger no longer sees the site name in his blog management interface.

Be nice if they'd warn you first, wouldn't it? But the word to SMB (especially SB) guerilla marketing types is: Be careful. If your free marketing ploy actually becomes successful, there's a good chance it might just disappear one day. Read the fine print on your usage agreement and watch your traffic stats.

Posted by Oliver Rist on May 16, 2006 09:57 PM