The recently reported news that the Office of Fair Trading is looking to prosecute companies who pay bloggers for positive coverage of their products makes interesting news for all of us at Propellernet. Why would anyone offering quality content need to pay for coverage?

Our approach has always been to develop content that offers genuine value to our target media, be that amateur bloggers, professional bloggers, or standard online media.  The fact that we use search personas and that we’re specialists in the travel and retail sectors means that we know the key media contacts well and we’re able to determine which sites are right for our clients’ target audience quickly and easily.   From there we use various inputs to determine what content will prove valuable both to our clients’ target audience and to the media that we’re targeting.

The result of this approach is that we value good relations with all our key contacts from bloggers to journalists (regularly face-to-face rather than relying on emails) and like to maintain our relationships by offering them valuable content.   On the rare occasion that content we’re offering doesn’t gain coverage because it’s not considered valuable enough to the target sites’ readership, then we don’t resort to paying for the coverage.   Instead we review why the content wasn’t considered valuable and consider how we can ensure that our next piece of content gets widely covered by our target media.

There are many inputs we use to increase the chances of producing valuable content that will get wide coverage.   By understanding what is important to our target audience, we can create quality content to run on our client site and/or externally to drive authoritative links, and that is exactly what we did for Sportsshoes.com, as mentioned in Grant’s earlier post.

Search personas and reading blogs and forums are just two of the many inputs that we use to ensure that we provide valuable content for the target audience that generates authoritative links and pushes up the natural search positions of our clients, driving additional revenues.   For the rest of the list, you’ll need to get in touch to find out how we can do the same for you!   But unlike some of our competitors, we certainly won’t be worrying about the OFT coming knocking on our door.