Better Communication Results has a post on Sponsored blogging and podcasting which gets picked up over at Corporate Engagement that examines the question of the ethics of sponsored blogging.
I’ve never had a sponsored post on any of my blogs but have often wondered about them. Do you have any experience with them? Would you be open to someone sponsoring a post – under what conditions would you or wouldn’t you do it?
Yep. I’ve done a fair number. They’re clearly sponsored (title, category, different look and feel, and a caption at the bottom of every post explaining it).
I don’t do them much anymore, mainly because I feel like I’m trading on my audience’s trust, which is never cool.
It seems a lot like sponsored search results. While compromised results helped to kill the popularity of search engines that started doing it, the effect was mitigated greatly when engines began properly listing and separating the sponsored links. I would hate to find purchased results in the google’s search, but I don’t mind their adsense to the right. I think the same might be true of blogging.
Make sure nobody thinks you’re trying to trick them and it should work fine.