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How NOT to use blogs to market your product: the Microplane mistake

This post was originally published on my beauty blog, Hey-Dollface.com, which is where the "incident", for want of a better word, happened. I thought I'd also post it here, though, because it's an excellent example of how NOT to use blog comments to try and market your product: and I guess it's also a good lesson to bloggers to trust your gut instincts and take the time to check out your comments if you think there's something fishy going on. Of all of my sites, Hey-Dollface is the one that gets targeted most by spammers, presumably because it's so product-based, but this was the most blatant example of bad self-promotion I've seen in a while.

NOTE: Although I did contact Microplane asking them for an official comment, and making it clear that I was writing a follow-up about this, to date the only response I've had has been from the person who originally commented on my blog. Needless to say, if the company do get in touch to further clarify the situation, I'll be happy to publish their response.

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Sometimes writing for a beauty blog - or any blog, really - can be quite the eye opener. It's amazing what some companies will do to try and promote themselves while dissing their competitors, and today I came across a good example of this, on my post about the Ped Egg.

In my post, I compared the Ped Egg to the Microplane Foot File. I've used both, and liked both products (you can read my review of the Microplane here), and as I noted in my review, the only real difference between the two, for me, is the price, with Microplane the more expensive of the two. I stand by that opinion, and the respective costings are simple fact which anyone can check out for themselves.

Midas Media Blog Network: June update

Remember those blog targets I set myself back in April? Never really said much about those ever again, did I? So let's revisit them now, and, in a bid to create a record for myself as much as anything else, let's try and make it a monthly update, shall we?

The good news is that both TheFashionPolice.net had its best months ever in June 2009. The bad news is that because January is always such a good month, and the traffic tends to dip off for a few months after that before picking up again, the final figures weren't massively higher than the previous Best Ever.

Hey-Dollface.com, meanwhile, had

The Fashion Police, June 2009:

660,956 page views
426,104 unique visitors

Hey-Dollface.com, meanwhile, had its best ever month in May, reaching 63,000 page impressions, but had a big dip in June, which can be mostly attributed to the fact that I was on holiday for most of the month, and so the site wasn't being updated (The Fashion Police, on the other hand, continued to publish the same amount of content during my break, so didn't experience any drop-off in traffic.)

Hey-Dollface.com, June 2009:

50,277 page views
37,631 unique visitors

Summer is always a really difficult and weird time for all of the sites, not only because I take a vacation myself, but because other people do too, so many of my readers are off relaxing somewhere rather than staring at a computer screen, and even those who aren't on vacation tend to spend more time out of doors, assuming the weather is good. Then there's the tennis, the 4th of July holiday and various other summer events that keep people away from the internet.

This summer we also launched the other blog I mentioned back in April, Shoeperwoman.com. As the name suggests, this is a blog entirely about shoes, and while it's still early days, at least I'm having fun writing for it.

Hopefully we'll have even better stats to report next month - assuming I remember to write about them, that is!