My Blog Is Not a Tourism Office

I received a request for a sponsored post from Blogvertise. They were asking me to write a blog entry on tips for flying to Iceland and hotels from Denmark and Iceland. As far as I can remember, I never submitted my blog under the Travel section; since I am based in Ireland, Blogvertise, being a U.S. website, might have confused Ireland with Iceland but I very much doubt that this was the case.

I know I could have tweaked the entry and given tips on shopping around and looking for the cheapest deal online when planning a trip abroad but the entry required me to include an image; I just did not want to spend an hour looking for a free picture of a beautiful Icelandic landscape so I decided to decline the offer.

I know a refusal could affect the number of future offers I get but I’d rather that than hurting my little blog’s rankings and I really think the advertiser would benefit more if the entry was written on a traveling blog.

If you decide to decline an offer for a sponsored post from Blogvertise or any other get paid to blog website, do it quickly and give them a good reason why you are declining the offer, but above all, be civilized and leave on a friendly note. Here is more or less what I wrote:

Reason for declining the offer: blog entry requiring an image; while I would consider future offers requiring pictures, a blog entry about traveling is not very relevant to my blog’s topics, which are mostly about making and saving money, along with some blogging advice.

I don't know very much about marketing (even though I have been reminded of a few basics from my college years lately) but for the sake of the advertisers, I wish that get paid to blog websites would try a little bit harder to direct their offers to suitable bloggers; what could be worse than spending money on advertising campaigns completely off-target?