I love to talk about the benefits of blogging for your business. But one of the things I never mention, and that you rarely hear other bloggers mention, is the bling.

Until now.

I refer to blog bling as the stuff marketers send you trying to woo a review or interview out of you.

You can get all kinds of cool stuff as a result of your blogging efforts. Just as an example, I’ve received all of the following and then some:

• Food and snack items
• Natural and organic skin care
• Non toxic cleaning products
• Natural health supplements
• Massage oils and aromatherapy products
• Books
• Books
• Books!

My market for my main blog is the natural mom, so your bling may vary, but you get the general idea.

When you have a blog with decent traffic, you have an audience, and marketers are wise to that. They want to get their product out in front of your readers. And they know that it’s cheaper for them to mail you something cool hoping you’ll love it and blog about it, than to buy advertising.

And it’s darn fun getting packages in the mail and from the UPS man all the time.

So, how do you start getting bling?

While there are ways to connect directly with marketers in order to review their stuff (or accept it for review), I must admit I didn’t do any of that stuff to start the products coming.

I just blogged.

And they found me.

It’s a good idea to develop a plan before you start getting pitches from marketing groups.

Some examples:

• What will you do if you don’t like the product?
• What will you do if the product doesn’t fit your market?
• Will you promise to review products you receive, or not?
• Will you require payment for a review?

These are all questions to think about so you can have a strategy before you start getting inundated with products (and trust me, this could very well happen. Right now I have more stuff in my home waiting to be reviewed than I have time!).

You may want to come up with a form email to send as a response to people who ask for a mention on your site. Or you may want to publish a page to your blog that tells people where to send stuff and your rules for reviews.

Don’t make yourself a slave to the companies who pitch you.

Personally, I promise nothing. I do not promise that I will write a review or even a positive one. (Although it is my policy that I will email the company and let them know I wasn’t pleased with the product instead of writing a negative review.) I don’t require payment, but I also use an affiliate link where possible when I mention the product on my blog, so that I can earn affiliate commissions from sales I generate.

There are no hard and fast rules here, you do what you’re comfortable with.

Enjoy your bling, one of the many benefits of blogging!