Acknowledgment Policy

This policy is valid from 10 May 2009 {Updated October 2011}


This blog is a personal blog written and edited by me. For questions about this blog, please contact Melissa (shimmermeblue23@yahoo.com).

This blog accepts forms of cash advertising, sponsorship, paid insertions or other forms of compensation. These are always clearly stated. I will never endorse a company/product that I don't agree with.

This blog abides by word of mouth marketing standards. We believe in honesty of relationship, opinion and identity. The compensation received may influence the advertising content, topics or posts made in this blog. That content, advertising space or post will be clearly identified as paid or sponsored content.

The owner(s) of this blog is compensated to provide opinion on products, services, websites and various other topics. Even though the owner(s) of this blog receives compensation for our posts or advertisements, we always give our honest opinions, findings, beliefs, or experiences on those topics or products. The views and opinions expressed on this blog are purely the bloggers' own. Any product claim, statistic, quote or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer, provider or party in question.

We do receive product to review. We usually won't post a negative review, because we believe in promoting only products that we actually like and would use. The compensation {products or monetary} never influencs our opinions.

The owner(s) of this blog would like to disclose the following existing relationships. These are companies, organizations or individuals that may have a significant impact on the content of this blog. We write sponsored posts for: Social Spark and Collective Bias.

Types of posts – The following buttons will appear on each post, describing the compensation (if any) received for each individual post. Each Post Level is described in further detail below:

Level 1 Post: Blog author received sample{s} and/or gift certificates to facilitate review by company mentioned above, or the PR agency representing said company. All opinions are her own and are not influenced by any form of compensation. 

Level 2 Post: Blog author did not receive any compensation {monetarily or otherwise} for this post.  It is either a giveaway {with sponsor providing prize}, or something blog author feels strongly about and wants to share with readers.

Level 3 Post: Blog author attended an event which involved travel.  Blog author was provided with transportation, food, lodging and/or other travel related expenses for the trip mentioned in this post. The opinions are the blog authors and are not influenced by any form of compensation.

Level 4 Post: Blog author was compensated for hosting this giveaway. Prize will be provided/sent by sponsor. Blog author either received product before, during or after giveaway post, or was paid monetarily.

Level 5 post: This is a sponsored/paid post. Blog author was compensated {by company mentioned in post, or PR agency representing company} monetarily for writing this post or posting an article written by another author. Many times a paid post only includes a link to the company website using certain key words/anchor text, and the name of company will not be mentioned.

To get your own policy, go to http://www.disclosurepolicy.org