Celebrate with us!

You may not have realized {it's kind of snuck up on me too} but Market Mommy will turn one on June 1! This past year has truly flown by!

As you can imagine, I would not let such a significant date pass by without a party. So, in addition to our exciting site expansion and redesign, I'm throwing Market Mommy's First Birthday Extravaganza here at The Blog! The entire month of June is going to be a blast!

There are several ways you can get involved. First, we are putting together an AWESOME prize package for one lucky mom entrepreneur. This package already totals over $500 and we're just getting started. Do you have a product or service that would be useful to a mom business owner? We'd like to include it in our prize package, contact me for details! We're especially looking for advertising space :>)

Do you have a great product, but it's not necessarily aimed at women business owners specifically? We'd still like to feature you and your product on The Blog. We will be hosting various giveaways throughout the month of June, so contact us to get yours scheduled!

And, the entire month of June The Blog is going to be packed with guest blog posts. We are going to have posts on a variety of topics, including 5 Must Haves on Your Facebook Page, Affordable Child Care Options, How I Run my Business for Next to Nothing, and much more! Are you a veteran blogger that would like to write a guest blog post for our Extravaganza? Contact me with your topic idea today!

The fourth option, is just to come, hang out with us, enter some giveaways and have a good time! I hope to see everyone here. We are excited about our first birthday and hope you are too! Thanks for your support over the past year, we appreciate it!

FTC Rules on Disclosure

There has been a good deal of discussion lately about the FTC and whether they would actually put a policy into place requiring bloggers to disclose when they receive free products in exchange for reviews. Well, it has happened. Last week, they did just that. Bloggers must now disclose all products that they receive and whether or not they were free. If not, fines can reach $11,000. The FTC's official press release can be found here.

Obviously, this is big news! Not only for all of our great mom-blogger friends, but also for us as mom business owners and entrepreneurs. It is a common discussion between mom entrepreneurs who have a limited marketing budget. Do I send free products to bloggers in return for a great review? Is it effective marketing? Is it effective budgeting?

Some bloggers are flattered by the ruling. Having the FTC acknowledge bloggers as legitimate journalists is a compliment, they say. Others are outraged that the requirements are different for them versus print journalists. The NY Times did an interesting article here.

Ultimately, I think it is a good thing for mom business owners like us, trying to effectively marketing our small companies on a very limited budget. Oftentimes there is a lot of pressure to send free gifts and it is very hard for us to compete with the large companies that send out hundreds of samples at a time.

This essentially takes a bit of that pressure off. As some have pointed out, the new policy may be hard to enforce. But, I think most bloggers will be forthcoming and disclose the information. It will be interesting to see how this affects the blogging and review world. The new policy takes effect on December 1.

What do you think?