What child friendly sites do most parents trust for valuable information? I know of several as they have all contacted me for advertising 'opportunities' on their sites. Most of the now large advertising companies are mostly run by professionals who may or may not have kids of their own. The thing I can't wrap my head around is that for all of their 'authoritative knowledge' of all things kid related, their e-mails and websites are simply paid advertising. The thing is parents don't actually know that because they haven't been contacted to advertise with them and had their events & venues ignored as a result of NOT advertising. There is actually NO information on most of these sites that isn't a result of a paid transaction.
So who is a parent to really trust???
As far as I can tell, by looking at the Facebook posts from some of these sites, there is little content that isn't paid for. I can say that Adventure Kids Playcare of Issaquah has been the recipient of several unpaid posts from Macaroni Kid and Rely Local, which does make me trust their information as more authentic. Parent Map, Red Tricycle and others have yet to do anything that wasn't every expensive for us to place, so we don't do much with them. We tried to place in Red Tricycle's best of contest, but placed behind other companies we know to advertise with them even though we believe we provide a better service based on the comments of our customers.
Adventure Kids Playcare sends out an e-mail every month or so and we try to highlight some parent oriented activities. It's crossed my mind to start charging businesses for this advertising, but I decided that I really don't want to. I want to keep our newsletter as an honest review of what's going on in our area. Of course that only gets read by our existing customers, so attracting new customers this way is a very slow process, which leads us back to advertising. What else is a small business to do? Please see our ads on Macaroni Kid.
