One of my other regular gigs is over at Ty’s Toy Box as the “Toy Box Mommy.” Now, Ty’s holds a very special place in my heart for a number of reasons. For one thing, they were my first steady client when I started freelancing. For another, they have always, always done me solid; they pay me fairly, they have been great about keeping me in the loop, asking my opinion, and treating me like a colleague. There are clients you work for and there are clients you work with (dangling prepositions aside), and Ty’s definitely falls into the latter category, for me.

So not only don’t I have a single complaint about them, together over the last few years we’ve watched the company grow and grow and grow, which is great for me as well as for them. They started the blog before everyone had one, back when they were still a smallish e-tailer. Now they’re an industry force and they’re still happy to have me on board, and every time I see them in the news I casually mention to people, “Oh yeah, Ty’s, I work for them.”

So when my contact there mailed me a link to this article in the Wall Street Journal by Sarah Needleman yesterday, I was elated. The title of the article is “Blog It and They May Come.” Ty’s has often been held up as a model for why it makes good sense to have a corporate blogger to help drive traffic to a site, and I was looking forward to reading more glowing praise. Heh.

Here’s some of what was said about Ty’s Toy Box:

Ty’s Toy Box Inc., an online retailer based in Erlanger, Ky., has lured people to its blog about trends in the toy-licensing industry by having other blogs and Web sites link to it.

Yes, I lure people in by having other blogs and web sites link to it. Honestly, there’s nothing wrong, per se, with this statement, but it does tell me that the author of the article is either not entirely familiar with the role of corporate blogs (for example, mostly we lure people in by… writing stuff they might want to read! Crazy, I know!) or there has been some sloppy editing done here.

According to Mr. Stolpe, Ty’s Toy Box pays a free-lance writer to maintain its blog and says the total cost for it is “a very minimal amount.” He says while he can’t quantify the blog’s role in the near-triple-digit average growth in sales every year since its start, he has no doubt it has played an important part.

Here’s where my warm fuzzy started to wear off. First of all, I had a discussion with “Mr. Stolpe” (that would be George Stolpe, Ty’s Toy Box VP) about this quote and he confirmed that his point was that they consider what they pay me to be a minimal investment on a larger return, which is something very different than saying that they pay me a minimal amount. I guess the argument could be made that if this article is to encourage other companies to hire bloggers, this quote is great because it makes it sound like bloggers don’t cost very much so why not hire one… but on the other hand, this quote made me wince because it makes it sound like bloggers don’t need to be paid very much so why not find someone who’ll run your blog for a couple of bucks. See the problem there?

This is what we, as freelancers, are up against. The perception of our worth is always being spun this way and that, and even in an article that essentially praises the work I’m doing, the implication is that this sort of business benefit can be gotten on the cheap.

For the record, I seized this quote and the opportunity it presented to send an email right back that said, “A very minimal amount? I need a raise.” I’m professional like that.