Promotional Writing

It occurs to me that paid bloggers are similar to advertising copywriters writing adverts for radio, although I admit that the quality of the copy varies quite a bit...
When I started writing blog posts, I thought that I had to make them like little adverts promoting a product or service and saying how great it was whether I believed it or not. In recent times I have come to understand that it is really the anchor-text that is the valuable thing to the advertiser, not so much the text that surrounds it.
Many advertisers say that a neutral post will suffice, and the reason for that is that they are not expecting lots of your visitors to take a lot of notice of the 'advert', but they need a link for a specific keyword to push their site or a specific page up the SERPS (search engine results position).
My posts now are much more personalised, as long as I get the link in and it's not out of context, the advertiser will probably be happy. There is no need to 'promote' the link, but equally it would not be helpful to be overly negative. Placing an out-of-context link would be unhelpful as there is value in the surrounding text that search engines can pick up on.
Occasionally when an advertiser wants to create buzz around a new site, product or service they actually request that you log-on to a site and test it. In these cases you are given much more direction, but generally you can slip your link into a related, but not necessarily overtly promotional post. Where I have to say something positive, I often put myself in the shoes of a voice-over artist for a radio advert. They don't need to mean what they say and nobody has any problem over them being paid for their time - There is no need for me to feel cheap about promoting something I don't actually like or enjoy as long as I do a good job. That said, there are certain things that I won't do, hence on numerous occasions I have turned down lucrative opportunities for promoting gambling sites and will continue to do so.