Appearantly, I come across as a cheap huckster (emphasis mine):
“We’re a small company that creates [REMOVED] plugins for all the popular [REMOVED]. You may have heard of [REMOVED], our most well-known [REMOVED], which has had 11+ million downloads since its initial release. We currently have a partnership with folks such as Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, and a couple others. Anyway, we have just released [REMOVED] and are very excited about it.
We’d like to issue you a free license for [REMOVED] (normally priced at $30). If you like it, all we ask in return is that you write a blurb to your users about it (which we think would be very relevant to them, given the content of your blog).
We have a free full-featured trial version of [REMOVED] available for download on our website, [REMOVED], so your users don’t need to buy anything in order to check it out. Thanks for your time and I hope to hear back from you soon.”
If you want to offer me free software, I’m fine with it. Just know that a) I’ll decide if I want to write about it, b) I’ll disclose that you gave me a freebie to incent me, and c) I’ll write honestly about it. I kindly suggest that you change the terms of your offer when dealing with people who value their integrity beyond the reach of your marketing budget.