Out of the Ordinary Advertising Requests
From time to time I will get a note from someone who expresses interest in advertising on this site. I handle each query on a case by case basis by first determining if their request is a legitimate one and, second, if their ads will add value to this site. I’ve toughened my advertising policy over the past few months by removing some ads, including Google’s Adsense, while being extremely picky when it comes to accepting paid posting opportunities. Sure, I wouldn’t mind making money off of this site, but I also want to maintain its overall integrity.
Let Us Share Our Ads With You
In an example of an out of the ordinary advertising request, one advertiser wanted me to take an article I had written and posted to my Portfolio section and link certain keywords within the article back to his site. That particular article had already contained links to a customer’s site in the author section as it was part of a series of articles commissioned by that customer for posting on select article directories and to this site. When I brought this matter to the attention of the advertiser he didn’t seem bothered by the conflict, but I certainly was.
Another request I have received involved the posting of articles or essays written by other authors to this site. The company promised to pay me a fee for each hosted page, but I quickly decided that the competition (never mind the confusion) of posting someone else’s work on my personal site wasn’t a step I wanted to take. I guess a strong web presence is what attracted this advertiser to my site, but my name/brand would likely be diluted if I chose to go with this option.
The oddest request that I have gotten to date was from a certain paid posting company. They sent to me via snail mail several samples of topical pain killing packets and wanted me to use the product and then blog about it. I never checked to see how much they were offering to pay for my post, but I can tell you that nothing about the product was of interest to me. Besides, why would I want to subject my readers to an uninteresting advertorial?
Advertising Run Amok?
Personally, I have no problem with bloggers monetizing their blogs or webmasters their web pages. I do both and have done fairly well with advertising revenue over the years. However, one worsening problem I do see is the overuse of javascript widgets for ads and social networks which have a tendency to cause such pages to load slowly. If I grow impatient and move on when confronted with a slow loading page, how many of your other readers do the same? Food for thought!
Maintaining your own standards for advertising is important. The last thing you want to do is to lose credibility because of advertising on your site.
Lillie, I fully agree. Ad revenue is fine, but not at the expense of maintaining integrity.
I’ve been lucky, I guess I’m nowhere near big enough to attract the bad apples of advertising. If becoming a presence brings that problem on, I guess it’s a nice problem to have.
That’s one way of looking at it Jeremy! I guess if I had zero advertising interest then I’d probably would hope for almost any advertising offer.