A couple of weeks ago, Fossil9 posted about his thoughts on advertising in his blog. It sort of got me to thinking about how I want to handle it on mine.
When I first started my blog, I know I was driven crazy by blogs that put ads up all over the place, and I knew it was something I wanted to avoid.
I still try to maintain that as much as I can. Do I have some advertising now? Sure. But it’s also fairly easily avoidable if you don’t want to see or deal with it… I keep it in my sidebar at the left, and as a separate page.
I also only put vendors up that I have personally bought from. And if you visit my Shopping page, I do give my personal pros, cons, and experiences of every site I link to. I would never add a site for something I didn’t endorse, unless I disclose as such from the outset. For example, I was recently contacted by a new company who was interested in sending me one of their adult products for free, provided I do a review/write up about it. While this is still being worked out, if this does end up happening, you can be assured that I will mention that fact in my review, and that I will be honest in my review.
While I do often link to items I use on my blog to the websites I got them from, I personally see it as helpful, as I do get many questions about where and what sort of equipment I have. This answers the question, and while it does take them to an external webpage, no one’s forced into buying the item. That said, I can’t lie, I do get a bit of compensation should you purchase it from one of my links. But to be totally honest, it doesn’t really happen all that often.
I imagine most of you think I must be making a fair amount of money from this blog. In fact, after having these ads up for nearly a year, I’ve yet to have any of them add up to a point where I actually got any sort of check, as a minimum amount has to be met before getting sent any compensation. While the specific numbers vary from site to site, in general, I’d get 10% of a sale if you purchase something through my ads. However, if someone buys a single item for $54.90, the website is not going to write a check for a measly $5.49. They’re going to wait until the total earnings add up to $100 before sending a check. While there have been a few purchases here and there, none have so far broken through these minimum amounts. So total amount of money I’ve made from ads so far after a year: $0.
Now don’t get me wrong: I’m not complaining in the least. I never did this blog for money in the first place, and it isn’t my primary goal now. But I just did want to perhaps put a reality check on many of you who perhaps though I was making some cash from this blog, somehow. I’m not. At least, not yet, and even if I do, I certainly am not going to be quitting my day job anytime soon.
Recently I had put up a few posts that were ads for sales for certain websites. To be honest, even as I did it, I had a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. I sort of felt it was turning the blog into what I was trying to avoid. Was I trying to maybe push a bit of traffic their way? Sure. But in total honesty, I really did think it was a good sale. If my favorite site were having a sale for a product I’d actually be interested in, I’d want to know.
I think I may have discovered a possible compromise. I might still post ad-related posts. But as stated above, they will be infrequent, and only when I feel the sale is especially good, or for products I’m sincerely interested in.
More importantly, though, I will now make sure they are never the top post of the day*. I will always put them below the most recent post. That way, if you’re a daily viewer, you’d never even run into it unless you scrolled down far enough. Something as a little bonus to you daily viewers.
All that said, if you do buy products from any of the sites I support, I would appreciate it if you got them through here. I did notice there have been a few purchases lately from a few of you readers, and I thank you for that. If you’d like to be one of them, visit my Shopping page. It’s a small, easy way to say thanks for all the work that I’ve put into the blog… and still doing for free, as I haven’t gotten one check yet. 🙂
*Well, they will be for one minute. I’ll set them to post at 4:59am, and then put my main post up at 5:00am. I think we can live with that.
