Jane Chin’s Reality Check on Blogging for Money or “Problogging”
Copyright 2008 by Jane Chin, All Rights Reserved.
You can monetize all kinds of blogs. Whether you do monetize a blog, and how you monetize your blog, depends on your comfort level with displaying ad codes on your websites. This get us into the “psychology of blogging.”
There are bloggers who are very uncomfortable displaying advertisements on their blogs.
These bloggers come from one or more of these positions:
These are all very legitimate reasons.
I don’t have a problem with blogs that remain staunchly ad-free, or with blogs that are clearly formatted to generate revenue for the blogger. I do have a problem with people who openly criticize all who monetize blogs because they chose not do to so. A popular marketing consultant thumbs his nose at ad-displaying blogs, yet uses his blog to promote all of his books. He gets away with it because he is linked throughout the blogosphere, and makes a lot of money from books and speaking engagements. Monetizing his blog would end up diluting his book-marketing efforts - not to mention display of competitive ads on his website.
Just because monetizing blogs isn’t his strategy doesn’t mean you need to buy into the idea that monetizing your blog somehow “cheapens” your content. When I’m adding value to the blogosphere, I expect to add value to my life as well. I don’t need to apologize for or feel bad about getting a return for my laborious time and resource investment to share information.
Blogs can be a nice source of supplemental income for many of us.
I started monetizing my blogs for a practical purpose: I wanted enough to cover our monthly utilities. If my blogs generated at least enough to cover our gas, electricity, water, and telephone expenses, I can free up that part of my mind for other creative pursuits.
Whether you choose to make money from your blogs - or through any other means - should be entirely up to your own motivation. If you already love to write and blog, then putting ad codes on your website will not bother most people. We are already used to seeing ads on most websites.
What about the notion that putting ads on your blog degrades the quality of your blog?
Here’s the cold truth: the quality of your blog deteriorates when you publish crap content, not only because you’ve put up an ad on your blog.
If you deduce that monetizing your blog with ads had eroded your site traffic, then you want to examine all the potential causes of this happening.
Is your content lukewarm to begin with, and your ads have increased the readability barrier of your posts?
Are your ads so intrusive that readers click off because it takes too long to get to your content? (I’ve done this for major news content websites that force me to wait through video ads)
Are your ads so confusing that readers leave because they are confused by how to get to your content?
The concern about “annoying visitors” with ads is valid; some text ads are less intrusive than others. I find pop-up ads or ads that take up entire pages and ads that prompt you to “click here to skip this ad” the most annoying. This is why you won’t see me choosing AdBrite’s “interstitial ad” option: interstitial ads are splashed across the entire site before readers can access content.
The bottom line:Don’t apologize about how you choose to generate value for yourself from sharing value with the rest of the world. While we’re at it, stop hanging out with people who make you feel bad about asking for value when you give value.
No comments yet