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Are You Going to let Your Advertisers Ruin Your Blog?

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Blog Advertising

Now, tell me the truth.. How many advertisers do you get for your blog? Are you willing to accept all of them? Are you going to put all of their banner ads on your site? Are you going to accept all of their paid reviews? Now, you need to think twice about this problem.. You need to answer the biggest question.. Are you going to let the advertisers run your blog?

There are lots of people around the world who are seeking to put their ads on your blog. What they need is publicity / back-links. Most of them won’t care about your blog. If you think only about collecting heaps of money.. then your in a big trouble! Accepting all the advertisers will bring you some money, but in the long run it could ruin your blog! So, before accepting an advertiser, you need to consider some points :

Does that advertiser have a good reputation?

Before accepting any ads, always check whether they have a good reputation. What if the advertiser is a spammer? What if its a malware site? What if that company is a scam? Then linking to that site will ruin your reputation as well as your users. Search engines and people who rates web sites like WOT always checks whether you link to bad websites. If you does, then your rankings goes down scaring off your visitors and genuine advertisers!

So, how to know whether that advertiser have a good reputation?

There are several places for you to check the reputation of a site :

  • WOT : This is one of the best places to check. Many people rely on the rank given by the famous WOT browser extension before visiting a site. They have a big community.. First the professionals (WOT Team) will check your site and give a rating. Then, the community can comment and give their own ratings! They will not only check the technical side like linking and malware infections.. They will also check various other issues like the quality, ethical issues, privacy policy,etc. So, the first thing you must check is the WOT rank.
  • Alexa :  Some say that Alexa doesn’t give you an accurate rank. But, to take some decisions, its enough. Some advertisers check our Alexa ranks before they choose us. We also should check their Alexa ranks before accepting them!
  • Webutation : This is one single place where you can get ratings from WOT, Google, Website Antivirus, Alexa, Page Rank and also ratings from their own community. I think this is the best place for you to check whether the site have a bad reputation.

Always think about the quality of your blog without aiming for money!

Some people get completely insane when they see money.. They’ll accept any advertiser if they are ready to pay big bucks! But, does that advertiser match your site? If a person comes to advertise a real estate business on your Tech Blog, what will you do? It will be a disadvantage for both of you.

When speaking about quality, never fill your site with ads! Your content must come first. Then you should go for ads. Normally, people don’t trust websites which are full of ads. Personally, I will never go near a site which have ads all over it. So, always have a limit!

Do not subscribe into too many ad services

There are some sites which are specialized in ad services. They have everything, paid reviews, Adsense ads, Adbrite ads, Info links and many other advertisers. This will not only make your site ugly, but will also slow down your site throwing away more readers. So, choose only a limited number of ads services which suits you the best!

Do not give too many links

Several months ago, one of my friends got some bad ratings on WOT. When we asked WOT, they said that the site had too many bad links. My friend did everything he could to remove all the links but still some links are there.. He have used so many tools to add links to his site, now unable to remove them! Not only that, for SEO also, its not a good idea to add too many dofollow links in one page! So, this effects both your reputation and the SEO.

Do not write too many paid reviews

I have seen some blogs which run mostly by paid reviews! There’s nothing much on those blogs for a normal reader. Yes paid reviews are another way of getting money from a blog. But for that also, have a limit! Do not post paid reviews very often. Keep a good interval between two reviews. In that way, your readers won’t even recognize that your writing a paid review!

Control your ads

I think this is more than enough for you to control your advertising. Always try to have a limit in everything! If you chase behind money, then your advertisers will ruin your blog and you’ll loose both your money and your readers! Still your not late.. Try to put some limits and choose wisely!

About

Pubudu Kodikara is a writer at Tech Hamlet (www.techhamlet.com), a state of the art tech blog which have a main target of educating people about the latest technology. They post latest tech news, tips on how to resolve problems, tricks and hacks to improve what you do, tutorials to learn new things and many more.

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{ 58 Responses }

  1. Jane says:
    Hi Pubudu, Really good points and some basic ethics needed for today's bloggers. It is not about money, but it is about value. Not only the blog's content but also the external pointers should be clean and of high quality. Thanks for bringing this up. Cheers, Jane.
  2. A. Tatum says:
    This something I haven't thought about directly, but I guess I've always felt its about the long haul. You don't get a reputation on the quick fix. Short term money does not equal long-term gain. I see these types of blogs all the time and I'm sure they have a high bounce rate.
  3. Morgan says:
    Fantastic advice! There are times I'll stumble across a blog and think, "Wow, all they care about is money" and I leave immediately. Thanks for the post!
  4. Udegbunam Chukwudi says:
    I'm more wary of what I advertise on my blogs 'cause it's a known fact that after sometime your regulars tend to take every ad appearing on your site as an automatic endorsement form you and when they get burnt, it most definitely reflects poorly on you the blogger .
  5. Rodger says:
    I do think you have to control of your advertisers of your page. You won't be taken seriously if you seem to be a sell out.
  6. Lennart Heleander says:
    Hi Pubudu, A blogs or sites that look like a Christmas tree with all ads and flash are the worst thing I know, I go out direct. Don’t let ad quantity go before ad quality.
  7. Mike says:
    Good point, Pubudu. I never go out and search for advertisers myself because I always want a third-party like BSA to stand in the middle and handle everything for me. However, those are really good points. Glad to see you around, Pubudu :)
  8. Fran Aslam From Onlinewriter says:
    Hi Pubudu: Good post you have here. I feel the same way about advertisers on a blog. But it is individual choice. Using the space for financial gains as an affiliate or from advertiser is another choice that we have and that is money. Money is the most powerful commodity on earth. fran A
  9. Harsh Agrawal says:
    Hey Pubudu That's really a nice topic brought up by you.. I have been using Buysellads and certainly I skipped the option which says manual approval of advertisement and I can still see many MMO and by link advertisement on my blog sidebar..which I'm not even sure if they are legit or just another spam.... I might need to put it back under manual settings now....
    • Pubudu says:
      You are right my friend, we must check them thoroughly before accepting! I think buyandsell is sometimes restricting our judgement :D
  10. Allie says:
    Ads in is used for adsense, right? What if I don't use ads in my blog, will I still achieve what I need?
    • Pubudu says:
      If you don't have any advertisers, then you won't get any income for you blog! Without any income, it will be very difficult to improve your blog!
  11. Alex says:
    With blogging you have to build credibility and trust before anything else. That is why you have to be careful what you recommend and who are you linking to. Some bloggers just stick in any kind of advertising, hoping that at least one of the banners the added will convert, but this definitely works against them. I find that the best advertising is then when you recommend something that solved one of your problems or can solve the problems of others.
    • Pubudu says:
      "best advertising is then when you recommend something that solved one of your problems or can solve the problems of others" : You're absolutely right with that mate!
  12. Val says:
    Good points, especially regarding paid reviews. I personally can live with a lot of advertising in the blogs I read, as long as it doesn't stand in the way of my reading. I understand that people need to be compensated for their work. Restricting shady advertisers is a good practice. First of all, it is your moral obligation, and also they are a risk to your reputation. One blogger even stated, "If you see any advertising in my blog, that means I find that product great and fully endorse it." Now that's responsible advertising. As for multiple programs and profitability, I recommend split testing and deciding based on cold hard numbers. That is the primary topic of my web tracking course and my blog.
  13. Vivek Parmar says:
    It depends on you how you control your ad space on your blog. just focus on your niche and the ads you serve will totally based on your niche only
  14. Pritam Nagrale says:
    Its really a nice post. We should be careful enough to check the reputation of the advertiser. There are number of things like you said above to check if this is useful to accept the advertisers. I have also stopped writing reviews of the blogs which are spammy and does not have good products or services.
  15. Vincent Chow says:
    I really wouldn't mind if someone wants to advertise his real estate business on my tech blog. His banner would just sit in the sidebar, readers would ignore it totally if they're not interested. Non-obstructive ads that are not targeted is still within my acceptable line. But if someone were to order a real estate sponsored post on my tech blog, I'd definitely reject it outright.
  16. Fran Aslam From Onlinewriter says:
    Hi Pubudu: Wow, you brought every ones attention to a topic that everyone was using as the resources allowed. An awesome post with many effective strategies about blogging. It is a good read. Thanks. fran A
    • Pubudu says:
      You're welcome my friend! :D
  17. Justin Germino says:
    Good article, many monetization methods work against each other and compete causing poor performance in one for another. When doing sponsored content you should keep the 30% rule in mind, never more than 30% of content should be sponsored and you should always space non-sponsored content after and before a sponsored article. Never have sponsored content back to back. I always check advertisers, this is one disadvantage of BuySellAds which defaults to autoapprove, or else you have 24 hours only to review or an ad auto approves. I wasn't using WOT myself, but my own judgement I should add checking with WoT as an extra method of measurement for advertiser quality.
  18. Daisy says:
    I do not accept every advertiser that comes along as I know it will do me more harm in the long run. It's amazing how many offers you get from somewhat questionable websites. Nice tips on checking their reputation btw!
  19. Mani Viswanathan says:
    Yes, it's pretty important to limit adverts on any blog. Else ur readers ll be pretty unhappy.
  20. Karan Labra says:
    I follow what I have learnt from Hesham. i.e. to review the products that you have personally tried. This helps us to give better insights on the product and add real value for our readers. Moreover, I always keep an eye on the rep of my advertisers.
  21. Jahangir says:
    Very nice points you shared. First me too used to run only after money and didn't care much about my blog but now I am more focusing on the quality of my blog than money. Now I am working hard to make my blog as a "respectable" source of information where readers can come and whatever they read they should believe it "true" :) When you get good reputation you will get good advertisers.
    • Pubudu says:
      Well said my friend! "When you get good reputation you will get good advertisers!!!!" You're absolutely right!
  22. Kharim says:
    This is a good thing to consider if you are selling ads on your blog. You don't want your blog to look like a billboard where people just come a post ads everywhere and you accept the money for them to do this. This would be like they are running your blog and taking away your visitors. Great point as well where you said to be careful with the sites that you are selling the ads to because it could spoil the repetition of your blog. Thanks for the wonderful article :)
    • Pubudu says:
      Your right mate.. Our goal is not to make a huge online bill board, but to make a perfect blog!
  23. mark says:
    Hi Pubudu, This seems like good advice in general. If you are showing an ad on your site that is from a questionable company, at least in the eyes of the public, that could hurt your reputation amongst your readers. I have an uncle who says "you are who you surround yourself with". Of course, there are sites, like TJ mentioned that lend themselves to reviews. It all depends upon your goals and how you generate traffic. Thanks for mentioning Webutation - I had not heard of that one before. Have a good day!
    • Pubudu says:
      You welcome my friend! :D And thanks for the nice comment!
  24. Andreas says:
    If you place ads unobtrusive and not within every paragraph of the article then readers will not abandon your blog, it is the same with magazines, how many pages of ads readers have to digg through before they arrive at content nowadays, and the magazines still sell.
  25. DiTesco says:
    That is really a good advice and one that many should be paying attention to. Checking reputation is definitely a good way to go, although, I am not so sure about the "reputation" checkers out there as some of them are "controlled" by certain individuals who can make your life quite complicated if you are not careful. I have my website considered by WOT "safe" and it took a while before I convinced the community to make it green. The reason why I am saying this is that if I want to advertise somewhere and they check my WOT before it was green, I would have been in a mess. I actually lost a potential advertiser due to this. Nothing better than visiting the website of the advertiser and "poking" around a bit to play it safe. All-in-all, I agree with you and one should not let the advertisers control its website, at no cost.
    • Pubudu says:
      My friend, if your site is not rated by WOT, you can mention that in their forum. After that, they will review your site and put the ratings within about 2 days (i got it within a day). Next, the community reviews will come from the normal users!
  26. Dean Saliba says:
    I don't get many advertisers, I rely on advertising networks. But you are right when you say that a lot of us let advertisers ruin blogs. I know I am guilty of this. And it is one of my goals for this year, to sot the advertising out on my blogs. :)
    • Pubudu says:
      Great work my friend! Wish you'll be able to sort things out soon! :D
  27. Bilal Ahmad says:
    WOT is good website, it shows the reputation of a domain, but it can be cheated also. What do you mean by Bad Links?
    • Pubudu says:
      Actually my friend, WOT's main rating comes from their own professionals. The user ratings are a separate thing! Bad Links means, links to phishing sites, scammers, spammers, virus sites, sites with bad reputations.. etc...
  28. Radu Tyrsina says:
    Buddy, your writing talent is pleasently surprising me :) How are things going? :)
    • Pubudu says:
      Thanks mate! Things are going really well! :D
  29. kbharath says:
    i do agree with you mate that quality is more important than money while coming to advertisement. most of the bloggers are doing the same mistake as you said when they see money they are accepting any advertisement. which is not really worth for the bloggers as well as the advertiser.
  30. ashwin shahapurkar says:
    Nice tips Pubudu, thats the reason i have not yet opened my blog for external advertisers. thanks for these tips .will always keep in mind.
    • Pubudu says:
      Better open it for some advertisers mate... You'll get a good income if you do it a in a more controlled way! :D
  31. Kevin says:
    I personally use WOT. I already have it installed on my chrome browser. You've made some great points! When I do offer advertising for my blog I'll be sure to check out the product before I accept any sort of payment. I'll probably even ask to try out the product before I allow them to put ads on my blog. Thanks for the tip!
    • Pubudu says:
      You're welcome my friend! And you have mentioned one important point that I have missed! Testing out the product! Yes its very important to test out the product by our selves first before offering it to our readers! If the product is a scam or something useless, our reputation will also go down!
      • Kevin says:
        This business is about trust and having a good reputation. So we don't ever want to jeopardize that right.
  32. Tuan says:
    Good post, Pubudu. Thanks for sharing your tips and the tools to check advertisers' reputation. I have also received some advertising offers but I couldn't accept most of them as they are not relevant to the content of my blog. This post helps me a lot.
    • Pubudu says:
      Your welcome my friend! Glad it helped you! :D
  33. Jenn says:
    Under what circumstances could a person not remove a link from a site they own or manage? Did this guy mean he couldn't remove the links from cached versions of his web pages? The search engines will recrawl the page after it's updated. . .
    • Pubudu says:
      Think that he have used so many plugins to add links to his site. Some of these plugins have added lots of links which are invisible to the humans but visible to the search engines! So, when we check from a link scanner.. there are lots of links.. But, we can't locate them!
      • jenn says:
        I see! Well, that makes sense, I guess. I'd love to have a list of what plugins NOT to use. It is so difficult sometimes to find a plugin in the Wordpress repository that works the way you want it to!
        • Pubudu says:
          Hmm... That might be a good topic for another post :D
  34. Michael Aulia says:
    Yeah..I try hard not to sacrifice my blog's integrity (or other reasons). So sometimes you just have to reject those offers if they are a bit too much (or if they are not really worth it). To me , building an integrity is worth more than money, but again, each may have different goals
    • Pubudu says:
      Your right my friend.. Building integrity on your blog is more important. If we go after money and break that integrity, in the long run.. we will also loose money!
  35. TJ McDowell says:
    As far as reviews go, I think they are more easily integrated with certain types of websites. For example, my blog is targeted at photographers, so if I'm reviewing photography software (which I actually did for my last blog post), I'm giving valuable information at the same time as I'm writing a review. I think the problem with some reviews is that they're not the primary intent of the blog. If you look at a mommy blog where she's constantly reviewing products that really aren't all that interesting to other moms, the review seems like an interruption to regular content. What do you think? Can you write reviews for certain blogs without interrupting the user experience?
    • Pubudu says:
      Yes we can write reviews without interrupting the regular content if we accept reviews which match our blog or niche! :D
  36. wasim ismail says:
    Some good points, also sometimes sites can slightly over do it with advertising, and can annoy readers, when choosing an advertiser, its best to choose and advert that is related to your blog and niche, so that your readers are aware and know what the advert is about.