Or If Sales Assistants Went On Strike….

This is a real world. People publish their own content and adding advertising to it is often the only way they can finance the time it takes to create it. I actually love seeing adsense on pages, I love the way that it adapts to a pages content and the unexpected results it sometimes brings up.

Just recently I was posting to a soccer forum that discusses the youth league that my son plays in. There have been a number of issues recently with the administration of the competition he played in this year. (If you are really interested you can read it here NSWFA ) . Towards the end of the discussion one user posted a funeral note – which was very funny and lightened us all up by bagging out the association which was at fault. The Adsense on this post when it was posted, showed ads from funeral homes. It has since changed after a new post but how cool is that?

Imagine, you write an article on golf clubs and next to it – totally automatically are ads to buy golfclubs. Its such a fantastic process, that just ‘happens’ all over the web, and most of us so take it for granted. Just think a moment what it is like to publish a newspaper. To cut and paste the snippets of news and fit those ads into the gaps like a jigsaw puzzle. But all we bloggers have to do is place a string of numbers, one time in our template, and our article is immediately flanked by advertising that not only fits snugly, but changes from day to day and yet is always relevant to the content. Its awesome.

There are however people who are totally snobby about advertising and intensively dislike it. When you are link building, having Adsense or any form of monetization on your site may hinder your efforts for the exchange of links with directories, serious bloggers and authority sites. However good your content is, having advertising aside of it, is akin to sacrilege. The feeling is probably “Why should I help you make money?”

Yes there are bloggers and webmasters who ‘do it for love’. But that doesn’t make them better bloggers than those who blog for a dollar, and lets face it, adsense doesn’t pay you a fortune.

But, academics have always been snobby about merchants, and online it is no different. Marketers and sales people are looked down on as peddlers, while people with letters after their name, are credible and respected members of society, even if personally they are arrogant, mercenary and manipulative. It’s the way of the world – we live with it.

If all sales assistants ever went on strike, the whole economy could crash in less than a month – but retail assistants are one of the lowest paid members of the work force there are. The invisible sales force who pay the taxes that pay the academics to continue to educate the rich.

Magazines are full of advertising, so are newpapers, and so are the authority sites that other snobby sites love to link to, and please don’t try the holier than thou argument on me, when its simple discrimination. If directories or authority sites don’t want to link to shopping or marketing sites then just say so. If you are going to be discriminating – be up front about it.

If you want to be fair about discrimination then look at the content, not the advertising. If a site fails to give value on those grounds – with its content – well fine, (but at least click past the front page to see if it does).

Choosing to display adsense or any other advertising may hinder your link building efforts with established sites. So choose carefully which model of business you want to use.

If your aim is monetization (as many websites are), perhaps you could create one site which is adsense, advertising and product free and use this as a portal to your monetized sites.  Just a thought.

How do you appeal to the Linkorati?
Listen to this audio interview on link building from  MindValley Labs with the one and only Rand Fishkin, CEO of the highly successful SEOmoz, by far one of the undisputed leaders in the SEO industry.

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 17th, 2008 at 1:11 am and is filed under Free Blog Traffic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.