Online advertising programs
This post is in regards to online advertising methods and the websites/companies that provide services to website/blog owners for earning money to make posts and or other advertisements. I am growing more discouraged with these types of programs as time progresses.
It seems that the programs all have there TOS and it is very easy to violate it without even thinking much of it at all. After I have experimented with a number of these different programs I have decided that there should be some guidelines that website/blog owners should follow as a rule of thumb and it may just spur these advertising affiliates into better practice.
Think of your website/blog as a newspaper. If you open your local newspaper you will see advertising for at minimum 30 companies many even being competitors all on the same page. These newspapers on an average are read by a percentage of the town or cities population. The small little 2-inch by one-inch ads can cost upwards of a few hundred dollars a week to run.
The online advertising affiliate programs and such expect that you will provide them with a minimum of a 200-word post or article describing their service or goods. They expect that you will do this for them for $20.00 or less and leave the ad active for 30+ days. Not only do they expect you to do this for pennies but they also expect that their ad will not be on the same page or near any other advertisement.
Well first off I don’t know about anyone else but in my city there are 58’000 people and assuming every one of them read the newspaper my website still reaches double that amount in a month at least. Now that it is obvious that we have a greater reach than a newspaper why is it that we get paid chump change?
After thinking about all of this I have decided that I do not go looking for affiliates. They look for me. If they want a post, great they will get a post and a good one at that. If they want to have a full page ad so be it they can have that to but we are talking about real estate here so the more ad space the greater the cost. Unlike a newspaper though we do require some level of decency and proper business practice for the companies we advertise for. If we decide a company is not up to our standards we are not about to tell our viewers that they are reputable. We will also not run advertisements for any program or affiliate that requires us to not have more than one ad per page or anything even close to that kind of tactic so if you are one of these you might as well not bother or you may want to change your TOS before contacting us. Before I go the last thing I must state is that we refuse to run advertisements that require us to remove internal links from our posts. What this means is that if my site has a page named kwidget and in an advertisement the word kwidget is used, the website will make it a link to the kwidget page on my own site. Think about it. If you go to Wal-Mart or the like and go to the shampoo isle what do you see? Sum 18 different brands of shampoo. What do you think would happen if Suave decided to contact Wal-Mart and tell them they could not have their product in the same isle or on the same shelf as any others. Well Wal-Mart would likely tell them well pay us more or we stop carrying your product since it is an unrealistic request. Anyway that is just a few of my thoughts on the matter and what we are doing about it. Hopefully others will follow and show the advertising world that we are not a joke and you wont get our prime real estate for nothing.
