BlogWorks: Honesty in advertising

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August 19, 2005

Honesty in advertising

Dave Taylor, an A-list blogger with several sites, told attendees of the Blog Business Summit how to get the most out of Google AdSense ads on your blogs: throw everything you know about Internet advertising out of the window.

"The more obvious [it is] the links aren’t part of your page, the less likely people are to click on them," Taylor said. Blogs tend to relegate their ads to the side of the page in a box that stands out as an ad. But readers are trained not to look at ads, he said.

He said the more he can integrate the ads into the content of his blogs, the better the ads perform. An audience member asked if it’s possible to take off the header "Ads by Goooogle." The answer is no.

In addition to Google AdSense, Taylor also uses affiliate links, such as audible.com and the Wall Street Journal, and has an ad for his own blog training event. His blog Ask Dave Taylor is his "big time revenue generator," he said.

Although Google prevents its AdSense members from giving numbers on how much they make, Taylor said it more than pays for his mortgage every month.

In my opinion, if you have a blog and you want readers to click on the ads, integrating them into the content somewhat is not a bad idea. However, you don’t want to deceive your readers into thinking it’s actually part of your content and something that you wrote. If you want to gain readers who will come back to your site again and again, you need to be honest with them, not only with your writing, but your advertising, too.

Technorati tags: bbs05, blogbusinesssummit

Posted by at August 19, 2005 02:01 PM