Time has come to make a command decision to lop off the dead wood, trim the fat, shed the extra weight, or whatever.
I've decided to concentrate on you guys and not on the peripheral garbage that has been cluttering up the place. So, in an effort to improve your experience, I have decided to implement the following changes.
Google Be Gone - I have decided that AdSense ads on this blog look crappy, take up space and don't make any money. When I see the miniscule amount AdSense brings in, it just makes me angry. I would much rather do this for free than be assessed a value of pennies a day. Google, in all it's forms, is gone.
BlogRush Got BlogFlushed - 7 days - 3 clicks, pretty much a no-brainer. All that widget did was slow down my load time and bleed off visitors. Chris Bloczynski wrote a compelling article about why he doesn't think the BlogRush model will work and I agree with him, I also believe people have already become blind to the widget. The bottom line is, it's not worth the real estate.
Deal Dot Com? - More Like Deals Don't Come - I think these guys are up to something other than actually selling a product. Some of the "deals" they've offered seemed shady at best. I'm not educated in all of this SEO, SEM, whatever stuff but something seems fishy. If they were actually trying to sell a product I think they would give real product info instead of the stupid, long winded, joke sales copy they put up. I also feel if they were after more than traffic they would offer an RSS option on the sales page. I don't care who's behind it, I don't feel comfortable about it so, it's out of here.
I know all of this seems to go against the original concept of this blog, but if you recall, this has always been an experiment. My experiment has led me to decide advertising on a blog about blogging of this format is a waste of time and space. I actually think it is a detriment.
I don't disavow advertising forever. As a matter of fact, I almost certainly will reinitiate it on the new WordPress design, if it ever sees the light of day. Until this blog is able to generate enough income to not be insulting, I prefer to donate my time and effort to the blog community.
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11 comments:
Power to ya for getting rid of all your advertising.
I too will likely be getting rid of BlogRush, but I'm giving it a couple more days. I kinda figured this would happen and referenced another post of yours when I first installed it.
I'm pretty much glad I didn't sign up for DealDotCom because so far, I haven't seen a single product on their site that even looked remotely interesting.
How's the move to a self-hosted WordPress blog coming along? If you need any help with it, let me know.
Nick - As you know, I've tried several different configurations and the bottom line is, ads just look out of place here.
BlogRush was and is all about the hype. It's the same old tried and died concept as BloggerSwap and AdGridwork.
Hmmm...I may have to blog about this again...
I'm taking my time on the move. Right now I'm playing around with a theme I kind of like. Just trying to get my mind wrapped around CSS and PHP. HTML was so much easier ot figure out.
Getting rid of adsense is a bold decision , wish i could do that but they seem to be doing a decent job for me .
I wanted to try blogrush but they dont seem to be working anywhere so i will leave that .
I think dropping the Adsense actually might give you a better perspective and vantage point to keep up your Ad Tracking :)
@ Madhur - I know it seems bold but, to be honest, the few dollars a week it brought in made me feel like I was selling my time and effort for too little so I'd rather give it away.
@ dana - It really does seem incongruous doesn't it.
I just removed Blogrush too. I don't see how it will bring me any significant traffic. They should not have overhyped the product. It is not a terrible product, but not the "rush" that it was marketed as.
Fred - I agree. I think it's going to fade away pretty quickly. I'll be surprised if anybody even talks about it in two weeks.
Thanks for taking the time to comment. Stop in any time :)
I didn't notice you had Adsense up, seriously. I was actually wondering where your ads were! But I have noticed that you really blog more about blogging than anything so I come back more for the content.
Now... it's the title that looks funny... ;)
YC - The ads were riding at the bottom of the posts and I had a referral banner at the top.
I fazed them both out over the past week because I had a couple of articles riding a StumbleUpon wave and stumblers don't like ads.
Yeah, I think the title is going to be out of here soon also :)
Dang, you're dead on with this one. I only recently started displaying Adsense ads. I also just put up the BlogRush and DealDotCom ads. With BlogRush my credits yo-yo from day to day (one day negative, the next day positive). As for DealDotCom, I actually purchased one of their products. It was one of those "read this to find out how to make money online" eBooks. I printed it out and soon put it aside after reading the first section.
I'm going stay the course for now but I share your feelings about all 3 ad companies.
ColorStruck - You're probably making the right decision, I just got tired of fooling with them.
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