Lose Money Today

Don’t show ads? You must be thinking that is about as stupid a way to lose money online as anyone has ever come up with. Of course everyone shows ads on their sites.

Actually, that is not true. There are tons of sites that do not show ads on their sites. Or, if they are showing ads, they are not showing ads where visitors will actually visit.

I have a nice chunk of websites. Some that I picked up in land grabs when I’m in a site buying frenzy. Others that I have just not touched in a long time. I can say with absolute certainty, that there may be a site or two (maybe three), that I am not showing ads on. Or maybe I have ads so tightly embedded in content that they are nearly invisible to users. There might even be a site or two that I felt were not traffic’d enough to deserve ads.

In my original way of thinking coming up on 10 years ago, I felt (as did some of the prognosticators of the day), that you should build out content and a critical mass of readers before dropping ads on the site. The thought was that users who saw ads would immediately hit the back button and poof, your traffic was gone. Now there may have been some validity to that point. But I believe looking back now, that the true meaning behind that thought was that you did not want to overwhelm your user with so much advertising that they we unable to appreciate your content. Remember, the primary ad media back then were graphical banners. Some were quite unappealing.

At this point on the Internet though, I feel that users have come to expect a reasonable level of advertising on a site when they visit. And reasonable is somewhat dependant on the niche you are in. Users expecting a classy, almost educational like resource don’t want to be bombarded with ads I’d guess. But users visiting sites more akin to sins of the flesh site might be willing to put up with a more robust advertising experience.

The real key though for the webmaster is to set the tone such that the level of advertising is acceptable while out in front of the user enough to acquire clicks. I struggled with the right word for that. I think entice is too aggressive. What we really want is to sustain advertising as a viable business model is for users to click knowingly and to convert. Tricky clicks, while a nice revenue model in the short run, do not encourage advertisers to keep paying big bucks.

Lastly, while I am sure you probably have seen it if you are reading this, you should at least give a peek at the AdSense heatmap for improving performance. The thing to keep in mind though is that although this is provided for AdSense, you can expect similar tracking patterns for other advertising media.

You might notice that I am not running ads on this site right now. That will change shortly. I’m kind of in the get the content rolling mode right now, and have really slacked on the revenue generation plan for Lose Money Today! I guess that is kind of the gist of this post anyway. Touche.