Blogging tips & www social trends
1 Jun
Darren made me think in his post about Donations in blogs.
I think that asking directly for money to your readers is something you can do only if you really deserve it, if you know you’re giving a lot to your visitors and you’re taking care of them.
Otherwise I think it’s really dangerous.
Take John Chow. Seeing that “buy me a beer” request at the end of each of his posts just made me angry.
In the last months he gave me the impression he is exploiting his readers, trying to squeeze as much money as he can from them.
Well, I don’t like it. I feel like he’s just using me and his readers.
If it was someone else to use that plugin, someone who gave my the impression he was blogging for the readers and not only for money, I would have had nothing to complain about… but this way it’s just too much.
Just to make it clear: I love that plugin. It’s cool and polite. You can donwload it from the official buy me a beer plugin page, but please, use it in the right way :)
What do you think?
Do you think that overmonetizazion is dangerous?
Do you ever think that a blog you’re visiting is written for money and nothing else? How do you feel about it?
7 Responses for "(Over) Monetization Strategies"
Overmonetization (intended as putting some “pay me” gadget in every corner of a blog) make me think about low quality.
The message I get is “well, I don’t really care about giving something valuable to my readers. I CARE about getting money.”
I think that earning money from a blog is not a bad thing, but at least it should appear as a ’secondary task’, something that comes after the quality of the contents.
John Chow has completely jumped the shark just recently. I don’t mind being peppered with ads per se, because there’s ways to avoid them.
But buy the millionaire John Chow a beer because he’s posted about earning $10k in a month? No thanks….
Once you don’t care about your readers, you’re out.
You have to respect your readers even if you’re in blogging for making money…
I’m glad to see I’m not the only one thinking that John has gone too far. I’m gonna track his stats to see if his subscriber count is going down :)
I find it hard to make money by blogging. For me, it’s hard money. I have to spend a lot of time to earn such hard money and type thousands words to attract people to buy me a drink?
I have better things to do. I don’t make million, but I will do that more efficient way. I run my small online store to sell women’s stuff. I find it easy to do customer service than writing a blog. ;-)
John Chow never cared about his readers, he’s purely in it for the money. He blogs about nothing but how he’s making money and he routinely puts up affiliate links and paid advertisements (he gets paid to promote Algoco and other new startups - who pay him a small fortune to have him endorse their product).
His entire blog is about making money, but if you really look he never really offers tips besides promotional products that he tells his readers to buy (with an affiliate link of course) that will help them to make money. His entire system is a cross-promotional pyramid scheme - and sadly many are buying in to it. Plus Google bumped him recently because he’s begging for links and trying to game Google. Look up John Chow or Make Money Online and he’s nowhere to be found.
Over monetization is dangerous if you want to have a true community website, however, if your website is just about getting one time visitors, and not worried about the community aspect then it’s all good to do it if you ask me.
Till then,
Jean
Over-monetization degrades trust. Posting affiliate links and spammy offers is not beneficial to your trust. But I guess he doesn’t care - it’s all about the money to him.
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