Avoid non relevant ads

If your blog talks about technology there is no reason to display ads about mortgage rates or hotels in Paris. Sure it might help you make some money on the short term, but over the long term it might harm your credibility since such non relevant ads offer no value for your readers.

Non relevant ads could include text link ads, sponsored reviews and direct sponsors. If someone is willing to advertise something on your site that is not even remotely related to your topic it means that he is just looking for the SEO part (i.e. Pagerank from Google). Secondly those ads might also discourage legit sponsors that do not want to get mixed with non relevant content.

I know it is hard to turn down potential revenue sources, specially when they help to pay your hosting bills. If you currently have non relevant ads or sponsors on your blog you could try to remove them gradually. Remove a single one initially and look for something else that could offer value for your readers.

Daniel Scocco on March 9, 2007 Subscribe to our RSS Feed

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11 Responses to “Avoid non relevant ads”

Philip Liu on March 9th, 2007 11:21 am

Agreed. I see a lot of text link ads on popular blogs are unrelated to the main topic of the blogs. It totally looks cluttered and is a dead giveaway that the advertiser is only interested in the “Google juice” of the links.
Daniel on March 9th, 2007 11:23 am

There is also one reason I forgot to mention, those ads might eventually scare “good” advertisers. Once I received an email from a company that wanted to advertise on my site but did not want to get mixed with mortgage sites. (just updated it into the post).
engtech on March 9th, 2007 11:45 am

Another thing is not being selective with choice of pay-per-post schemes. It’s hard to resist the allure of $125 or more for around an hour of work writing about something… but if it isn’t something related to your niche at all?
Philip Liu on March 9th, 2007 11:48 am

Engtech, what if we made the PPP on-topic? E.g., linking some aspect of the product/service to the blog? Kinda like James Bond driving Beemers in the movies.
Daniel on March 9th, 2007 12:05 pm

Engtech, I agree completely, sponsored reviews or posts on non revelant topics turn a lot of people down (including myself).
Jack on March 9th, 2007 2:07 pm

Agreed. I write about my life, and my advertising is always tied in with my life. Like I am promoting bands I listen to at the moment.

I’m considering taking up paid reviews, but I am only going to refer to stuff that is relevant.

More than putting off potential sponsors, I don’t want to alienate my readers. They’re what’s important to me.
Thilak on March 9th, 2007 2:29 pm

I agree that potentially unrelated ads could turn down both Advertisers and Readers alike. I’m caught in a weird situation here, some guy bought a text link ad off my site. He later changes the URL and the anchor text of the ad. Now I could do nothing about it
Daniel on March 9th, 2007 3:28 pm

Thilak, if you email TLA I think they will take care of it, just explain what happened
Mexxrg on April 18th, 2007 3:02 pm

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