Text Links vs. Banner Ads

Another common use of text link: they are placed into the body of a webpage. Content is built around the text link. It much easier to built a value proposition, or tell a story when you have content build around a link then it is to tell that same story with just a banner/picture with a short tag line.

In other words, if we’re painfully honest with ourselves, ads work best when people don’t realize they’re ads. Ads work best when we trick people into thinking they’re part of the text.  Sad, but true. And something to consider.

I don’t employ this technique, which is probably why I don’t earn much money. I do believe that obvious ads can work if you have the right audience and they have the right relationship with you. It would be interesting to see a test of sidebar text links versus sidebar banners.

Affiliate Marketing Dictionary

The dictionary is a work in progress, so if you have a suggestion for what should be there or an alternate definition for a particular word, please let me know.

There are still plenty of times when I could use this. Because I don’t do AdSense, I went several months without knowing what “MFA” sites were.

Why I’m not watching your videos

It takes too long - I just did a little testing, and it appears that I can scan text at a rate of about 800 words a minute, but only talk at a rate of around 260 words a minute. That means that for a 1,000 word post/video, I can read it in around one minute 20 seconds, where I have to sit through you talking for around four minutes (and this doesn’t even take into account buffering time etc). I’m a busy man with little free time, so this is a real negative.

There are several more reasons, all of which I agree with.

BloggingFingers is offering a free ebook on blog monetization strategies that’s actually worth recommending. That link is to a post where you enter a contest by downloading the book, and yes, I’m getting some entries for writing this, but I rarely recommend - or even finish - free ebooks, and this one actually got my attention.

He talks about flagship blogs and niche blogs, and explains so clearly what he means by each term that you’ll have no problem seeing where each of your blogs fit. He also talks about niche blogs you’re hoping to grow into flagship blogs. Honestly, this part alone was a valuable refresher on basics for me: I sometimes see a niche blog doing well and think, “Oh, I could make this into a big blog and do even better” and end up screwing up what was working. Ahem.

Anyhow, after that he goes on to talk about precisely how to monetize each type of blog, and why this works for this blog and that works for that one. It’s an easy read, well worth the time.

What Makes An Awesome Product Site?

Is the social shopping stuff a fad? Should the product site have profiles and that jazz or just basic info.

This is just one of several questions that get discussed in the post and comment thread. It makes for some good reading, especially if you’re just about to sit down and revamp some of your own affiliate sites.

Single Serving Sites

Lately I’ve noticed a pattern of people building Single Serving Sites, web sites comprised of a single page with a dedicated domain name and do only one thing. Here are a few examples:

Sometimes Red, Sometimes Blue. Sometimes the page is read, sometimes it is blue.

D-E-F-I-N-I-T-E-L-Y helps you spell definitely correctly.

The Abe Vigoda status page. Currently alive.

There are a lot more examples if you click over. Seriously: wtf? Some of them are at least sort of useful, like the one that tells you if the next episode of Lost is a repeat, but there are about 5 million other ways to obtain this information. Can anyone explain this to me? Have people lost their minds? Lost bets?