There are millions of blogs out there these days and each of them has its own reason for being. Some people blog for fun and there’s nothing wrong with it – but we’re not talking of such blogs now. Some people blog to attract attention to their business and establish trust with their potential customers, and it’s well known that blogging is a great tool to achieve it. Some people blog for the sake of monetization because, let’s face it, content has its value and creating content with the purpose of its monetization in some form is a legitimate business model as well. But how well can one combine the two goals and will they not interfere with one another?
I asked myself this question many times before and asked it again today when I came across the blog of iPower, a web hosting provider. Why do they run a blog? With posts like this one, it is pretty clear that they want to use it as a tool for driving more customers their way. Great, but why would they want to place AdSense ads on their blog then? Aren’t they familiar with the way AdSense operates in that it will display ads topically related to the content of the page the ads are placed on? In iPower case, the ads of other hosts who are, clearly, iPower’s competitors. Isn’t that the contrary of what they are trying to achieve with the blog and wouldn’t it drive their potential customers away?
OK their reasoning behind this step might have been that those blog visitors who browse away from their site and buy hosting services elsewhere could at least be monetized by clicking those AdSense ads – but with the current cut down costs per click for AdSense publishers, it doesn’t quite justify it for me. Heck even affiliate links of those competitor hosts would have done better. However, in my opinion it looks like they do not have enough faith in their host if they provide their visitors with ways to leave their site and go to competitors. An ideal “landing page” (used in quotes here as a blog cannot be literally compared to a landing page – although each page of your commercial site should be aimed at converting your visitors and persuading them your service or product is worth their attention) is the one where the user has only two options: complete a purchase or get more information about your service or product. The less distractions, the better.
So if you try to combine different ways of making profit on the web, there is nothing wrong there – but you should consider carefully your monetization methods so that they do not interfere with each other. Pursuing contradictory goals will get you nowhere and neither of them will be achieved as well as it could have been otherwise.