I had a hard time decided which of the things I’m currently pissed off about to be pissed off enough to write about…
I finally landed on ad-stuffed blogs. I recently started back up with Google Reader so I can have a good list of self-publishing and author blogs to check out. It’s part of being an author, building relationships with others to help advance you books. The beauty of Google Reader is that I can just view the plain text of the posts – no fancy script, no colorful backgrounds, and most importantly, no ads.
Just reading isn’t enough, though. You have to comment on posts to build those relationships (plus it’s another avenue of exposure), which requires me to leave the relative comfort of Google Reader and go to the blog page, where I am immediately inundated with sidebar ads that go on for forever. I understand that people want to leverage their blogs to make a little extra cash on the side. I also know that building a website isn’t cheap. I begrudgingly renew my domain every year and pay the chunk of change to keep it going.
Let me just share a little bit of my own opinion here – if you’re writing an author blog to make money from ads, you’re doing it wrong. Your author site exists for the benefit of your readers and for you to spread the word about your books. Ads make your site look cheap and unprofessional, especially when you’re using a free site framework like Blogger or WordPress. And some of your ads are *really* egregious. Some of your ads aren’t even for things your readers and fellow authors would be interested in, at all. And you put ads in every single place one could possibly put an ad – in the banner, in the footer, in the left sidebar, in the right sidebar. This cheapens your content, which is what your readers are visiting your site to see.
Lucky for me, there’s AdBlock Plus 🙂
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