As you all know (or should know) I have made a point of not having any advertisements or other promotional material on this blog. This blog is a service and since I would be doing this anyway for myself, why not share it? At the same time it would be nice to make a little money as a reward for my time authoring this blog and after all it seems like some people have received some value from this blog.
With that said, I recently received the following email from the folks over at the Elliott Wave site. It seems that the fact that I have posted some of their more relevant articles (relevant to housing that is) on this blog attracted their interest. They are extending to me an invitation to become an affiliate. What that means (if I understand this correctly) is that I could add a link to their site from mine (like I do for a lot of blogs over in the right hand margin of this blog). Anyone who clicked on that link and ended up buying one of their books or something would generate a little revenue for me. I don't think I would go so far as to add the banner graphic though.
I don't want to do this if it alienates any readers especially since we are probably talking about a few pennies in profits. So below you will find a poll. Please vote your thoughts.
Here's the email:
My name is Andrew Jordan, and I am a part of the affiliate team at Elliott Wave International (EWI). I have recently reviewed MarinRealEstateBubble.blogspot.com, and I would like to propose an affiliation between our sites. The EWI Affiliate Program offers you Free Auto-Updating Market Commentary, EWI Bookstore links to Robert Prechter's best selling books, Education content and more. Earning 56% commission, I believe you may find this beneficial for you and your site viewers.
First, here's a little about our company. EWI has provided investors with world-leading, independent technical analysis since 1979. We sell our analysis to individual and institutional investors throughout the world. Our staff of writers also maintain a number of free content programs, including market analysis and interesting articles. These articles aren't your usual recap of today's market activity. They give investors insight into market and economic events that they simply can't read anywhere else.
We offer this content to qualified sites, at no cost, to help fill out their site. We also offer above-average commissions for traffic that originated from the site at 56% (on most products and services) -- the commission for our most popular service is $100.
To make sure that you have the very latest articles on your site, we offer JavaScript, which updates the content on your site as soon as our writers post to our site. Over all, it's a turnkey way to get unique content added to your site and earn commissions too.
We also have a Traffic Rewards Program. Currently, you would earn free books for traffic. You in turn can sell them, give them away, use them to promote your site, donate them to the local university library, etc.
13 comments:
As someone who is lucky enough to be linked by you, many thanks, still I am agnostic. Free money seems a no brainer and I can certainly autofilter anything trying to distract me from your excellent content but it is a distration. If it weren't they wouldn't be offering. You transcend the distrations so take their money, it is the same color as real money.
I voted "I don't care," but honestly, I doubt anybody is getting more than a few dollars from people clicking ads. Therefore, personally, I would decline, and I have invested quite a bit of time and effort into a web page that costs me $110/year in hosting fees and is unrelated to my work or anything profitable. If you do decide on this I'd be curious what your revenues turned out to be, not that it's any of my business. Best of luck in any case.
I have no opinion for your site, as I don't think it would affect content quality. And I'm sure it wouldn't involve flashing banner ads, or other high-profile redirects, such as content tie-ins.
I recently moved to Sonoma county and considered buying a house. Thanks in part to this site, I am happily renting. I appreciate your work and check the site often. Thank you
No! They have the L. Ron Hubbard "we the enlightened" guru feel. They want to sell their system, much like other goldbugs, permabears, and Google search hijackers out there.
I must tell you that I have enjoyed this website greatly and I can tell that you have put a lot of work into it. Being a throwback who believes in rewarding performance, I tried to vote "yes" but was immediately assaulted by a multimedia ad for an xbox. Please don't allow this to happen to your site.
I'm not sure this is the best way to do it (after seeing some of the other comments), but if you can make some money - go for it.
You deserve it.
Yeah it's a great site Marinite. it'll take a little longer to load now on my broken down old computer but I can handle the wait.
make a few bucks if you can.
If it was my site I would check similar links on other sites to see what happens when clicked by a user.
One blogging site I visit recently took down some ads because the links were doing drive-by installs of browser-jacker software.
If your would-be advertiser throws all kinds of pop-up and blind-link junk up on the screen, your own site vistors may feel inconvenienced when they click.
But -- if there's no garbage behind the ad links, as a visitor to your site I wouldn't have a problem with you having ads.
Thanks for all the great feedback!
Regarding the popups with the poll hosting service -- the popups are few and seem to occur randomly as in not on every visit. Also there are ads on the "view results" page. That's fair enough for a "free" service.
I tried a number of different poll hosting services and this one seemed like the best and the easiest to use. I tried one (BraveNet or something like that) that would spam users each and every time with popups and I am still getting junk email from them; I dropped them like a bad habit asap.
I have asked my Elliott Wave contact if he could point me to other sites that are part of this affiliate member thing so that I can see what the impact is on their web site. But as it stands now I think I will probably NOT join as an affiliate member but I have not decided for sure yet.
Just my $.02
Ben Jones does his blog full time now, and you post almost as frequently. He makes enough off of the ads to live on (I don't think he'll be a millinaire anytime soon)
But, ads are not that intrusive. We see them everywhere, cars, billboards, tv, newspapers, even on clothing, computers, everthing has a logo...
I guess a better question I have for people, is why wouldn't you put ads on your site? (Adsense does not include obtrusive ads, usually, and you can colormatch them to your site and force text ads (as opposed to obnoxious full-color ads) But, unless your site is a mecca, you won't be getting sufficient revenues anytime soon. (I remember seeing my first few months of ads on my site, where there was $.02 to $.03 per day; yes, per day)
Recently, I made enough to take my wife to dinner after nearly a year at Ruth's Chris. To put it in perspective, I make more in 2 hours at work, than I have in my entire time on my blog. You won't get rich, but it may justify some of the time you spend doing it.
Marinite,
I support you 100%. You have proven yourself to be cautious and wise... I see no reason why this would be any different. Like others have said, I ave faith you will do it subtly and tactfully. I worry that this will be like opening Pandor'a box, though, and you maybe faced with this decision many more times with other affiliate companies in the future.
In any case, just do what your gut tells you is right: for you, and right for your readers. Those of us who loyally check in to see what you have been up to aren't going to stop doing that just because you wanted a little revenue validation for your efforts! And those who would, deserve to be victims of the RE plunge for their dismissive attitude toward your common "cents." Good luck.
I think you should accept the money, even if it's only a few pennies. You're so offbase on the majority of what you write, accepting a few cents for your efforts is truly fair compensation.
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