The question of whether to add commercial advertisements such as Adsense to your website and blog stirs up plenty of debate. Some claim that placing Adsense and affiliate links on your sites are a must. Others state that Adsense is dead, and that it’s time to move on.
Advertisements earn income, and money is always nice. Each click brings in a few pennies (or sometimes even dollars), and that can add up to a nice amount of passive income without you having to do much marketing or pushing.
On the other hand, does loading up your site with ads really rake in the dollars? Does it boost your site appeal? Does it encourage repeat visits or build your brand? Do visitors really click links to help you earn hundreds of dollars? Is it worth it to load up your site with ads?
That depends. My opinion is that you have to decide what sort of business image you want to display to visitors, as well as what mission your business has.
This site, as you’ll notice, is devoid of any Adsense or affiliate links. So far.
We’ve thought about which way we want to go with advertising. We’ve debated whether adding advertising to the site is a good thing for an already overloaded society. We’ve discussed if advertising respects our mission to provide superior services to individuals and whether adding some will reduce our site appeal. We’ve talked over the distraction of the flash, bling, and distracting chunks of “click here!”
Another issue we’ve wondered about is whether people are getting wise to pay-per-click strategies. The bombardment of Adsense is so familiar that one has to wonder if site visitors will actually click through. Some do, some don’t. Also in the question is whether advertising directs people to good quality websites. Think about it: You don’t see .edu sites using Adsense, do you?
Still, there are plenty of people making quite a bit of money from Adsense and advertising strategies. The debate of whether we’ll add advertising to our site is still up in the air, and your opinions on the subject are more than welcome.
For those who do use advertising on their sites for passive income or for those considering the move to Adsense, here’s a great article from ProBlogger that will help you with your decision.
Passive income is King! When I first started building my site, that was the first thing I did because people somewhat expect to see ads somewhere on the page. I think it ads (pardon the play of words) to your site legitmacy couple with “good” content.
Lisewise, I also invest in adwords becuase I think it helps with branding. Conversely,the more people that know that their click ads to someone else’s pcoket, the less likely they might click. I have a friend who refuses to click on someone’s adsense because he’s just that type of person. So its a bit of a grey area.
Its funny that your article is just title Adsense. It made me click on it more to see what it was about rather than skiming through to see if it was going to be woth my time.
P.S. It was worth my time
I yanked Adsense from my freelancing site… after I clicked on the suggestions it had. Without trying any of the programs I just didn’t feel comfortable giving them a link on my site. So… I decided that I would just promote products and ebooks that I had used and found helpful on my writing journey.
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