For a long time I had links to Sensible Cocoa, BinPress, Dropbox and Mobfox in the footer of every page on Cocoanetics.com. I also had two entries for other people’s components in my parts store section that linked to another company’s store via affiliate links.
I had established the links because I was hoping to earn a bit of passive income from these links, with the exception of Dropbox where I wanted just wanted to increase my free storage. This was the only successful part, I raised my storage to just under 25 GB over the past year.
A long hard look at where our income was actually coming from revealed that advertising made up only 1% of revenues, with affiliate commissions only be a fraction of that. All in all I was giving mixed messaging and noise to my readers, while at the same time not deriving any relevant monetary value from it.Also, we recently passed the 6000 follower milestone on Twitter. When I granted a wish to the lucky person his first one was for one of the affiliate links in my parts store. Talk about mixed messaging…
There was a time when I was excited about the prospect of sending a bit of traffic to other people’s websites in exchange for sharing in their success. But it turns out that you need orders of magnitude more of the first to actually notice the second. So I was not seeing the upside, but the affiliation noise was only giving me the downside.
So I learned my lesson. I’ll quit the bait-and-switch game and leave that to the big guys. There are no more affiliate links, anywhere on Cocoanetics.com. Yes, I could have come to this realization sooner, but better late than never!
Having removed that you might be wondering why there are still ads in some very prominent places. For example there is a wide banner inserted at the place of the <MORE> tag in each article which gives it about 13000 views per month which is nothing to sneeze at. So yes, you can still advertise here.
BuySellAds.com is doing a great job in helping us small guys sell ad space. And not just the small guys, even heavy-weights as Ray Wenderlich are using BSA. And if it is good enough for Ray then it is good enough for most of us.
