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It’s easy to lose sight of what the average visitor is after when you spend a lot of time creating websites, webpages or lenses and hubs.
Visitors want information. Either give it to them or show them the best places to find it. Keep all your content on topic.
Don’t ask anything untoward from your reader. Don’t beg for money. Don’t remind them that you will get a commission for each sale. Don’t tell them to click on ads. Don’t inform them about your financial plight. Avoid alienating your outside audience with constant reference to inside information. Be professional.
Think about it, if you were walking down the street and you had shopkeepers coming out urging you to come into their store to buy their product because they have a sob story, you’d think them highly unprofessional.
Here’s a recent blog post by Susan52 on the same subject that I highly recommend: Who Are You Making Lenses For?
I had just got onto Twitter and noticed that 1 second prior Squid Engineer Gil had made this announcement:
“New Squidoo ad experiment coming soon. To opt out, select “Opt out of text link ads” in Lens Settings section of Workshop.”
Oh dear.
They of course have the right to experiment, but I speak for many when I say that text link ads takes away from potential Adsense ad clickage. And don’t pay nearly as much. And I don’t know this for a fact, as it’s been so long since I’ve ever clicked on an Adsense ad so it’s just hearsay, but Adsense ads launch in a new browser window (or tab) but Text Link ads (if it’s going to be Kontera) are usually set up to open the target site in the same window by default. That means once your visitor has clicked, they’re gone!
And the contextual part of it is totally crap. They’ll grab a word that is relevant to the advertiser, but the advertiser is (from my experience) completely out of context with the content of the page.
Update: It’s not Kontera, but Infolinks. I haven’t had experience with them. But what will be the reaction of Lensmasters when they start to see these unapproved links in their content? Adsense ads are one thing, but right in amongst your own words it’s like you’re personally endorsing the link.
