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A few months ago the very first person approached me wanting to advertise a certain affiliate program on my blog. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the program in question would go on to become probably the most advertised program I have ever seen in the make money online niche, the banners for it are EVERYWHERE.

I’m not going to mention the specific program in this post, but as I write this there are at least three advertisers promoting the program on my blog so you should be able to figure out it. I personally have not investigated the program so I’m hardly in a position to offer an informed opinion about it, but that’s not the topic of this article anyway.

In the past two months I’ve had at least 20 people contact me to promote this particular program on my two blogs and I’ve turned most of them back. I’ve had to refund at least $1500 because many people sent me money without realizing there are already several people already promoting the program on my blogs. It’s come to the point now where I’ve had to put a notice on my advertise page explaining I will no longer take on any advertisements for this program.

I’m not looking to judge the quality of the program, but I do want to point out the psychology that it is creating. Like many affiliate programs, this system is multi-tiered and I expect the pyramid like growth you can experience if you get out there and recruit as fast as you can is one of the biggest selling points. It’s worked so well, people are throwing money at promoting it without understanding anything about online advertising.

Promote Fast or You May Miss Out!

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I like to start the week with a big meaty blog post but I haven’t had a chance to write one for you yet because of one very good reason - I just bought a house!

Yep, my first home purchase, a three bedroom townhouse in Brisbane where I live in Australia. It’s in a suburb about 7 kilometers away from downtown Brisbane, within the very popular and expensive “inner city”.

The Brisbane property market is nuts at the moment and I’ve spent the last few months since I returned from Canada hunting for a home only to find that most places are gone by the time I find them or I have to compete with five other buyers in a horrible silent auction process. That’s the problem with a city growing very quickly in population and not enough land to go around.

The market in Australia is pretty much like this everywhere and it’s a scary thought that for a lot of people, especially people in my age bracket who might be limited by working normal jobs (yet another reason to be an entrepreneur - no salary ceiling) that they may have to rent for a long time or choose to buy property far out from the main city area.

Thankfully I found a place that I like and can afford. It’s not ideal in location but I’m pretty happy with it, especially as a first home and investment. Keep your fingers crossed for me over the next few weeks as I go through the loan application process and all the other things you need to get done when you buy a house. I’ll have some photos of it for you once I can finally say it is mine.

Today I’ve been busy getting all the little details sorted with the property purchase, so to keep you busy I thought I would offer some recommended links. I’ve been saving up a bunch of good links for a few weeks now so take your time and enjoy…

Recommended Links

• My friend Erik Vossman from Hawa’ii offers up 41 Links to Help You Start a Blog Network. There’s some great links and tips for any blog empire builders out there in this post.
• How to Be a Successful Blogger: Learning From the Best presents some quick points on what it takes to become a great blogger. Any time I see my name along with the likes of Michael Arrington I have to send out a link
• Kevin and his site Blogging Tips is the latest text link sponsor of my blog. His blog topic is pretty obvious and you might think it’s yet another blog about blogging, which it is, but I can tell from the post frequency and content quality that Kevin is serious about this project and it’s worth checking out.
• I might be a bit late with this one, but if you are interested in a gig as a paid b5media blogger covering the topics entrepreneurship and start-ups, then this job ad should interest you.
• The team over at Young Go Getter published a great article - The Devil & Online Advertising - which struck a cord with a lot of people considering there are currently 74 comments on it as I type this and it has been dugg 103 times too. If you have an interest in online advertising, and as blog publishers you should, then have a read of this article.
• The Lazy Owner continues a recent theme I wrote about on my blog last week with the article Freelancing is Not a Business Model. Hopefully freelancers really get the idea that if they want freedom eventually some form of business structure and systematization is necessary.
• The Go BIG network has launched their new service called Projects, which is a clearing house for connecting freelancers and service providers with start-ups looking for help. The idea is that start-up companies, who may be tight on capital, can offer equity or stock options in exchange for labor.

If you ever want to see your site in my recommend links here’s a tip - write something worth recommending for starters and send some link love my way in the article. I check my referrer stats everyday and I often come across other bloggers who mention me or my blogs in a post and of course that’s one of the best ways to get a blogger’s attention and some link love sent back your way in return. No promises of course, but it’s a good way to start relationships.

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I watched the movie Titanic with Leo and Kate on Friday night. It’s a good movie and afterwards I was interested to learn more about the tragedy so I Googled up some answers. As I progressed through page after page something started to bother me. I had trouble finding the real content because there was Google AdSense in all the most prominent places on EVERY site I visited. It wasn’t until I hit the “clean” Wikipedia entry on the Titanic that I finally got some valuable information.

Google has to be commended for providing one of the best ways to monetize a website. It’s so good because even the most average Webmaster can easily cut and paste some code to start earning some cash from their web property. Even sites that have a clear purpose and real content still apply some AdSense here and there for the “extra cash” that can be earned. Afterall you would rather someone clicked AdSense ads on your site when they exit so you get your 20 cents.

The problem is that when a webmaster gets a taste for the money suddenly their eyes start to sparkle and you hear that “cha-ching” noise. The possibility dawns - I can make real money on the Internet - and suddenly the motivation behind building the website goes from one of indulging in a hobby to making money. More and more AdSense blocks appear on sites and it becomes harder to find the real content.

Theoretically of course you would think that the AdSense ads themselves should have the content I’m looking for. For me personally I long ago caught “AdSense blindness” unless it’s a very specific Google search. Any AdSense on websites I ignore, just the way I ignored banners in their heyday. Plus most AdSense ads are for products or services relating to my keyword -rarely does an AdSense ad actually provide the best free content about a topic, afterall, the AdWords buyer is usually there to make sales.

Now we are faced with a situation where AdSense is proliferating at an outstanding rate and thousands of webmasters build sites specifically to earn money. Many of these site owners realize that content is still important, so they work hard to locate original content for their sites, but it’s still contrived content - just enough to get some reasonable Google rankings so the traffic starts to trickle in and the AdSense clicks increase. It’s not content created from a genuine interest in the subject. Compare this to a webmaster who hasn’t discovered AdSense yet and builds a site to provide the best content. Money doesn’t come into the motivation equation at all in this case.

But does that matter? Does the quality of our Internet increase or decrease if everyone who publishes a website does it, at least partially, to make money?

If we go back to the days before AdSense people were trying to make money. They did it much the same as they do now - with affiliate programs and CPM banner campaigns - AdSense just added another, very effective monetization method. Perhaps my argument is moot - money will always be part of the motivation.

AdSense made it all too easy. When your average hobbyist can actually see that $5 a day come in there is an immediate impact on their motivation. The taste of the money is so much more tangible because the results are quick and easy. It’s because banner ads and affiliate marketing are generally harder for novices to have significant success with that they don’t spark the same far-reaching penetration that AdSense does.

Maybe Google AdSense will begin to perform poorly for advertisers and “blindness” may become a problem like it did for banners. However I don’t think the impact will ever be significant. The average net user does not see text as advertising and I don’t see that characteristic changing. This means finding the real answer to our questions may become harder and harder as more site owners drown their content with AdSense to make money. I find that quite ironic considering Google came about as a better alternative to finding answers to questions.

Yaro Starak

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