Posts Tagged ‘Antivirus software’

We all hate advertising right?

Actually, I think we all hate untargeted advertising that sells to us, drives us a bit mad, and constantly tells us that our lives will fall apart with out this essential item. For a blogger some advertising is essential. As a reader you may think it’s wonderful that a blog has no advertising and heaps of free advice, but someone, somewhere is paying for that. Yep, they are paying pounds, shillings and pence so you can read, learn and hopefully interact and become part of their community.

Some people don’t like the interact part, they just prefer reading and that’s where the advertising aspect comes in. The blogger may choose to use adsense, affiliate links etc to help cover those costs. The real clever ones source, test and market products to their readers, whom they know inside out through their interactions.

In the mean time, building a blog and recouping some of the costs means looking at things from the ‘selling’ point of view as well as the ‘being sold to’ point of view. This can mean finding what you are comfortable with and using adsense and contextual links advertising to start with and then building it to a sustainable level – the balancing point between earning some money and not alienating your readers. That also means rotating the ads so regular readers are not oblivious to them.

How do you prevent ad blindness?

I looked into some ad supporting plugins over the weekend, they were recommended by fellow bloggers and I tried them out on Birds on the Blog.

The first was Ad Buttons, this plugin rotates 125 x 125 ads in one of the sidebar widgets. I downloaded the plugin and then went to look at their website, sadly Google told me this site may harm my PC, so be forewarned I clicked the link and my anti virus system went berserk. All that was missing was the klaxxon and the flashing lights.

I decided to uninstall it at that point, although the plugin worked perfectly well, I was unable to access the support function.

WP 125 was my next recommendation, and this also had the facility to show in house ads, so obviously this was of great interest to me

Sadly, the formatting of the plugin didn’t like the theme very much and overlapped the sidebar widget. I thought it might adjust, it may have just needed time to settle in, but sadly, it didn’t look right after several page refreshes and cache clearances. It probably was conflicting with another plugin, but I didnt have the energy to sort out which one, so it was Au Revoir.

The final free suggestion was the ad rotator plugin, and I am looking at that now.

Anyone use it?

Sarah