In Link Buying Basics for Business Bloggers, Steven Spencer brings up the topic of paid text links. We all knew this was inevitable in blogging. Whenever I look at a Weblogs, Inc. blog, I’m disgusted by the ratio of ads to content. However, there’s no deception, here. We know those ads are bought and paid for, and we accept it. But what if you saw plain text links on a blog and you found out they were secretly unannounced paid links?
So, this is where I come out against stealth paid text links. It utterly destroys the trust that exists between blogger and reader, and between fellow bloggers. If markets are conversations, and blogs are all about that conversation in an authentic and human voice, it’s reasonable to infer that trust is currency of the highest value.
Putting paid links on your site which are not announced as such is deception tatamount to blog suicide, in my opinion. You have destroyed your readers’ trust the moment they find out and start spreading the news all throughout the blogosphere. They will, in turn, destroy you by not reading you anymore. Will it have been worth it? Somehow, I can’t imagine you’d think so.
All of this comes back to a very fundamental question: do you believe the means justify the ends, or do you believe, as most people do, that the ends justify the means? We’re so conditioned to believe that the ends justify the means that many of us accept it without question. But consider: if that’s true, and your goal is to make money, then “whatever it takes” to get money is justified and acceptable. Why be in business at all? Stop pretending and go rob a bank. Lie to people. Deceive them. Play unfairly. Ethics are a hindrance to victory. Whatever it takes, right? That’s what it means to live the belief that the ends justify the means.
That’s how we did business last century. That’s not how we do it, anymore. Reputation, integrity, and trust are more valuable than competence. And you don’t get a top-notch reputation if you’re willing to do whatever it takes to make money. If you’re decieving the very people you claim to help, there is no trust. You have no integrity. You’re so beholden to commercial interests that you are no longer free. And, as Hugh MacLeod says, “A person who is not free is not worth reading.” Furthermore, in another post:
Having a valuable online reputation keeps you honest. Because if you do something squirly, you will pay dearly, and you will pay fast.
And of course, the more this becomes self-evident to me, the harder I find it doing business with non-bloggers. An increasingly essential trust mechanism seems strangely absent.
You can’t sell only a little bit of your soul.
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>> Whenever I look at a Weblogs, Inc. blog, I’m disgusted
>> by the ratio of ads to content
Actually if you look at the length of page we have a much smaller percentage of ads to content of traditional websites.
Yes, we have a lot of ads but that’s because the page is really long. However most of the ads are up top… by the time you page down once or twice you can have very few ads.
best jason
Jason, that is true. But the first time I ever saw a Weblogs, Inc. page, the beginning of the content was a little lost in all the ads. People may accidentally click on them, but when they realize they’ve clicked an ad, they do not feel good about doing so. That doesn’t put people in the mind to follow through to conversion. You get more clicks, but not they’re not qualified clicks and it seems to me your conversion wouldn’t be as high as it could be.
In my work as a trainer, I remember one time having to explain to an inexperienced person that the error message he wanted to click on so urgently on his screen was in fact an ad disguised as an error message, and it was designed to deceive. When he understood that, his face turned red with embarrassment and he felt tricked and foolish. Any deception of any kind will end in this situation. It is not a good situation for creating customers or ending in a conversion event.
In any case, I do think Weblogs Inc. blogs look better than a lot of other networks, out there. Thank you for taking the time to comment.