User Experience
Your visitors / users should be your absolute primary concern. Obviously you should absolutely try and monetize your traffic but above all your users should be your key focus. Without your users, your site is nothing. Without your users, your income is nothing. You should try and look at your site from both sides of the boat and ask yourself if you would really visit the site and gain anything from it.
Just like the old business motto of ‘the customer is always right’ the same applies to the internet. even if you’re not ‘selling’ anyone any products, you should always be trying to improve the experience a person has on your site. Make this n that easier to do, serve the best, most informative content and ultimately improve your user’s experience / opinion of your site in anyway you can.
If you are advertising on your site and trying to make your income by tricking users into clicking, that’s not a good thing. I don’t believe in trying to blend Adsense 100% if your users think a link is content then they end up on another site two things will happen
1. they will realise they were tricked
2. they probably won’t come back
So was it really worth manipulating someone into clicking, never to comeback for a few cents? definitely not should be the answer. I think there has to be a distinction on some level in that you are clearing letting the users know which is which, it’s true people are becoming more ‘banner / ad’ blind but tricking them isn’t the answer in my opinion.
Think of creative ways to display your ads in eye level with your content or in a primary position of your site upon entering i.e in the site header, or just below.
Alot of people, will actually appreciate the fact you haven’t tried to trick them into clicking anything and will usually pay more attention to everything they see due to your honest blatancy. Equally becoming less prone to ignoring things… such as ads themselves.
If you look at some of the big blogs / sites on the net, alot of them don’t blend ads at all.
They just integrate well n by well I mean distinctively but not in a way that it’s completely alien from your viewpoint.
Take for example shoemoney.com now I know not everything is contextual and there are payed and affiliate ads there but regardless, even Shoemoney’s contextual ads are on the far right, away from his content. Now this isn’t always a good idea obviously, no two sites are the same… unless one has copied the other?
Anyway, his ads look attractive and well placed. They don’t look tacky, they don’t ruin the content, he doesn’t try and trick you into clicking. Everything is honest and there’s no user manipulation, therefore he is making the user experience as good as possible, even when trying to make money. Probably one of the reasons his blog is so successful
All in all, always remember your users are the ones with the power!
