On the side & paid to blog?
April 21, 2007 by upyourego
New banners, buttons, boxes and includes pop up on blogs all the time - from the brilliant My Blog Log as a way of turning the blogosphere into a giant social network to support badges for causes like the EFF or Alan Johnston.
On this blog I have a big banner asking people not to print pages unless they need to, My Blog Log, Facebook, Joost, the EFF, a call for people to not be an idiot and various other things including FeedBurner and Technorati.
But do any of them make any difference - other than slowing down the speed the page loads? I’ve been considering going for a clean sweep and dropping them all to speed up loading time - what do you think?
Do you find having certain things on the sidebar makes a difference? Do you think it’s useful to know my Technorati ranking or who else is reading the blog?
Paid Reviews
This post originally started as a look at a new service that seems to be popping up on blogs - a service that invites other bloggers to pay a blog to review their blog - we’re back to the confusing Bernard Wooley inspired Meta world again.
So would you pay me an amount of money to write a review of your blog on my blog, or even write a review of your blog for your blog that’s also on my blog and linked to from my twitter feed?
It’s not just other blogs that this service invites reviews for though - the call is “Bloggers - get paid to review products and services on your site. You control what you review.”
I don’t feel comfortable doing this - I posted before about Pay per Click and how I don’t like the idea of reading a blog and not knowing whether they’ve been paid to write about the product/service or not.
I suppose a way out would be to have a giant banner at the top of a paid post that said something like “I was paid to write this review” or “DISCLAIMER: PAID POST” but that would look awful and taint the rest of the blog.
Tell you what - if you want me to review your product or service send me an e-mail ryan@upyourego.com and I’ll do it for free - if I get the time as part of the Good Geek Guide - but as I’m doing it for free there is no guarantee of a good review.
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As far as the sidebar goes, I did completely clean up the sidebar a little while back, but I have ended up gradually adding things again. Still, I think at the moment I have a happy medium. This is helped by the fact that in effect I have two sidebars!
One thing I really hate to see on a sidebar is a huge list of date archives, one for each month or (even worse) each week! Nobody would ever click those links. Instead, I use a list of categories inspired by tag clouds.