Tell Blog Readers How You Make Money Through Them

  

One of the best ways to appreciate your clients and blog readers is to tell them how you make money from their activities on your site. Many blogs and businesses focus on making money through website readers without actually letting those readers know about that practice. If you are making money from your site, it can be a very good idea to let users know about it. A blogger can specify somewhere on a blog how money is made through user interaction with the blog content. Having such a disclosure can make sure you appear as an honest entity to your readers. In addition to that, it also increase the level of confidence and trust your readers have in you and your site.

I see bloggers and websites debate a lot these days whether or not such disclosures are necessary, and whether or not avoiding such disclosures is unethical. Disclosures about how you make money through your readers is ethical only if you believe it is ethical; ethics can be proven to be relative. You should not focus on whether or not a thing is ethical. You should focus on whether or not your reader will be happier and you yourself will benefit if a certain thing is said or done. Telling readers how you make money is better as it shows your readers that you are transparent, and it also shows your readers that you trust them enough to tell them how you make money through your site.

If you want to be transparent with your clients and blog readers, you can start with the most powerful method of letting others know how their behavior around your site makes you money.

Example of how not disclosing can ruin relationships

Imagine being the friend of someone who invites you to come try out new foods at their house daily. You go to their house for years and most of the time you taste the worst tasting food in the universe. After many years, you find out that your friend worked for a food company, something you never knew, and that for every food you tried your friend reported your experience to the food company and got paid for it. How would you feel then?

Now imagine if your friend had told you from the beginning that they would make money through your food tasting torture. Would you have been happier then? Would you have gone through the food tasting experience after such a disclosure?

The same exact principles apply to your blog and your blog readers. If you tell your blog readers how you make money through them, they are more likely to support you and your blog in both the short term and the long run. It is one of the reasons blogs like ProBlogger, John Chow and Shoemoney make more money than majority of the other online blogs combined.

6 Reasons Your Blog Readers Want To Know About You Making Money Through Them

1. Your readers realize how you value their time and efforts on your site. In return, they will be able to decide directly if becoming your loyal fan is beneficial to them. That decision making stage is what you want all your readers to easily and quickly pass through.
2. Your readers can learn how you run your website.
3. Your readers realize your mean business. People prefer sticking with long-term businesses and blogs which know what those people want.
4. Your readers will realize beforehand why you call them to perform some action. In contrast, if your readers realize later on that they have been used to make money, they are more likely to distrust you.
5. Your readers build confidence in the solid system your brand projects.
6. Your readers realize you are transparent and honest.
7. Any controversial act of trying to make money becomes ethical if you do it right.

Do you tell your blog & site readers how you make money?

Telling your readers how you make money through their activities on your blog allows you to be more appreciative to your readers, as you are not indirectly manipulating their behavior of reading content or clicking links to make money for you.

What do you think about this? Do you agree that bloggers should tell readers how they make money, or do you think placing affiliate links in content or making money through other methods is normal and should not be disclosed to the readers, as long as the reader is being given good content to read or interact with?

Please share your comments or experiences below. Thank you.

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