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Tell your readers how you make money through their visits

By Bes on Apr 11, 2007.

This post was intended to go online yesterday. However, due to unforeseen personal circumstances, like being abducted by Aliens and the time it took for me to escape from the Alien Mother Ship, I am posting this today. My apologies!

One of the best ways to appreciate your readers is to tell them how you make money from their activities on your site. Many blogs these days are trying to manipulate their users into doing things to earn money. If you are making money from your site, I think it can be a very good idea to let users know how you are making money from your site. A blogger should specify somewhere on a blog how money is made through user interaction with the blog content. Having such a disclosure can make sure you are honest to your readers, and it also increase the level of confidence and trust your readers have in you and your site.

I see some bloggers argue a lot these days whether or not such disclosures are necessary, and whether or not avoiding such disclosures is unethical. I personally think 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 be happier if a certain thing is said or done. In my view, 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.

Example of how not disclosing can ruin relationships

Imagine being someone’s friend and that friend inviting you to come try out new food products at their house everyday. 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 since the beginning that they would make money through your food tasting torture. Would you be happier then compared to not knowing for a long time that your friend benefited from your upset stomachache?

An example of how I try this on my site

On my own site, most of my Amazon.com links are affiliate links. So far, I have not made any real money from those links. Even then, I have disclosed this fact about Amazon.com affiliate links in my “About” page also. Among many other reasons, I do this for three main reasons:

  1. I want to show my readers how I make money and how my blog benefits from their activity on my site
  2. I do not want users to get upset if they somehow find out that I manipulated them into reading posts and clicking links, which were in fact nothing more than ways for me to make money.
  3. I myself want to know how I am being “used” to make money for someone else

Telling others how you make money through them can be good

Thus, in my view, 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 yourself.

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?

 

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