Classified Ads on Your Blog - Worth It?
Hey guys! David Risley here with DavidRisley.com and as you can see I am now back in the office. From last week I was on a cruise the entire time and a lot of my regular readers probably know that but I am now back in the office and quite frankly feeling very lucky to be back here because the cruise went very well and anybody who's been on a cruise, you know that you eat like a race horse. You eat like, like you're never going to see food again and I’m sure as hell dead and I got back home feeling like crab quite frankly. I wasn’t sick but just when you eat that much, it just completely wears on you and so I am now on a mission to lose some weight and hopefully it will go well for me.
Anyway, I have some pictures and some video that I recorded while I was on the cruise you guys will see that coming out over the next few days and I’ll Twitter it out. You guys can follow me on Twitter. My user name is David Risley on Twitter so if you’re not following me, you can go ahead and do so now and I will tweet out when I’ve post some pictures up on Flickr and things like that.
Anyway moving on, I have not yet pre-recorded any videos for this week or anything so what I wanted to do is jump over to some of the questions that I've been getting from readers and one of them is by Malaika. I think I’ve pronounced your name right. She’s from MillionaireMamas.info. Your name actually stands out to me because there's only one letter off from my wife where her name Malika.
But anyway she asked how do you feel about adding a classifieds page on blog? Will it help by combining all the ads so that your pages aren’t cluttered or will turn it off readers? She was interested in how I feel about this is as a pro blogger.
I don’t really have a strong opinion on and however I will say that I, on PCMech.com, I did try a classified section, a marketplace type of thing and the response from me wasn't that great over there but at the same time I'll tell you that I didn't spend a whole lot time trying to promote it.
One good thing about it is this provides some interactivity to your site which is always good because you want people to be interactive with your blog. It should not be just a one way flow. So if you can get people in there and enough so the potential drawback to a thing like that is the same thing with forums and that is that, if you don't have enough people using it, it looks dead and that that is negative social proof. You're not going to have that many people start using it if it looks dead when they get in there so that's the problem when you start at marketplace or forums or anything like that.
And what some people do is they will actually simulate discussions by registering multiple profiles in their forum and actually kind of fake converse with yourself or you can hire people and do this for you and it’s a way to kind of get forums off the ground because social proof is very important. And when you’re launching forums, if there’s nobody in there, just like crickets chirping and there’s nobody's going to sign up.
The problem with the marketplaces is you might have a hard time doing that because you have nothing legitimate to actually post. It’s not if you post something in the marketplace, it needs to be something there you’re actually selling. So for that reason I kind of steer clear of things like a marketplace. But if you have a site which is very product-oriented or has a very ingrained community then maybe a marketplace might make sense as an additional value added benefit to your readers so it kind of depends on the site. It really is about how deep as I get on that.
So hopefully I give you my take on a marketplace type of thing and we'll talk more about this in the future. So anyway, that's been my pro blogger flip tip for you today. My first one back for this week and I will see you guys tomorrow.
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