|
|
|
|
|
|
by ergo98
5766 days ago
|
|
|
>A blog is a delivery tool to direct people's attention to places - you can sell stuff via your blog. A successful blog is also a powerful reputation-building mechanism. Reputation goes down the toilet the moment you start selling stuff on your blog. Affiliate links are the scourge of blogs, because you don't know whether it was an incidental monetization, or whether the blogger thought "How am I going to get this thing to pay by indirectly and inefficiently taxing readers?", scrounging around for some sort of affiliate junk to claim to be over the moon with. Examples abound of prominent bloggers flushing credibility and reputation down the toilet when they chose the "Sell" route for monetization. Reputation itself is a bias, though. Some of the worst blogs are the ones where the writer is clearly preening themselves for future employers. |
|
|
I'd say there are a great number of exceptions to that. My blog has several thousand subscribers (for whatever you want to define an RSS subscriber as) that have been following my blog for years, they know I have been working at early stage startups for years and they value my opinion, even going out of their way to ask if I have an affiliate link for something I might have mentioned on Amazon before or elsewhere.
One guy even held off buying a big DSLR camera on Amazon for a few days until he was able to get my affiliate code from me while I was out of town.
People can have a voice that is valued online and sell stuff through their writing/blog. Affiliate sales on my blog alone pay my rent while I can run around doing startups with no compensation.
Ken Rockwell comes to mind too. He reviews cameras and has amazing guides. Each camera page has a blurb about asking readers to buy it from sites that have his affiliate code.
http://www.kenrockwell.com/