Links Are Recommendations
Lorelle VanFossen writes on the Blog Herald that Links are recommendations and forms of referral. It’s like telling a friend about a great restaurant, or referring your family doctor, or showing someone that cool gadget you bought, hoping he’d also buy one.
Whether through intention or accident, the links from your blog to others are mini-letters of recommendation. When you link to an external site, you are inviting your readers, the ones you worked so hard to earn and keep, to click away. That link better be pretty special.
My thought here then would be: what about pay per post? What about paid reviews? What about paid links? And here’s the shocker: what about AdSense?
When you are paid to write about something, isn’t that like being a sell-out? Tony Hung believes that there’s nothing wrong with getting paid to blog or to review stuff, and it’s a fact that there are “blue collar” bloggers out there who don’t have other viable options in monetizing their blogs, unlike many so-called A-listers who enjoy their celebrity status, and the huge traffic, ad revenues, endorsements and other deals, that go with it.
But then the dynamics behind linking, selling links, getting paid to link or review, still escape me. If a toothpaste company paid me to recommend their product to my friends, would I feel bad about doing that? Or if a friend suggests a restaurant to me because he works there, would it be tantamount to his being a sell-out? But consider this: if an actor or a celebrity gets on TV to endorse a product, would that be a sell-out, then? We know he/she gets paid millions to do that.
But then bloggers are expected to be candid and honest with what we write about. So any sign of getting compensated financially for our posts or links might be taken in a bad light.
Strange world we live in, huh?
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