I am a huge fan of Fred Wilson’s AVC blog and have mentioned it a few times here on Financial Slacker. Fred writes about venture capital, technology, and a little bit of everything else. And he’s been posting everyday since 2003 – truly amazing.
AVC has often served as inspiration for my own posts. The site has an incredibly easy to use Archive page and there’s nothing else on his site other than the writing and comments.
Yesterday’s post about Medium’s shift away from ads to a new revenue model is well worth reading, especially if you run a website and have any thoughts about monetizing it.
When I created Financial Slacker a little over a year ago, I didn’t have any real plans to make money from the site. Just the same, over the past year, I’ve experimented with ads, affiliate products, and sponsored posts.
These experiments are more educational than geared at actually making any significant money. And while all three approaches are viable and have been proven to make money at least once a site has sufficient traffic, I can’t say I’m a fan of them all.
As a writer of personal finance articles, there’s an inherent conflict between my mission to help readers make better financial choices and trying to get them to buy products through advertisements on the site.
That said, there are products which I believe can help readers with this mission. And by promoting those products and explaining how you can use and benefit from them, I believe that I’m providing value.
Specifically, I’ve identified a few categories of products that support the mission of Financial Slacker. And these products I highlight on my recommendations page.
Such products include Personal Capital for tracking and saving money, 1&1 Hosting for starting an online business, Lending Tree for refinancing your mortgage, and IdentityForce for protecting your identity.
If you have a chance, check out the products mentioned above. I would be appreciative of any feedback.
The FTC requires websites to disclose when they receive a financial benefit from recommending a product. I do participate as an affiliate for the products mentioned above, in which case if you decide to purchase or sign-up for the service, I may receive a small commission or referral fee. And while small, these fees help pay the operating costs for this site and are very much appreciated.
Readers, what are some of your favorite products or services that would help support Financial Slacker’s mission to help people make better financial choices?
A timely post indeed FS as I have also come to the conclusion that, unless a site gets significant traffic (and I do mean SIGNIFICANT), ads and affiliate links just don’t raise enough revenue to justify the ulterior motive of having them there. I absolutely agree with you that there does appear to be a conflict when you write about being frugal and spending less and then go and post ads prompting readers to spend more money. For this reason, I have just this week, removed all of the affiliate ads and adsense ads from Get FIRE’d asap. I have kept a few links to the services that I do use and have no hesitation in recommending quietly tucked away at the bottom which may give me a few dollars worth of credit if readers use them, but besides them, I’m ad-free. A timely article as I am writing about what I’ve done in my next post. Great minds eh 🙂
Sounds like we’ve come to the same conclusion regarding ads.
For the most part, the affiliate products that I represent have a free or low cost option (like Personal Capital) or have the potential to generate income (like 1&1 Hosting).
I am interested to see how things work out for companies like Medium.