Kev Price SEO

Milly Shaw of hookjab, my favorite copywriting blog, recently wrote a post about blog ads. In which the question is asked, “If I’ve read a good post, I click an ad. Is that wrong?”

I began writing a comment in response, however it ended up pretty huge so I thought I would post the response here instead…

Its never occurred to me to click on an ad in a blog as a thanks for good writing. I think its because I run ad campaigns for myself or others, measure stats and watch the money disappear from budgets on the other side of things.

If I clicked a link without any intent of buying I would have nightmares of some guy who has had a dream. A vision of online entrepreneurship, spending weeks building a site and fighting against the blackhat spammers of SEO to get into the rankings, finding finally that his only hope is online advertising. He takes his life savings, places them in his current account and sets up a direct debit to google ads.

My frivolous click on his ad takes a portion of those life savings, a portion of that dream, and places it in the account of the person who is displaying the ad and he gets nothing out of it. Each time this happens, a tear falls down his cheek.

Also, through years developing online I have become ‘ad blind’ in which my eyes scan and filter out anything that is trying to sell to me.

There are the occasional ads (usually displayed in gmail, interestingly enough) that are so well written they catch my attention and I have to click because I am intruiged/entertained. I think that type of ad deserves my attention and my study.

There is a lot of talk online at the moment about advertising and the changing in trends. A huge amount of buzz about the ‘cadbury’s gorrilla’, which is pure entertainment (there is nothing funnier than a man in a gorilla suit). There is so much advertising out there now that most of us are becoming blind to weak ‘call to action’ text or sales copy. Agencies have to do more to grab attention, they are learning that the public doesn’t want to be sold to, they want to be entertained.

if I see an ad that has entertained me enough for me not to be blind to it then I will click it. Mainly to say “I am listening, this is how you should communicate with me” than anything else.