Should you advertise on your site?

I had this email from one of my best clients who has two main interests: one is a highly polished very professional showband that he plays bass in, the other is to do with World War One battlefields. The site we are talking about here is not his main money site, but it is a mature and well indexed site, this makes it attractive to advertisers.

He sent me this email:

What do you reckon mate? – (see below)
I recently sent you an email about hosting an advertisement on your site. I hope you received it, if not it may have ended up in your junk folder.
I believe we offer a very attractive system of advertising. You would be paid a yearly-renewable fee for placing a text-based advertisement that is appropriate to the topic of your site.
Please get back to me if you are interested in placing an advertisement on HP?
Kind Regards,
PG

My reply: It’s up to you really. I’d be concerned if you were considering this on MF (the showband site) or the ABF site (the WW1 money site) as you might be diluting your brand a bit, but a think HP looks a bit more like a hobby site where you might expect the odd ad. Is the amount of money they are talking reasonable? If it’s not I wouldn’t bother, but if it is – do bear in mind that there is a possibility it could hurt your rankings, so you would need to weigh up the pros and cons.

It works like this:
  • If someone finds your site by Googling something and then stays on your site to find out more, looks at other pages etc. – that is a very good sign to Google. On the other hand….
  • If someone finds your site by Googling something and then is tempted by an ad offering something more fun and consequently leaves your site straightaway, this is a bad sign.
Up to you 🙂

Meet the Author

Rick Lomas

Rick became 'interested' in Google Penalties when Google Penguin 1.0 almost made him homeless in 2012. Since then he has become an expert in fixing Google Algorithmic Penalties and Manual Actions. Rick has cleared hundreds of Google Manual Actions since 2015. He has saved businesses $millions. He has a 100% success rate in penalty removal.