The Day The Great Problogger Darren Rowse Wrote Me Back

Check out an email conversation I had with the great Darren Rowse of Problogger.net. I sent an email not expecting a reply but I was surprised to get one from Darren himself a few hours later. Check out our conversation!

Hi Darren,

I'm not even sure if you're even gonna pay attention to this question or if
this question has been answered already but here it goes:

Don't you think it's kinda hypocritical to actually encourage your readers to
sign up for these websites like linkworth or widgetbucks by displaying their ad
on your problogger blog without you having to actually use it on your blog? I'm
not too sure if I can call it ironic or a hypocrisy.

I'd be happy to find out what you think about this because I noticed you
display a lot of sponsor ads on your side bar but you do not actually have a
widgetbucks widget nor do I see you participate in linkworth.

His reply:

Hi good question.

Couple of things.

1. These are ads and I don't think I need to try them all to accept them. Most advertising in newspapers, tv, radio wouldn't be tested by the publishers before being accepted. I don't accept ads that I find offensive or against my beliefs - but I don't mind other things as long as they are on topic.

2. They are clearly labled as sponsors - not endorsements

3. I have tried WidgetBucks and have written about it quite a few times on ProBlogger. I don't use it on ProBlogger itself as it doesn't work on that type of blog but it's a good system for other types of blogs (product related).

4. I see on your blog you've got ads for ING Car Insurance, GIO insurance (AdSense), 10 or so cell phones and about 14 make money online affiliates. have you tried them all? I'm pressuming you have with some of them - but doesn't the same sort of thing apply when you run AdSense on your blog and have little control over the ads that appear?

hope something in that is helpful in answering your question

Darren

Here's my reply:

Thanks for the quick response Darren. Honestly I never expected an answer back. Nevertheless, you're answer was enlightening. About the Google Ads, It's something I haven't figured out how to control what ads are displayed on my blog or maybe I'm just too lazy to do something about it to make those ads relevant to my blog. The cellphone ads from widget bucks are there because my audience are mostly Filipinos like myself. I figured Filipinos are crazy about cellphones and it might give me a better click-through rate for the widget. It's just another experiment I'm trying out to see what works. I've have the widgetbucks widget for only a week so I might have it for a little longer to figure it out. For the make money affiliates, the answer is yes! You'd be surprised to find out that I've really tried them all at this point at one time. Some of them, I've figured are not working as promoted so I just decided to keep their referral program on my blog instead.

Thanks again Darren. I never really expected the great Darren Rowse to reply to my small query that fast or at all. It has been great reading your blog every now and then but I guess you hear that all the time. I love your blog!

BTW, I'd love to get one of your problogger t-shirts for myself but I wished the site had an option to pay by paypal. Don't you think it'll be a good thing to have a paypal option?

I haven't had a feedback after but I don't expect any anymore.

Posted in: Blogging