Unfortunately, one of the first things I do in the morning when I wake up is check my Blackberry. Without a doubt, there is always a new blog post from Seth Godin – the most inspiring marketer/thinker/speaker (in the world that I live in). His post on Sunday morning, titled “Pay for stuff”, made me smile.
“As a bootstrapping entrepreneur, my instinct has always been to work before spend. If there was a way to spread the word virally instead of buying ads, I would… It turns out that paying for stuff works too… Ads that pay for themselves are worth buying… In the free media world in which we’re living now, it’s so easy to get stuck on not investing, on avoiding outlays at all cost. Frugal is an admirable trait, but being a miser is dumb.”
Seth’s post hit the nail on the head for me. In the online advertising world we live in, an “all ads are evil” mantra tends to prevail. Hence, the adoption of things like ad blockers, tivo, etc. – the entire slew of “ad blocking” facilities that exist and help companies like HubSpot promote a world of “inbound marketing” bliss. And, while that is a very nice picture they have painted (and one I truly believe in, I used to work there), it’s not the FULL picture. Inbound marketing is only one piece of the marketers tool chest. As it turns out, ads work too. And, not all ads are evil (i.e. we don’t sell punch the monkey ads at BSA). If you look though our sites you will see relevant ads from quality companies on quality websites.
Do you agree with Seth?
Todd founded BuySellAds and lives in Boston with his wife and chocolate lab Rusty. He's a front-end engineer by trade and believes in a less obtrusive future in online advertising. For more, follow him 
I agree.
And when ads are both relevant and nicely integrated I see absolutely no harm in them. Rather the opposite. After all, somehow we like to see a return on investment of time and effort. People tend to take the information made available on the internet for granted, for free, while other people have to gather, format and publish this information, day in, day out.
Talking from my own experience, until I’ve “wasted” the $50 bucks I had in ads for my social network it was stuck in the anonymity.
I’ve managed to sell the network for $10,000 USD few months later after my SERPs were growing wonderful and I’ve reached #1 for my main keywords dominating the market.
It was a lucky step, with low investment and huge return but it made me consider paying for quality stuff more than I use to.
Cheers,
- Sergiu ;)
I love Seth Godin’s blog posts as well and your point about ‘not all ads are evil’ is true, although there are many bad examples of ads out there.
No iPhone Todd? ;)
hehe, nope. In Boston, Verizon has the coverage, so it’s hard to switch … I have someone I talk to regularly who recently bought an iPhone, and, without a doubt the call gets dropped at least once each time we chat ;) as soon as iPhone & Verizon make a deal I’m game. I can only imagine what such a deal would do for iPhone apps and the entire iphone ecosystem once the device easily crosses providers ;)
I agree, right now I am entering the point of building a campaign for my first advertisement launch, there are many outlets to turn toward and with the social network exploding ads give a better opportunity to hit many peoplr from many areas at any time….the only unfortunate aspect is money spent, but without investing there can be no return, so here I go investing away, i hope it works… good articles and tips thanks, I will check back often.