No more in-post ads

This is just a very quick announcement.

I tried a brand new advertising idea a couple of months ago, here on Jim’s Marketing Blog. The idea was to allow readers to have a small ad inserted into the bottom of a blog post. That way, their ad would not only be seen by everyone who reads the post, but the thousands of other people who get this blog via email and feed readers. It was popular, with ad requests coming in every day from readers worldwide.

Sadly, the vast majority of ads sent for approval were incorrectly submitted. This became a huge time suck. Most commonly, ads were submitted with more words than allowed or came with broken links. Dealing with incorrectly submitted ads became unsustainable. Ironically, the idea of offering readers the chance to advertise here, was to allow me to free up more time to develop the free work I do on the blog. So, I have decided to no longer offer this service. All ads already placed on Jim’s Marketing Blog will run for the entire lifetime of the blog.

What did I learn?

If you have a few hundred regular readers, you can absolutely offer the kind of advertising I tried. However, when you have a large readership, advertising works best on a less granular level. Dealing with hundreds of email requests was just too time consuming, especially as some required several replies.

Anyhow, it has been an interesting experience, which I wanted to share with you.