Hi everyone! I love impromptu marketing lessons that just … happen. They’re unprovoked and not any sort of “secret underground conversion tracking” – they just appear out of thin air and we all learn from them.

So here’s what happened. There was a day when I decided to freshen up some of my ads on the blog here. Sometimes I use AdSense, sometimes I pick out a product to promote, sometimes I promote my own stuff, etc.

Well because I’m loving Product Creator Pro, I decided to alter the single post page of my blog to include a banner ad for that item. The affiliate tools area had two banners for that space. One said, “You’re Ugly” and had a picture of a homely girl (intentionally homely with hair slicked down and parted in the middle, fake freckles painted on, bad teeth, etc.).

And then the banner went on to say something about how that’s what people think of your eBooks when you don’t make them pretty, etc. It’s an ad for a product that turns plain PDFs into professional looking ones.

So when I saw it, I instantly giggled – and I grew up ugly as sin and am now overweight, albeit now happy with myself.  It’s not like I was some beauty laughing at the ugly girl. In fact, she reminded me of my at one stage of my life. Long stringy hair, bad teeth, freckles, etc.

It had been up a few days when a totally unrelated blog post about Kindle was posted and someone mentioned in passing that the banner ad almost hurt her feelings. She got me thinking and wondering…so I mentioned it to my list and the floodgates opened!

While there were some people with a sense of humor like mine who laughed at it, and there were those who didn’t care either way, the majority of people did NOT like it one bit. They either felt a pang of hurt over it personally – just because it reminded them of painful things – or they scrolled past it quickly thinking it was in bad taste.

WOW! Eye opening for me! I never considered any of that when it comes to banner ads. The wonderful thing is what Ruth said – she said I would eat nails before I hurt one of you – and she’s right. I apologize if anyone did feel hurt. That breaks my heart.

But what I worry about are those random traffic people who landed here while that ad was up and got offended and clicked out. Ack! That’s not good! They don’t know I wouldn’t hurt a fly. They just think it’s not a pleasant place to be.

So down comes the ad. I even tried changing the ad to say “You’re Beautiful.” (but your product aren’t)  but the damage had already been done I think from the ugly bit.

Now the person who originally spoke up said she wasn’t trying to tell me how to run my business. I know that! I don’t think that at ALL. I promise. In fact, I LOVE that she felt comfortable enough to tell me – because she probably knew I’d CARE. And I do.

I want this place to be appealing to all my people – and we can still have humor without it evoking bad memories. I think it was awesome hearing the opinions of so many others and in FACT, it opened my eyes to a very narrow niche  idea that I twisted off the original scenario so I’m grateful for that, too.

Anyway – watch what your people feel and mention. Make changes when it’s warranted. Those are blogger lessons. Another lesson is for product owners with affiliate programs – we need a wide variety of choices. I’d love it if Ronnie would develop a couple of more professional banner ads I could use – without the people’s pictures on them. (There was one that had a man on it and it said, “I don’t trust you!” but I didn’t like that one).

I created something up there right now that you see that tries to show the plain versus a little better PDF file but I’m not sure if my banner ad is any good. I suck, frankly. And I know this! But it’s better than hurting people.

By the way, for those who don’t know this – if you just go to tiffanydow.com/blog that’s a main template and you can have a banner ad positioned under the header there. Then you can go to single page editor and put a different banner under your header there for if they go to a specific post like tiffanydow.com/blog/kindle-publishing-here-i-come/ – so it gives you multiple advertising opportunities.

Okay back to work people! My Internet’s finally working so I have lots to do!

Tiff

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