My blog occupies a funny middle ground on the Internet. It’s not big enough to make me famous, infamous, or even Internet-famous, but it apparently garners enough traffic that I get emailed regularly asking if I would post an ad link to this company or allow a guest post from that company or wouldn’t I love to hear about an offer that my readers would just LOVE!!1!
The answer now, as it has been for 4.5 years, as it will be in the future, is no.
No, I do not want to put your ad in my sidebar.
No, I will not embed a link to your service in my post.
No, I will not post a pre-written article extolling your product and publish it under my name.
No, I do not want you to write a guest post for my blog. If I want one, I’ll email you unsolicited, not the other way around.
The good people at adfreeblog (whose logo is the only one, beside Creative Commons’, you’ll find on this blog) sum up pretty well my feelings on why you won’t find Google Adsense or viral marketing here. One of the major reasons I left Edublogs back in 2008 was because they started auto-inserting advertising links into the posts of their free blogs.
To their succinct list, I’ll add that I feel very protective of this digital space. I’ve written many times about the sense of ownership I feel over this blog. What I write here represents me – for better or worse – as a citizen, a dad, an educator, and a student, plus whatever other roles I take on. If I write about a service or product I enjoy, as I do from time to time, I want whoever reads this to know that they can take what I say at face value. If I am critical of something, know that that criticism comes from the heart and what I believe is in the best interest of children, and not from my target’s competitor. Whatever I say here is, if nothing else, always genuine.
I would appeal to the organizations who write to me to stop, but somehow I doubt there are real people behind the emails. I’m probably just on a list that gets cycled through every so often. But as long as they keep sending me requests, I will keep marking them as spam and going on about my day.