As you may have noticed, I haven’t been writing much in the last couple of months. It was because of one of my regularly scheduled writer’s blocks. When I’m blocked, I usually find other things to do, and convince myself that they are really important and urgent. One such thing this time around was a revamping of my blog backend. The original design was dated, and it really needed an upgrade. Or so I told myself and worked on it for a few weeks. If you are reading this post, you can see the fruits of my labor. And I hope you like it.
I was rather proud of my handiwork — until I showed it off to a collaborator. Or rather, a would-have-been collaborator. He was the big boss of one of those Internet startups in the advertising space, trying to reach the user base of my popular WordPress plugins. Our discussion wasn’t going well, and he wanted see my blog, all revamped and modernized. He took one look (about five seconds) and shot it down without even a second look, and told me that it was second-grade. I begged to differ, and I certainly hope you would too. You see, this guy was trying to shoot down my work to get an upper hand in the collaboration negotiations. It didn’t work, and the collaboration never really happened.
This is how the whole thing panned out. An illustrious marketing guy from the said startup contacts me one morning and tells me that I stand to make a ridiculously large amount of money by way of affiliate commissions if I promote their advertising product. I have heard such promises before, but I say to myself, sure, why not? But before doing anything, I decide to try out their product, and find that the returns from their product are, well, ridiculously small. The commission, which is a fraction of the returns, would be even smaller. So I offer them a different deal — a monthly paid banner placement model. They get all upset and try to badger me (and badmouthing my blog was part of that badgering effort), but finally come up with an offer which was about 3% of their original promise. Now, I’m not greedy, so I counter with 6%. I haven’t heard from them yet, and I don’t think I will.
If you make a living on the Internet, you have to be very careful about who you partner with. I don’t actually make a living (I’m retired), so I can afford to turn down such bogus affiliate offers and probe them with potentially smaller returns. I know that there are bloggers out there who make handsome rewards from their popular blogs and websites through such programs. But be careful — your assets may be worth quite a bit more than you think.
Photo by cambodia4kidsorg 