I completely understand your point – keep sponsored posts on theme with the overall blog. I will definitely work on that in the future.

I hope your exam went well!
Andrew

It’s not that the sponsored posts bother me – I think it’s great the way you’re doing it (open and obvious) and that you’re making money from blogging. It’s just that The Exit Sign Shop is so out of character with the whole theme of the blog. Sorry if I was a bit short in my comment – it was 5:30am and I was up studying for an exam.

I do think the idea of sponsored posts is a good idea, I just don’t read most of them because I’m not in the US and most of them (from the skim read I give them) are US-centric.

Keep up the good work!

First off, I’m thrilled that both of you took the time to post a comment. Honestly, having a community of readers is a true pleasure, and I want to do my best to please and serve all of you guys.

I’m going to cop out here and say that I think you’re both right. I try to provide decent info to everyone for free, and doing some ads and sponsored posts helps to compensate me for the time. BUT, I definitely don’t want money making to get in the way of the real content here.

Jaysee, since this post obviously affected you, it might have affected other readers as well. That definitely means I need to scrutinize sponsored posts more thoroughly in the future.

I will work to make monetization more on-topic and less intrusive to the blog itself. I do try new things as time goes on, so please post another comment or email me (aflusche@gmail.com) if you think I’ve gone overboard again.

Thanks to both of you for the comments!
Andrew

We, as readers, subscribe to Andrew’s blog because we like the information he posts. He gives this information to us free of charge, and if we didn’t get some kind of benefit from his blog, then why do we subscribe to it?

We subscribe because we like the information. We get it for free. He works very hard to supply us with topics and we don’t pay him for that information.

I for one think he should be able to support the hard work he does to bring us this information. We can skip the reviews, we can unsubscribe, we can cut down his efforts to try to make money with the work he does for us…but why would be want to do that?

I enjoy being a subscriber. I can’t afford the time or money to research or pay for the information he posts for free. Can you? Maybe if his subscribers paid for all this information, he could cut the reviews?

Just my two cents worth.

In my humble opinion, sponsored posts like this one, with it’s awkward segway as to why it’s relevant and it’s overall message of “I never thought I needed an exit sign but I might put one in anyway sometime in the indeterminate future in a home I don’t yet have and if I did this is the place I’d get it” is, to be honest, silly. Anyone could write the “review” you wrote – “yay! exit signs are good!” and it cheapens both you and the Exit Sign Shop that this post counts as a review.

I don’t mind seeing reviews of relevant things, (I still won’t read them since most of them are US-centric) but this is just silly and pointless. More “reviews” like this will turn me off this blog and make you look money-hungry, out to make money from your blog any way you can.

Just out of interest, how much did you get paid for this? I hope it reflects the incoherent and irrelevant nature of the “review”.