Free Tax Sites: A Lesson for Bloggers about Advertising Balance

photo credit: PPDIGITAL

Happy Tax Day to everyone in the United States. If you haven’t filed yet, you still have a few hours to get today’s postmark. I am a master procrastinator. Last year I was at the post office near closing time on April 15th. This year I e-filed four days in advance. Quite a feat for me. Good luck to all of you. I wish you quick, plentiful refunds.

This is going to be a pretty short post, but I wanted to discuss something I noticed during my e-file process. I used a completely free service. It is the same service I added last year, but this year something was different. Actually many things were different. There were shiny new ads all over the site, attempting an upsell at ever click of the mouse. As a marketer, I understand that every company has to make their money somehow. Even knowing that, though, I was quite annoyed with the constant nagging by the time I finished the process.

At first I thought it was an excellent idea. And, really it is. The problem is there has to be a balance. This particular company splits the 1040 form into sections and each section has a certain number of fields. I personally have a very easy time filing because last year I worked one full time job and one brief contract job. Now that I’m freelancing I’m sure I won’t have the same easy time next year, but that’s another post altogether.

So within each of this sections, you answer questions or fill in the data that corresponds to related fields on Form 1040. Most of this stuff is very simple, but if you need help you can click on a help button or use one of the mouseovers to get an idea of what’s going on. The help button does, in fact, bring you help. But before you get help, you have to go through two full screens of upsell. Did you know that with the Deluxe Pro Special Edition version you get a free pony?!

Each section is split into subsections. Basically, you are filling in about three fields per page. And after nearly every page you need to complete, there is a page of upsell. They really outdid themselves though. Each upsell page directly corresponded to a field on the previous screen that some users may find hard to understand or calculate. It was very specific and they obviously hired a great marketer to get it set up. In fact, if I had a more complicated set of tax information I might have been upsold myself. But only if there were about half as many attempts to get me to part with my plastic.

Seriously, filing your taxes is monotonous enough, the last thing you want is a bunch of ads drawing things out even further. Okay, I know this is starting to sound more like a rant, so let me get to the point. Monetizing a blog with advertising is perfectly acceptable. These days, it’s practically expected that a blog will at least be peppered with Adsense blocks. However, just as with real pepper, certain things are only effective in moderation.

If your blog has every possible bit of free space taken up with ads, you have pop-ups and pop-unders and peel-aways at every turn, please take a step back. Put yourself in the shoes of your visitors and ask yourself if all of those ads are really bringing them any value. And, really, are all of those ads even making you that much money. You will have more return visitors and more successful ad campaigns with fewer ads than you will ever have by making your blog look like a circus.

Should you need a bit of help seeing the truth about your blog, just visit one of the free tax sites and see how many upsells you can count during your process. I am absolutely in favor of profit, but I’m not all about it. And I’ve found that most people who focus solely on making money with their blog rarely get past their first ten cents. Next time you sit down to place some new ads on your blog, consider spending the time commenting on other people’s articles, making connections through a social media site or sharing some useful advice on a forum related to your area of expertise. You will enjoy your time more this way and people will enjoy you. A sustainable income online is built through hard work, dedication and relationships built with other dedicated, hard-working individuals. And you won’t get any of that if you spend all day surfing Commission Junction for new creatives.

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