There are a lot of blogs out there who like to brag about how evil they are in the way they “do whatever it takes” to make money or to get on top. It’s up to you to decide if this is really how you want to make your blog successful. In my opinion, you should not work with advertisers who you wouldn’t buy from yourself. After all, your readers tend to be people who agree with you, so why should you expect them to purchase a product or service that you yourself would not recommend or use?
With that in mind, I have decided to drop an advertiser from my affiliate program. Given the money I’ve made so far from them this is not an easy decision, but I feel it is important to demonstrate my integrity and I cannot recommend to you, dear readers, a service or product when I myself have had a bad experience with the advertiser. Allow me to explain…
In mid-July I had a post in which I recommended the Vonage service to all of you. I had just switched to them myself and was looking forward to saving lots of money with them and I was, at the time, very excited to finally switch over to a VOIP carrier after hesitating for several years. I had every reason to believe that the service would work out great for me and had no reservations about recommending the service to anyone who would listen. And I do still stand behind the idea presented in the original post - that is, saving money is like making money. However, I can no longer stand behind the recommendation of using Vonage for your phone service. Here’s why:
In the few weeks since that post, I have gone through 2 defective Vonage routers and had to go out and buy a 3rd one at the store just to get my phone working. I ended up spending an additional $100 on this device and have spent the last 2 weeks calling nearly every day trying to get them to reimburse me for the original defective router they sent. Only yesterday did I finally get them to refund that money, but this was after spending a total of 7.5 hours of my precious time on the phone (my cell phone of course, since my regular phone was not working) with them either troubleshooting issues with the service or fighting over how much they need to refund me.
My time is valuable to me, as I am sure yours is as well. For me to spend that much time on the phone just to do something as simple as getting a phone to work and to return a defective product (or 2 in this case) is just plain ridiculous. Not to mention the time I spent in locating a store nearby that carried the 3rd router I had to purchase in order to finally get my phone to work and that gas spent in driving there to get it, etc.
It is with this in mind that I have decided to drop the Vonage affiliate program that I was a member of. I am not telling anyone not to try them out for themselves if you want to but do so at your own risk. While I am still keeping my Vonage service at this point (mostly because I prepaid for 1 year to save even more money) I do not intend to renew them next time around.
Now, back to the original point. I cannot advertise Vonage on my site knowing that there is potential there for someone else to take my recommendation and end up in a bad situation. I care too much about my reputation for that. It is important to me that readers of this site can trust me and I take that trust very seriously. If you ever have a bad experience with any of the advertisers that you see on my site then I want to know about it. Vonage paid a nice premium for any users I was able to get signed up. But in the long run, my integrity and reputation are far more valuable to me. Hopefully you feel the same way and will remember this when you choose your advertising partners!
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August 7th, 2007 at 2:40 am
Amen! You rarely see people these days, particularly in this type of genre, that have this kind of integrity. Thanks for renewing my confidence that people aren’t just out for the almighty dollar but some have a conscience. Have a good one.