Buy Me A Coffee, I’ll Sell You A Link?
August 16th, 2007 by Stephen Cronin (2,322 views)Most bloggers think that selling dofollow links is bad, right? But what if you do it in a roundabout way, without really intending to? Let me explain…
It started when I read Blog Begging or Donations? on the Cayman Host Blog. This discusses whether the rise of donation plugins like Buy Me A Beer or Buy Me A Coffee is a good thing or not.
While I can’t see myself ever asking for donations for a normal post, I am considering it for my DualFeeds plugin page.
It came to me that I should create a list of links, on the plugin page, to anyone who donated. This seemed like a nice gesture for people willing to give me some of their hard earned money.
Then I thought, “Hey, they’d benefit from the fact that I have nofollow disabled - maybe that’s even an incentive for them to donate”. Not only are they rewarding me for the plugin, they are getting a dofollow link on a page that might end up with a decent PageRank (the decent PageRank might be some time away, given this is a new blog).
But it raises questions in my mind. Is it okay to give links to people in return for a donation? Am I crossing the line if I use the dofollow link to sell making a donation?
Of course I haven’t actually decided yet whether I will ask for a donation, but I’m interested to know what you all think about this.
Tags: dofollow, monetization, pagerank, selling links, wordpress plugins
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I don’t think that it is a bad idea. There are a lot of people who do this. I have actually seen some bloggers who offer to sell their links on their page for $1 donation. I havent done this yet but it is interesting.
Hi Stephen
Thanks for the mention
Sorry, this is a long comment, but I’ll start by saying I wish you the best of luck with whatever way you decide to proceed!
My initial reaction to this is that if you do decide to offer people the option of donating, there are probably some that will do so, as a way of thanking you for developing an original (and as far as I know unique) plugin.
(My post was really made as a social experiment, just to see how people would react and so far the opinion seems pretty evenly divided). Introducing your additional thoughts here, expands the issue into another interesting area.
Firstly, is the link of any intrinsic monetary value, when, as you point out, a comment on your blog gives the same result in terms of “link juice”?
Maybe not, but, on the other hand, recognizing those generous enough to contribute introduces a “feel good” factor for those mentioned, so a public “thank you” is a nice touch in my opinion and illustrates that linking to one another through blogs is about far more than SERPS and page rankings.
I don’t know if your idea would make people more or less likely to donate, I guess only time and trial would tell. I still think you have a valid case for asking for donations in exchange for something people value enough to download and use. I don’t think you would be overstepping the line as you put it, but I understand your concerns - does publishing recognition make the link a paid one and is that an exploitation of your no-nofollow status? Is it an underhand incentive or not? I don’t think so but I’m sure some crusaders would disagree. It’s an interesting puzzle.
Do donations rely too heavily on conscience? I think an individual’s conscience is impossible to quantify - Shareware is a case in point, and conscience ware has been tried before now with varying levels of success. Appealing to people’s better nature sometimes works and sometimes causes nary a bat of an eyelid, and a cynic would say the latter are in the majority.
Although I have never personally donated to any blog, I don’t think it’s because I’m mean spirited or tight. As you stated yourself, some people’s budgets simply don’t allow for any additional expenditure. I always try to give back some publicity to plugin authors by at least mentioning and linking to their work. I will also happily do this for plugins I don’t employ myself if I think they benefit users. OK, it’s not dollars, but it’s free publicity, which we all agree I think, is essential to grow any site or blog.
I take the position that asking for donations is fine - ‘don’t ask don’t get’, as granny used to say
but with certain reservations that you and I have discussed elsewhere. I’m certainly interested to see how you make out if you decide to try it, with or without the public “thank you”.
One final thought, if you had chosen to release your plugin as a paid one, I’m sure some people would have wanted it enough to consider paying you - I could be wrong of course :-). However, I’m almost certain that you would have had less downloads because “something for nothing” is a powerful persuader. It’s also true that any paid Wordpress plugin will probably invite the adoption of your idea by another programmer who will make an alternative available for free, so defeating the revenue potential you might have had for a while.
Hi Maurice,
Long comments are good, especially when they are thought provoking.
Sorry I’ve been a bit slow to respond - I’ve been adding the Buy Me A Beer plugin to my blog! I needed to do a little bit of work to get it to only show for my plugin page. I’ll do a separate post on how to do it.
Having thought about it more, after reading your comment, I realised there’s no real problem - giving them the link recognises that they’ve gone out of their way to be generous and there is no real benefit in link juice (I know that, but many newcomers don’t).
I do say “Make a donation and get your link listed on this page”, but I don’t mention the fact that it’s a dofollow link. For me, that is a sensible path.
As you say, there will be some who may disagree, but I know in my own mind that there’s no exploitation involved.
As for paid WordPress plugins - that just seems wrong to me. I’m happy if someone wants to donate, but I’d never make a plugin paid, for the reasons you mention above (and because WordPress is all about Open Source).
So now I just have to wait and see if anyone donates!
I feel weird asking for monetary donations for wordpress plugins. So, I just ask for someone to write a blog post about the plugin if they use it. Some will, some won’t. Still, I think this works out better. People learn about the plugins, it gives the blogger something to blog about, and I get a link.!
Hi Lucia,
I see what you mean - having people write about the plugin is great exposure, which creates more traffic and links for your site. I guess I’m hoping for people to write about the plugin if they use it anyway - I hadn’t thought about asking them to do this.
I didn’t write the plugin to make money - I wrote it because I saw the need and because I love programming. If I’m honest, I have to admit that in the back of my mind, I was thinking it may increase traffic too, but that wasn’t the main reason for writing it. I hadn’t even thought about donations at that stage.
At first, I felt weird about asking for donations. After all, it’s a very rare day when I make a monetary donation! But Maurice and I have had long conversations about this, here and elsewhere and at the end of the day I don’t mind asking. I’m not really expecting many to make a donation, but no harm in asking.
Having said all that, I do need to monetize my blog somehow. I’m not in this to make money, but I want to cover hosting costs etc and maybe take my family out for dinner once in a while as compensation for losing Daddy to the computer so often!
huh? What did you say Tom? I read this comment thinking perhaps English was not the native language of the poster, but with a name like Tom Paine I’m guessing you’re a native English speaker. The guy’s giving you a link, you can do better than that.
Back to topic, I could see doing this on a page that would be desirable for people to have a link on. On the other hand, any blog of substance should be able to pay for itself, and any blog of substance that the owner is interested in making money on can.
Hi Mlankton, Thanks for your comment. I consider Tom’s comment to be borderline spam. I almost deleted it, but I decided to be nice on this occasion (Edit: That was a mistake - I have since found the exact same comment, word for word, on another site, so Tom’s comment is history).
I agree that there are other ways of making money. I did decide to use the Buy Me A Beer plugin, but I’m not expecting much from that avenue.
As for selling links, there’s really no issue there. In hindsight, listing people who make donations isn’t giving them anything they couldn’t get simply by leaving a comment on the same page (as this is a dofollow blog)!
I might use such a plugin if there was one that said “buy me a pie”. I’m not much of a beer person.
I think that for plugins, it’s fair to ask for donations. I don’t know if you’d get any, because although I’m new to blogging, I’ve been running a large online community for 3 years… it has over 11,000 registered users, and although we take donations, we never get any unless I say I’m going to use the donations to buy prizes for a contest.. then they’re all over it. LOL
You’ve got a decent blog here… you might be better off just selling text link advertising to raise some cash?
Just a thought.
First time here and I like the blog!
~Jayne
Hi Jayne, thanks for the stopping by and I’m glad you like it here.
Actually I changed Buy Me A Beer to coffee (you could change it to pie, but you’d need your own picture). I wanted to change it to Buy Me A Car, but I thought that was going too far!
No donations yet, so you’re probably right.
I got some Adsense code ready to insert and I’ll be exploring other monetization options soon. I not particularly worried about making money (although of course it’s nice) but I need to learn about the options as I’m starting to write websites for other people.
You’ve got a nice site there. I really like the theme - I don’t know what the old one was like, but the pink one is really nice (and I’m not normally into pink!).
I don’t think its bad to sell dofolllow links although google may punish you spend the cash on buying you own backlinks. Plus with a decent blog and positioning you can make $50 a month.
Joe
My initial reaction was, ‘what would Google think’, however, your concept has merit. The option of donating is great, buy me a car isn’t
Cheers,
Tristan
Free Downloadable. With the recent PageRank deductions, people would have to think twice about selling links - but I don’t have any real need to do so at the moment anyway… Of course you can get a link without paying through the comments - just as you’ve done…
Language guy, so far no donations - definitely no car in sight
Interesting way of putting it but you’d still be selling links, people would not be donating because they like your post or because they appreciate your work but only to get a link on a page with good pr (If it ever gets there)
It reminds me of a couple of church schools here where I live, you’re not entitled to pay anything (because the government pays the wages etc…) but at the end of the year not only do they send a letter asking you for a donation, but they also tell you how much you have to donate…
DT,
I’m giving links away for free in the comments (as nofollow is disabled), so I don’t think that they’d be donating for the PR.
As it happens, no one has made a donation yet, so I’m safe! My mistake is that I don’t act like those church schools - donations are purely optional here…