Sail with New Freebooters

I’ve created this page to explain what my policy is concerning advertising on the New Freebooters site. First, let me state my goals:

• I want this site to make money. I’m blogging about sailing because it’s my passion, but I’m also living on a reduced pension. I need another income stream. If I can’t make this blog the source of that stream, I won’t be able to spend anything like as much time posting on it. I hope you find that prospect as uncomfortable as I do.
• I want you to find this site both informative and entertaining. If it isn’t, not enough of you will visit it and I won’t make any money from ads or anything else I do here.
• I don’t want advertising to feel intrusive. That doesn’t mean I wont place ads where they’re likely to get clicked on, but it does mean I’ll do my best not to interrupt the flow when you’re reading, listening or watching.

This means I’ll spread the ads about so that you don’t see too many at any one time as you scroll and click your way around. Oh, and I will never, ever, allow anyone to display animated ads on this site. I have already removed the Adsense skyscraper block because it was sometimes hogged by one animated graphic. I hate animated ads and can’t understand why anyone ever clicks on them. And another thing: I will never allow popups on this site. I hate them, too.

Here’s what I have on New Freebooters  at the moment:

• Google Adsense pay-per-click ads in various formats
• Commission-paying affiliate ads
• Kontera context links

Adsense automatically serves up different ads depending on the coutry from which you are viewing this site, but I can’t do that with affiliate partners.

The only affiliate I am partnered with at the moment is the yacht chartering broker BoatBookings.com, which operates worldwide so I won’t advertise any other yacht chartering broker.

Later, I’ll advertise online companies such as yacht chandlers - I’ll have to find a few of these so that I can cover the US, Europe and Australasia.

Kontera turns keywords into double-underlined links that display the ad in a bubble when you hover the mouse over the word. I’ll be experimenting with these ads for quite a long time, because there are lots of options I can configure, one of which is the colour of the font. My two main goals are to make them unobtrusive so that they don’t interrupt your reading, and to make sure you don’t think they are ordinary text links.

Both Adsense and Kontera allow me to decide which parts of the New Freebooters content I want them to analyse and provide ads for, and which parts I don’t.

I have also given myself the flexibility to decide, even within a single post, where I want ads and where I don’t. That means more work for me than I would have if I left it all to the Theme template to automate, but it allows me to vary the look depending on the subject.

I’m still learning how to do this, so bear with me, but don’t hesitate to comment on either my advertising policy or the way I have implemenetd it.

I appreciate feedback, and I promise to respond to every comment.