Add an Ad, Anyone?

If you are interested in making money via the Internet, there are three main ways.

1. You use your blog or website to promote your products and services
   
2. You use your blog or website to promote the products of other people, and when a sale is made through your site you get paid a commission
   
3. You have a blog or site that has very high traffic, and businesses who want to get the attention of those who pay attention to you pay you to feature their ads on your site.

As you can guess, I chose the first option, to promote my worship ministry e-training material. I didn't expect other people to want to advertise their stuff on my site, so I was pleasantly surprised when I was asked if I'd be willing to host an ad for Louie Giglio's products on my site. Being a fan of Louie Giglio's work, I of course agreed!

So my site has only ONE ad. At the other extreme, there's another worship leader's blog that has ads galore. What he did was that he signed up for those ad programs that allow Google or the blog host to allocate ads to your site based on what their systems think is relevant. Problem is, their systems decide based on keywords, and if advertisers of wrong products chose keywords poorly, the wrong kind of ads can appear on your site.

This has resulted in all kinds of products being displayed at his worship ministry site. One ad clicked over to a "Free Develop-Your-Psychic-Powers DVD program", another to "Witchcraft Exposed", which promises to teach you witchcraft secrets and spells that others will not teach you. To be frank, I sometimes head over to his site JUST to see what kind of ads will turn up THIS time!

On one hand it's funny, and on the other, it's sad. Because I know about the quirks of the ad program he signed up for, and having been online for a longer period of time than he was, I once emailed him some time back to tell him the ad program was featuring yoga products on his worship ministry site. I was expecting him to either:

1. Ignore me, since I am a stranger to him and him to me
   
2. Thank me profusely for pointing out something he didn't know and was embarrassing him behind his back. Then deal with it.
   
3. Tell me that he has investigated yoga and thinks it's OK. And if that was his personal conviction, I can respect that.

But can you believe it? He actually emailed me, saying "The ads are beyond my control…" No, they are not! He chose to allow ads on his blog. He could have decided to use a free blog that wouldn't charge him anything for hosting his site, or he could have just trusted in God to provide the less than US$10 each month to host his site.

Nope, he decided he needed the few-cents-per-click income from his site more than the respect of fellow believers and the need to follow his own convictions. * fumes *

Anyway…

In case you are thinking about making money via the Internet, I sincerely believe that the Internet, as a market, has matured. Gone are the days of making mindlessly easy money online. Making money online now takes wisdom, hard work and a willingness to grow way beyond the average person's comfort zone.

I am not very much help in this area, since I am only a worship musician. But I'd like to remind urge you to remember: whatever you do online, especially when it comes to making money, please remember:

1. The God you one day have to answer to;
   
2. Your own convictions, your personal beliefs on what is right and what is wrong; AND
   
3. Your spiritual family, the rest of the Body of Christ.

Don't do things that you'd be ashamed to acknowledge before anyone, such as using automatic article spinners to produce and submit many different versions of an article for the sake of tricking Google's search engines. If I'd be ashamed to admit that to Google, how much worse would it be to admit it before the Judge of all the earth, right?

Thanks for putting up with my rant. I just needed to get this off my chest. Be blessed!

An Email I Received...

I just came across something in my spam filter and thought of blogging about it.

It was an email from a worship leader from whom I have not heard from for a long time. I subscribed to his mailing list, and soon discovered that he had only one product to sell, and he would email me only to sell me that one product, so I got to see how many different ways he had to plug that one product. It was entertaining until he ran out of ideas…

Then I saw his most recent email. It was on a money-making opportunity with a multi-level payout. To qualify you had to get people to click on internet advertisements, and once there are enough people in your group clicking on online ads you stand to make a handsome 5-figure sum monthly.

I am not going to say if such an opportunity is going to work in the long term, or will it collapse within a couple of months or so. The best way to find out, I feel, is to get involved, but I honestly don’t want to give up even 5 minutes a day to look at online advertisements.

But that is not the point of this post.

What I want to say is this: if you have subscribed to my mailing lists at Invisible Worship Musician, I assume you want information and insight on worship ministry. I am also going to assume that if you want money-making opportunities, you will look for people you respect in this area and consider the opportunities they offer. I am currently in the midst of setting up a secular business of my own, but if you are on my worship ministry list I will NOT bug you over it, because when you signed up I promised not to spam you with irrelevant messages. And that, in our context, refers to anything that doesn’t apply to worship ministry.

As for the other guy, I wish him well. He is the Lord’s servant, and he is accountable to God for what he does with his mailing list (Rom 14:4). On MY mailing list I will NOT promote to you anything that is not related to worship ministry in some way, shape or form.

And if you are on his mailing list too, I’d like you to share with me, either via email or the comments section below on this page, your thoughts and feelings about him branching out into such other matters and emailing you about it. Are you intrigued, amused, irritated or offended?

Let me know!