A few days ago I have been contacted by someone from the spanish business newspaper “Mejor Negocios“  and I was happy to answer a few questions in order to set up a short material about MillionBlogs.

People seems to be more and more interested about our concept and if a newspaper like the one above mentioned with great coverage in Spain and Latin America enquired about our project , it means that the things are going into the right direction. We are also in discussions with a big SEO and consulting US based company to set up 67 keyblogs for their clients. Hopefuly these good news will attract further interest from other interested entrepreneurs and website owners.

Here is the original spanish version of the material realized by Mejor Negocios. We have translated the page in english with Google translator for those interested in reading so here is the translated version.

  Advertising is an integral part of the Web user experience these days. No matter how old or new, how big or small a website is, we all see banners, text links, flashy stuff everywhere. It has been proved that people react in different ways to different types of advertising. Many studies have focused on how successful ads are at driving traffic to the advertiser. There are also several design techniques that impact the user experience in a negative way and as a website owner you should carefully choose your advertisers and also the design and message of the ads listed on your website.

Sometimes a wrong ad will undermine your website credibility and will force users not to come back anymore.  I’ve seen so many websites these days where users have to scroll for five minutes through ads in order to find a bit of content which is obviously wrong.  Unrelated ads might also be a problem…I’ve seen a fishing related blog with about 12 banners and text links on it. Guess what…none of the ads were related to fishing at all and now I wonder how many readers of that blog enjoy seeing mortgage, auto and get rich banners on a fishing blog?

Here are some stupid advertising techniques which you’ll never should apply to your website:

- Pop ups  -  I hate them from the bottom of my heart. Users browse a website for a reason. They may look for useful info, products or services and when they concentrate to find what they are looking for, sudenly a stupid box appear asking them to click on it. In most of the cases these ads don’t even have a “Close” button so you will have to wait to disappear.

-  Huge flashing banners  -  So many of them these days with silly colours which blink on and off making the user experience even more annoying. Most of these ads have totally different colours from your website design and just don’t fit together.

-  Audio/Video ads which automatically play sounds  -  Monument of stupidity! Imagine yourself opening a webpage and then…”Hello guys, my name is Bob the Builder and I’ll show you how to earn one million every day…” oh god, I hate them and I consider myself lucky if I can find the “Stop” button (if any)!

- Ads floating across the screen  -  even worst than all the others as you’ll need to do a bit of athletics with your mouse on the screen and be happy if you catch them.

-  Hidden Ads - These are bits of text well hidden in the content in order to create the ilussion that you actually click an internal link.  Once you clicked you will be redirected to advertiser’s webpage. How stupid!

As a website owner you should think twice before accepting and implementing these stupid forms of advertising into your pages. These may cause a drop in customer satisfaction and may damage your long-term prospects.

As an advertiser you should think from the user’s point of view and understand that a stupid ad will damage your business image.