I've had several people contact me who want me to advertise for their services on my homeschool group website. Should I let them? Should I charge? Our homeschool group is a laid back, no fee, no registration, parent-run kind of thing. I'm not sure I want to get involved with charging for advertising, but do I just let anyone and everyone use our forum? I'd appreciate anyone's thoughts on this.
When I got yelled at for "advertising" my free courses on my home group website, the list owner explained that she had reacted so strongly because she was flooded with requests for advertising and had a hard time keeping people from spamming the list with ads for their stuff. I totally understand that, but a very strict no-advertising policy is frustrating to people like me who have spent years developing a free resource as a gift to the homeschool community, and I know I'm not the only one. I'd say be careful both ways. Don't let people just post ads in your forums. If someone is offering something free you might want to check to make sure it's legit. Some groups have a special section where members can advertise goods or services. I also like this site's policy of letting you put things in your signature. As far as selling some ad space on your site, well this site does that, and so do lots of others. I think that it provides a little compensation for all those good folks who run forums like this for the rest of us - I'm sure it's very time-consuming.
Personally, as a curriculum provider, I'd charge them for advertising. I mean, if they have a product you just gush about anyway - then go ahead and do it for free. But just so you know - they will be paying eveywhere else, even to be mentioned on someone's blog as a "paid review". (You'd be surprised at how many "reviews" are actually paid advertisments.) And if you put a link on your site that doesn't have a no-follow tag, then they get higher Google ratings for backlinks. So basically, you would be giving them two services for free when everyone else would be charging them per month. Believe me - this type of news will travel fast and you'll get quite a few people wanting you to advertise their products.
Nobody is wanting to advertise here. MLC is only trying to set a good policy for advertising on another site. I was saying that this site has good policies. You don't see spam or ads on these forums.
