No Longer Ad-Free Zone

0 CommentsMonday • October 11, 2010 • by Imei

Though I never promised Hips For Hire’s site would be free of advertisement, I feel you should know why we’re not an ad-free zone anymore.

If you do a Google search under the keywords, “belly dance” and “Seattle”, you will discover just how many amazing professional dancers of Raks Orientale live and work here. Scan their websites, and you might notice one thing that is different from their websites than most others: they have no paid advertisement. For some, they feel that advertisements are a “sell-out” to their art, and not a necessity to run their dance businesses. Others may not understand how advertisement could actually help them receive more requests for gigs by driving traffic to their site.

From day one when I launched Hips For Hire, I knew I would need to break from the pack and do something different. The Internet market has changed the way we do business, and we don’t want to get left behind. I’ve carefully waited to put all the pieces in place, and now I have an umbrella over my head, waiting for pieces of poo to fly in my direction for doing what other web businesses are doing. At least they should know my reasons.

First of all, I managed to find my old Adsense account. For months, I was not able to access the account because of a lost username and password combination (my bad). Anyone who has ever used Adsense knows that it isn’t exactly the easiest site to understand, but once you get going, it’s a pretty cool world.

Second, it’s one of the smartest ways to drive traffic to your site while making a little passive income through revenue sharing. If you are an artist maintaining your own site, you might want to educate yourself a bit about relevant affiliate marketing, links, and SEO (Search Engine Optimization). A great book on the subject is, Marketing in the Age of Google (Vanessa Fox).

Third, I can control what kind of ads I want to place on my site by indicating what general categories I want. For example, if I am trying to help artists make better videos of their work, I can also place advertisements for inexpensive but high-quality cameras when prices drop.

With October 2010 being Breast Cancer Awareness Month, advertisement (like the image I posted in this blog) which stands in line with our objectives to support charitable organizations such as Susan G. Komen Foundation makes good business sense as well as compassionate common sense to help us use dollars we spend to do double duty in helping others. It’s simply time that we all got smarter about how we spend and how we help.

Did you know that every 69 seconds, somewhere in the world a woman dies of breast cancer? With early detection, minimizing risk, educating women on health issues, and better treatments through funded research, we can eventually lower that number. In the meantime, Hips For Hire stands in solidarity with other businesses like E.L.F., Commission Junction, and Shop The Net Affiliates, with affiliate marketing that does us all a world of good.

It doesn’t have to be all greed and consumerism. It can also include caring and sharing, as cliche as that sounds. We can’t help it. We like to do good things.

Oh, and keep your eyes pealed for news about an exciting Seattle-area Tweetup on Facebook that will help you experience the lap of luxury for a few bucks while raising money for the cure.