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When I was a kid I grew up in dairy farming country.  The people that owned and operated these family businesses were the true salt of the earth in my opinion.  There are not many businesses where you get to work 7 days a week, 365 days a year with backbreaking labor, toil and sweat just for the opportunity to have some bulk milk buyer pay you what ever he wants at a rate that he sets according to the butter fat content of your milk delivery for the day.

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At age 13 I worked on one local farm, boarded out as they say, for one summer season and decided I would have a career in electronics.  One thing that I remember vividly was when a man in a suit and hat stopped at the farm one day, suits and hats were a rarity around those parts, and he made a deal with the farmer to paint a huge advertising sign for his clothing company in the nearby city on the end of the barn.  My farmer boss was very excited to gain $20.00 per year in payment and he chuckled to think that from now on he would never have to paint that end of the barn.

Well that was a paid ad wasn’t it?  There were also little Burma Shave advertising signs along the road that you could read one sign after the other as you were moving and they were cute little rhymes which ended with the Burma Shave sign.  You might also remember seeing handbills or posters plastered all over blank wall spaces around construction projects.  Well those were free ads weren’t they?  You might have seen a sign that said “Post No Bills !”  Well what that meant was the property owner was sick and tired of offering his real estate to non-paying handbill advertisers.

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So I am sort of wondering if we in the Internet Marketing business can gain anything from these older but similar situations.  You as a publisher own real estate.  Your real estate consists of from say 200 to 300 square inches of space on a video terminal.  You generally have some appropriate graphics and images that fit the theme of your website design, and then you have a body area where you write articles and include images or graphs and such.  Then on one or two sidebars you have some column advertisements that you provide “Free” real estate for, as in no cost to the advertiser, and the only way you can make any money is if someone clicks on that banner and then makes a purchase, and then trusting upon the integrity of the affiliate advertising manager, and sometimes I wonder, you will be paid a paltry sum of a commission for the transaction.

Well I do this on over a hundred websites, but I am not happy with it.  We are giving up space on our sites to increase the brand awareness of the advertiser even if no one buys, don’t we?  A better method would be to charge a minimal insertion fee that could be equated to a value compiled from say your traffic metrics or number of average views per month.  Would the advertisers be apt to go along with this?  Not a chance!  Not a chance that is unless we could all join in and start demanding at least some type of compensation for furthering the advertisers brand awareness.  It is only fair even though I doubt will ever happen.

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So if you are torqued off about this you might want to consider inserting ads for your own products and kick the cheapskate squatters off your property.  Evict them for non-payment of rent.  Come up with an eBook,or sell crafts you make, or the Brooklyn Bridge, something, anything at all that you can call your own and that you will make 100% of the profit on.  Maybe if enough publishers started doing this to enough of the freeloading advertisers they might get the message.  What say you?

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