Are “Shameless Plugs” Worth It? Some data
danmaz74.meYou make a library for A/B testing. Why didn't you use A/B testing here?
I agree that that would have been the best way to measure the effect of the plug. But that wasn't an experiment, I just wanted to get as many readers as possible; the idea to measure the effect of the plug only came later (actually, it was suggested in a comment here on HN).
Test it now :)
So your conclusion is that advertising works ? Well, I can see why you'd be concerned about pissing people on HN off.
However, if there were no advertising anywhere, how would we know what products to buy ? Mainstream advertising channels make users extremely susceptible to 'banner blindness', 'channel flipping', etc.
Of course, the more sensitive users on HN would question your motivations. It's because advertising is becoming so insidious these days that you can never be sure whether an 'expert' is just talking out of his hat or actually giving 'expert advice'.
In this case, since your product is yourself, I'd still give you the benefit of the doubt. Anyone getting annoyed at that needs to think about what's being sold and why :)
I don't know how it's elsewhere but in India lawyers and chartered accountants aren't allowed to advertise their services. They can have only a small board (very discreet) outside their workplace saying who they are and what they do. I wonder if programmers are ever going to go the same way :O
I guess the desired conversion from promoting yourself is getting a client, not click and tweet count. So: did you get any gigs thanks to that?
Author here: the desired end result is to get clients, but the first step is to get your readers to know what your "offer" is. The objective of the plug was this first step; then you should measure the conversion of the offer itself, but that's probably quite independent from the plug itself.
Anyway, for your curiosity, the end result was only one little gig for now - vs 0 from the first post, for what this is worth. I'll have to work on my portfolio etc I guess.
Frankly I was surprised so little of people viewed the 'about' section, I've read it's common to check who's the author, and I do it myself. Until I tried to find yours and it took me a moment. You should expose the menu bar better and maybe get rid of the highly distracting binary crap. It may be one of the reasons why the plug generated more views of the 'about' and 'consulting' section - nobody sees those links without it.
The placement of the menu was very conventional and I didn't think it could be a problem, but, now that you made me think about it, I'll consider this.
On the other hand, I don't think that the "binary crap" can be so much more distracting than any other picture I could put there. And I happen to like it :)
While the placement may be conventional, it's actually quite easy to miss the fact that there's some text in all that orange. At first it looks like it's simply another part of the header. Certainly, I didn't notice it until I went back to look for it.
my point was the pic takes enough attention I didn't notice there is a menu below. the important elements for you are under-exposed. you added the plug but didn't fix the main problem that made it necessary in the first place :)
Ok, I'll look for a solution. Thanks!
The other way to look at it - 97% didn't react to your shameless plug, and probably a good chunk of these were annoyed by it. An ad is an ad, regardless of how you call it.
>97% didn't react to your shameless plug, and probably a good chunk of these were annoyed by it
I think that's a pretty bold claim. I can't remember ever being annoyed by a blog post which included a brief "This is me and what I do" plug.
It's not the "This is me and what I do" plug that's annoying, it's the endless advertisements its attached to.
Right now we have on or just falling off the front page
- 37signals writing about Siri
- Thumbtack writing about ab testing
- weddinglovely on why a startup has a print product
These are advertisements disguised as random bla bla written for HN.
Not all random bla blas are created equal.
There are a few authors I wish they advertise themselves more on HN.
On the other hand, 99.7% of my readers didn't react to my website in the first attempt, so it is a net positive anyway. And, from a marketing point of view, those who are annoyed by that most likely aren't going to hire you anyway.
The author could start to answer the annoyance question by AB testing the plug and looking at reengagement figures and time spent of the two segments. No drop off in time spent or second visits would be a pretty good indication there's no significant annoyance. I think this can be done quite easily with Google Analytics and his AB test library.
Unfortunately, I'm not such a prolific blog author, so I don't have posts to spare to this kind of experiments...
Its not so black and white, a pop up is way more annoying that some text at the end of the article. And what is more relevant, the user just have to stop reading and just close the page, two actions that the user was going to eventually do even if there was no ad; but pop-Ups and video ads make the user lose resources (time) and it requires a special action to be cancelled (look up for the little ex in the corner and click it). Also because is text and not and imagen it does not significantly distract the user from reading the article. Also the fact that is highly relevant (consulting for companies/startups and a scrip to improve HN reading) makes it more acceptable.
In this order of ideas related shameless plugs are better than most other forms of advertising.
Shameless Plug < C2A
Why reinvent marketing best practices? At least be aware of them before you test something.
Design - 3-4 C2A at the bottom pointing to your consulting page (or about page) and then A/B test those C2A. Readers are probably more annoyed by a shameless plug then a well designed C2A.
But a call to action makes sense if the post is about what you want to promote. If I write a non-specific post about something that interested me (and should interest readers), I think that a call to action would be perceived as a shameless plug anyway :)
What is a C2A please? Google was no help without more context.
Call to Action
Ah, of course. Thanks.
Regarding shameless plugs, how about using your own app embedded midway through the article to exemplify the concepts being talked about? Is that done, and how is it perceived?
I'm sorry but I don't understand which app you're talking about. The Hacker News plugin can't be embedded...
I'm talking about any given app which the developer embeds into his own article to create a seamless promotion.
Ok - when that's possible, it makes a lot of sense.