Over the past few weeks, I’ve been approached with advertising opportunities here on The Daily Cocca. All the offers were for legitimate operations; no link farms and nothing MLM or sleazy. Sponsored links and content, and the content has been things I think my readers would actually enjoy. But for now, I won’t be going down those routes. You might know that the good folks here at Automattic (the company that runs WordPress) have a policy against blog owners running ads or sponsored content on WordPress.com hosted sites like this one. Blogs with traffic in excess of 25,000 visits per month are eligible for an Ad Control feature. The Daily Cocca is gaining steam, but is not quite at 900ish hits per day, dear readers. If I ever do run ads or sponsored content, rest assured the ads will only be for things that are on the square, and the content will only be posts or graphics that are engaging and worth your time and mine. I’m not into blogging for the money (sort of like writing). I’m interested in connecting with awesome people and sharing awesome things.
If you know me professionally, you know that I do make part of my living by working on content and social media outreach for groups with the right kind of ethics. Three Pillars Trading Co. is a new company I’m working with. They’ve asked me to help capture the essence of their fair-trade products and three-pillared approach to sustainable, responsible business. I’m plugging them here because I like their mission. I’m going to put a link to their Facebook page in one of my sidebars to help promote them and to pretty up all that white space. For the record, they have not asked me to do this and I’m not being paid to place their content here at TDC. I just want to give them a shout out, and perhaps start a discussion about how we can use our blogs to help ethical, sustainable operations simply because it’s the right thing to do. We’re all in this together. To that end, if any of you have projects that you think might sort of fit in with this idea and you’d like me to put together a graphical link to them and display them on my white space, let me know. I’ll do it for free (though a link back here would be appreciated). If you want to talk about hiring me for other things, well, hey, that’s great too.
Automattic image by niallkennedy via Flickr
Chris Cocca 
I wish automattic supported ads or sponsored contents on free blogs. :(
I like your approach to this! It’s one thing I enjoy about the internet community- we all just want to help each other out! The beauty of the internet is that it’s free- we’re able to share and offer our opinion to audiences that would not be available normally. And you, have done this in a pretty classy way, if I must say so myself :)