Why does everyone insist on installing the “buy me a beer” widget. No matter how you dress it up (buy me a coffee, buy me a cup of tea, buy me a coconut) it looks silly on almost every blog. Out of everyone who has had it installed on their blogs, how much money have people made from it? Anything? No?

In July, John Chow made $114.33 from his buy me a beer plugin. Before you start to think, “Well, that’s a lot of money”, you need to remember that the people who buy John beer are the people he’s helped out in some way. John also has thousands of readers. Unless you are really reaching a wide audience and you are helping people, who in their right mind is going to give you money for nothing? It just doesn’t make sense.

Small-time bloggers are making themselves look silly with this unproductive plugin that makes them appear as desperate as promoting the fact that they have two RSS subscribers showing on Feedburner.

If you met me in the street for the first time, introduced yourself, chatted to me about yourself for ten minutes and then asked me for $5 so you could buy a beer, I’d think you were insane. If people have enough money to be giving out donations, they aren’t going to be giving it away to anybody.

Create a respected service before you start asking your readers for money, or at least offer some incentive if you absolutely must do it.

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Tags: Monetize your blog //