If you’re spending a lot of time worrying about how flashy, cool and hot your website or blog looks, it may be costing you potential revenue.

Early last year I read “The Surprising Truth About Ugly Websites” by Mark Daoust. This startling and provoking read examines the ideas and theories behind why ugly seems to sell.

Now, I’m not talking about “ugly” as in using those huge bolded fonts, in all caps or harsh and clashing colors. I’m talking about ugly in the sense of plain, basic and without frills. Like sites that are extremely clean, simple and highly functional and that don’t focus on design aesthetics, but rather on making their sites unbelievably user-friendly.

As far as websites go – Plenty of Fish, Wikipedia, eBay, Google, Amazon, Craig’s List, My Space, YouTube and Ryanair are all perfect examples of ugly websites yet they are all hugely successful.

For example, Plenty of Fish earns over $10,000 per day on Google Adsense. That’s over $300,000 per month. Yet when you look at this free online dating site, it is plain, simple and basically an ugly website.

Recently, after reading How to Make Money with Adsense on Grizzly’s How to Make Money Online Blog, I got to thinking about the ugly website concept again and how it relates now to blogs and Google Adsense revenue.

I’m not going to go into the details about how Grizzly does it, you can have a read for yourself. But, his blog is certainly a great example of an ugly blog that makes money.

So, where’s the beauty in ugly blog or web sites? Besides their money making potential, what I’ve found is (not necessarily in this order) they all have some common factors:

1. The Trust Factor.
I don’t care who you are – people hate being marketed to (at least they think they do). I don’t like the idea of anyone trying to sell me something either. We all like to believe that when we buy something, it’s not because we were lead by advertisers, marketing teams or pushy sales people. Rather, we tell or convince ourselves we weren’t lead or seduced into buying at all. Instead, it was of our own conscious choice and decision to do it. Why? We don’t always trust the motives of big players with big money, right?

The beauty of ugly sites is that it may be easier to convey that the site doesn’t have a pushy marketing team who’s trying to sell something, but rather an individual or mom & pop site who’s focused on providing you with something you want or need on a more personal, authentic and honest level. By keeping it real, these sites may be provoking the notion that they are therefore, trustworthy.

2. The User-Friendly Factor.
People want to be able to find and use the information, tools and/or resources with ease. The beauty of ugly sites can be found in sheer simplicity by providing users with no-brainer approaches and methods for using and navigating their sites.

3. The Content Factor
Gerry McGovern points out that the fact is, we don’t spend our time looking at websites. We spend our time reading and using them. There are three things a great web design must be: useful, useful and useful.

The beauty of ugly sites can be found in their purpose and focus of providing an abundance of useful and quality content rather than flashy ads, slow-loading graphics and other web design clutter.

As with everything, there’s got to be a proper fit. So, I’m not saying that as a general rule every site should follow the ugly rules. For example, sites like Gucci, Mercedes and Disney wouldn’t fit. These sites are all about beauty, glamor and glitz.

Since dabbling in the blogging arena the past few months, I have found many sites that I think would do better if they played by the ugly rules. Blogging is largely about content and if I can’t easily navigate a blog or they take too long to load – I click away.

In fact, now that I think about it, the blogs I tend to read and subscribe to are the ones that apply the ugly rules. They’re fast loading, basic, simple and easy to navigate – free from clutter. I hate clutter.

Think about it. Do your favorite blogs and sites follow the ugly rules?

Come to think of it, back in 2006 when I started a work from home jobs site it followed the ugly rules (not on purpose). I started making money from Google Adsense immediately. You can see by my 2006 Adsense Earnings.

By the end of Dec 2006, I decided that my site looked too plain and I wanted to make it look better so I made it prettier. Looking back, I think this was a mistake. This is precisely when my Adsense earnings started to drop. Until I did this, my earnings were consistently increasing each month.

On the other hand, maybe I’ve got it all wrong. Maybe ugly websites are profitable and successful because visitors are willing to click on ads just to get away from them?

What do you think?

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