Adsense Or Affiliate Programs – Which One Is Best?
When you begin blogging and are consistently putting out high quality content, your traffic begins to grow, you have more people following you and interested and what you are saying. At some stage you come to a point where you may like to recover some of the costs associated with maintaining a blog or you would actually like to start earning a decent income from your blog.
At that stage you often face a difficult question that all bloggers ask themselves; Should I monetize my blog with AdSense, Affiliate programs or both?
There are advantages and disadvantages to both options, which is why the decision is so tricky. Using something like AdSense enables you to get many more clicks and earn money for those clicks, but the value of each click is going to be cents (or a dollar at the most). By contrast an affiliate program can pay many dollars for each sale you make but the number of clicks you need to make any money may be a lot more.
In an ideal world, affiliate programs will be more profitable to promote if they pay you $10 or more per sale. However, there are so many variables the only way to be certain which is best to use is to track, test and analyze – three words many people try to avoid because it involves a bit of work!
The first thing you should do is to try out Google AdSense. Place the ads above the fold and make them look like part of the content, wrap the article text around the ads so that people can’t fail to see them. You need to make sure that every page your AdSense ads are on are highly optimized to ensure that only relevant ads are displayed. To achieve this apply some simple On-Page SEO such as placing the targeted keywords are in the URL, the title and mentioned throughout the body of the text. This will make it easier for Google to show the most relevant ads.
As a word of note, many people go to Google’s Keyword Research Tool and discover that some keywords are costing $7 or more per click and dollar signs light up in their eyes. However, this is how much it costs to get the ads on Google, the cost per click on the Content Network (that’s AdSense) is significantly lower, as little as 10% of the value to actually bid for that keyword. The reason is simply that the Content Network is not as targeted as the searches people do. There is also the problem of Smart Pricing, this basically means that the payment one website gets is different to what another website gets for the exact same ad. Google decides how valuable the clicks are from your website and gives you a rate based on that – it’s entirely possible to have some clicks be worthless.
You need to stick with AdSense for at least a month or until you have data on at least 1,000 visitors. Once you have done that you can divide the amount you have earned by the number of visitors you received to work out your earnings per visitor.
Once you have data on this it’s time to replace AdSense with affiliate program advertising – you can even put the affiliate ads in the same positions. Again, wait until you have a significant number of visitors and divide the amount you have earned with the number of unique visitors and you will find out your earning per visitor.
Tracking like this is the only way to determine which is more profitable for your site. When you have this data you can try and mix things up by using a combination of AdSense and affiliate programs and seeing if this increases your earnings per visitor.
Of course, if you are capturing email addresses you can boost the earnings per visitor significantly because you can get them to come back to your site again and again and be exposed to your ads.
Every site is different and the monetization strategy for each site can also differ. It is important that you apply and test constantly to find your monetization strategy.
Cemil Ozcelik
www.OnlineBusinessBlackbook.com © 2009 - 2010
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{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
Some great info, have been using Google Adsense for some time, but now starting to look at Affiliate programs, some great tips there Cemil.
Regards
Belinda
Hi Cemil,
This is really excellent advice. I’ve been tossing up whether to use Google AdSense or an Affiliate program on my blogs so your post comes at a great time for me.
I like your advice on trying Google AdSense until you have at least a thousand visitors so that you can get some idea of your earnings per visitor and then moving to an Affiliate program and doing the same thing. This will definitely show which is more profitable.
Thanks for the great tips.
It’s all about testing what works for your site Jazz. The layout, content and niche of the site all comes into play – so test, test, test
Thanks for this post, I get a clear picture in my head when I read this.
I appreciate the ‘common sense’ approach, and I like that I’m always learning a bit more when I visit.
I knew that Google has a variable algorithm for deciding how much to pay per click but I didn’t realize the problem was as serious as you point out. I can see the only real way to work out if it is worth while is to measure it as you said. Thanks for pointing this out.
Some good tips Cemil. The other thing I would suggest is using the Adsense heat map (https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=17954) to help with the placement of the ads.
This is a great tip Tom. The Adsense Heat map is a impressive guide on where ad placements convert the best. I would still recommend that everyone test and measure as it is not a “one size fits all” solution.
Hi Cemil,
Good advice on AdSense. I would not have thought of replacing AdSense with affiliate marketing programs. Also, easy info on tracking visitors against cost. My only comment would be to elaborate on some of the terminology you have used such as ‘above the fold” I know from experience that some people don’t know what that means.
Thanks for sharing!
Eileen.
Good tip Eileen, I will try to remember that for future posts
For anybody that doesn’t know what “Above the fold” means – Its the portion of a Web page that is visible once the page has loaded without the need to scroll.
G’day Jazz,
Thanks for this vital Info. It’s preparing me for when the Homestudy arrives next week, and then it will be head down …………..and not a pretty sight. Doing the research is critical.
Cheers
Harry
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