Make Money Online, adsense, affiliate, affiliate marketing, google — July 27, 2009 — 2 Comments
From Adsense to Affiliate Links
This post was published 2 years 9 months 21 days ago. In SEO, things change quickly and this advice might be out of date. Just wanted to let you know before acting on the advice. :)Typically webmasters start out with Adsense as their revenue stream. While it’s easiest and definitely quick to use, Adsense is not always the best performer if you’re looking to earn money online from your websites. With Adsense you’ll always run into a couple problems.
1. You can’t presell. With an affiliate link, you can talk about the product so your visitor knows what to expect when they get to the advertisers page. You can give them the price and details, and if they still click, they’re likely to buy since they already know everything. If that isn’t the product they’re looking for, they’ll continue browsing your site. You’ll make a sale, or keep a visitor. With Adsense you don’t get the chance to do either.
2. You’ll earn less. While I can’t say that every single one of my sites that has affiliate links makes more with those affiliate links, a majority do.
3. All your eggs in one basket. If all of your income is coming from one source and something happens to that source, your revenue drops to $0.
4. Unknown revenue share. This has always been the biggest issue with me. Google doesn’t tell you how much you’re going to earn. In fact, they tell you how much they will give you per click, after you send them the clicks. It’s totally backwards but until they have a reason to give you that info, they never will.
Moving away from Adsense is tough, and I wouldn’t suggest dumping it all together. Start slow, remove the ads from one page and replace it with affiliate links. Test it for a month and see what the revenue is like when compared to Adsense.
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About Brandon Hopkins
I'm a professional link builder with a team of full time link builders and clients around the world. Contact me as soon as you're ready to rank #1. This post was written by Brandon Hopkins.
You make some fair points about Adsense revenue. I agree that part of promoting products effectively is about actively selling them to visitors and being able to describe the benefits that they will receive. However the beauty of adsense in it’s defence is that it automates the process of selling on larger sites, which means that affiliate links never go out of date. This can be a real help if you are running a site with 400+ pages of content
[...] Affiliate marketing has never really been something that I’ve cared for. Why should I sell your product and get 50% of the earnings when I could create my own product and keep 100% of the earnings, then hire affiliate marketers to sell the product and give them 50% and keep 50% after doing nothing? Well, the truth is that creating that product and marketing it is a very difficult task. Your product needs to stand out among other similar products, then you need either a large list, or a way to get the word out to a lot of people. Definitely not as easy as it sounds. [...]