23. Affiliate Site v Adsense Income

In this chapter I want to discuss two of your options for making an income from your website. After all, that’s why you’re building the site, isn’t it?

These two methods are affiliate programs and Google Adsense. They are the most common, and financially rewarding ways of earning income from your site, yet there are pitfalls.

A lot of marketers use affiliate programs and Adsense on all their sites. However, my own observations in the last year have shown that sites with both make very little income from affiliate programs. Adsense is such an easy way to make money from your traffic that most webmasters don’t appear to care about the lost affiliate revenue.

In the last year I have begun experimenting with Adsense focused, and affiliate focused web sites, where I use one or other of the techniques, but not both.

I modified a website that was getting 200+ visitors a day to only include Adsense.

I ran the site like this for one month.

I then modified the site to only include affiliate links, and left this for one month.

Finally, I used a combination of both, and ran that for a month.

I don’t want to give exact figures here, but I can tell you the relative amounts earned by each combination:

Adsense Only – made $Z

Adsense + affiliate links – $Z x 1.2

Affiliate links only – $Z * 4

Obviously these results are not statistically significant, and cannot be applied to all websites, but it does imply to me that Adsense can hurt your sites affiliate commission earning potential.

My point in sharing this information with you is not to tell you to abandon Adsense. It is this:

Test and track, and experiment with your own sites.

Experiment with where you put Adsense.

After further experiments, I can offer two simple guidelines:

1. Don’t put Adsense on a web page that reviews a product. By its nature, these pages will attract visitors who are interested in buying the product, so point them to the merchants that sell the product via your affiliate links.
2. If you have a general content page (an informative article on a topic), add Adsense to that page. These pages are less likely to attract buying customers, so Adsense is a way that you can make some money from them before they leave.
3. If a review page is not converting visitors into paying customers via your affiliate links, work on your pre-sell, and test again. Only put Adsense on these pages as a last resort, and even then, only after you try a different merchant(s).

As with anything in business, diversify your efforts. Work on two types of site:

1. Large content sites that are primarily targeting Adsense income.
2. Smaller sites that are concentrating on affiliate income.

The techniques I use for building these two types of sites are different only in what I do with the articles I write.

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