Google Adsense Could Mean Death to Affiliate Programs
Google Adsense Could Mean Death to Affiliate Programs
The popular search engine, Google has introduced
a dramatic new contextual advertising service called Adsense. This
new program could mean death to affiliate programs on those web
sites that qualify for the Adsense program. Why would Google advertising
affect affiliate programs? Because Google is making Adsense ads
available to smaller content rich sites.
Adsense dramatically simplifies the process of
choosing appropriate advertising for sections of sites. Since it's
all automatic with Adsense, I'm through with searching for affiliate
programs to fit my content. It just doesn't pay enough to justify
the effort in most cases. While I won't dump existing producers,
I'm dropping those affiliate programs that don't produce like hot
potatoes.
I've moved house often over the last few years
and in that process have struggled to keep affiliate programs abreast
of the latest contact and banking information. Several honest affiliate
program managers have emailed me after getting my affiliate checks
returned from previous snail mail addresses.
Adsense will resolve this issue for me as I needn't
keep the hundreds of affiliate programs up-to-date on my latest
mailing address and/or banking information - only Google Adsense.
I'm dropping smaller unproductive affiliate programs.
Allan Gardyne of Associate Programs penned an
interesting and insightful article on Adsense this past week where
he mentions this as an issue and predicts the death of smaller or
weaker affiliate programs.
I agree.
http://www.AssociatePrograms.com/search/adsense.shtml
Google Adsense simply requires the host site
to paste in a few lines of HTML code on their pages where they want
those ads to appear. Once Google has spidered your content pages,
they can assess what those pages are about. Adsense serves a series
of ads that match and compliment your page topics automatically
without site owner participation!
I've been impressed how Adsense has performed
for me in just the last week. I've actually enjoyed looking at my
own sites to see what ads are served to match my content. WebSite101
demonstrates very well how Adsense works. If you visit the HTML
tutorial, you see Adsense ads for web page editing software or web
hosting. If you visit my email tutorial, you'll see Adsense ads
for email broadcasting software and targeted email list broadcasting
services. If you visit the Domain Name tutorial, you're served Adsense
ads for Domain Registrars and web hosting. If you visit the Anti-Spam
Tutorial, you get Adsense Ads for Spam Filtering Software.
http://www.website101.com/email_e-mail/
http://www.website101.com/HTML/
http://www.website101.com/Domain_Name
http://website101.com/SpamFilter/
You get the idea.
I like not having to mess with my own ad-serving
software and twiddle with the rates and I absolutely LOVE not having
to do any ad sales. I'm sold and wholeheartedly recommend Adsense
to anyone with sufficient content to support it.
I've got over 1000 pages of good solid content
that I've built over the last 6 years. I've struggled in vain to
get that content to pay by carefully choosing affiliate programs
to fit neatly into dozens of topic areas. My two biggest producers
have been software sales and health insurance referrals for small
businesses. Those have been sporadic producers.
My biggest complaint is that I can't track what
is producing clickthroughs. Google simply tells me clickthrough
percentage, number of ad impressions per day and average earnings
per clickthrough across all of my sites. That makes it very difficult
to know where to concentrate my energy to produce additional revenue
generating content. But it does seem to offer site owners incentive
to maintain quality content and spread the ads across all content
pages.
My privacy site runs a variety of HIPAA compliance
ads, GLB compliance ads, and DoNotCall List Compliance ads. It seems
the money in privacy is in charging large corporations to keep them
within the letter of the law so they don't get sued for violations.
It is interesting to see my own site ads to know
where the money is in PPC for each of the topic areas. Sometimes
it's just not what you expect. I've got an article about Google's
reverse phone lookup and how to get out of reverse phone lookup
databases that is on the Privacy site and it sometimes shows ads
about "low long distance rates". Clearly the keyphrase
"Phone number" is triggering ads that are quite off target
on this page.
While Adsense won't outperform my total affiliate
income from the many programs spread across my sites, it WILL, if
current trends continue, match my total affiliate income and therefore
double advertising income!
The biggest benefit was the incentive to rebuild
WebSite101, which got it's design in 1998. <embarrassed grin>
I've needed to do that, but man is it tedious adapting all that
content while maintaining page names and fitting it all back together
with existing affiliate links and updating outdated stuff. Adsense
gave me the incentive to do that by making my content finally pay
for itself. It also gives me incentive to keep adding more relevant
content.
I'm sold and wholeheartedly recommend Adsense
to anyone with sufficient content to support it. While I won't dump
existing affiliate program producers, I'm dropping those that don't
produce clickthroughs and sales - fast - like hot potatoes.
Get
Adsense if Google approves your site. You'll love it too.
http://google.com/adsense/
About the Author Mike
Banks Valentine is a Search Engine Optimizer specializing in ethical
small business SEO
http://searchengineoptimism.com/SEO_Tutorial/
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