Adsense is one of the most popular categories here on DP, but in my experience it is not the strongest potential earner. While Adsense is good to have in the mix since they tend to pay relatively highly per click, focusing on Adsense alone is a BIG mistake. The day I expanded from Adsense was the day my earnings started to transform from a mere survival wage ($1000-$2000/mo) and started moving towards 5 figure monthly earnings. I literally had hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors but was only making a mediocre wage considering the traffic. Right now I also use programs like In-text ads (like Infolinks), Banner Networks, Private Ad Sales, Own Products, and countless affiliate programs to earn a lot more. Often you have to learn a lot about each monetization model and apply it correctly, but it is key to bumping up your income. Adsense is approx. 20-40% of my revenue depending what I am currently focusing on. I'd like to drop that down to below 10%. On some sites other sources of income are so much more profitable I will hopefully be able to justify dropping Adsense entirely. All this buzz and focus on Adsense is really killing a lot of people's overall earnings. If I was just using Adsense my sites would have a very low eCPM, now they have a $15 - $40 eCPM on average with all revenues combined. In examples where I have pushed targeted traffic to well converting landing pages I've had in excess of $100-$200 CPM and not even used Adsense.
I can't agree more! Diversify your earnings! I currently use Adsense, Kontera, IDGNetwork and several affiliates and do quite well.
So far it's averaging about $0.75 eCPM.. Not very high, but actually far higher than near identical Adsense units with the exact same placement.
Certainly don't use Adbrite. I got like $0.05 per click. With over 500,000 page impressions, only $200.
Adbrite had terrible ads for my sites, not even close to relevant and I earnt about $2 in the 2 months I tried it out. Affiliate marketing I also tried for a month or two, grand total of $0. Clickbank? $0. Project wonderful? About 20c a day. Adsense? $3-20 a day. So I've just stuck with adsense.
I'm sticking with Adsense until I get average 1500 people per day, then I offer advertising places, have it all sorted out, for * Months = *$. But Adsense still rocks..All those other Ad programs are mostly crap.
I've just put up paid links/advertising slots on my lowest paying site today, it passed 1500 a little while ago .. I guess I'm just slow
Thanks for the advice. Could you please tell me what would you suggest for a blog with about 500 impressions a day to ad besides adsense? Tnx
Likelyhood is that you just stuck up affiliate banners in place of your Adsense banners, or alongside them. Affiliate banners DO NOT work. You must create affiliate links manually on a per page basis, matching the promoted affiliate product up with what people reading the post would be interested in buying. If you don't discuss products then affiliate revenue won't work as well, but it is often still possible with some imagination. It beats Adsense in 95% of cases when I have tried, but at the end of the day it supplements Adsense so its additional revenue. Affiliate marketing takes a bit more work and more imagination, but it pays a lot more than Adsense in my experience.
No, been very slowly building manual links per page - problem is I have about 3000 pages. And they're not 'posts', just pages, no product discussion at all. The CTR on the few pages I have amazon on is massively higher than adsense ever was. I have left the google ad there but dropped the size, my CTR has of course dropped from 0.01 to 0 on that site since I did that so the revenue is down by about 80%. The google ads in the small format are even worse, I had an ad for diamond rings from Australia's most trusted jeweller on my 'fake' page (which doesn't mention jewelry at all), and that's one of Adsense's BETTER matches. You'd have to be an idiot to click that kind of ad. One day I'll work out how to monetise the site, it gets about 6000 pageviews a day at the moment.