Once upon a time I was making a (small) boatload of money with Adsense. But there was trouble brewing... Folks were being sandboxed or banned outright for what was basically a bait and switch scheme for getting visitors to their lame sites. So, even though my content was high quality, mostly unique and relevant, I started thinking about why I was even selling ad space at all. The big question was: Why do people visit the site? Hmmm, certainly not for the ads. They come for the information, entertainment and engagement. Which doesn't pay the bills. Yet, for some reason people did click the ads - a lot. Because the ads offered them a solution to their problem that my content didn't. Ouch. This was no better than the content farms. However, it did give me the brilliant, but late, idea of using my own text and display ads instead of third-party advertising. For products that I either developed from scratch or bought resale rights to. Or, in a few cases, CPA and affiliate offers. So now my sites are making 10-20+ times more per click compared to the typical adsense payout. And hat's how I cheated Google fate and wound up making more money without the worry of being banished to search engine limbo. Best of Success, S.
Thanks - good question... Well...I don't want to claim that a correlation equals cause and effect. However, I think that the combination of decent content and no adsense or similar junk kept me out of google lockdown. OTH, pagerank for a few of my sites has dropped by 1-2 The way I approached it was assuming a real Googleplexarian would visit the site and make a snap judgement (just like a real person) - I made sure that display advertising was limited to 1 banner and text links were sprinkled within the content. No big blocks of blinking boxes or maxing out on 3 adsense blocks, or anything that was an overt distraction from the content. Outbound links were cloaked using my own domains, so robots or humans see natural links, not Clickbank, adsense, commission junction, etc. For me the motivation was to earn a few more bucks from the same amount of natural traffic. So far, so good S.
There's a couple of ways to look at that... 1) The highest pay per click for the niche you are in. 2) Competing in a niche with the highest payouts. What I found is that it is easier to get good traffic to a smaller niche where the competition and PPC costs are not so high. So it was more profitable to sell original info or software to that niche, rather than get the small adsense payout. I think my highest paying adsense was only around $6.50 (MLM leads). But now I average about $35 per click. Figure it this way - Adwords advertisers pay Google 10 to a 100 times what google pays out for the clicks. I'd rather collect the whole amount for the click Best of Success, S.
Well great but google in Panda Update hit the affiliate sites and sites that have a lot of links in content.