I decided to write this post because I was told something by someone a year ago that I decided to try out. He said to me that it would be better for me in the long term if I looked at my adsense placements as real estate and decide on other forms of clickable entries. For example, affiliate links, opt-in forms etc. Up until that point, my adsense revenue was about $80-100 a month, and my cost in obtaining the traffic to achieve this revenue about 50% of that, $40-50 a month. I also used all of the possible blocks etc allowed by Google, i.e. 3 ad blocks and one link block on each page. I then tried two things. Whenever I tried using less than 3 ad blocks, i.e. 2 or 1 ad block and one link block, my revenue increased per click (not overall - just per click). For some reason, it seems to be lower the more ads I have on my site. I then changed some of the ad blocks for affiliate links etc. My income rose 1000%. This is not a typo. Last year my revenue was $13,000 since implementing affiliate links where as before that it was about $1000. I also tried using an opt-in form and some of that affiliate revenue does come from the list. What percentage is from the list is unknown as not all affiliate centers allow me to determine this, but from the ones that do show this info, it's about 50/50. So the upshot of all this is this: If you are able to promote other products within your niche, and offer something that will enable you to capture emails, you'll increase your revenue by a large amount, not just because of the commissions, but also because it seems the less ads you show, the higher the revenue per click and the more chances the clicks will be on your affiliate links and opt-in box. This is just my research on my own site over the last two years where the first year I had mostly adsense, and the second year where I focused more on opt-ins and affiliate links and reduced my adsense space. I hope this is informative Dean
Thanks Dean.....this post was informative. I am new to blogging and I am looking at different blogs to see how they are setup for ads. Is the blog you are mentioning the one you listed at the bottom of your post? Thanks
Hi rchase14, No it wasn't a blog at all, it was just a pure web site. You can see it here: www.atradersuniverse.com To give you an idea of how I used to have it all set up with adsense, visit any one of the articles (down the left hand navigation click on articles > select any article) and you'll see how I used google adsense blocks on my more visited pages (i.e. home etc). I used to give them placements in the top fold. Now on the more visited pages this has an opt-in box. If I wanted I could even try at placing affiliate links in where the adsense blocks are on my article pages and test that for 6-12 months. Basically, what I am trying to put across is there is far too much emphasis placed on adsense when there shouldn't be in my honest opinion, but then again, not all niches may be able to take advantage of affilites and lists in the way I have Hope this helps Dean
I am continually amazed at everyone in the this forum and how their websites are done. There is so much money available from the internet and I definitely need to get going on becoming a master of design and promotion. Thanks for keeping a young PC guy like myself excited about learning and growing!!!
Dean, Sorry, this is not critic but it is question. Base on Alexa, your site traffic is not figure to earn $13,000 a year from affiliate and $80-$100 adsense monthly (in my opinion). What is your really strategy to get that?
Alexa ranking is not necessarily related to revenue-making potential of a site. It's very easy to have a highly focused niche site that has a very low Alexa ranking, but makes a lot of money with Adsense and affiliate programs.
Why do you base your estimates on Alexa ? It's absolutely worthless for site below 5k/day. It's not a real measurement tool on any level.
I don't have a clue what my Alexa ranking is. But I guess you have to keep things targeted which I do. You also have to remember I pay for half my traffic, in the order of about $25/month now (it used to be around the $50/month area). I used to have a website where I sold wildlife figurines to the US market using dropshippers, and I live in Australia. It cost me about $4/month to run and I was making anywhere from $60-600/month (xmas time was the best), and when I tried adsense, it really didn't do much better, if anything sales dropped. I had a high PR at one stage and was able to sell text links which created a good passive income. I have since sold this web site to another of my countrymen in Victoria, and he has now more text links than I did and so I know he's probably making more on them. The web site is www.wildfigurines.com which incidentally sits at #1 in Google, Yahoo and MSN for 'wildlife figurines' but may not have anything great in Alexa. I'm not sure of the importance of Alexa sorry Dean