Well, I build a lot of sites, and make a little decent Google adsense money. I would never run adsense on my primary business site though, unless the links compliment what I do, like ski photography, and ski resorts show up. If my competitors show up, I choose not to put it on. Also, adsense takes your traffic away, so choose not to take it away from a core business website at all. If you want to build an adsense blog, I set it up in advance, puttting in the php script blocks in the beginning, and put adsense on right away. Then I blog a few lines and create a few well keyword pages, give the site the content it requires to start, then continue to blog until you get traffic, followers, and more adsense money. With full SEO utilized such as Wordpress with SEO plug ins that give you great conical (keyworded) page names and structure, I have seen first adsense dollars in as little as a week! I personally hate affiliates, because of the email spam for the constant ad announcements that block up my email account, announcing sales and changes. Like I personally care. The ones I have tried require me to change ads manually. NOT! Affiliates are work intensive and many only pay when they sell something, and got an awful lot of free traffic from me for all the manual pasting of their expiratory adds. Yes, junk too. Google is fresh, match and update with a high level off accuracy, and pay with a good level off accuracy. Besides, Google checks cash anywhere, reliably! I like google, put it on the site with the creation of the site, then let her work as she does. I think the best success is market, position, traffic, and relation to what you have, what your ads have, and what your customers are looking for. It all has to fit best. Google adsense in the beginning? Sure! No worries for my projects. Here is a free picture site we built, only a week ago. It does not rank, but does it place! Our keywords are "mountain scenery" in a dot net and org both. It all 301 redirects to the net as you will see when typing the com and org variables. Note they all go to the www too. Try the google search with the obvious keywords. See the position? Go to the site, see the ads? Then go to the Photo Gallery link, and there is all the content and depth. Works nicely, for a brand new seo domain name site, front page, only a week or so old at the time of this posting. The main page is Wordpress blog for my site structure, but the real content is a photo gallery by coppermine. This does not generate a lot yet, but the traffic will build, and will be nice! The photos are not indexed yet... Good Luck as Always! "Do it right, or don't mess up what you got!"
Great post, Game Producer! I agree that it totally depends on what audience will react to. Sticking in high conversion ad doesn't mean much if audience has no interest. If your goal is "highest revenue", testing and finding a best matching offer seems to be the right path.
Either way, building a list is usually a good idea, especially if your can provide exclusive content to subscribers and then promote quality offers to them. Ads are obviously always an option; adsense obviously, plus you could sign up to sites that allow people to bid on banner ad placements (just google it). Try subtly promoting related affiliate and CPA offers as well. Simon