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AdSense – is it all that the
hype says it is?
We’ve all seen the hype surrounding
AdSense, contextual advertising on your web site, and heard the stories of
people banking thousands from this groundbreaking concept. But… for every
person banking $1,000’s there are many, many more who are banking less than
$50 per month. There are many reasons for this so let’s examine a few.
* Value of the ads – despite
the hype over the high paying keywords, many keyword pay only a few cents
to the advertiser (that’s you). The high paying keywords are fiercely
fought over by both bidders and advertisers. That’s a fierce arena for
someone with little experience and little traffic to their site. So forget
about throwing up a “meso” or credit web site and then sitting back and
banking your new found fortune. That is probably not going to happen.
* Your business model
– there are two ways to profit from AdSense – a few
web sites with loads of traffic or numerous web sites with average
traffic. The concept is the same as with any business – it’s “bums on
seats” or “people through the door” that make the money.
Looking at the first model –
plainly the problem is to get many interested people to your web site –
preferably those seeking information so that if they don’t find it on your
site, they click on one of your ads and move onto another site – leaving
you with a few cents as they leave you. Traffic, as any internet marketer
will tell you, is not only the life blood of your business, but is also
very expensive and time consuming to build up. Shouldn’t you be looking at
capturing emails for your mailing list or selling them something rather
than letting them go leaving you a few cents in tips. Of course if you
merely look at AdSense as a secondary income, then these few cents are more
than welcome.
Let’s look now at the second model
– the pile it high concept. You need numerous very large sites, all
attracting high paying words with thousands of pages, to make a good living
with AdSense. There is a place for this, and indeed we sell large batches
of densely keyworded AdSense article sites ourselves – because we know they
work. But… here is the problem. In order to make them work – you need not
only a lot of domain names, but also a serious amount of hosting and we are
talking paid hosting, not the no cost stuff. Many packs sold have over 100
sites and tens of thousands of pages. 100 sites means 100 domains – that
is about $1,000 a year and a lot of time finding good ones. Of course you
could use sub domains, but then you have problems getting them all into the
search engines and pay per click advertising. 10,000+ pages and 100
domains – that’s a server you need to rent, be it virtual or actual. That
is serious money each month – and you have still not earned a dime! You
have to earn a serious number of click thrus to cover your annual and
monthly fees.
* The ads themselves
– just as banners are no way as effective as they once
were, then surfers are growing weary of AdSense ads. This is especially so
of those ugly sites that just throw up the maximum 3 sets of ads in the
default colors, not caring if they are messy and detract from the site.
Many of these sites contain minimal information and are spoiling it for
those that make much more effort with their internet business. Google
knows it has a cash cow and a virtual monopoly with the AdSense business, I
can’t see it letting this happen for too much longer, but sadly it will
take a long time to clear up and, as this happens, surfers will get more
and more immune to the ads.
It’s not as if you can encourage
your visitors to use the links, or disguise the ads, or even place graphics
around them – all forbidden by the Google Terms of Service.
So what can you do to keep
making a secondary income from your web sites?
Well if you want to stay with
Google and why not? Then; understand that it is a business and be prepared
to spend out on advertising, test your product, refine your web site,
tailor your advert design to your web site and lastly offer good value to
your surfers.
Lastly look elsewhere – we found a
great software program that lets you provide contextual adverts on your web
site derived from the 1,000’s of high commission paying products in
ClickBank. The beauty is that you can merge these ads into your web site,
draw attention to them, encourage people to click on them and add graphics
to them. Better than that, although you don’t get paid when someone clicks
on the ads, your Clickbank name is added to the link, so if someone buys
from the powerful sales page you send them to, you make a very large
commission – up to about $75 from some sites?
So AdSense is a great system, but
what about looking at other methods? – Just a thought!
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