Great post Mikael.

I am in the same place as you at the moment. I am building adsense minisites and it is starting to pay off as the sites get indexed by Google and the Adsense-counters starts ticking.

You are right about the Adsense income not being stable. There are many factors. One of mine is effects from the outsite that affects traffic. For instance I have some sites that gets more search traffic when the weather is bad. But as you say sometimes two days of the same traffic results in very different click rates.

That being said I am actually very happy with Adsense. I am not doing it for a living, so I don’t need a steady income. Any income is an added bonus really.

I also get intrigued reading about all the money one can earn with affiliate networks. I have tried signing on to a few networks, but not being American seems to be a problem… I don’t get accepted. It also seems more complicated to get convertions… I think you need to do PPC to really convert… I am not sure.

For now I think I am happy with Adsense and will just keep building new sites and blogs.

Hi Max, I’m glad to hear that you’re experiencing the same as me. First of all the Adsense income is also “just for fun” for me currently but I’m planning that it will change in the future.

As for making money from affiliate marketing it will definitely require something else than Adsense, but I’m not sure that it is harder to do… just different.

The most important thing as I see it is that you should know how to drive traffic. You need that to make money with Adsense and you need it with Affiliate Marketing.

Every aspect of traffic generation is the same and even the testing part has similarities. With Adsense you’ll need to test placement, colors and sizes. With Aff. marketing you need to test wording, pictures and benefits. It’s almost the same thing.

There are several ways to do affiliate marketing. You should try places like http://www.cj.com and http://www.clickbank.com. I’ve had no problems with either of them and if you find a aff. program where you can use their sales letter you can have a site up fairly quickly.

I’ve even found that there are programs outthere that will give you both the sales letter and the product so you don’t even have to be an affiliate. The only two things you’ll need it to 1) drive targeted traffic to your site and 2) test the sales letter.

Staying with Adsense will definitely also be able to generate a nice income for you. I’m still playing with Adsense and I probably always will be but I’ve decided that I need to check out selling an affiliate product also.

If I should get into affiliate marketing, one thing I would do differently was the designs of the landing pages. Looking at the landing pages for many products, they are all the same spammy looking mile high webpages with yellow and red highlighted texts, hundreds of phony testimonials .. you what I am talking about.

I guess the traffic I drive to my Adsense sites could be driven to affiliate sites in stead… but I think there is a long way from getting someone to click a link to getting someone buy stuff.

You are absolutely right about that Max. But what would you rather have:

Option 1:
100 visitors - 10 Adsense clicks - $5 income

Option 2:
100 visitors - 1 sale - $25 income

I would rather have option 2.

As for the look of sales pages I know what you mean and it has been discussed all over the place. As you might know I have the personal opinion that I don’t give a damn how the site looks. The thing I care about is how the conversion rate is. But again it all depends on what you want. If you’re doing IM for fun you can do what ever you want but if you’re trying to create a business for yourself you have to do what works, not what you think looks good

Of course anyone would prefer option 2

I just have a feeling that it’s easier to find people who will click a link.. by mistake, by curiousity, by interest… it’s free for them.. than it is to find people wanting to type in their credit card number. There is a long step from clicking and reading to buying. And there are way less niches that sells than niches which generates clicks… it’s all guess work as I haven’t tried affiliate yet.

I normally care about design, but not in this line of business. Of course one needs to do what works.. I just can’t believe that these spammy landing pages work in other niches than MMO… I might be surprised.

Well I haven’t got any stats to show you that makes you believe that they work (I’m sure that they don’t all work, but some works very well) but I know from personal experience that I have bought several IM products through these “not so pretty” sites

I don’t get enough traffic to my Adsense sites yet to see any kind of traffic/revenue pattern. Hopefully it will come soon

But the big question to me has always been: Why spend hours testing and optimizing a handful of Adsense sites, when you can spend the same time to produce a couple of new sites?

I’m testing the tactic of building a ton of “fire’n'forget” sites. Many of them will probably fail, but once in a while you stumble upon a profitable niche.

And if one of the sites gets taken out either by the competition or by Google, you’ll have 3 new sites up in no time. Plus, if the sites are on different subjects, you spread the risk and have a more steady Adsense income.

That’s my theory at least. I’m still pretty new to this game. In fact, I should recieve my first Adsense check this week

Søren, the “hit & run” game can also work very well an you’ll learn a lot in the process. But to answer your question:

It’s not a valid long term strategy because it’ll be a never ending game and you’re up against some of the most hardcore SE techies (Google engineers) and you WILL eventually loose the game.

However I still think that you will learn a lot from it (I know I have) and you will be able to make a few thousand dollars over time.

But don’t think that you can fool Google because you can’t. Your Adsense tracking code gives you away (and you’re not allowed to have more accounts).

But congratulations on your first check! That is always a great feeling!

I don’t read Søren’s comment as he is trying to fool Google or anyone else. There is no rule against having many sites with Adsense on them, are there?

My Adsense sites are only borderline spam-sites. They contain some 20-40 pages of unique text, along with other features such as Google Maps, Weather Widgets etc.

So they should be OK according to Google’s Guidelines, as they do provide some “real” value to the users.

But you never know. The particular engineer who’s reviewing your site might be having a bad day

Okay, I agree that my use of the word “fool” might have been misplaced. But as Søren correctly points out it is all about “quality” for the visitors.

There is nothing wrong with having hundreds of sites but I think you’ll be hard pressed to create valuable content in a matter of minutes (or hours). The only way Google will see sites like this as “quality” is when everything else online is worse

I agree that it is a strategy (again I’m been doing that myself and I still make money from it) but I don’t think it’ll be worth it in the long term.

But IMHO I think a skilled IM’er should try it all. Even spam and scraper sites, blackhat techniques and everything. The only trick is not to get caught :p

Mikael,

I don’t think it’s an “either / or” decision regarding using Adsense vs affiliate. Smart internet marketer’s use both.

I’ve found that Adsense works BEST on tightly targeted content OUTSIDE the topic of websites/MMO. When you read the stories of Adsense success, it’s usually someone with a well defined, tightly targeted niche site.

When I started launching sites outside the “web development” genre (Thank you Courtney Tuttle!), I started to get excited about the income possibilities of Adsense.

Kathy, you’re right that it isn’t “either/or”, but I find it to be rather difficult for people to focus on two things at once. Using Adsense as a “bi-product” can very well prove to be a great solution. But the fact of the matter is that Adsense will not give a consistent stream of income in the same was as affiliate sales often will. But don’t get me wrong… I’n not saying that Adsense can’t give you a great income because it diffinitely can.

The best “proof” of affiliate sales (incl. making your own ebook product) beating Adsense is that most of the people that started out making a killing with adsense moved towards selling products over time.

[...] are on the right track or whether you’re more or less wasting time? No to long ago I wrote a post about this topic but I still haven’t come to a conclusion so I thought I would bring it up [...]

I think this is a tough one.

If you are using both Adsense and Affiliate, you are risking to loose a potential customer to a competitioner, if he/she clicks on the Adsense.

On the other hand if the visitor is not planing to buy anything, the income from Adsense is better than nothing.

I do not have the answer, so right now I am using both.