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.

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.

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.

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

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

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!

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