Google
Adsense Could Mean Death to Affiliate Programs!
by Mike Banks Valentine copyright © 2003
The popular search engine, Google has introduced
a dramatic new contextual advertising service
called Adsense. This new program could mean
death to affiliate programs on those web sites
that qualify for the Adsense program. Why would
Google advertising affect affiliate programs?
Because Google is making Adsense ads available
to smaller content rich sites.
Adsense dramatically simplifies the process
of choosing appropriate advertising for sections
of sites. Since it's all automatic with Adsense,
I'm through with searching for affiliate programs
to fit my content. It just doesn't pay enough
to justify the effort in most cases. While I
won't dump existing producers, I'm dropping
those affiliate programs that don't produce
like hot potatoes.
I've moved house often over the last few years
and in that process have struggled to keep affiliate
programs abreast of the latest contact and banking
information. Several honest affiliate program
managers have emailed me after getting my affiliate
checks returned from previous snail mail addresses.
Adsense will resolve this issue for me as I
needn't keep the hundreds of affiliate programs
up-to-date on my latest mailing address and/or
banking information - only Google Adsense. I'm
dropping smaller unproductive affiliate programs.
Allan Gardyne of Associate Programs penned an
interesting and insightful article on Adsense
this past week where he mentions this as an
issue and predicts the death of smaller or weaker
affiliate programs.
I agree.
http://www.AssociatePrograms.com/search/adsense.shtml
Google Adsense simply requires the host site
to paste in a few lines of HTML code on their
pages where they want those ads to appear. Once
Google has spidered your content pages, they
can assess what those pages are about. Adsense
serves a series of ads that match and compliment
your page topics automatically without site
owner participation!
I've been impressed how Adsense has performed
for me in just the last week. I've actually
enjoyed looking at my own sites to see what
ads are served to match my content. WebSite101
demonstrates very well how Adsense works. If
you visit the HTML tutorial, you see Adsense
ads for web page editing software or web hosting.
If you visit my email tutorial, you'll see Adsense
ads for email broadcasting software and targeted
email list broadcasting services. If you visit
the Domain Name tutorial, you're served Adsense
ads for Domain Registrars and web hosting. If
you visit the Anti-Spam Tutorial, you get Adsense
Ads for Spam Filtering Software.
http://www.website101.com/email_e-mail/
http://www.website101.com/HTML/
http://www.website101.com/Domain_Name
http://website101.com/SpamFilter/
You get the idea.
I like not having to mess with my own ad-serving
software and twiddle with the rates and I absolutely
LOVE not having to do any ad sales. I'm sold
and wholeheartedly recommend Adsense to anyone
with sufficient content to support it.
Between my 3 main sites,
http://WebSite101.com
http://SearchEngineOptimism.com
http://PrivacyNotes.com
I've got over 1000 pages of good solid content
that I've built over the last 6 years. I've
struggled in vain to get that content to pay
by carefully choosing affiliate programs to
fit neatly into dozens of topic areas. My two
biggest producers have been software sales and
health insurance referrals for small businesses.
Those have been sporadic producers.
My biggest complaint is that I can't track what
is producing clickthroughs. Google simply tells
me clickthrough percentage, number of ad impressions
per day and average earnings per clickthrough
across all of my sites. That makes it very difficult
to know where to concentrate my energy to produce
additional revenue generating content. But it
does seem to offer site owners incentive to
maintain quality content and spread the ads
across all content pages.
My privacy site runs a variety of HIPAA compliance
ads, GLB compliance ads, and DoNotCall List
Compliance ads. It seems the money in privacy
is in charging large corporations to keep them
within the letter of the law so they don't get
sued for violations.
It is interesting to see my own site ads to
know where the money is in PPC for each of the
topic areas. Sometimes it's just not what you
expect. I've got an article about Google's reverse
phone lookup and how to get out of reverse phone
lookup databases that is on the Privacy site
and it sometimes shows ads about "low long
distance rates". Clearly the keyphrase
"Phone number" is triggering ads that
are quite off target on this page.
While Adsense won't outperform my total affiliate
income from the many programs spread across
my sites, it WILL, if current trends continue,
match my total affiliate income and therefore
double advertising income!
The biggest benefit was the incentive to rebuild
WebSite101, which got it's design in 1998. <embarrassed
grin> I've needed to do that, but man is
it tedious adapting all that content while maintaining
page names and fitting it all back together
with existing affiliate links and updating outdated
stuff. Adsense gave me the incentive to do that
by making my content finally pay for itself.
It also gives me incentive to keep adding more
relevant content.
I'm sold and wholeheartedly recommend Adsense
to anyone with sufficient content to support
it. While I won't dump existing affiliate program
producers, I'm dropping those that don't produce
clickthroughs and sales - fast - like hot potatoes.
Get Adsense if Google approves your site. You'll
love it too.
http://google.com/adsense/
Mike
Banks Valentine is a Search Engine Optimization
specialist practicing ethical small business
SEO
Search Engine Placement, Optimization, Marketing
http://SEOptimism.com/
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