Should I Use Adsense on my Niche Sites?
There are many ways to make money on the Internet and one of the most basic ways is to create some kind of website that receives traffic and then to monetize that traffic. Niche sites are one example of that model, blogs are another.
Adsense is a hugely popular method of monetization and it is generally very easy to install on any website. However there is still only a small percentage of Adsense users that are making the majority of the revenue. It’s a sad fact that many new webmasters only make pocket change from Adsense.
Are You Monetizing or Testing the Market?
With any business venture, it is important to be clear about your goals. I am doing niche marketing as a result of my participation in the Thirty Day Challenge. There is one very important point from the challenge that I think many participants missed. The ultimate goal was for us to create our own product and sell that via our niche sites. But we did not get that far in the training. Instead as Ed kept iterating over and over – the purposes of the externally hosted content and selling affiliate products was to test the market to find out if it was willing to buy.
The idea was to quickly get traffic going to a page that would redirect to a money page (such as an affiliate link) and see if it would convert. If it did then great we know the market is willing to buy and that gave us the green light to go ahead and push further in that market. If not then we dump that niche and move on.
Now it just so happens that many people on the challenge did indeed make a sale, and if it was $10 or more then they had won the challenge. Also, we were shown sites like Hubpages that allow you to integrate Adsense revenue directly into the page. So at this point many people became focused on the money and forgot that they were testing the market.
Adsense Takes Your Visitors Away From Your Site
The vast majority of Adsense ads earn revenue when they are clicked on. It is possible to get some that pay per impression but most are pay-per-click. If a visitor clicks on an Adsense ad they have clicked away from your site and your money page is now nowhere to be seen. You just lost a potential sale.
During the testing phase that is going to distort your results. How can you know what percentage of people will click on your money page if you send them away to advertiser sites?
I’m not trying to bash Adsense here. Many people make a lot of money with it. Check out this picture for an example. But don’t do it in your testing phase – focus on the test and leave the Adsense until later.
Your thoughts? What do you do? Has anybody had success with Adsense on their niche sites, and if so did it affect sales? Did you even test it? :-)
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Scott Bannon
September 6, 2007
Caroline, I’m really enjoying your blog postings and you’ve asked a great question here. One that every affiliate marketer is going to face over and over again.
In my experience with the mini-sites I’ve developed over the past few years (single page sites similar to what was being produced in the 30DC, only with their own domains and not using Web 2.0 platforms), I usually base the decision on what popular terms in the niche are costing advertisers, and if it is over or near $5 for the top spots then odds are I’ll place the AdSense ads on my site.
My reasoning is that I’m going to have quality content and targeted traffic on my pages, which seem to go far with Google’s secret quality scoring. But basically, I tend to see the higher paying ads being displayed because of it, which leads to the higher paying clicks coming from it to me.
You’re never going to get a 100% click-thru rate for your affiliate product links, so for me it’s a decision of whether or not I’m willing to maybe lose 1 or 2 sales per month off a page in a trade for what I can earn from AdSense for the month.