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/
