Affiliate Marketing vs Website Welfare
Why you should think about Affiliate Marketing!
I personally have always believed in affiliate marketing and one of the market leaders Yaro was the reason I started this blog. It’s been a quiet launch - soft if you like, and you’ll have noticed down the side (at the moment at least - if you’re reading this in a couple of months time the theme may have changed!), we’ve got a bit of Adsense. However a post by Sugarrae (The Lazy SEO Vs. The Lazy Monetizer) made me think about this some more…….
Sugarrae classifies some sites as being on “website welfare” where:
Google will give you a handout for sitting on your ass and not working to monetize the site yourself.
I run several types of site, I’ve tried to classify them here:
- Company
One site is a fully fledged company in its own right. I wouldn’t let Adsense near it - which probably tells you that I agree with a lot of what Sugarrae says! - Affiliate Sites
I’ve got one or two of these - one of them is particularly “seasonal” it’s quiet at the minute, but when in season it’s ridiculously busy. These are the properly monetized sites that Sugarrae is talking about! - Newsy Niche Adsense
A couple of the others are “newsy”, I’m not sure what I could promote in the way of affiliate marketing on those - so they’re kind of Adsense based for a reason, what’s on them changes on a daily basis and they don’t have particularly associated products - the odd DVD or book maybe? They’re not in my opinion “website welfare”, because I have to work on them to get the context sensitive ads in. - “Made for Adsense” / “Website Welfare”
In the early days I built a couple of “made for Adsense” sites, some of them are really atrocious and I just renew the domain names. But I do get Sugarrae’s point - I will change them in the near future, they’re just not a priority at the moment - these are definite “Webmaster Welfare”.
Can “Made for Adsense” / “Website Welfare” Site Make Money?
Of course they can!
The scary part of the above is that one of the “Made for Adsense” sites is bad - really, really bad. You want to know how bad? I didn’t even bother to change the logo - so instead of a logo at the top it still says “Upload your logo here” - now that is really bad! What’s scary about it? It makes money - and regularly makes this money!!
But they don’t make a lot, and they require regular traffic, and lots of it!
You’ll often find that a client (any visitor to your site should really be considered a client!), clicks an Adsense link, goes away to the site they really want (which is being advertised) and never returns to your site - hence you require a continuous stream of new clients. Compare this to the Newsy Adsense sites, they have regular readers who login every day to see if there’s more news, or even subscribe to the feed so they always know what’s been added to the site! Keep the content good and hold their interest they’ll become clients for life, add to you clients daily and soon you’ll have a large group of clients, get them to interact and suddenly you’ve got yourself a little community around your chosen subject!
So why don’t I make more “Made for Adsense” sites, if they make money?
This is a tough call, I could have an army of 300 sites like this, all bringing in 20 pence per day in Adsense, or a monetized site like my seasonal one which can comfortably make a couple of hundred pounds per month “in-season”. Wouldn’t that be nice? There’s kind of a moral ethic too, I take a bit of pride in making the net a better place (that probably sounds a bit flimsy here, but what I mean is I want people to enjoy the sites I put up and get something out of it!).
The halfway house is the “Newsy Niche Adsense” sites, they are about areas that are genuinely of interest to me - so I’m reading the news about them, know about the products and can talk confidently about them for hours. Writing for them is easy, however - you can’t have many of them, it can really eat into your time - and you could easily lose your passion!
Is this how everyone feels?
Mark @ MeAndMyDrum has been pondering between a few affiliate networks and the contextual-style ads of Google Adsense recently. Luckily one of the leading Internet Marketers - Garry Conn, dropped him a few notes on the subject in the comments section of the post - these are definitely worth a read! Garry’s sites I believe are much like my newsy sites, I don’t believe he auto-generates them (he may tell me different!) - he says:
By default, Adsense is the easiest way for me to make money online. It doesn’t require me to apply any kind of sales tactics, it doesn’t require me to do anything special. I just write what I write and because Google Adsense is so full of advertisers, 9 out of 10 times, I’ll have ads that match my content perfectly.
With that being said, Adsense doesn’t make a lot. It takes traffic. Traffic is a huge challenge for anyone.
He goes on to discuss a few affiliate networks and what success he’s had with them!
Steve @ PureBlogging has been discussing something similar recently - how some bloggers are in it for the Long Term and others the Short Term, building a site quickly - stuffing it with advertising and then selling it because those ads made lots of money in a single month - this certainly isn’t my idea of growing a site. But he does provide a good example of possible income from collaborative blogging. I’ll be contacting Steve to discuss this.
Do you have any views on this? What sort of sites do you prefer to see on the net, and to write yourself?
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Nicely done! Thank you for the mention.
No problem Mark! Have you had any success with the different networks and programs you were looking at?
It’s just a matter of time. The ones I utilize on MeAndMyDrum don’t receive many clicks. PepperJam is the only one that I’m sing right now on that blog. Google AdSense doesn’t work too well on that one since most of them are drum related. I plan on integrating other programs on other blogs in the near future, so my fingers are crossed.
Have you considered using Adsense’s filtering to block out the drum adverts and see what you get? This theme isn’t particularly well suited to advertising I feel, I need to find something better.
I like Amazon’s affiliate program whenever I can use it!
Yeah, I’ve tried the filter tags for AdSense. That’s for when I include ads in my posts. I’ve gone back and forth on that and decide for now not to put them in there. Currently, I’m only trying AdSense in my sidebar on a rotating basis. I’m hoping to get better returns by people clicking and signing up on the affiliates ads I’ve placed.
But as with all my blogs, they’re a work in progress so it may change next month.
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