Home | List of Articles | Submit an Article | Contact Us

Affiliate Alternative; Google Adsense

The Rise and Fall of Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs were once a great source of online revenue, a savvy webmaster with an eye for marketing could easily parley a site into a money making machine with a little luck and effort. However, the evolution and growth of the Internet has hampered the growth of fortune making affiliate programs. Constant search engine algorithm changes, along with the search engine's clear distaste for sites participating in affiliate programs; have made it a little more difficult to earn a healthy affiliate revenue. An influx in the use of software programs that terminate cookie tracking and privacy programs that prevent webmasters from tracking referrers, have also hindered the affiliate sales channel. While it is still possible to make money through affiliate marketing, other alternatives ought to be considered.

A Healthy Alternative or Supplement

Google's Adsense program allows approved websites to dynamically serve Google's pay-per-click Adword results. This has become a popular alternative and an effective revenue sharing program for webmasters. Google's spider parses the adserving website and serves ads that relate to the website's content. While the Google's Adsense program still has some issues, they are making efforts to improve it.

The website maintenance related to Adsense is very easy and requires very little effort. Webmasters need only to insert javascript into the webpage or website template. The javascript calls the ad from Google and will ensure that ads are served each time a visitor goes to the webpage. If the visitor clicks one of the Adsense ads served to the website, the website owner is credited for the referral.

The implementation, while simple, has its drawbacks. Google dictates the format of the ads. Webmasters can select from a handful of preformatted text boxes that lack creativity. A recent improvement allows webmasters to modify the ad boxes to resemble the website's color scheme. Still, a far cry from some of the creative ads webmasters are accustom to.

The example below reflects how the color scheme can be modified to match the look of the website, but the ads physically don't fit well into the overall website design.

sample modified to match sites color scheme:

http://www.hospital-software.com (scroll to the bottom)

Google determines the content of the ads that are shown/ Sometimes the ads are poorly targeted, and of no interest to the website visitors.

sample of poorly targeted ads:

http://www.real-estate-supply.com

Adwords can be a great addition to a website, and when well matched to the content the revenue stream from Google is consistent and effortless.

sample of effective Adsense program:

http://www.police-supplies.com (scroll to the bottom)

http://www.small-business-software.net (scroll to the bottom)

Not that the Google Adsense program is not without its problems.as the reporting provided by Google is lacking. Google has not implemented any way to track multiple sites that serve ads; they simply show the number of ads served, the percentage of clicks received, and the revenue earned each day. Google does not disclose the amount of the revenue they share, what percentage of the revenue they earn and what someone can expect to receive for each click. Webmasters with multiple sites will have difficulty determining which websites are producing the money in the Adsense program.

With affiliate programs many webmasters implement a new browser launch with each click off the site, Adsense removes the visitor from the website and there is not currently an option to launch the visitor into another browser.

Early on Google implemented a filtering system that allowed webmasters to prevent a specific domain's ads from being served on the website. Ad blocking meant that webmasters could prevent their competitors ads from being dynamically served on their website.

Overall, adwords are great supplements to websites where affiliate programs are either not performing or when affiliate programs don't exist that target the sites content.

Give it a Try

Implementing and maintaing Google Adsense program on a content site requires very little effort and can often bring a steady stream of additional revenue for webmasters. Consider supplementing content and see what happens.

About The Author

Sharon Housley manages marketing for NotePage, Inc. http://www.notepage.net a company specializing in alphanumeric paging, SMS and wireless messaging software solutions. Other sites by Sharon can be found at http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com, and http://www.small-business-software.net

Related Articles:

Are you using both sides of the GoogleCoin? - By now most of you realise that Google can give our websites the ability to appear within their results pages using a Pay Per Click model (PPC). This is called Google Adwords Hopefully, you will also be aware that that Google offers website owners the ability to display these PPC results on their own websites. For this privi ...

Google Ban - How not to get banned by Google! - Given that Google now provides most Internet search traffic, the last possible thing any site owner would want is to be banned from the Google index! With countless search engine marketing techniques being employed these days, and contrasting advice available all over the web, it is well worth ensuring that you do not 'over optimise' your s ...

Getting a Google Page Rank 3 in Six Months - I entered the world of website ownership in July of 2004. I did a Google search for “websites for sale” and found that e-Bay was a big seller. I had learned some web programming as the acting webmaster for a non-profit organization. My training consisted of reading, Learning Web Design: A Beginners Guide to HTML, Graphics and Beyond by Jennifer Nei ...

1 Simple SEO Strategy To Get More Visitors To Your Site From Google - Did you know that you can dramatically increase the number of visitors that come to your site on a daily basis from Google? And it's not constantly improving your position in Google search engine result pages(SERPs) for your competitive keywords which can take some time after working on your search engine marketing campaigns. I take this e ...

Is "Page Not Found" making Google tell the world "Site Not Found"? - Search Engines are hard to tame, that’s for sure. But if you can get on their good side, search engines can be your biggest ally when it comes to generating tons of free traffic to your business web site. Not many people understand how search engines think. So, search engine "optimization" ends up either ignored or left up to highly paid experts ...

Surefire Google Adwords Formula - Success with Google Adwords isn't quite as easy as some would have you believe. Still just about anyone who is persistent can succeed if they'll but implement a consistent testing program. Since testing can produce a nearly constant improvement in your click through rate (CTR). Here’s the surefire three-step formula that’s as easy ...

Are You Getting Nuked By Google Lately? - Are You Getting Nuked By Google Lately? By: Martin Lemieux Since the last Google update, there have been many instances and examples of the Google Nuke Bot! This is what I call it anyway. Have you visited a favorite website lately only to realize they've been nuked by Google? More and more we are seeing internet marketing / SEO companies gett ...

For a Complete list of Articles with summaries Click Here