If you’re an affiliate marketer, Google Adsense, Kontera, or another online advertising program that places Contextual Advertising on your website, may not be the best way for you to go.
Some affiliates make the mistake of filling a site with ads. The pennies you earn are pennies that could be robbing you of dollars.
Let’s say you’re marketing the Clickbank product: “Fat Loss 4 Idiots” by creating a diet blog and you put affiliate links on the page, your goal is to get site visitors to click those links and buy the product. You might earn about $26.30 USD if they do. But if your page is filled with Google Adsense ads, other marketers who invest in pay per click campaigns are the ones making that sale.
Your efforts to bring a qualified buyer to your site might be working but if that banner ad is more compelling than your content (and face it, two sentences is easier to read than a whole page), you’ll probably make $0.25 instead of almost $27.
In some cases, when you’re in a highly competitive niche market, contextual ads may be worthwhile, especially if your blog is fairly new. Once you’ve gained a lot of traffic and your reports suggest that your visitors are clicking those ads, you might want to change the layout of your site and direct traffic to a great banner embedded with your affiliate link, instead of directing them to someone else’s website.
The best way to make the right decision is to try out various methods to see what works and what’s most profitable for you.
When Might You Decide That Contextual Advertising Is A Good Idea
Here are some potential scenarios:
• Revenue sharing sites that you use for link building – Some of these sites share revenue on Contextual Advertising and don’t let you put an affiliate code in. This is a case where this can be profitable for you.
• If you’re into site or domain flipping – You might try out a site as an affiliate marketing website and find after some time, effort, and money that it’s not paying off for you. In this case, you might monetise the site with contextual advertising to bring in some passive income while you decide whether to sell it or not.
• If your site was created to sell an affiliate product and the product has exceeded its shelf life but you’ve got a good informational site with plenty of traffic, monetising it with a new affiliate product or with Contextual Advertising could help you continue to profit from that site.
What’s most important is that you look at all your options and first try to make a go of the most potentially profitable option. If, after time and effort, what you are doing is not working, changing your approach and your website monetisation strategy is a good idea.
About Sean Rasmussen
I believe some people make the mistake of having adsense on their affiliate site and actually drive traffic with PPC. This is crazy because their competitors can end up advertising on their website selling the same product as their trying to sell. They get 25 cents for the click on the ad and the competitor gets the $40 sale
Richard
It does sound pretty crazy. Why would they do that? Maybe they didn’t think the strategy through
I seem to be getting a fair amount of traffic to my new website (thanks to a PPC campaign). I have Adsense on the website but have recently begun to use Contextual Advertising to see whether there is a difference to the CTR and revenue.
The affiliate products do not seem to be appealing and this may be a interim way to continue to have some income while the site builds its net presence.
Hi Sean,
There are so many areas that can trip up a beginner. I haven’t actually considered this before and yet it makes perfect sense. I didn’t make this mistake purely by accident.
Thank-you for the great tips. I will certainly give a lot more thought to the way I monetize my site.
Hi Sean,
The question is an important one that needs consideration. Making a decision on Contextual Advertising for each site depends on my intentions for each site I build. It could be a blog. It could be an affiliate marketing site. I may intend to flip the site when it’s monetized. One option for achieving monetization is by Google Adsense ads.
Camil has a productive idea as well. Many options are presented here to get the creative juices flowing. Thank-you for the knowledge.
Thanks Sean,
This really is the fun part of internet marketing for me as I like to play around with the different ways to monetize my site. I am using a combination of affiliate products & contextual advertising as well so I can figure out what works best.