Adsense or Affiliate text links?

On my more recent sites it's really a case of only having affiliate links, but I was building product-centric micro-niche AdSense sites back around 2009 or so and on those I still typically have a combination of both.

I tested, of course, and didn't just take a wild guess as to what would work best.

I found that on those early sites, targeting quite seasonal niches in the UK, my affiliate links (usually to Amazon) perform better in-season, with AdSense detracting very little (if any) from my income during that period, and the rest of the time my AdSense performs quite a bit better and kind of makes up the shortfall. In essence, it's a sort of "catch-all" option.

On my other, newer, informationally-oriented sites, which are rather different, I wouldn't dream of using AdSense. On those, both the primary and the "catch-all" goal is to opt visitors into my mailing list, so that I can then promote to them on a regular basis, with direct sales through affiliate links being a nice side-bonus.

So it really depends on what type of sites I have, what niches I'm in, what my goals are, and more importantly, what performs the best! Testing is key.

as direstraits says above you just have to test

what you have to bare in mind is that getting a click is easy as appose to making a $30 sale with say clickbank but you will get a lot more per sale as appose to a click

clickbank is a lot harder because you have focus on preselling a lot more if you plan on sending traffic direct to the sales page

adsense is usually the best option as long as you get some half decent priced clicks

clickbank is good but generally better when building a list at the same time

adsense and amazon are usually the winners because its much easier to make money with from the average person

but test and see what works best for you

paul

Without a doubt, you should go for affiliate marketing. Here's the reason. Statistically speaking, it takes just as many people to get an adsense click as it does to make an affiliate sale. So, it's like asking yourself, "Would I rather make .30 or $30+? You can use adsense and affiliate marketing on the same site, but you shouldn't use adsense on a page where you are doing affiliate marketing because adsense takes away visitors from your site. Does that make sense?

Good luck,
Joey

Very well said miguelito!

Good luck cbnet!