Adsense & affiliates program on a single blog

Hey Vinzsama,

Here's the thing with Adsense. You put all this time and effort building a quality site and getting traffic to it, with the goal of sending that traffic away as quickly as possible (via an ad click) to 'competing sites' for pennies on the dollar.

This is not a viable business model. Lousy return on investment. What happens if you get Google slapped and the traffic stops?

Personally, I would drop Adsense all together and focus on building a quality content site that is designed to presell AND build a list. I'd then follow up with that list via an autoresponder with one primary affiliate offer (and have other related offers waiting in the pipeline). Not to mention lots of great helpful content. Did I mention the importance of preselling? That's what great content does.

Better still is if you can create your own product to sell. This is ideal. Remember when you promote products as an affiliate you hand your 'hard-earned' list over to the product owner and usually for a one time payment. Wouldn't you rather have people sending 'you' traffic and building 'your' list? I know I do.

This is the tried and tested way for building a stable long-term income online. It works.

Don't get me wrong, I do promote products as an affiliate. However they are almost always membership sites with recurring commissions for the life of the subscriber. I'd rather sell something once and get paid many times over. Makes good sense doesn't it?

In regards to creating content first and then adding in affiliate products after, you've got this back to front IMO. I suggest working out exactly what you're going to promote first and then create the content based on the buying keywords that people use to search for that kind of product or service.

This all fits into the market research / due diligence you do before even deciding on a niche topic for your site.

In my opinion, you've got to know how your site is going to make money from the very start and then build each page on your site 'purposefully' with that end goal in mind.

Obviously there's a lot more to it than this, and it probably feels quite daunting as you're just starting out, but this is a basic overview of what I do.

Some of my sites bomb while others do great. You just have to keep trying and testing and learning (like what you're doing here) and never, ever give up. That's a must!

Anyways, that's my rant. Hope you get something out of it.

That is correct. The model now is a lot different than it was in the "old days" when just about anything would work, like arbitrage and such. I didn't get into Adsense until 2007 so I missed that round of it.

Back in the "old days" (2001-2005) I sold a lot of stuff on eBay and it's a lot different now too. I don't recommend selling on eBay anymore to people who want to make money online but I'm sure there are some current powersellers who would tell me I'm wrong.