Google Adsense Adverts are everywhere, some of the biggest and most well known sites make the majority of their income from Adsense (and I mean Millions of $$$), these sites work on huge volumes of visitors and the % of those clicking on their ads.  Plentyoffish.com the free dating site made something like $300K/month back in 2006! 

Anyway, back to the point of this post, the choice between Clickbank and Adsense…

I look at it like this:

A Clickbank sale of $80 will take 80-100 hops to make giving an EPC of about $1

An Adsense click in the same niche may earn about $1

The benefit of Adsense is that you don’t have to make an allowance for refunds, the problem is you cannot encourage people to click on the adverts like you might with a Clickbank hoplink.

So, if you find a good high paying niche consider Adsense as an alternative to Clickbank.  It doesn’t harm to diversify your income streams to allow for changes!

If you are a Clickbank affiliate you will probably seen this advert for the HopAd Builder on the right of the account page.  Note the new colour scheme (nasty red and yellow) that Clickbank introduced today.

There are two options, create text adverts (look like Adsense) or create tabbed Adbox with options for different keywords.  I am not keen on this idea as it is asking too much of the visitor to select which adverts they want to see.  I am therefore going to focus on the text ads.

Unlike Adsense which automatically searches the site content and displays adverts relating to the keywords found in the content, the CB HopAd Builder relies on you inserting a keyword.  You add the keyword, your CB ID, an optional Tracking Code (TID) as shown below, note that it shows you example ads on the right hand side, make sure you refresh to check the right sort of ads for your keyword are showing, you might want to try a few options because “ppc” might not be the best keyword, “adwords” might be better.

Like Adsense set up, the next options relate to the size of the adbox, the text size and color scheme, the one difference is the option to set “target” which means you won’t lose the visitor to the new site, your site/blog will remain open.  As before, the size and style of the box is a bit of trial and error, don’t worry if you don’t get it right as everything is editable html later on.

The next step allows you to copy and paste the html code for inserting into your website or blog.  The HTML can be edited, Clickbank has a complete guide for that here -  https://www.clickbank.com/hopfeed_guide_popup.html

Below is an example of the text HopAd Builder box with adverts relating to the keyword “ppc”

I was skipping through the thousands of articles and came across a whole file dedicated to email marketing containing 190 PLR articles. I then used my tried and tested URL search using a combination of Adwords Keyword Tool and the godaddy bulk domain tool to quickly find a popular three word domain name with little competition. 3000 searches a month on Google and 800k results. I also know it is something that I can promote CB products with and get good CPC from Adsense.

I purchased the .info name after finding out that the .com and most of the other TLDs are up for sale. This cost me $0.99 for a year! So far my investment is $4.99.

The next step was getting hold of a wordpress based article directory theme for free. Luckily someone at nichechoppers had just posted about one which they were using and it looked pretty cool, if a little limited graphics wise. http://articlesss.com/article-directory-wordpress-theme/

Download the theme and the essential plugins, throw it up on your site and you have an instant article directory that anyone can submit articles to. IT is very easy to configure to exactly how you want it with basic wordpress knowledge.

Finally I have uploaded 40 articles at the time of this post, OK it is PLR but it already has a few hits and with more and more content (I hope to get to about 150) it should rank for quite a few keywords.
I have just put Adsense up for the minute as I am looking to diversify my earnings, it will also help if I decide to move the site on in the future, lots more people use Adsense than CB.

We have got to admit to ourselves. Most of us are into it for the money. We are not going to waste our time and effort just for the fun of it. Many sites would not wait until hell freezes over just to see their profits. While there are some who takes things lightly there are always those who would rather see profit any given day.

It is common knowledge that without traffic we have no business. Like any business, without any customers you don’t get sales. Traffic represents all the people that gets a chance to see what you have to offer. The more people who see your products the more people there would be to buy them.

Nobody puts up an E-commerce site that doesn’t expect profit. We have a startup capital that needs to be regained. With a consistent traffic, we at least have a fighting chance to achieve that probability. Monetizing your traffic would optimize your chances of making the best out of it.

Making Money out of your Traffic

The best and most proven method of making a profit out of your traffic is using advertising. The internet generates hundreds of thousands upon hundred of thousands of traffic everyday. Most of them are searching for something. While some are just looking for information there is also a good percentage that is looking for something that they need.

The internet has proven to be a very reliable source in finding what was deemed to be a very unsearchable product. The internet has made the world a smaller place; you can advertise a product from the depths of Istanbul and still find a buyer from the center of Philadelphia.

Generating traffic is not an easy task. You have to contend with a great number of sites to generate a good number of traffic flow. But if done successfully this could open up a Pandora’s Box of possibilities. One of the benefits is monetizing your traffic flow.

So, to get to the core of it the more traffic you generate the more likely you are considered as a desirable, desirable, in a sense that a good traffic flowing site is easily convertible to profit. Basically traffic equals profit. Advertising is the name of the game; with the good advertising scheme you can use your traffic flow to your advantage.

When you have good traffic you have a good number of potential customers, customers that are willing to pour money into your coffers. Other than that these are also traffic that can be redirected to sponsored links that are willing to pay you for a sizeable portion of the traffic that you have generated.

This scheme is called “pay-per-click”. With every click a visitor of your site makes on an advertised link you will be paid. The more traffic you generate and the more clicks that happens would spell to more profits.

Affiliate Programs

Another method of monetizing your traffic are affiliate programs. You can link up with other tried and tested sites and online companies and monetize your traffic by having a percentage of sales generated by traffic coming from your site.

The basic idea is, traffic generated from your site will go to another site that can offer a product that you do not carry. Many programs can keep track and make records of transactions that was made possible because of site linkage.

When purchases are made by customers that was led by your site to their site you get a percentage of that sale. Affiliate programs would give you the benefit of monetizing your traffic without the actual need of carrying or promoting a certain product.

There are so many ways and methods to monetize your traffic. All it takes is a bit of hard work and the desire to successfully launch a profit-earning site. The internet is a veritable source of information, many tips and guides are offered everywhere in how to monetize your traffic and make your site a good profit earner.

JZ

I have bought my fair share of rubbish, mostly when I’ve had a few drinks and it seemed like a good idea at the time! For example I was up late watching a series on TV called SKINS, which promised to be the next big thing for the British Youth. It was on C4 in the UK and I got very excited when I saw that c4skins.net and c4skins.co.uk were available. I did NO research and got carried away. Once I owned them, I started to check out what already existed on the internet in terms of fan sites, forums etc. I found that C4 was way ahead of the game with a fantastic site set up complete with great graphics, forums and information. There was no way I could compete with this so I shelved the idea, I actually turned one into my first affiliate page advertising the richjerk etc.

The lesson I learned from this was to do my research before jumping in with both feet.

The next lesson, and the real point of this post, is that I have found having keywords in the domain does so much more for SEO than any number of links or even content (this is my experience). This week I sold two of my sites, both with good keyword domains, as I have never had the time or inclination to promote and build links for them. I made approx $500 from the two sites which I think is great considering they cost me about $20 to buy!

site one – www.postalfrankingmachine.com was specifically bought to promote an offer which paid $100 per sign up. I had one of these during the year I owned the site.

site two – www.debtandloans.co.uk was bought originally to promote loan and mortgage offers, but never made any money so I added Adsense and made about $150 in a year.

So in total an investment of $20 plus approximately 5 hours of my time in total plus hosting for a year $30 (I can host a unlimited number of sites so this is an approximate share of one years hosting).

Profit = $750 – $50 = $700 or 1400%

SO even if your sites are not that successful, consider selling them on to someone with more traffic or just ability to promote and you can still make a good return.

This was the start of a new ebook sales business for me which has saw me becoming an eBay Powerseller in just 48 days and selling over 2000 ebooks via eBay and my website www.infoebookstore.co.uk.

It was a high volume, low margin business which for me gave me a profit within a month and a nice bonus cash injection just before Christmas.

I also began to investigate other online money making opportunities, from Google Adsense to Tradedoubler to Affiliate Marketing (Clickbank, Commission Junction etc) to Article Marketing Strategies.

I had caught the bug!  And while I did make a modest profit, enough to pay for a nice weekend away with my girlfriend at the time, I soon realised that there were much easier ways to make money without selling anything myself and not having to deal with idiots, non payers and spammers on eBay.