Is Adsense or Affiliate Marketing best for you

If you have a blog or website and you are wanting income from adverts to generate online income then which is best for you - AdSense or Affiliate marketing? The space on your pages is valuable and limited and so this is an important question.

AdSense is the most popular of the Pay Per Click advertising programs that are available. You will see AdSense ads on all sorts of Websites and blogs. There is a good reason for this - AdSense is easy to sign up for and easy to use and most importantly it is very easy to generate a steady stream of small scale income from AdSense.

To make a good income from AdSense though you really do need to get lots of people visiting your site. The amount that you get paid for each click is generally not very high and so you need lots of readers and lots of page views if you are aiming for a good income.

There are a number of ways of improving your performance with AdSense. One is to ensure that your site content is well focused and that the ads that AdSense is delivering are as high paying as possible for the niche within which you are operating.

At first sight it would seem that AdSense wins the AdSense versus Affiliate marketing competition hands down. But things are not that simple.

With Affiliate marketing you will get paid usually only when someone actually purchases the product that you are promoting. This is a much rarer occurrence than someone just clicking an advert out of curiosity.

On the plus side however you will find that the amounts that you are paid for a successful affiliate sale are much much higher than your standard payment per click through AdSense. If you target your site content very closely to your affiliate offers then you can considerably improve the percentage of people who come to your site looking for just the offers that you are promoting. It doesn't take many such sales for you to start making substantially more than you would with AdSense.

So is there a winner? Well not really. You must think carefully about how you match the advertising content of your site to the sites content. In many cases the best way to go is to use a combination of Pay Per Click advertising and Affiliate marketing. You may even be able to sell advertising space directly on your site.

Only careful monitoring and targeting of your content and the advertising on your site will produce good online income. AdSense and Affiliate programs therefore both have an important role to play in generating the maximum income from your website or blog.