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.

What is Niche Blogging?

What is niche blogging and why should you care anyway? Well, niche blogging is one of the ways to get your blog a focused stream of visitors and it is one of the ways that you can improve your income from blogging and income from ads on your blogs. It's simply about focusing your blogging onto a narrow subject range so that your blog does well in the search engine results.

Niche blogging is not right for every blog of course. Two of my other blogs for example are very wide in their scope. I blog about anything that takes my fancy on them. They get a good readership and I enjoy blogging on them. They even make me money.

Niche blogging though is about focusing the attention of a blog down to a narrower range of things. This blog for example is in the Internet marketing, publisher affiliate and advertising income niche. This blog is still fairly broad within that niche but it is still a niche blog.

Blogs can be focused even more narrowly on a niche of course. If I focused this blog solely on Affiliate programs for example this would be an even narrower niche. I could then go further and focus even more narrowly on one affiliate program.

The advantage of niche blogging is that you may stand a better chance of coming higher in the search engine results when someone searches for something to do with that particular niche. The visitors who come to your site will be very much the ones who are looking for information about that particular niche. This is of course helpful if your advertising inventory is also focused on that niche.

Personally I like narrowly focused niche blogs for their ability to get focused visitors. I do think they sometimes make it harder to get people interested in your blogging and involved in a "conversation". So. I use niche blogs but I also blog more widely on other blogs, including this one.

There is no doubt though that if you choose your niche carefully and match your niche with well selected Advertising inventory then niche blogging can be very rewarding.

This is why some people get obsessed with "high paying keywords" in their quest to maximise their income from adverts. If you know that keywords related to "insurance" for example pay a high rate per click in AdSense then it seems to make sense to make a niche blog about insurance.

The problem with this is that some niches are very crowded. Many people have thought of this before you have and even a narrow niche blog may struggle to get anywhere in the search results.

The secret, if you can really call it a secret, is to find a niche which is not crowded, and , very importantly one which you will enjoy writing about.

Put AdSense code in a Blogspot Blog

This is basic but it is something that many newbies scratch their heads about when they first get a blog and an AdSense account so here is a walk through on how to put AdSense into your blogspot blog.

First things first. You must have already signed up for a blogspot blog and have some posts on it with some reasonable content. Then you will have signed and been approved for AdSense. In AdSense you will have generated some AdSense code and now you are ready to put it into your blog. OK?


Well first of all you don't actually need to get the code from your AdSense log in.

There is a gadget that you can use in blogger that makes all this very easy. Go to the layout tab in your blog editor. Then look for the "page elements tab". You now see the layout of your blog in graphic form.

Click Add gadget and then look in the list for the AdSense gadget. Click on the + sign and a page comes up as shown in the picture. Choose the format ( size ) of the add that you want and the colors. If you haven't already linked your AdSense account you will need to give your identifying information and thats it. You save the gadget and make sure you have dragged it to somewhere on the page layout where there is room for the ad size that you have selected.

If you want to generate the code in your actual adsense account then you can also do it another way. Simply get the code then add a HTML gadget on your page elements page. When the HTML gadget is open paste the code into it. Save the gadget and you ads will show.

Multiple Domain Unlimited Bandwidth Hosting

Back in August I posted briefly about signing up for a Multiple Domain Hosting Package with unlimited bandwidth. I thought it would be useful to give an update about this and reflect a little more on why Multiple domain hosting on one account is so useful for someone trying to develop income streams on the internet.

Trying to find the right web hosting package with all the services that you need at a good price is the Holy Grail really. I use three webhosting providers at the moment ( leaving aside the free web hosting packages that I use).

Currently I have packages with GoDaddy , Heart Internet and, most recently a multiple domain hosting package with HostMonster.com .

Heart Internet has been a very reliable hosting provider and they were the first paid webhosting service that I signed up for. I have stuck with them because they have been very reliable and their support is very responsive. they are not cheap though and I have been a bit frustrated by the fact that I cant host more than one domain on my account.

As for GoDaddy , I have very mixed views about them. I find that their navigation to control various aspects of your hosting account is not always the easiest to find you way around. Otherwise it's a pretty good and reasonably reliable service.

Both of these packages don't really make it easy though to host an unlimited number of domains on the one account and my Internet activities have reached the stage where I really need multiple site hosting on one account.

When you are running a number of affiliate promotions you will tend to need specific landing pages and sites relating to those promotions. It looks better for visitors and is more effective in terms of generating advertising and affiliate income. It's much easier if you are managing multiple sites like this if you can do it through the one hosting account. It's also important , depending on the kind of sites that you are running, that there shouldn't be too much restriction ( if any) on your Bandwidth usage.

I did a lot of looking about before I settled on HostMonster.com. The account comes with PHP 5+, CGI, MySql and a host of features together with cpanel. And it really does have no limit on the number of domains that can be hosted or the Bandwidth that you can use.

It's now been over two months since I signed up with them and I have been very pleased with my new account which is costing me $4.95 a month - excellent value. I have moved and set up five domains now on this account and I will be moving the majority of my domains over during the next few months. The process has been fairly straightforward but for those who are nervous about this I might post about the process of doing this in more detail in the future.

I am not often in the habit of giving glowing recommendations but I can give a hearty thumbs up to Host Monster.com - their multiple domain hosting package has really exceeded my expectations.