The Webmaster Place

A colleague of mine forwarded me the following excellent discussion:

AdSense Bad For Your Business

Here is my response to this discussion:

First, we are moving to a new apt. in 3 days so I just don’t have the time to read it all, but I agree with about 95% of what I read.

The AdSense model is flawed in a few major ways, which they mentioned:

1) It encourages webmasters to create junky sites which is bad for everyone.

2) It encourages webmasters to get people to leave their sites, which is normally the opposite of what you really want to do, because:

3) The real money is in products or services. Think about this: My wife does Google Cash. She and other Google Cash-ers shoot for a 100% ROI at least. She in turn sends to another program that has to pay her and probably also wants 100% ROI. So the final product has to make 4 times what Google and the publisher get combined, or about 12 times what the publisher gets.

Who is smarter?

I have been making high-4-figures on AdSense for years but I have been forced away from the AdSense game to a certain extent for the reasons people say. I have been pushing AdSense harder and harder but have been getting less and less money. So I have been getting back into consulting, partnerships, etc.

There is an important caveat though: Some people are very good at creating real content sites. For people like that AdSense can be an important revenue stream, though one has to be willing to push the ads hard (sell out).

There is, however, a solution that allows for the best of both worlds: Building a mailing list. The REAL money is in your mailing list, whether you have an information site or a product site. EVERYone says this and has been doing so for years. If you think about this, it is also obvious (once you understand it): Would you rather someone visit your site once and click on an ad and never come back, or email them over and over and over again, making some money each time? Same thing if you replace the words “click on an ad” with “buy something”.

So my advice to webmasters is:

1) Keep building information sites with real content if that is what you do. Content still rules.

2) Keep making money from AdSense. If you have an information site, you should probably push it hard to make money while you can to finance your next steps, as listed below:

3) Keep your other options open: keep doing consulting and seminars. Look into selling eproducts or real products. Explore other opportunities like real estate investing. If something else works you can keep the info sites on autopilot and they will keep making money.

4) Start collecting email addresses ASAP on your sites, no matter what kind of sites you have. It will take time and learning to start making money from these but it is critical to your business and the sooner you start the sooner you will be making real money.

Don’t say I (and everyone else) didn’t warn you.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 3rd, 2006 at 9:41 pm and is filed under Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.