Google affiliate marketing, adsense adwords and alternatives
I received an email about ten days ago from Perry Marshall advising me that Google had changed the rules in relation to affiliate review sites and adwords advertising. As I’m not a great fan of adwords I didn’t lose a lot of sleep over it, but it’s kind of been running around the back of my brain for a little while.
Google has at one stroke destroyed the livelihood of countless internet marketers who have honestly gone about their business setting up affiliate review sites. Some of these are garbage, I know, but some are really comprehensive and have done a lot of hard yards researching and recommending products.
Google has arbitrarily slapped all Google adwords advertisers who are running review sites. There’s no rhyme or reason. They do it because they can. Yes some review sites are tacky and dishonest, I agree and have no problem with that, and I’m sure that Google’s intentions are good in this matter, but they are killing off livelihoods because they want some utopian search engine experience.
I don’t like Google, I think that they’re arrogant, bloody minded, and completely profit driven. They’re allowed to be – they have a monopoly and I regard them as a necessary evil.
Let’s take the Adsense mechanism as an example of what I mean.
Google Adsense is theoretically a great way for bloggers and website owners to earn income. You just place a little bit of code on your site and when somebody clicks on the ad you earn some money.
Of course there are terms and conditions, you can’t advertise that site on a Traffic Exchange,an unusually high click through rate attracts suspicion, you can’t click on your own ads etcetera. And if Google determines in its wisdom that you are abusing their terms and conditions they’ll ban you for life, no please explain, no warning, your gone mate.
Now they could program the code so that it’s only displayed when a search is conducted – I know they could because a competitor by the name of Chitika does. They don’t because they’re either too lazy or it suits their business model to crush the little guy.
So what should you do if you have affiliate marketing review sites and you rely upon Pay Per Click marketing
I would do several things
First off I would visit Alex Goad’s site at Frontier marketing and listen to the interview he conducted with Glenn Livingstone, owner of Rocket Clicks ( a pay per click management company)
Secondly I would take a reall good look at Perry Marshalls website now and get some expert training from an adwords professional – yuo either want to use adwords or you don’t. If you’re going to be competitive you need expert help.
Thirdly I’d start to investigate alternatives.
Here are my recommendations to start with
Revolutionary concept offers the opportunity to earn from your advertising if click through rates are high enough, well worth alook and ridiculously inexpensive
High Traffic free advertising site. Pro membership costs a pittance and selivers visitors for relatively little cost compared to Google.Technorati Tags: Google adwords, affiliate marketing, PPC advertising, Pay Per Click, SBI, US Free Ads, Pyrabang, Google slap, Google monopoly
Mail this post
Well, you have to agree that Google provides some great tools and opportunities…
[...] will pay you for a variety of actions that you get visitors to perform. Recent changes at Google have made affiliate marketing that much more difficult – because it is becoming imperative that [...]
True. I have had a love hate relationship with Google for years now… starting in the early 1999-01 days when I helped them by setting thousands of peoples homepage to Google after tech support. Then after college graduation back in 2001 I applied there over and over but because my GPA wasnt 3.8 they would not even call me. I even got in an argument with my uncle, a vice president of yellow pages about them being philanthropic, and I was on G’s side.
On one hand they appear to be so philanthropic, on the other they put people who are doing stuff very much like them out of business. For instance. I worked for a company that sold links and once the almighty G turned its eye onto that it was only a short matter of time that whole industry was suffering. Isn’t selling links exactly what ad sense and the content network is? Now, they are hunting down affiliate marketers. I have a quality score of 4 for a keyword that I am ranked organically number 3-4 in Yahoo and Bing for. My site is not thin, it is quality, but Google says my ads and keywords are not relevant.
My question G. What do people like me who are not artistic enough to work as a designer, who are not focused enough for programing, who are still extremely technical and deeply understand websites and Search…..what do we do for a living?
[...] http://www.profitsentinel.net/blog/google-affiliate-marketing-adsense-adwords-and-alternatives [...]
i am just starting out with Google Adsense. i am hoping that i would earn a good deal of money on this program.
Adwords is really great for promoting your website and also affiliate links. i have just passed the Google Adwords Professional exam today and i am very happy.
I have been using Adwords for the last 2 years and i can only say that it increased my online sales by about 20%. The pay per click cost of Adwords is even cheaper than Adbrite. I love Adwords.
Thats great for you and I wish you well -as you are using a specific targeted niche i.e acne treatment, I imagine that you can define your campaign to narrow keywords that work.
Adsense is the best paying make money online program on the internet. I just wish that i could increase my website traffic to high levels so that i could earn more money on Adsense.
i use Adsense on my blogs and websites, i can say that Adsense is the best make money online program on the internet.
I recently added an Adsense square ads on my travel blog. my adsense earning is still low since i dont have large volume of internet traffic yet.
`
Adwords is really good for promoting a product that you want to sell online. It is very important that you geoatarget your intended audience so as to avoid wasting your advertising funds.
Adwords is a really great tool for promoting your website, forum or affiliate link. the ppc cost of adwords is even cheaper than Friendster or Facebook. before, i used to advertise on facebook but the ROI is so low. Adwords gives me a much better ROI compared to Facebook ads.
Interesting viewpoint, I find the exact opposite.
the secret to affiliate marketing is always targeted traffic from developed countries like us, uk and canada. affiliate marketing would not give you a good income if you try it on asian internet traffic.
i signed up on amazon affiliate program last year and i can only earn 100 dollars amount from this affiliate program. i guess i need more traffic to earn more.
It can depend on a lot of things Camilla – how targeted your site is and how well matched it is to the products being displayed by Amazon, or as you say more quality traffic . By quality I mean keyword targeted traffic
I use both Adsense and Adbrite and i can say that adbrite is also a good source of income but not as good as adsense.`::
it seems that my Adsense earnings this month have plumetted. i don’t know why .