Perhaps you've heard the cries lately that Adsense is "dead". This is the rallying cry of one marketer in particular, who points out that the November 2005 policy change at Google Adwords significantly undermined the profit potential of thousands upon thousands of websites.

Let's look at the facts. What Google did with their Adwords program was to establish separate bid structures for the Search and Content networks. The Search network is ads that turn up on the search engine results pages when you do a search in Google. The Content network is the ads that show up on sites like this one.

Prior to November, 2005, prices were the same, so that advertisers who paid top dollar for certain search terms were also required to pay the same amount for click-throughs from ads they chose to simultaneously run on the Content network (which was optional).

The net result of this was to dramatically cut into the income of many an owner of a machine-generated site. It had become very popular to buy a page generator for a few hundred dollars, "scrape" a bunch of content (either articles from public directories, or the search results straight from Google and other major engines), and create a machine-generated "website" consisting of thousands of pages of scraped content. Some of these sites generated hundreds, even thousands of dollars per month in Adsense income.

Nothing was new or unique, and they didn't really serve the needs of site visitors. Two people using the same software and keyword list would generate essentially identical sites, with relatively minor differences, if any. So Google did three things. They changed the TOS of their Adwords program, and on the search side, they began a massive de-indexing of these machine-generated sites.

Then, in July of 2006, along came the "Google slap", wherein the minimum bid structure on the Content network was raised for any website that did not achieve a high enough Quality Score. The QS was based, among other things, on whether a website had unique content, and standard things such as a privacy policy and the contact information of the site owner.

Hardest hit were site owners who were buying Adwords traffic to "sites" that were little more than a squeeze page, but one-page sales letter sites were also hit hard, as were folks who were using "arbitrage" to buy inexpensive Adwords traffic and send it to a page that had higher paying Adsense ads on it, hoping to profit from the revenue/cost difference.

So … is Adsense dead? Nope. All that is "dead" is the days when you could buy a $200 software program, generate hundreds of thousand-page "websites" per day, and expect each of them to in turn rake in your initial $200 investment on a daily or weekly basis.

If you build high quality content sites that offer visitor value and unique, original content, Adsense is far from "dead". You can also use other forms of website monetization, as we discuss here. Things like affiliate links, building an email list to sell your own or affiliate products, and signing people up for CPA offers work as well or better than ever.

Technorati Tags: Adwords, Adsense, website monetization

One of the best ways to monetize a web site, and among the least known, is lead generation, which is actually a highly lucrative form of affiliate marketing, but is used by relatively few online marketers.

Here's how lead generation works. Listen up – this information is golden!

Monetizing a website by becoming a member of an affiliate CPA network is very, very simple. You sign up with one of the 50 or so affiliate CPA Networks that are available online, drive traffic to the custom landing pages that they provide, and get paid whenever a site visitor fills out and submits a form. That is really all there is to it.

An affiliate CPA network is a clearing house that brings advertisers and publishers together. Perhaps the best known is Azoogle, which is extremely popular, but less well-known CPA affiliate networks, such as CPA Empire, and relative newcomer Modern Click, can be less competitive, which may lead you to better results.

Personally, I prefer to belong to several CPA affiliate networks, to get a broader selection of ads, so that I can closely target them to the interests of my site visitors. Just as with tightly targeting your Adsense campaigns to the "theme" of your website helps, targeting your CPA ads to the interests of your site visitors will improve your clickthrough rates and earnings.

I would much rather run a lower-paying ad that is consistent with the interests of my site visitors than to run a high-paying ad that gets very few clicks because it has little to do with my site content. In the long run, that helps me in two ways – first, I'll probably make more money with the lower paying, but relevant, ad, and second, it keeps my site looking professional, and minimizes the risk of alienating my visitors with the display of irrelevant links and banners.

CPA advertisers provide a custom landing page and form, pay the network a commission for making it available to affiliates, and the affiliates in turn are paid for driving traffic and generating signups. CPA stands for "cost per action", and in this case, the action is the site visitor filling out the form. Compare this to traditional affiliate marketing, and you will see the beauty of it quickly. Done right, it is a much easier and more lucrative way to monetize a website.

A traditional affiliate must acquire traffic, do a good job of "pre-selling" the product, and send visitors on to the vendor site through an affiliate link, hoping to generate something like 1% to 5% sales, which in turn is highly dependent on the quality of the vendor's sales letter and product. If the vendor does a poor job of selling on the sales site, or has an over-priced or poorly received product, the affiliate has spent a lot of time, and perhaps money, for very little return.

A CPA affiliate, on the other hand, has a much easier job of things. He or she must still acquire traffic, either by paying for it, or by putting together a well-optimized site that gets good search engine placement for certain key words. At that point, however, the CPA affiliate's job is nearly complete.

The next step is for the site visitor to fill out a form requesting some sort of information. Keep in mind, this does not entail the visitor getting out his or her wallet, or making a decision to spend any money. All it entails is that the visitor request free information and give his or her name and email address, and perhaps a physical address.

You, as the CPA network affiliate, get paid even though your site visitor has yet to buy anything. You are getting paid for a LEAD, not a sale.

Many people have no idea how huge and lucrative lead generation is, and not a clue the kind of money that certain businesses will pay for a good lead. Things like mortgage and insurance leads, in particular, are very, very valuable, as are credit card leads. But even something as seemingly inexpensive as a cell phone ring tone can bring you a nice commission per lead. Why?

These lead purchasers are planning on maximizing the long-term value of a customer. In the case of a mortgage, one lead can generate a commission of thousands of dollars to a mortgage broker. An insurance or credit card account is worth recurring commissions potentially for many, many years. Even a ring tone lead has a long-term value, since the vendor will continue to market to that person over and over again, selling them many times what it cost to acquire them as a customer.

If you are looking for easy and lucrative ways to monetize a web site, CPA affiliation could be your answer. To really do well as a CPA network affiliate, you need to learn how to use things like Google Adwords effectively, in which case I highly recommend Perry Marshall's definitive resource on Adwords advertising. That ebook, and an adwords account, could be all you need to effectively monetize your website!

Technorati Tags: monetize a web site, affiliate CPA network, lead generation