Lots of people, myself included, are initially reluctant to try monetizing a website with contextual advertising for fear that it will reduce their sales. They reason that the ads will take visitors off their site, and thus reduce their chances of getting a sale.

That was my reaction, too, when I first heard about Adsense. After all, I had built my sites to sell my own products, and/or to promote affiliate products. I didn't want people clicking away from my site too quickly.

What I and others have found, however, is that this generally is not the case. Why? Well, for one thing, if somebody really likes your site, they are not going to click away on an ad, until they are convinced they cannot find what they want right there on the site.

The flip side of that is that if they do not find what they want, they are going to leave anyway. Why not have the chance to make a little bit when they leave? You might provide them a Google Search box, some text link units, or a block of the standard ads. Any of those can earn you anywhere from a few cents to several dollars, depending on how many ads the person clicks.

My own experience has been that adsense has not reduced the other revenues from my websites. The best way to find out, of course, is to keep careful records of your sales from a period of several months, and continue to track them before and after putting the contextual ads on your site. Some people find a slight reduction in sales, but see it made up by the increased advertising revenue. Others see nothing but an increase in overall revenue due to the advertising, but no real reduction in sales.

The only way you will know for sure is to track your subscriptions and sales carefully, and see for yourself how well contextual advertising works on your web site.

Technorati Tags: Adsense, contextual advertising

By now, most people have heard of the Google AdSense program, which is the grand daddy of contextual advertising.  What we mean by contextual advertising is very much like it sounds – advertising in the context of free content.

Beginning in 2003, Google introduced its AdSense program, and savvy internet marketers sensed a goldmine in the making.  The smart ones encouraged people to use Adsense as was intended, embedding it in a content-rich site or using it as a vehicle for some additional monetization of an already thriving website.

The shrewd ones saw a different form of opportunity, however.  They realized that, at least for a time, they could create thousands of machine-generated pages (often known as "scraper sites" because the content was "scraped" from other sources rather than original) and experience huge incomes from Adsense.  In fact, many of them did.

Google didn't seem to like that, however, since these machine-generated sites all contained duplicate content.  Search engines prefer original content, not scraped results or articles that have been reprinted thousands of times.  This is as true of the other major search engines (e.g., Yahoo and MSN) as it is of Google.

Finally, Google put a damper on all of those machine-generated sites in November, 2005, when they changed the Terms of Service for AdWords advertisers, effectively lowering the bids for all AdSense appearing on what is called the "Content Network" (i.e., sites other than Google's search results).

So can you still make a good living with AdSense?  Yes – but the rules have changed.  Machine-generated sites get de-indexed (read condemned to never, never land) very quickly.  Real content sites, on the other hand, are alive and well, especially if they contain unique and useable information, which is what the search engine spiders love.

It's still well worth your while to monetize your website with AdSense, especially if you have a quality content site, and/or have other methods for monetizing your site, and see Adsense as part of your overall strategy. It takes more time and effort to produce genuine and unique content than it did to do machine-generated "scraper" sites, but in the long run, you'll be better off, and your site visitors will have a reason to come back again and again.

Technorati Tags: Google AdSense, monetize your website