Wow. This is huge. Google is now beginning to offer "pay per lead" and other types of pay per action through their Adwords program. For those who get in early, this will be a real money-maker. Even when it gets going, it will still be a tremendous source of leads and sales, but the "early adopters" will have it all to themselves for a while.

Those who have been hurt by the various "Google Slap" changes over the past year or two now have a whole new venue to explore with the introduction of Google Adwords Pay Per Action

No more worries about page quality scores and all that other stuff. You just implement Google Conversion Tracking, place your bids, and away you go.

Instead of being charged "per click" as you are in the current Adwords program, you will be charged only for "actions" such as newsletter subscriptions or product purchases, and how much you pay will be determined by how competitive your bid is.

As of this writing, the program is in "beta" and only available to US advertisers who use, or can implement, Conversion Tracking on their thank you pages. Eventually, it will be open to everybody, although my guess is that use of Google's Conversion Tracking feature will still be a requirement. That's not a big deal, though, as it takes only a few minutes to set up.

In this same announcement, Google also introduced their new "contextual links" program, which will allow you to put adsense links in the context of your blog posts or web site pages, instead of using the traditional ad blocks or text link blocks. This promises to be a big change, too, as publishers can use Adsense contextual links the same way they have been using affiliate links. The fact it's an adsense link will be largely disguised, which will help with click-through rates and earnings.

If you haven't already, sign up (free) for both Google Adwords and also for Google Adsense and explore these new ways of monetizing your website and generating customers, newsletter subscribers, or leads.

Technorati Tags: pay per lead, Google Slap, Google Adwords Pay Per Action