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.

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