Building for Affiliate Marketing versus Adsense
This article stemmed for a question someone asked me wickedfire.com.
"In your opinion (or in your experience) which is better: making a great number of the same type of site, or making groups of different types of sites? I guess what I'd like to know is do you tend to specialize in one niche and one format site, or a few different niches and a few different site formats."
My humble opinion is Learn and Live niches. It's harder then the ol' throw it against the wall and see what sticks theory, but building random stuff leads to only having one avenue to monetize it and that's Adsense. I think it makes more sense to focus on affiliate marketing and niches and here are some big advantages:
1. You don't have to deal with Google, this one is a BIG number 1 for me. As everyone knows Google will can you at anytime and there's no one to talk with about it. Affiliate companies are not this way, they're their to help and support you and answer any question you need answered.
2. You have a lot more flexibility in what an advertiser will take for a traffic source using affiliates. My main thing is that I want an advertiser to make money. I'm not a fraud guy, I deal in dirty traffic but that's dirty real traffic that's going to put money in the advertisers pocket, if they want to deal with it. I find all advertisers have a certain level of dirty traffic they're willing to take. Always develop a relationship with your affiliate companies and advertisers. Make sure they're happy and know what you're doing.
3. Options for where to send your traffic. To many times I've seen people build massive networks of sites and then get canned by google. They get their mom to sign up then their brother and the list goes on. Eventually they exhaust those and go with corps but at the end of the day they end up with a bunch of sites and nothing to do with the traffic. I've had a lot of conversations with people about this exact thing, the people I've known that run Adsense have pretty much all switched to affiliate if they stay in the business. Try pushing 5-10k a day through Adsense and see how fast they can your ass.
4. Relationships with advertisers. A lot of this business as you begin to become a bigger player is about making deals with advertisers to allow you to do things that everyone else isn't allowed to do. For example you find a payday advertiser who's program converts like a mofo but they're on DirectTrack and going through redirects. You can always make an interim sales page, but the bottom line in most niches I've found is by doing that you lose conversions vs. them landing on the order form itself. So you work with an advertiser and push them some good traffic, go to show and meet with people and build trust then you'll be allowed to make white label sites or full custom sites. For one of my advertisers I have 50 front-end sites that are all on different domains and IP's. They post the first page of data which pre-populates that second which is iframed in another page. The advertiser is all for it and I have a 50 unique sites all with the same backend and great conversion.
5. Affiliate work is going to teach you how to focus on a niche and build and dominate a niche. When I first started in internet marketing I went the made for Adsense road, or Adcents as I like to call it. I never did very well with it because I wasn't niche focused. Niches are everything in internet marketing and you want to stay narrowly focused on one at a time. Learn it and know it and you'll become familiar with what it takes to make headway in a niche. If you're doing SEO work you'll start to watch the serps (search engine result pages) everyday and see who's ranking for the words you care about. Then you'll build some sites and some will rank and some won't, then you can analyze those to figure exactly what you need to do to dominate that niche. Once you've learned your first niche the second is much easier. It'll be frustrating at first and is much easier to put a site that's about random shit that looks like it'll get some traffic and be easy to rank for but you're really doing more harm then good in your internet marketing career if you take that easy route.
6. Affiliate Marketing pays more. If you find that right offer and the right niche you can KILL IT in Affiliate marketing. For example if you're number 1 for Payday Loans on Google, with the right title and description, you'll bring
close to $1,000 a day just for that 1 ranking. Get to know that niche real well and you might 3-4 listings on the first page and the money ads up. Then you find other words in the niche that convert well and work on getting similar rankings in those sections and you have yourself a tidy little sum just from one niche.
7. The niche sites you build can and will support each other. There's a great ebook out there you can find on emule or torrents that talks about building for niches. It's called "Revenge of the Mininet". It talks a lot about how to build networks and link them for greater success. You always want to build your networks in layers if you can. Where the new sites are supporting and advancing the old. So for example you have layer 1 which is 5 main whitehat sites that you want to promote. Then you have your next layer as 50 blackhat sites that you bought with good pr and resident backlinks. You 301 these to the whitehat sites so they pass all the weight to them. Then you build 10k parasite sites use 100% scraped spam content and you fill them with links to your blackhat bought domains. Then the last layer is spamming millions of links to these parasite hosts. Now you have yourself a very deep network of sites on many different levels. you can add more levels into this as well such as social networking and bookmarking to support you whitehat sites, etc. This is complicated and involved as most good blackhat is. However the point is just think about layers and levels. The more layers you build in the stronger your network is going to be.
So as you can see there's plenty of reasons to support why you should focus on affiliate marketing and niches versus adsense and random sites. I hope you can see all the potential out there for what's possible in affiliate marketing and venture down that road. And always remember This shift is Fun!