I am more and more disappointed with Adsense (aff link – the affiliate income from Adsense is still good :D ). And it is not like I don’t understand the system or know how to increase CTR, click value, eCPM aso, but the earnings are going down and down, no matter what. To understand where I am, I have a site in the automotive industry which racks in around 200-300 clicks a day. My daily earnings? Somewhere around 10-12$. Yeah, I have an incredible click value: 3 to 7 cents a click.
After 2 months of tweaking everything I can possibly tweak on that site, I decided to quit on Adsense (at least there). With an eCPM of $1.2-$1.4, almost any other form of advertising would be better.
So, I started (yet again, after almost a year) on the road of direct ads sales and affiliate marketing. This time, done by the book: using a newsletter, a subscriber’s list, direct ad selling and so on.
While, in theory, I know a lot, practice is what kills me. I have read almost everything I could on affiliate marketing (I even made some money of it), but never followed it through. Come on, when you think of how easy was to set-up and start Adsense, why would you put all that effort in learning to write affiliate texts that should not sound like they are affiliate pitches and so on? The same is true for direct ads.
So, in the next months, I will surely start an almost new road while learning all the strings of the affiliate marketing. I will not use (for the moment, at least), CPC advertising, like Adwords or MSN Adcenter. All I will try is website marketing and newsletter marketing (when I will have enough subscribers).
More, I am testing AuctionAds (aff.) , which is starting to rack in some money (not much, a lot less then Adsense, even now, but hey…! these are money that get into my pocket, not getting out of it :D ). Well, the guys on DigitalPoint (including the creator of AuctionAds, Shoemoney) say that it takes some time for the auctions on EBay to finish. One bad thing for Romanians: payment only by PayPal, which means you can’t get any, for the moment (I am being helped by a friend with his account).
If you know of any other good site monetization method, please tell it here… I am more than happy to test anything I could.
