4 Hidden Benefits to Monetizing via Google AdSense

In the past I have been a bit hard on AdSense, stating how it cannibalizes publishing, but there are some up sides to Google's AdSense too. Many people talk about the ease of implementation, scalability, and lack of maintenance cost, but 4 more rarely talked about benefits are...

  • Safety From Google Editors: Since AdSense is a Google product you never have to worry about internal Google quality rating guidelines calling an AdSense link a sneaky redirect (like they do with CJ links).
  • Profit From Spam: If you have a pharmacy affiliate or payday loan site then many people will consider the site spam by default. But if you tastefully write an article about such topics and then just happen to have AdSense on the page you are not viewed as a spammer by the general web public - Google (and AdSense) are a ubiquitous part of the web.
  • People Under-estimate Your Earnings: Many web publishers have published AdSense sites and made nothing. Thus if they see you publishing an AdSense site they may assume that your site earns nothing, and be less likely to clone your site and more willing to link at your site than they would be if your site appeared more commercially oriented.
  • The Informational Bias of Organic Links:Information is generally considered more citation-worthy than pages that sell stuff. Thus if you monetize via AdSense you can get inbound links to the money making pages without having to buy links. With most commercial offers you are stuck building links to other related pages and hope that internal anchor text & domain authority lift the page's rankings.

Longterm from a business sustainability standpoint it is nice to have direct ad revenues not controlled by Google, but AdSense can make for some nice short-term cash flow.

Published: June 10, 2008 by Aaron Wall in contextual advertising

Comments

DigitalD
June 10, 2008 - 6:55pm

They do that with CJ links? Did not know that
- Eric

June 11, 2008 - 2:54am

If you read their 2007 remote quality rater document the example "sneaky redirect" link they gave was a standard CJ link.

reinventia
June 10, 2008 - 8:37pm

Including adsense code also seems to decrease the time before your pages appear in SERP's

mikesed
June 10, 2008 - 11:37pm

Point 3 on your list is brilliant. Nice thinking.

As for adsense, one throw away line you made about Adsense in your SEOBook massively increased by adsense revenue on one site. It was a fantastic tip.

June 11, 2008 - 2:53am

SEOBook massively increased by adsense revenue

glad it helped you. we do pretty well with AdSense too :)

avecfrites
June 11, 2008 - 12:54am

The thing about using AdSense I like best is that you can watch to see what Google advertises on your various pages, and after a while you'll know what products or services close best. Then you can find affiliates or other upstream providers of those, establish a direct relationship with them, and make more per visitor.

June 11, 2008 - 2:54am

Too true. AdSense can act as a welcome path that helps drive you further and further up the value chain.

dlbrown06
June 11, 2008 - 11:20am

Longterm from a business sustainability standpoint it is nice to have direct ad revenues not controlled by Google

So so true. I just got banned from my adsense account. Apparently there were a lot of invalid clicks, which really confused me???

Lately, I have only been getting and estimation of around 5 cents for 10 clicks! I'm sure that has to do with the key words, but for some reason Google wasn't even counting half the clicks I was getting. I never clicked on any of my adsense ads either.

So that leads me to another question. Knowing what happened to me... could I go on a competitors site that is hosting adsense, and start a click storm campaign until Google sees that they too are getting a lot of invalid clicks and their ads drop? How do I know that didn't happen to me???

It had to happen from malicious users. I just wish there was some alternative...

June 11, 2008 - 6:11pm

I am not sure the exact procedures to getting someone else's account banned, but I wouldn't share that data if I was.

Jboo
June 11, 2008 - 2:50pm

I certainly agree with point 3. About a couple of months ago I was researching niches and came across a site at the top of Google for a very popular term. At first I didn't think it would be SO popular and also didn't realize how much money could be made in that niche with adsense and chitika.

I was just about to leave the site and would have disregarded the niche and moved on if it wasn't for a link on the homepage that directed to another page where the owner showed his earning reports for that site (over $200 per day). I haven't got a clue why he would have done that!

Anyway, with only 400 links and the site dominating the niche I've now started my own competing site.

It's also helped me realize the revenue potential of different niches when I research. Some niches which I would have never considered entering because I *thought* the niche was too small; now look really promising, and all because I discovered that you don't have to enter competive markets like loans, credit cards, etc, in order to make good money with adsense.

sfihomebizz
July 27, 2010 - 9:14am

It is amazing how adsense ads presence or no presence on websites can decide whether they are genuine or not by site visitors.

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