If you’re struggling making money from Adsense, you may be looking for the best Google Adsense alternatives. When I started looking for way to earn online, I started out with Google’s Adsense program. The main problem I had was I just didn’t get enough traffic to make my efforts worthwhile.
Back in the early 2000’s I jumped from course to course learning various strategies to earn online. One of the courses I took was called The Keyword Academy which taught a Google Adsense strategy involving building content on a blog.
The strategy involved doing keyword research to find topics which were worth building content for. Some topics are hardly worth blogging for, since they don’t pay enough to make it worth your while. But other topics which pay more per click, are incredibly competitive.
Best Google Adsense Alternatives
So you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to earning revenue from Adsense! For example, clicks for “currency trading” are worth £11 in the UK on Adwords as per the Google’s keyword planner. As an Adsense user, you’ll get 51% or 68% revenue share of your advertising clicks. According to this article you’ll get 68% for content revenue share and 51% for search.
So, if you have a currency trading blog which is getting traffic (and that’s a challenge if you’re thinking of attempting it), you’ll earn £5.61 per click on search or £7.48 per click on content you own.
But that’s a site which is going to be really, really hard to get any traffic on because of the massive competition. With less competitive content, you’ll likely only earn cents/pennies on clicks, so again it’s often not worth the effort if you’re starting from scratch.
Just look at all the adverts for currency trading after a simple Google search for it too.
Not only is there massive competition for organic traffic (see the number at the top), but there’s also a huge number of advertisers bidding at the top of the page.
Best Google Adsense Alternatives – Less Competition
Going for less competition seems like a suitable alternative strategy. But when you do you’ll find your clicks are worth much less. Let’s choose a pretty low competition keyword such as “collage making”. A quick Google search shows that there’s no paid adverts running and much less competition than with the currency trading, which is to be expected.
So, with a long tail keyword, you could perhaps get some free traffic in this niche. But the problem then arises that you’ll only make a tiny amount for each advert click you receive. Even if you get your content ranking on Google, you’ll only make 68% of £0.77pence here in the UK. (See below). That’s £0.52 pence per click for content, £0.39 pence for search. So you’ll need a lot of traffic to make a living from such a site!
Best Google Adsense Alternatives – Affiliate Marketing
You’ve probably figured out that I’m not a massive fan of Google Adsense for generating income online. I did make some Adsense earnings after building hundreds of sites when I started out online several years ago. But I found another business model which seemed to work much better for me from the start. It’s called affiliate marketing and you’ve probably already heard of it.
An Adsense website can also be used for affiliate marketing too. Many Adsense users also use affiliate marketing for monetisation purposes. Affiliate marketing is better, in my opinion because you can earn a lot more and through using easier, better strategies.
Adsense is great if you’ve got a lot of traffic. But it majorly sucks if you don’t. And it’s really not working for the tiny income you’ll make from Adsense earnings; especially when Adsense can easily shut you down whenever it wants to as it did with a good friend of mine!
The other thing which affiliate marketing has over Adsense earnings is that there’s really only one way to earn from Adsense – through organic traffic. You obviously can’t pay for traffic because you won’t earn enough to cover your advertising. So you must earn traffic through building content and back links. This is incredibly difficult whether you’re using YouTube or Google to rank your content. You’ll need to be incredibly passionate about creating content over months and years to make any headway.
Why Affiliate Marketing Is A Better Alternative
Affiliate marketing offers a much better alternative to Adsense for a number of reasons. Firstly you can choose products and services which pay out much larger amounts that Adsense does. Ideally choose affiliate products which offer the following benefits:
- Recurring commissions – why sell a product which only pays you once when there’s many which will give you the lifetime value of a customer?
- High ticket commissions – With high value digital products you’ll make the most of your efforts with your online marketing strategies.
- Multi-tier commissions – you can earn commissions based on sales made by other people you have referred to a company.
- Lifetime value of a customer – affiliate companies like Amazon don’t offer you ongoing commissions from previously referred customers. But some companies do and also offer a product range. If your referral buys a product, even years after you’ve referred them, you get the credit.
- A built in sales team – can help close sales on your behalf so you only need look after the front end marketing strategy you use.
See SFM Digital Business System for more on this.
Another reason this is a better alternative to Google Adsense is because you can also use a paid marketing strategy with a business model like this.
Scaling Of Affiliate Marketing Vs Scaling Adsense Model
With a business model like the one described above, it’s far easier to scale up your business to make more profit. Using a paid marketing strategy, you only need for your business to be profitable in order to start increasing your marketing budget and scaling up.
With the Adsense business model, of building more and more content, you can’t scale aggressively and you’re at the whim of Google’s organic results. However hard you work, your results will always be determined by whether Google ranks your content, and if they allow you to continue using their program!
Affiliate Marketing – Control
So with Adsense you’re kind of at the mercy of the big “G” in two ways:
- They own the platform which pays you
- They choose whether to rank you
You might even argue that Google’s interests may be contrary to yours, as an Adsense user.
You could say, their decisions determine whether, or how much you get paid too. And they can drop you whenever they what. With affiliate marketing though, you decide which products and services you want to market. You’re less obliged to a particular company or product with affiliate marketing.
Access Training & Resources
Anyone with a website can use affiliate marketing to monetise their blog. If you already have a lot of traffic, you should look for affiliate products and services which “marry” up with your content. Ideally look for products which would suit your website visitors. Build an email list from your website and promote your products and services through your list.
For more information about affiliate marketing, and for access to a digital product suite and an online training and education platform, click on the image below to access a free video series.
