Google Adsense vs affiliate marketing – which is best? With Google Adsense you place advertising on your content. As visitors click on your adverts you earn a small percentage of the advertising revenue.

With affiliate marketing you earn money from selling products and services online. With a small amount of traffic to a website, you’ll only earn a pittance with Adsense, whereas with the right audience and targeted web traffic you can earn a lot more from affiliate marketing – with that same amount of traffic.

Many bloggers start out by using Google Adsense. You can use free blog platforms such as Hubpages.com and monetise very quickly and easily with Adsense. The main problem though is traffic. Unless you have thousands of daily visitors to your content, it can be difficult to make Adsense worth your while. Only a small number of your visitors will click on your ads too, so you need to attract a lot of them. This takes a huge amount of time and effort. Unless you’re already there with having a lot of free traffic, you might want to look at affiliate marketing instead.

The other thing about Adsense is that you’ll need free traffic. With some affiliate marketing business models you can use paid marketing and get traffic quickly. But Adsense pays so little this just isn’t possible, if you monetise through the Google Adsense program.

Putting all that aside, Adsense does offer a way to monetise which is quick and easy. If you enjoy creating content it can be the right path for you. Adsense is a useful alternative to affiliate marketing in a difficult niche to monetise too. If you don’t have an affiliate product within your niche, Adsense might be the way to go.

Google Adsense Vs Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing can be a lot more lucrative if, and it’s a big if, you get the right audience. With affiliate marketing you need to create content which attracts the right audience. This isn’t such a problem with Google Adsense as adverts can be placed on any content, whatever it is. Get the wrong audience to an affiliate marketing site and you’ll struggle to make any sales at all. So your content needs to be a good match with your product.

There’s more scope for alternative strategies too with affiliate marketing. With Google Adsense you need to create content to place your adverts on. This can be video content on YouTube, for example, or written content on a blog. But with affiliate marketing you can be a blogger, video marketer, use paid marketing, build an email list etc. There’s also scope for building a business much more quickly than with Adsense, particularly if you use recurring income affiliate programs and high ticket affiliate programs.

You can of course use email marketing in combination with Adsense too; build an email list from your website and send subscribers back to your website. But if you’re going to do this, it’s well worth having some affiliate products to promote as well.

Combining Google Adsense & Affiliate Marketing

Of course you can use both affiliate marketing and Google Adsense. Many online bloggers and v’loggers do this. Some say they wouldn’t use both because a Google Adsense click takes their hard earned website visitors away for a tiny reward. Affiliate sales are worth far more, especially if you have a high ticket program and recurring commissions from your sales. So risking a loss of a new sale for a few pennies/cents doesn’t make much sense.

On the flip side of the argument you might also say if someone is going to leave your site without taking any action, better they leave through an advert which gives you something rather than nothing! Adverts can make your site seem spammy, especially if ads appear on every page and obstruct the content. So visitors might think less of your site if it’s crawling with adverts.

So it’s worth taking some time to consider how you want your site to be perceived by your visitors.

Earnings From Affiliate Marketing

Earnings from both Adsense and affiliate marketing can vary from month to month according to your website traffic and many other factors. To monetise an affiliate website can be more tricky. Most affiliate marketers build an email list of subscribers and then promote products to their list. This gives them a long period of time to build trust with subscribers. See the power of email marketing.

Most people use the internet as an information gathering tool, not as a shopping tool. They generally won’t buy immediately from an unknown website without having built up trust in the owner. As an affiliate builds their list of subscribers, and if they have the right people and messaging, they can build a solid income which grows over time. With only adverts to monetise, you need to focus on generating more and more traffic. This can be tough, especially in the early days when you’re just getting started.

When I started trying to earn online, I first started with using only Adsense and blogging. My experience soon led me to focus on affiliate marketing and abandon Google Adsense because one affiliate sale was worth far more than several weeks of Adsense advertising “clicks”.

See also affiliate marketing vs blogging for more on this topic.

Summary

With Google Adsense you’ll need a lot of traffic to make even a small amount of income. You can make more from less traffic with affiliate marketing, but your traffic needs to be very targeted and lead the right people to products and services which they want. This can be a challenge if you don’t know how and it’s worth building an email list and building trust over time with your subscribers.

Learn more about the different affiliate marketing models in a free video series. Click on the image below for access.