Adsense AND Affiliate Marketing?
By: John Elder posted in Affiliate Marketing
Hello good people!
Well this morning when I woke up, the jackhammers were gone! But they were replaced by buzz saws… this is getting old fast! At least I had another great Adsense day yesterday, with $92 in Adsense and $13 in Amazon commissions (off 6 items purchased at $184) for a daily total of $105.
If you noticed anything weird with the website in the last day, or even today or tomorrow, it’s because I’m upgrading my webhosting account for the site.
I use Hostgator for this site (vs Servint for my adsense sites) and with all the traffic that the site has been getting lately, I needed a stronger hosting package. I’m pretty sure the transition is complete, and everything went smoothly, but you never know with something like this.
Today I want to talk about affiliate marketing and how it can be tied into your Adsense empire.
What is affiliate marketing?
Basically it’s just the act of promoting someone else’s product or service, and receiving a commission every time you make a sale. Usually the commission is a set percentage of the sale price for the item sold.
Pretty simple.
What most people don’t realize is that you can add an affiliate component to your Adsense sites to create an additional stream of revenue. It doesn’t conflict with your Adsense earnings if you do it correctly! I do this myself using Amazon.com as my affiliate marketing vehicle of choice.
Why doesn’t it conflict with Adsense?
It won’t take away from your Adsense earnings for a couple of reasons. First, Adsense isn’t always great at showing relevant ads. If there’s not a good ad to click, your site visitor is wasted and you won’t make any money.
If on the other hand, that visitor is searching for a hoover vacuum cleaner, and see’s a picture of the exact vacuum they’re looking for and a massive low sale price, and a button that says “Buy Here” which takes them straight to Amazon.com checkout…well you’re on to something!
That’s exactly how I set up my sites. The only problem is orchestrating those offers across every page of every site you own. You can’t do it by hand, you need some sort of widget to handle that work for you.
I use PhpZon Pro.
Phpzon Pro comes in two versions, wordpress plugin version, and api version. If you use wordpress, then their wordpress version works just like any other plugin. If you build sites with html and php like I do, then you’ll need the api version.
The wordpress version is $79 and the api version is jut $49, or you can buy a package of both of them for only $99 which is a great deal (and what I bought myself because I do have about 30 wordpress blogs still).
What about Google?
Some people get worried because the Adsense terms of service mention something about not mixing ads from other parties besides Google on your site. What the terms actually say is that you can’t put third party ads on your page that LOOK like adsense ads, at least not on any page that also has real adsense ads.
That doesn’t have anything to do with affiliate marketing links, as long as they aren’t formatted to look like the traditional adsense ad block. No problem here, phpzon pro doesn’t look even remotely similar to adsense ads. It looks like this:
Which you can see looks nothing at all like an adsense ad. So you’re perfectly fine on that point.
The other reason it doesn’t distract from Adsense earnings is simply because some people don’t like to click on “Ads” and are just looking to buy a particular product. If they see a little picture of the thing they’re looking for, a price, and a button to click and buy it, then they’re more likely to do that then click some adsense ad.
And let’s face it, you almost always earn more from an affiliate sale then an Adsense click. My average adsense click is around $.50 or less and can spike up to $3-4 dollars on occasion. But if someone buys a $50 item through amazon and I earn 7% commission, I just made $3.50.
And people spend a lot of money on amazon. I’ve had people buy $2,000 bedroom sets through my amazon affiliate links, $900 fitness equipment, $300 cookware sets, and on an on. Let me tell you, it’s nice to wake up to see that someone’s just bought a $2,000 bedroom set through your affiliate link (that’s a $140 commission!).
The bottom line…
If you aren’t integrating some sort of affiliate marketing component to your Adsense empire, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table. Once you set it up once and add it to your Adsense site template, you never have to do any work again. The phpzon pro plugin does all the work. I highly recommend it!
Keep on building!
-John
The Marketing Fool!
Rahul
07. Dec, 2011
What you think about this one..
http://reviewazon.com
The Marketing Fool
07. Dec, 2011
Hi Rahul,
I’ve never used it myself so I couldn’t say. But it looks ok. Seems a bit overkill for me though. I just need something that will throw up a quick amazon listing with product picture, price, a little description, and a link to buy it.
And I want it to run as quick and as lean as possible. That’s why I love phpzon.
Whenever I hear people talk about Reviewazon, they seem to think it’s a resource hog. But I’ve never confirmed that.
Also, it’s a wordpress plugin…does it have a php api version? If not I couldn’t use it on my sites because I don’t use wordpress.
But really, whatever works for you…there’s no one way to do this!
Rahul
08. Dec, 2011
i don’t use any but i like to create simple websites. like you. How you create them any software?
The Marketing Fool
09. Dec, 2011
Nah I don’t use any software to create my sites, I just write the html code myself on notepad. I only built one site template (using html, css, and php) and I use that template for literally all my sites. But I know people who have used xsitepro and like it…but it’s expensive.