Multiple Streams Of Income
By: John Elder posted in Adsense
Hello good people!
And welcome to Monday! Well the place is settling down and getting back to normal now that my house guests are gone. Went out last night and had a great time eating sushi for the very first time. I know – I know, how can I have lived to my mid 30’s without ever trying sushi? But it was great, and the company was even better.
Just a quick earnings update, yesterday I saw $81 in Adsense earnings and $19.42 in Amazon.com commissions from 3 items sold (at a total of $298.84). That’s brings yesterday’s total to just at $100 for the day. That’s a three day average of $112.48! The Panda recovery continues!
Today I want to talk about something a little bit different; namely – ways to bring in extra money from your Adsense sites.
Extra Money?
Yep. Adsense and Amazon commissions are a great way to monetize your site. But they aren’t the only way, and they can be very dangerous when you consider the fact that Google can either change their algorithm at the drop of a hat or flat out deindex your sites and kick you out of the Adsense program for any reason at all.
It’s good to have a backup monetization process in place. Most people fall back on other advertising networks that are similar to Adsense, like shopping.com or the ebay affiliate network, but that’s not a great way to do it.
Why not? Well, its ok if Google has kicked you out of the adsense program, but assume Google deindexes your sites…then it doesn’t matter if you swap out adsense ads for some other type of ads…your sites are still going to be deindexed – which means no site traffic and no income.
I suggest something altogether different
I suggest you start a master email list, or several. Here’s what I mean.
Go to aweber.com or any other email list management service and open an account. It might cost you $20 a month. Then create lists and signup forms for all the sites in your adsense empire that you can group together into similar themes.
What I mean by similar themes is; say you have a golf site, a baseball site, a basketball site, and a cooking utensil site. You can easily create one newsletter geared towards “sports” and one geared towards “cooking”. You get the idea.
Then offer a free newsletter subscription in an unobtrusive way on each of the pages of your websites. You’ve probably seen blogs do this all the time. You just need to put a small signup form on your sites sidebar, or at the bottom of the page asking for a person’s first name and email address.
What’s the point?
If you build a substantial list of email addresses over time, you can continue to market to that list forever, no matter what Google does to your website. Imagine if 5,000 people sign up over the next 2 years. Now imagine that Google deindexes your sites and kicks you out of the Adsense program. Who cares! You can still send affiliate offers to your subscribers and keep the money rolling in.
Not only is this a great monetization method, but it also makes your websites seem more professional in case Google ever sends a manual reviewer to your site to determine if you are a spam website. Offering a newsletter makes you appear more legit.
You can also use feedburner for free to collect email addresses and send out newsletters, but it’s a little tricky and uses a slightly different strategy that I’ll discuss another time.
The bottom line is, it’s always important to diversify and have many different potential streams of income. This is just one way to do it. Can you think of any others?
Keep on building!
-John
The Marketing Fool!
