Is Affiliate Marketing a Better Choice for Small Blogs?

One of the mistakes that I think most new bloggers make involves their reliance on AdSense. I myself have been blinded many times by the legendary AdSense paycheck. Let's be realistic though - if you're like me AdSense isn't a paycheck, on a good day it MIGHT be a bag of chips. In a good month it might be the AdSense sandwich. The point is that new bloggers, and even some long time bloggers with small audiences, probably aren't going to make significant money through Google.

Should you abandon the almighty Google? probably not. There might be a better direction to concentrate your efforts though.

Awhile back I decided to make a change to many of my regular posts. Rather than simply leaving games, books, and products as plain text I opted to link through Amazon in order to attempt generating some extra revenue. While associate links that were placed in my sidebar recieved almost no action, links in my reviews and general comments started going through the roof. In the past month my affiliate marketing earnings have far surpassed AdSense.

I think this really comes down to one of the inherent problems with contextual advertising. While you're guaranteed links that relate to your context - the computer is only so smart. Take Kontera and Vibrant Media's Intellitext for example.

If a post contains the phrase "XBox 360 HD-DVD Player" their programming could choose any variation of the keywords. I could get a link for "HD-DVD", "DVD Player", "HD-DVD Player", "XBox", "XBox 360" or finally "XBox 360 HD-DVD Player." In the end, of these 6 possible links only the last two are really contextual. At the average payout they probably won't offer much for earnings though.

Besides lacking a 100% match on context they also create an aesthetic problem. Recently I've been tuning out Kontera and Intellitext links almost as much as I've been ignoring AdSense ones. Double underlining and popup ads are pretty annoying and when a user has a plugin like NoScript running ads may not even display.

Now you're probably wondering how affiliate and associate programs are better, right? The first curse of the previously mentioned programs is their reliance on JavaScript. Many Firefox users may have JavaScript blocked for sites they don't frequent - that means they may not see the ads on your site. What's worse is that if they do see them, there's a solid chance that the link really isn't truly contextual and they may not click through.

With affiliate and associate programs you can put links directly into your text that are 100% contextually accurate. Rather than risking being fed a link that only pertains to part of a phrase you can link directly to something related to the whole deal. They won't be blocked by JavaScript blockers and, in many cases, the affiliate link will pay off better!

Some Examples

Take the Amazon Associates program for example. The current program offers between 4% & 8.5% on qualified sales. What that means is that if you link to a product and that product sells you can make upto 8.5% of the final revenue. If a reader visits your site looking for information on an XBox 360 HD-DVD Player they can click directly through to the product page. If they buy one you're now guaranteed a payout! Amazon also allows for some "friendly fire" here.

If your reader clicks through and ends up buying something else you could get paid for that as well.

Because it's not reliant on JavaScript (links are usually simple HTML hyperlinks) JavaScript won't block them either! These links will also appear in your feed!!!

The Caveat

If your AdSense CTR is around 1% and you're making $.10 with 100 visitors/day (imaginary numbers not my stats) you'll need about 1k visitors (roughly 10 days worth of traffic) to make $1. For blogs that get 2k, 3k or more visitors a day (or hour) that ads up much faster.

Now - imagine you put a link to a $100 Amazon product in place of your AdSense banner. All you need is one person to click through and buy that item for you to make $4. Write a review of the same product and convince 3 people to buy it - you make $12.

Right now I've decided to cut back on my AdSense code. While I made plenty of space for it across this new theme I'm not planning on using it right now.

Is anyone else using affiliate programs? How are they working for you compared to AdSense?