Are You A Publisher Or A Broker?

If you are reading this email because you want to purchase something, then please stop reading now. There is nothing to buy. No money to spend. Nadda Badda Madda

My daughter is now officially a clinger. At 11 months old she won’t let go of my wife. Literally, if she leaves the room then my daughter goes bezerk. I guess that it is a phase and that she will grow out of it… Just hoping that will be before university

Although it is perhaps what I am known for most, I have spoke very little about Adsense recently. I have a love/hate relationship with Adsense. On one hand it has and continues to a large part of my earnings. On the other hand, I do sometimes feel choked when using Adsense.

Let me just tell you some of the positives and negatives I find (let’s keep it to just 3 otherwise we will be here all night…):

Positives

1. Extremely easy to implement on a site. You only need to copy and paste a snippet of code to get started.
2. Highly contextually targeted meaning that you generally don’t need to work hard in order for the correct ads to appear.
3. It is supported by a major player online who pays regularly and promptly - if you have experience with other networks you will understand why this is so important.

Negatives

1. Once someone clicks on your ad, you have lost this visitor to another site, probably forever.
2. The amount that you are paid per click can be very little, often less than if you were to implement another solution.
3. You are limited in the control you have over the ads that display on your site.

Keith Baxter released a product a few months ago. It was actually a rerelease (or an update) to a product that he released a few years ago. The product is called Beyond Adsense and was an eyeopener for me. I didn’t agree with everything that he said, but a major point that he did make was the need for testing other revenue streams apart from Adsense. It is very easy as I have highlighted above to only use Adsense, but at the end of the day you may be leaving money on the table by doing this.

Notice that I say ‘maybe’ and not ‘definitely’. Adsense may work well for you. On some of my sites, after extensive testing I am confident that it is the best way forward. However, on other sites, after extensive testing with other methods I have found that they have outperformed Adsense, in some cases significantly.

For example, I tried out Auction Ads on one site (Targeted ads that lead to Ebay) and found that it gave about 20% revenue of the Adsense ads that I was splitting it with. However, on another site which perhaps was more targeted to the audience who purchase on Ebay, my revenue nearly doubled.

So what is my point? Don’t be just satisfied with Adsense, but try out other methods also.

(I promised that there is nothing to buy in this email, but if you would like to find out more about Keith’s presentation then write a note at replytoben.com and I will send you the direct link)

Another thing that I have learnt recently from my experiments and my testing and investigations is that I am not a website publisher at all. It seems that my whole philosophy has actually changed. What I am doing in essence is brokering traffic.

My job now is that when I receive a visitor to one of my sites, I redirect that person in the direction that is most profitable for me. On the whole, that is also the direction which is most useful to the visitor as customers purchase when they are given what they want (so good karma there also…).

So my business now is totally focussed on two areas:

1. Driving traffic to my sites
2. Discovering what each visitor wants

The above may sound obvious at first glance, but I hope that you do digest it and that you make changes to your model like I have.

Best Wishes,

Ben Shaffer

PS. Watch out for my next email where I describe some more stealth ways of profiting from your website.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 15th, 2007 at 3:30 pm and is filed under Adsense, Emails. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comments and pings are closed.