The Two Forms Of Adsense Sites

Case Study Article 10

Often, newcomers to the idea of making an online income will be confused about the various different types of advertising, and promotion, available to them. So many first timers' sites appear with every possible advertising form including affiliate adverts, Cost Per Action (CPA) promotions, banner ads, and Adsense ads - in addition to many others.

When faced with such an onslaught of imagery and promotion a visitor is likely to hit the back button rather than click on any of the ads. What the new site owner may not realize is that his sort of site smacks of desperation. Sites which appear with too much 'in your face' advertising and promotion are frequently the haunt of viruses and other infections; many unscrupulous advertisers like to infect the computers of their visitors so their 'advert' will stay on the computer and reassert itself in different ways.

Most computer owners don't like this and actively avoid it. Not only will a busy looking site put off visitors because many are cautious of infections; but also, a site with too many obvious promotions sends other wrong signals. A site owner who fills his site with adverts is, perhaps, not focusing on the content of his articles and the value to a visitor. So a visitor may have good reason to dismiss such a site on the grounds that it just doesn't look 'serious'.

Finally, you may get a persistent or naive visitor decide to 'look around' but when there are too many ads or too many promotions it is 'pot luck' which they click on, if they click on any.

There are no strict rules when it comes to advertising or promoting on a web site; but there are some conventions based upon what has been successful in the past. In my view Adsense is a good place to start if you are considering using web sites to earn a little income; and are useful to know about if you are taking it seriously too.

Not only do you find people using Adsense ads on their blogs, but you also have full time marketers creating huge networks of web sites using Adsense as their main form of income - then you also get affiliate marketers and others putting Adsense on their sites just for the additional income it creates. Adsense is an advertising medium for all sites and all people; that is not to suggest you just throw a few ads onto your site indiscriminately, but it does underline the fact that many people use the ads and there are strategies for each of these uses.

There are two main 'models' for using Adsense, both of which require you to understand something about ad 'positioning'. The 'models' are for Adsense publishing sites and for affiliate sites.

An Adsense publisher builds and promotes websites in order to get as many visitors to them as possible. Adsense is a 'numbers game'. Most Adsense publishers know that, so long as their Adsense ads are properly positioned, then a certain percentage of their visitors will click on an ad and earn them a commission. So, the more people who visit the site, then the more people will click on the ads.

These Adsense publishers will target a general topic, such as 'dog training' by first targeting individual pages at specialisms within the general topic. As these pages become more popular they add pages, or sites to their network, which target more general dog training topics and will eventually have hundreds of pages targeting aspects of the whole area.

This means that someone arriving on a page targeting a specialism may well move on to another page targeting something more general. The content of such a site will be information based. There will be articles and information targeted at the interests of the visitor to encourage them to return and use the site as a 'first stop' for all their dog training information. The Adsense ads will all be on related topics and provide a further resource for the visitor.

The other model for Adsense is the affiliate marketer's model. This is a highly targeted site created with the objective of 'pre selling' a particular product via an affiliate link. There will only be a few pages and all the content will be either directly selling or informing on the product concerned. Most affiliate marketers prefer not to have any other advertising on their site since they really only want their visitors to exit through their affiliate links.

But many also see their sites as generally informative and may have more than one affiliate product being promoted, or else they may see Adsense advertising as another possible income stream and resource to their visitors. The main difference is in the content of the sites. Where an Adsense publisher aims to produce highly informative content to a targeted audience, an affiliate or sales site will be directly promoting products and providing information based upon those products. In the case of a purely Adsense site then the Adsense ads take prime position and in the case of a promotional sales site they may just 'fill in the spaces'.

In addition to providing different content and having different advertising strategies, these two site types will be targeting different types of visitor. An Adsense publisher's site will attract, and target, people looking for information. They may not be looking to buy anything but wish to be informed about a topic. The affiliate, or sales promotion, site targets and attracts those looking to buy something. In the hierarchy of sites, an affiliate or sales promotion site may take out an Adwords campaign and have their Adsense ad appear on an Adsense publisher's site - but an Adsense publisher wouldn't, usually, use such a strategy.