Affiliate Rant!

I have written an article that provides some strategies for avoiding Adsense blindness on websites. The article can be found here: Adsense Blindness - How To Beat It!
Here’s a brief excerpt:

Adsense blindness is a topic that is becoming more relevant with each passing day based on the enormous success of Google’s Adsense program. The amazing success of the Adsense program has led to what almost seems like universal adoption of Google’s ad serving technology. The problem is that the ubiquity of Adsense is causing more and more people to unconsciously filter Adsense ads as they view websites. The question that this article seeks to answer is what can be done to recapture the revenue that is being lost?

Within the article I offered two distinct approaches to combating Adsense blindness. First, I focused on changes you can make to your Adsense panels to help them to demand your readers attention. My second strategy was to incorporate other affiliate program offerings. Because readers are so tuned to the Adsense panels offering new ads (even those you craft yourself) can have a devastatingly profitable effect on your bottom line. Here I offer some useful resources to assist you with both strategies.

Combating Adsense Blindness By Tweaking Your Adsense Panels

First up, a great little tip for choosing up to four colors to rotate when your Adsense panel is displayed: Rotate 4 Colors

Next, a discussion on DigitalPoint. Some great points including rotation of ad units, varying colors, and making those Ad Links bright!

Third, Webmaster World has a great forum covering all things Adsense: Webmaster World Adsense Forum

Fourth, the definitive (e)Book on Adsense matters, Joel Comm’s: What Google Never Told You About Making Money With Adsense. Don’t bother with the sales letter just scroll down to the bottom and order. You won’t be sorry. I consider my Adsense panels to be highly optimized and Joel’s tips improved my Google earnings by about 15%!

Next, one of the challenges with changing your Adsense panels is that you need to test each individual change and to test effectively you need to be able to gauge the effect of each change statistically. Enter Jonathan Leger’s Adsense Gold. The idea is simple - add a little JavaScript code to each page and Jonathon’s program collects information each time a user clicks an Adsense add on your site. Among the many pieces of information Adsense Gold collects, it records the keywords the user searched for to find your page and where she came from. This invaluable information can be used by you to further optimize your pages or even create a new page optimized for new keywords.

And finally, perhaps there is some light at the end of the tunnel? JenSense shares some insight on new Adsense ad formats that will be showing up soon.

Combating Adsense Blindness With Other Affiliate Offerings

Yes, the world is filled with affiliate programs if you just take the time to look for them. Try a few and I promise you will be pleasantly surprised! Here are a few resources to get you started.

Commission Junction Network - tons of affiliate programs.

ABestWeb - awesome affiliate forum. This is a literal goldmine of information for all things affiliate.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t indulge in a little self-promotion. Have a look at my Affiliate Success: eBay software and learn how you can feature eBay listings on your website displayed in an Adsense-like format (or any format you choose). eBay pays very well; so well it outperforms Adsense on one of my sites 4 : 1. Best of all, Affiliate Success: eBay formats the auction listings in plain-text providing the search engines with keyword-rich fodder.

Categories: Affiliate, Web, Web Monetization, Reference

-BW Griggs