Missy has a great article on the benefits of Adwords. I haven't heard many success stories like hers. I have only heard of very low conversion ratios. I am eager to hear your success stories on the use of Adwords.
But that is not the real reason I posted. I have been tinkering with the idea of monetizing my sites with Adsense. The reason I have been tinkering, is because of this girl. You can place little nuggets on your website and Google will place a few relevant ads on your website. She tapped into something and made millions...oh did I mention she did this at age 14. My son has some catching up to do.
It seems pretty amazing how it works. It grabs a few words off your post and places ads in there by the people that are paying for Adwords. So I am sure if I was to mention a few times in this post Ann Arbor Real Estate and a few other words related to real estate and Ann Arbor, Missy's advertisement would show up. As a demonstration, I could put Adsense in my profile to the right like Brad Andersohn and her ad would appear there. But I wouldn't do that to Missy. She would be paying for a lot of clicks and definitely not get any returns on her invoice.
I have read that people have mixed feeling about the Adsense program, because your competitors can advertise on your website. I have mixed feelings about that too...first, the websurfer found my site and I didn't have enough content to keep them there and they moved on, so why not get paid for that? second, I am sure the websurfer will find me again and they'll be back. (I write a lot of SEO magic into my blogs.) At that point, I either have them or they really don't like what I have to say and would move on anyways. You do have the ability to filter out local competitors in order to keep them from showing up. Third, does it cheapen the website...jury still out on that.
I look at this way, monetize on the ones that you keep or monetize on the ones you lose.
The other question that keeps coming up, does the ads cheapen your site? I have a couple set up on a few different sites.
Focus On Frederick.com - Light to moderate
FrederickHomeAuction.com - Heavy
Bobs Brain Dump.com - Light
Take a look at all of them. Did you notice how the ad content change with the post content? There are a couple referral sites on there too. You can make money off of recommending products too. I have just started with Adsense and don't have a track record yet. I plan on leaving the sites as is for about a month or two and monitoring the results.
My main site is Focus On Frederick.com - tell me if you think it's too much. I don't want to really jeopardize it for a few bucks.
Just like Real Estate referrals, you can monetize through referral of certain products. I have been using Firefox a lot lately. It has tools available for working with CSS sheets and editing. This has been my next task...to understand CSS. So on the bottom left of my Focusonfrederick.com site you will see a referral link to entice people to install it on their computer.
Below you can see some examples of referral links. You are compensated (in one way or another) when someone uses the product through the link.
I hope this opens your eyes to some other opportunities to help line your pockets... And you know you can do this with most websites that accept javascript. I use Wordpress.org and you have the ability to make anything happen...real happy with them.
;)
Links;)
Tags (Tag Cloud);)
Archives
I used AdWords for a couple of years until I got sufficient organic SERP.
I used AdSense for a week until I saw an ad for Long & Foster on the page.