BellaOnline Forums Career Business Owners Google teaching some harsh monetization lessons

I've spent the last two days exchanging contextual ads and monetization tips with other SBIers and noticed that google is teaching a harsh monetization lessons to a lot of people. One guy I ran across has 4 sites that he's been working on since 2007 that at one point were earning him $100 a day combined in google adsense. This may seem like a lot but in my opinion he could have made the same running just 2 sites and doing a better job of it.

Since panda his sites are now earning $20 a day combined. They rely heavily on both google traffic as well as google adsense. The guy is ready to drive his RV off a cliff at this point but he's missing the big picture lessons that google seems to be teaching everybody right now.

1. Don't rely on google traffic alone. Diversify and work hard to get traffic from other places i.e. yahoo, other sites or blogs, forums and weekly newsletters to get people back on your site often. There is a lot of traffic that you can acquire from other sources and if you get your repeat visitor numbers up that makes a huge difference too.

2. Don't rely on google adsense as your main source of income ESPECIALLY if you're good at pre-selling. If you have really well written content and amazing pages why settle for pennies from clicks when you can sell affiliate products that pay $30 $50 $70 commissions per sale. If your content is excellent and you're good at networking why not sell ad space. Collecting a couple of hundred dollars a month from a handful of advertisers is guaranteed money vs. hoping people click ads. Think outside the box!

3. Clean up your monetization mix. I don't know how many sites and blogs I run across that are just plastered with ads and affiliate links from top to bottom and side to side. It's ugly, distracting, and desperate! Just 2-3 adsense blocks per page and one affiliate link is all you need and on some pages less works better. It's good to give people options but plastering your site with ads without considering what people on that page might actually want is just dumb! Always think of solutions for your visitors. Placing ads all over your site says "I only care about my bottom line". Give until it hurts then give some more by caring about what your visitors might need not what you need.

Hope this helps anybody struggling with adsense or panda or work from home online business.

Excellent tips, this happened to me too and i have been forced to make drastic changes to my strategies. Thanks for the very good advices!

Google updates have been hitting my site and every time I gain back some traffic, I get hit again, despite trying to make changes. I do make some money from Amazon but adsense has always been my main source of income.

I tried other things like Linkshare and Commission Junction but I only ever got one $11 check from Linkshare and nothing from CJ so I quit using them.

I've tried affiliates too but didn't have much success with that either. I would make a few sales here and there but never enough to even make the threshold for getting paid.

I guess this is why I stuck to adsense because up until the past year, it gave me the most consistent income.

I've had to change some things too with my blog, namely using no follow for ad links. I started out with a lot of affiliate stuff on my site but over time, I took it off. I do get some traffic and earnings from Amazon now but most comes from Google.

I have gotten free products to test and books to review though because of my blog.