Sleepyblogger has a post up where she advocates use of affiliate programs over Adsense. While I have had some success with very targeted affiliate programs, I think that Adsense and YPN can be the best solution for many sites.

Drawbacks to Affiliate Programs:

1. Your audience may not match up well for making purchases online. For example, my friends who run Kiwibox.com, a site for teens, would not make much running affiliate programs where you get paid when a user purchases something. Yes, there are some affiliate programs that pay upon registration or other non-purchase activities, but these have become increasingly rare.
2. You are dependent upon the merchant and the effectiveness of their site. Even if you drive lots of traffic to a site, if a merchant’s site is not intuitive or slow, you will be the one to pay for it.
3. A click can be more accurately measured than a purchase. Although most affiliate programs use cookies to track returning visitors, you may not receive proper credit from a sale if the user returns to the site to make a purchase after the cookie’s expiration date. Or the visitor could make a purchase offline, and you would not be compensated.

I look forward to reading the rest of SleepyBlogger’s affiliate program series, and learning more from her success with affiliate programs.

As I mentioned in a previous post about AdSense blending, I mentioned that I have been doing some testing on one of my sites. Over the past few weeks, I ran four different versions of AdSense blending color schemes on my cliff notes site. I tested the color scheme that I have always run on the site (labeled Baseline in the table on the right) and three different color variations.

My goal was to increase the click through rate on the ads. The results are listed in the table on the right. The bottom color scheme increased the click through rates on my ads by 31%. While I expected some improvement, I did not anticipate getting this much lift from just altering the color scheme. I am particularly surprised by the difference between the fourth ad and the third ad. The gray text appeared to have a huge impact on click through rates. The gray text really helps to give the ads a different feel and blend them into the content of the site.

I still have a lot more experimenting to do, and I will continue to post my results on the site. As always, I would love to hear your AdSense optimization tips.

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about AdSense optimization. In reading through the forums over at SitePoint today, I came across this useful post asking for example of good blending of AdSense ads into content. There are some very nice examples in the post which may help to generate some ideas. I especially like this one. The site uses complimentary images very well, and does a great job of blending ads with the content.
I have been running some AdSense blending tests one of my sites, and I will publish the results here soon as a case study.

After having one of my sites banned from AdSense, I decided to test a number of alternate advertising programs. AdBrite (aff link) was the first program that I tried. AdBrite sign up is quick and painless. As soon as you are accepted to the program and place the code on your site, you can start displaying run on network ads. You can also enter tags to your site, which will help advertisers find your site. The run of network ads were acceptable, but not great. Ads relating to MySpace and educational sites performed best on my site.

I ran AdBrite ads for about a week, and my click through rate was close to ten times lower than my AdSense click through rate for the exact same space. Revenue per click was half of what I was earning with AdSense. Needless to say, I will continue my search for AdSense alternatives.

Despite my lack of success with AdBrite, I think that it could work very well for some larger sites. If advertisers are frequently asking for space on your site, AdBrite could be a hassle free way to manage your inventory. I would be very interested to hear about any AdBrite success stories out there.

A few weeks ago, I emailed Adsense support to ask about an idea I had for displaying an Adsense search box on my site.  In response to my inquiry, I received an email from an Adsense rep informing me that my free term paper website did not comply with the Adsense program policy. After exchange a number of emails with customer support reps, they informed me that they had “exercise editorial discretion” and determined that my site was not a good fit for Adsense.

The situation is mind boggling to me. I have been running Adsense on the site since April of 2003 without any problems. I was one of the beta testers for Adsense because I was working with the company Google acquired to get the foundation technology for Adsense.

Banning my site is also confusing because on the AdWords side of the house, Google allows term paper related advertisers. A Google search for term papers shows at least 50 AdWords advertisers. When I pointed this out to the AdSense customer support rep, I was told that AdWords is a separate program and that it has a separate policy.

Despite my efforts to point out the inconsistencies in my banning, I could not get the ban reversed.  In the next few weeks, I will be trying out a number of replacement programs, and I will post my reviews of the programs here. I plan on testing YPN, Adbrite, Clicksor, Text Link Ads, and others.

I would be very interested in hearing from anyone with similar experiences or good ideas for Adsense alternatives.

I have had some decent success with a handful of advertising and affiliate programs. Here are five programs from which I have made at least a $1,000.

Websponsors - One of the first affiliate networks that I had some good luck with. For a while, I was making a ton of money off their free poetry offer that paid out at $1.00 per lead. Lately, I have had some success with their free student pack offer that pays out $.60/lead.

AdSense – I have done well with AdSense since its inception. I would like to do some more testing to optimize AdSense on my sites, and I will chronicle the results of the testing on this blog.

Adteractive – Adteractive is another good affiliate network. I have had some success running their FastWeb scholarship and JackPot offers on a few sites that I helped with finding good affiliate offers.

EmarketMakers – Their free stuff and contest offers have produced for me. They have a large selection of offers.

CommissionJunction – I have not run any CJ programs in a long time, but I made some nice money on offers for internet accelerator software and romance books a while ago.

While compiling this list, the one thing that stuck out at me was that I have had a variety of different types of advertising programs earn me good money. The key was just taking the time to ferret out the good programs and offers that fit well with my audience.