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.

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.

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.

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.

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.