Making money with Adsense? You gotta be kidding...

Using Google Adsense to cash in on your website is seemingly such a simple model: after setting up an account with Google, you position the ads on your pages strategically, sit back and wait for the money to roll in.

It is so deceptively easy that I decided to give it a whirl. After doing some keyword research, I found an area of interest to great many people: playing free online games...

...and before you could say otorinolaringology, the Finest Free Online Games site was born!

I tossed in some 1,500 free online games and a bunch of videos for good measure - and of course the Google ads, which were to propel me into the decadent world of rich people.

What happened? Well, I did not exactly pose a threat to Bill Gates. Getting visitors was easy - I put some of my Internet marketing techniques into life and after only 60 days Finest Free Online Games was in the top half a million sites in the world by traffic...

...but with the click-through rate of less than 2% I could not recall a single day when I'd made more than $2, which is not something you'd write home about.

Quite simply, people wanted to play games, not to click on the adverts!

This got me thinking. When people come to your website, you want them to click on an ad so you could make money, right? Right! Now if the content on your site is truly valuable, would anyone want to click on an advert? Hell, no - people would want enjoy the content, be it reading your articles, playing the games, or doing something else.

So how do you get them to click on the ads? The obvious answer is by surrounding any useful content by multitudes of ads, and by using the formatting and colors to make it hard for people to distinguish between the content and the adverts. Even better, let's offer utterly useless, good-for-nothing content - in the absence of anything of value, people would have no choice but to click on the ads!

Hey, then we can boast about having a great click-through rate and write a book about making a fortune with Adsense!

OK, seriously now - the whole concept of earning a living with advertising on your site is flawed:

• It sends people away from your site


• In makes your own site less valuable


• It decreases the likelihood of your visitors coming again
  
  


• It is disrespectful towards your visitors - having in-your-face ads, especially the annoying ones that are flashing at high rate, is not why people come to your website.
  
  

In short, having ads on your website means selling out big time - but only for a little bit of money! Based on my own experience, with affiliate promotions you stand to gain 12 times (or more) and with your own product 23 times (or more) per visitor than with advertising.

So here's the alternative: forget about Adsense and use the rich web content to build a long-term, respectful and mutually beneficial relationship with your customers. How? That's another story...

...but if you'd like to hear it right now, visit my site at DrAlexMarketing.com.

Dr Alex Davidovic runs

DrAlexMarketing.com, the company specializing

in helping soloists and small businesses (up to

30 employees) to effectively publicize their

services through the synergy of Public Relations,

Internet & Salient Marketing (PRISM).