Affiliate or Adsense: Which is Good?

When ever we start with Affiliate marketing, very first question comes into our mind is Affiliate or Adsense? And this is a trap question, as you might be in the stage like me (professional blogging), you can’t play with your recurring income and you can’t even afford to miss trying affiliate marketing, where real money is.

Anyways, here I’m going to share some of my experiences and you can decide which is good for you: Adsense or Affiliate.

If you are new to affiliate marketing, you can read my post on:  how to start with affiliate marketing. Now, talking about my model: I use Affiliate marketing banners + Adsense + Direct advertisements to monetize my blog. People have a most common misconception that Google is against affiliate marketing and which is not true. Google says, keep the affiliate link but on a quality blog. If you write sneaky and low quality content and put 10 affiliate links, that is something no search engine bots would entertain.

Things to know: Adsense vs Affiliate Marketing:

    It’s easier to get into Affiliate network than Adsense

    Affiliate Marketing pays higher than Adsense

    Most of affiliate companies offer PayPal as payment method, where as adsense doesn’t.

    You can find affiliate products for all the niche but Adsense is not allowed on certain niche.

    Adsense gives recurring money where as Affiliate pays at one shot.

    Adsense is managed by Google alone where as there are many small and large Aff. companies.

    Affiliate ads are more attractive where as we don’t have control over adsense.

It’s quite obvious from above points that Affiliate marketing is more lucrative and beneficial than adsense, but before you give it a final conclusion, you should know:

Affiliate marketing works on certain pages and every page of your blog will not be making money for you. Where as, Adsense works for those pages which doesn’t work for affiliate marketing products. Adsense is backbone for any blogger when it comes to make money online, because it will let your cash machine going, though the payout per day is less than a single affiliate sale.

With one affiliate sale we will be making somewhere between 10-100$, depending on the product which you are pitching, in my case it will be more than what I will be making with adsense in a week.

One thing which I can do here, is take away my prominent adsense ad spots above my post, and replace it with any affiliate banner of my niche. Though it’s like taking a risk, because it might perform very well or it might not. Even if I end up making 5-7 sales a month, it will be better than my adsense unit for that location, but if not I might end up making 0$.

If you are like me, who rely on adsense and affiliate sales both, I will suggest make a combination of both of it in right way. So that you don’t turn out to be an affiliate market blogger, and with useful content you will end up making some handsome amount of cash by the end of the month.

Make sure your most clickable area like above the post and sidebar 350 block is covered by adsense. IMO you can select these areas for affiliate placement.

    125*125 (sidebar)

    728*90 (header,Foooter)

    468*60 (below post, below comment, above comment)

Always remember using maximum adsense unit, does not  guarantee  maximum revenue. In fact using 1-2 ad units , mix with link and search units yields better result.