The Rise and Fall of Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs were once a great source of online 
revenue, a savvy webmaster with an eye for marketing could 
easily parley a site into a money making machine with a 
little luck and effort. However, the evolution and growth of 
the Internet has hampered the growth of fortune making 
affiliate programs. Constant search engine algorithm 
changes, along with the search engine's clear distaste for 
sites participating in affiliate programs; have made it a 
little more difficult to earn a healthy affiliate revenue. 
An influx in the use of software programs that terminate 
cookie tracking and privacy programs that prevent webmasters 
from tracking referrers, have also hindered the affiliate 
sales channel. While it is still possible to make money 
through affiliate marketing, other alternatives ought to be 
considered. 


A Healthy Alternative or Supplement

Google's Adsense program allows approved websites to 
dynamically serve Google's pay-per-click Adword results. 
This has become a popular alternative and an effective 
revenue sharing program for webmasters. Google's spider 
parses the adserving website and serves ads that relate to 
the website's content. While the Google's Adsense program 
still has some issues, they are making efforts to improve 
it.  

The website maintenance related to Adsense is very easy and 
requires very little effort. Webmasters need only to insert 
javascript into the webpage or website template. The 
javascript calls the ad from Google and will ensure that ads 
are served each time a visitor goes to the webpage. If the 
visitor clicks one of the Adsense ads served to the website, 
the website owner is credited for the referral.  

The implementation, while simple, has its drawbacks. Google 
dictates the format of the ads. Webmasters can select from a 
handful of preformatted text boxes that lack creativity. A 
recent improvement allows webmasters to modify the ad boxes 
to resemble the website's color scheme. Still, a far cry 
from some of the creative ads webmasters are accustom to. 

The example below reflects how the color scheme can be 
modified to match the look of the website, but the ads 
physically don't fit well into the overall website design.  

sample modified to match sites color scheme:
http://www.hospital-software.com (scroll to the bottom) 

Google determines the content of the ads that are shown/ 
Sometimes the ads are poorly targeted, and of no interest to 
the website visitors.  

sample of poorly targeted ads:
http://www.real-estate-supply.com 

Adwords can be a great addition to a website, and when well 
matched to the content the revenue stream from Google is 
consistent and effortless. 

sample of effective Adsense program:
http://www.police-supplies.com (scroll to the bottom) 
http://www.small-business-software.net (scroll to the 
bottom) 

Not that the Google Adsense program is not without its 
problems.as the reporting provided by Google is lacking. 
Google has not implemented any way to track multiple sites 
that serve ads; they simply show the number of ads served, 
the percentage of clicks received, and the revenue earned 
each day. Google does not disclose the amount of the revenue 
they share, what percentage of the revenue they earn and 
what someone can expect to receive for each click. 
Webmasters with multiple sites will have difficulty 
determining which websites are producing the money in the 
Adsense program.  

With affiliate programs many webmasters implement a new 
browser launch with each click off the site, Adsense removes 
the visitor from the website and there is not currently an 
option to launch the visitor into another browser.  

Early on Google implemented a filtering system that allowed 
webmasters to prevent a specific domain's ads from being 
served on the website. Ad blocking meant that webmasters 
could prevent their competitors ads from being dynamically 
served on their website.  

Overall, adwords are great supplements to websites where 
affiliate programs are either not performing or when 
affiliate programs don't exist that target the sites 
content. 


Give it a Try

Implementing and maintaing Google Adsense program on a 
content site requires very little effort and can often bring 
a steady stream of additional revenue for webmasters. 
Consider supplementing content and see what happens.