ClickBank versus AdSense

16 Nov 09 8:17 pm

Hi Troy,

Thank you for your advice. I'll stick to that and see what happens :-)

All the best,
Jakob

06 Dec 09 4:02 am

James, what do you consider high traffic? I mean free seo traffic?

09 Dec 09 4:16 am

2-3 thousand and no money?? haha, the offer must really suck at that point lol...

15 Dec 09 6:32 pm

Newb,

You should be checking your keywords for commercial intent before you even get to the stage of building your site. You need to be reasonably certain that those keywords are converting and not just getting traffic. Traffic keywords are usually people just looking for information, not buyers.

Here are some examples.

People seeking information might type in phrases like:

dog training
train my dog
train a dog

People looking to buy something will type in much more focused keyword phrases like:

dog training school
dog training book
dog training Los Angeles
dog training course

Or product names like:

Sit, Stay, Fetch
Kingdom of Pets

Some other phrases to look for are:

lessons
course
author name

Some products are for physical/mental ailments and you'd want phrases like:

cure
remedy
remedies
relief
get rid of
remove


That's only touching bases on a few things, but hopefully you get the idea. You can test keyword phrases to see which ones convert into sales by using pay per click advertising and tracking each individual phrase all the way down to the sale. It's best to start off with smaller groups of related words and track by the group first, especially if you have a large keyword list. Look and see which group(s) most of your sales are coming from and then track each keyword individually from there.

You can also keep track of the top paid ads listed in Google for each keyword phrase. The idea here is to see which ads are still bidding on the keyword after two weeks or more. Those that are still there are likely making a profit. Why would they spend money on advertising if they weren't? Of course there are exceptions to this rule, like insurance which makes most of its money on the backend, but normally this will work. You can use free tools like SpyFu to research keywords and see how long ads have been there too.

There's also other paid software that is excellent for doing this type of research.

Also, if an offer isn't converting well after you've sent 300-400 visitors or more, you may want to test another offer in its place. This could be the result of a crummy salesletter or a bad reputation. Did you type in the product name into Google before you promoted it? Of course, there will be some affiliate reviews that try to sell the product, but there should be some honest ones as well. I just did this last night for a product that's been a best seller at Clickbank for years, but I found out that many people were saying it wasn't as good anymore and that there were better options available now. That research saved me money AND got me a better product! Do your research!

Newb, I highly recommend that you stop everything you're doing and go back and watch the videos of Mark creating this new blog. There are many lessons to be learned there that you need to know before you go any further, otherwise you may end up frustrated. Just trying to help you.


Joe

16 Dec 09 3:34 am

Just trying to help. Do whatever you want. No biggie.

19 Jan 10 5:44 am

I find this a good topic. Could anyone give me advice regarding adsense, I have several websites using the same adsense code and template but unique contents and afraid that it get deindex by google and block sites since its in the same IP.

any thoughts?

07 Mar 10 10:21 pm

Some people really think they can get rich with Adsense but I recommend seeing it as gravy (bonus money) rather than the meat. (real profits).

Where with Clickbank you can make $20 to $50 from one sale, with Adsense it took 15,000 visitors over 3 months to make me $20.00. That is because less than one percent clicked on the ads and each of those 150 clicks earned me an average of 13 cents.

One top blogger wrote that to make a $2,000 per month from Adsense you will need 200,000 visitors a month and I believe him. (these numbers a guestimates, don't hold me to it).

That is why only 5% of my banner ads are Adsense and the rest are affiliate links.

Smuigal is right. You can have one adsense account and add the HTML codes to any niche website & Google will adjust the ads to reflect the content.

I would follow the advice not to give up on Clickbank and keep testing and changing things on your webpage such as keywords, content, headlines and niche product until you hit the right combination that converts.

22 Mar 10 5:52 am

Or, you could go straight to Clickbank... I think there's a hoplink generator that will do text ads if I remember correctly.

Grady

31 Mar 10 8:49 am

Personally I focus all site traffic on highly targeted clickbank products and try to cut out all other distractions. If you have chosen a product with a decent gravity, and are sending highly targeted traffic that is ready to buy to your website, then I cant see why you wouldnt be making sales.

I have a few adsense sites, but they were set up especially for making money with the adsense program. For adsense sites I target tiny niches with virtually no competition (easy to rank quickly and for a long time), an average adwords cpc above $0.70, and a decent amount of traffic. I also make sure that I can get a domain with my main keyword in it (.com or .org are best). I have had a decent amount of success using this method, although the commissions potential of affiliate sites are far more alluring to me these days.

29 Jun 10 8:30 pm

I have started using Prosperent whenever I would normally use adsense. It boosts income considerably. http://prosperent.com/ref/215768 is a referral link they gave me but I have no idea what advantage I get for referring people, I thinki it might be left over from when the product is in beta, as the link came from my dashboard. You can just take off the ref/bit and you will end up at the same page!

Anyway the great thing is that Prosperent is an affiliate with thousands of companies and they then add targetted ads to your pages depending on the search term, and you get much higher commissions if someone clicks through and buys. If for some reason they dont have a targetted ad then you can set it to default back to Adsense. My income has gone up considerably.

02 Jul 10 3:52 am

What does this TCPA stand for? lol

26 Oct 10 6:00 am

Concentrate on getting free traffic

04 Nov 10 5:13 am

I get good traffic on my sites , but still i am not able to sell the clickbank products. So i am going for adsense

10 Nov 10 12:26 am

rangi54 wrote:Thanks for the responce's so far...
I am also looking at the difference between Adsence/Clickbank.

Adsense is program run by Google where website owners get paid for displaying Google ads that are relevant to their site's content.

Clickbank is a retailer of digital products. It is also an affiliate program network which means that they are the middle station between the digital product sellers and the affiliates who want to promote them.

27 Nov 10 12:30 pm

I couldn't of put it any better myself, imo its best to use adsense on web pages orientated around information rather than promoting products.

michellerana wrote:

rangi54 wrote:Thanks for the responce's so far...
I am also looking at the difference between Adsence/Clickbank.

Adsense is program run by Google where website owners get paid for displaying Google ads that are relevant to their site's content.

Clickbank is a retailer of digital products. It is also an affiliate program network which means that they are the middle station between the digital product sellers and the affiliates who want to promote them.

02 Dec 10 6:21 pm

Don't even waste your time with adsense. Takes more time to set it up than the money it will make you.

05 Dec 10 12:52 pm

I agree wollowra, although I suggest he place a small adsense link as well. That way he can get some income from people just passing through. Its important to not overdue it with adsense when you are offering a product, because it could in turn back fire driving potential consumers to your competitors webpage instead by displaying links via adsense.

wollowra wrote:Hi TJ,
In my opinion I would pick the best keywords and still go with your plan.
Then give it a few months and tweak here and there..
You could get 2 sales and $40 and more as time goes on, where adsense will be just a few cents at a time.

Then if it is not going to plan, you can decide to put adsense on the site.

Regards
Troy

14 Dec 10 3:16 am

You might earn at least a few cents if you have 5000 site visitors per month for a new site.

You'll need thousands of daily visitors to earn even a small amount from any advertising option. There are advertising programs that pay for impressions but they require that your site have a huge traffic volume (around hundreds of thousands of visitors per month, at a minimum).

15 Dec 10 1:14 am

Oh no, no, no!!! Do not do both!!! We at Affilorama do not recommend that.

Any sort of advertising on your site where you promote clickbank products should be for the clickbank products that you promote. If you are to add anything else at all, it should be an opt in to your newsletter series.

16 Dec 10 3:27 am

Cool!

We do not really have anything against adsense. It's just that on affiliate sites, adsense can distract site visitors from clicking your affiliate links and/or signing up for your newsletter. You stand to make a lot more from affiliate referrals than from adsense clicks.

I use adsense a lot myself, but not on my affiliate sites and niche sites. I put adsense on my test sites and on sites where I am not currently promoting or selling specific products.

19 Dec 10 6:48 am

who says clickbank sites have to stop at 20 pages? If I have a 100 page site, I would put products on every page, and have my email opt in on them. I actually have one that was over 120 pages before I broke it up into 5 separate sites.

Adsense is ok, and I am not a top CB affiliate by a long shot. yes a 100 page adsense site would make more (if promoted correctly) than a 20 page AB site, but if I had a 100 page site, it would be making money with cb ads long before it got that big. Adsense is pretty useless in my opinion. there are so many other ways to get better commissions.

I could put CPA offers, on it, amazon, my own products, (If I can write a 100 page site, AND enough articles to get all those pages ranking, I should have my own ebook !)

The fact is, with these article sites, monetization isnt the issue. Building the site, and getting it ranking in search is the hard part. If you get the traffic going, it doesnt really matter how you monetize it, it will make money.

22 Dec 10 2:46 am

Great Thread! Lots of info, i never tried adsense, i only sell products from clickbank, i need to learn more about the methods when becoming succesfull with adsense....

09 Feb 11 4:04 pm

Your Adsense earnings really depends on the keywords that you use and the places where you display your ads. I used to have a site that averages 500 page impressions per day and earns about $100 per month.

11 Feb 11 2:30 am

Hi kajm, I see that when you say cb you mean the clickbank hopads. CB, in the context of the discussion on this thread, means the CB affiliate programs and not the hopads. And, in the context of this discussion, the hopads would actually be the same thing as the adsense ads. What we are trying to compare here is promoting products as an affiliate using affiliate links on our site, versus putting up ppc ads on our site as a publisher.

12 Feb 11 3:36 am

So if you had to use ppc adds what would be the best adds to use out of

Facebook
Adsence
HopAd builder
other

23 Feb 11 3:49 pm

There is a wealth of good information posted here. Personally, I have not found that AdSense is beneficial. The money is not worth distracting away from my page. I like what jmpruitt does with WP plugins and the Clickbank ads. Now, that makes sense and it's a viable solution with great benefits. Thanks James for the great advice!

16 Mar 11 10:13 pm

Ambit Energy wrote:

jmpruitt wrote:I recommend giving a site 6-7 months. If you are getting HIgh traffic and still no sales, then consider Adsense. However, You should try the clickbank products first. that is going to be more profitable in the end.

Is this the period of trials for the clickbank 6-7 months. I think it's too long. Can't this be done by two? Clickbank and adsense?

It usually takes about 6 months of working on your first site to see consistent sales. But if you keep working on it and learn everything you can on your first site, your next sites will be easier to build and earn faster.

22 Mar 11 3:00 am

Hi Johntig,

You can monetize your website with adsense if you can pick a niche which usually pretty competitive with high CPC, hence, it's difficult to get your site rank higher at google, unless, you build a consistent backlinks from quality site with high PR too.

Otherwise, what's the point with the low CPC keywords - the lower it is, the lower you will make.

Cheers

23 May 11 2:00 pm

Click bank ( affiliate programs ) and adsense are quite different.
With affiliate programs you make money on a long term while with adsesnse on short.
I found that you earn much more with affiliate programs.

29 Jun 11 6:26 pm

Why do you have to pick and choose? Why not use both or use PLR/MRR products with adsense. All the money adds up the same at the end of the month.

22 Jul 11 4:56 pm

justonce94 wrote:Adsense is great!!! But the money you can earn from Cb is greater - if you do things right!

Agreed 100%
It's anyone's personal decision: money fast ( adsense ) or more money slower ( affiliate programs )

01 Sep 11 6:35 am

Hello TJ,

My advice for you is to stick with adsense for about 3-4 months and watch if your sales will meet your expectations. But when the said time comes and still don’t have any progress on your sales, I think that’s the perfect time to change your adsense to clickbank and added by thinking of a very strong keywords.

16 Oct 11 6:37 pm

Adsense ads are usually removed by deleting the code in the single.php. Please login to your WP dashboard and go to Appearance > Editor and remove the code. Make sure to save the changes after.

Hope that helps!

02 May 12 4:31 am

This is always a debatable topic and its difficult to choose sides. Some people have cracked the adsense while other are earning great bucks with clickbank products. I too opted with clickbank choosing products of WpSmartApps.

I have signed up as their affiliate and am earning some good cash to start up with.

I promote both the products: Immediate List Building Pro & Readers From RSS 2 BLOG.

02 May 12 9:46 am

Cecille L wrote:

This is always a debatable topic and its difficult to choose sides. Some people have cracked the adsense while other are earning great bucks with clickbank products. I too opted with clickbank choosing products of WpSmartApps.

It's a matter of preference and strategy. If you have a really good blog in a niche where you get good traffic, then adsense is a good option. You can earn from it just from the traffic you get on your site. It will not be a lot but you don't need to do much else but maintain your blog and its readership.

Promoting products in your blog is like taking the monetization of the site a notch higher. It 's when things become serious because you have ranking to think about now and keywords and all that. In return, you get a bit more compared to adsense.

Hope that helps. Have a good day!

Well put up Cecille. That's what I wanted to say LOL...

03 Jun 12 7:00 am

tjenpenge wrote:I've now picked about 30 keywords / key phrases for my new site. Looking closer at them not all of them are targeted well enough to sell any of the 3 ClickBank products I originally had in mind.

Would it make sense to place AdSense on those particular pages instead?

If you're going with CB there's a hop ad builder within the account that you can use to create text and image banner ads:
http://i50.tinypic.com/2lxz7rs.jpg

From my own experience the best converting regions right now for my adsense site are 160x600 Text Ads Only and 468x60 Text Ads Only

160x600 - Used to be placing these on the right but they started converting better after i placed them on the left instead.

Since most visitors are english speaking, it only makes sense ;)

Also made the color of the ad blend into the rest of the blog to defeat the banner blindess problem.

Using a program called colorpic to grab the hexcode colors of the site to configure the color of the adsense text units.

468x60 - Converts best above the fold and before the main content. Haven't tried placing it in the body of the text though.

I think the body is best reserved for email optins. Need to test that one :)

Cheers,
Jay

21 Jun 12 4:58 pm

I've been an affiliate with clickbank since last year of october but I didn't received my first paycheck since I already have 10-15 sales.. I don't know why clickbank are doing like this..

16 Jul 12 11:23 pm

@jardine.jones2312 and @davita131

I'm very sorry to hear that you haven't received your paycheck from Clickbank. :(

To be able to receive your commissions from Clickbank, you need to fulfill two requirements (information taken from Clickbank: Earning Commissions and Getting Paid):

1. You must reach your payment threshold, which you set in your Account Settings.

The "Payment Threshold" is a predetermined minimum amount of money you must have in your account before you receive your check. You can select from $10 to $1,000,000 but the default setting is $100. Clickbank holds your payment until your payable balance reaches this amount.

2. You must meet the Customer Distribution Requirement.

ClickBank will withhold payment of any account balance until the following criteria is met:

*Sales made with 5 or more different credit card numbers; and,
*Sales made with two different payment methods (either Visa, MasterCard, PayPal or European Direct Debit(ELV)). Note: PayPal purchases do not count toward the minimum 5 different credit card numbers.

This requirement is in place to help prevent Affiliates from abusing the ClickBank Affiliate program by using their accounts for the sole purpose of fraudulently collecting rebates and/or discounts on their own purchases.

Once you have met the Customer Distribution Requirement, your account will begin issuing payments normally, in accordance with our Accounting Policy, beginning on the next payment issuing date.

If you have any further inquiries, please contact Clickbank: Vendor and Affiliate Support

Hope that helps! :)

22 Jul 12 2:16 pm

These days adsense is not anymore like 10 years before.So i think better is Clickbank but you also can put adsense on your site and earn some small cash for your hosting what you need to pay every month :)

21 Aug 12 4:29 am

If you're going with CB there's a hop ad builder within the account that you can use to create text and image banner ads:
http://i50.tinypic.com/2lxz7rs.jpg

18 Sep 12 10:24 pm

Sanctuary,

How are you using the text and banner ad maker on Clickbank?
thanks

21 Sep 12 10:32 pm

I think Adsense is great yet.No need to sell stuff of promoting any product. No search for niche product simply optimize the site.Though many guy earning good amount from ClickBank I this Adsense is best.

31 Oct 12 12:05 pm

Hi jmpruitt

I have seen your lots of threads .All having something new information.I have one doubt that why Clickbank is unable to track the activity of user clicks.

Thanks
Sagar Awasthi

jmpruitt wrote:I recommend giving a site 6-7 months. If you are getting HIgh traffic and still no sales, then consider Adsense. However, You should try the clickbank products first. that is going to be more profitable in the end.

13 Dec 12 5:30 am

If I were you I would stay away from Adsense and their pennies! A friend of mine was making $80,000 a month with Adsense and all of a sudden Google froze his account and will not even answer a call from him and still owes him like $27,000! Google is a dirty nasty company and mark my words the FTC is going to get them very soon. I hope that this helps you!

20 Jan 13 3:29 pm

My rule of thumb is one goal per webpage.. In other words if you are going for a sale then that is the goal on that page. I never put Adsense on any of my pages.

I do not need Google's 25 cents to take away from my $75 sale or even worse a email subscriber which is even worth more then that..

I would keep Adsense to it's own blog separate from all other things..

25 Jan 13 11:03 pm

I am not sure if this will answer your question but take a look at
Luminate.com
Infolinks.com
Grab-media.com
http://coull.com/
http://www.viglink.com/

The good thing is you can incorporate all of them into one blog

06 Feb 13 1:47 am

When you begin to perform very well on your website, it would be better to desist from monetizing. That's because ads can distract the attention of your visitors.

14 Jun 14 8:13 pm

Clickbank has made me a lot and I really live it much...
Link removed by moderator

01 Feb 16 4:07 pm

In my opinion, you should focus on better targeting the keywords in order to be more close to the products you are trying to sell.
I always preferred affiliate commissions in the detriment of Google Adsense.
If you manage to sell something you will get more than what you would get from 100 clicks.