The Death Of Adsense?

What's so different about Easy Chair Millionaire? Well, in a short space of time it's becoming very popular: it's the hottest new product that affiliate marketers are choosing to promote. And they're doing that for only one reason: it's selling.

Part of the attraction must be the sales page: very slick with a cute little cartoon characher (echoes of Rich Jerk?) and a lady in a sensible skirt doing an audio/video. A good sign is that there are no cheesy testimonials and no squeeze page - the sales pitch is clear and straightforward and does its job well.

Easy Chair Millionaire could be one to watch.

What goes around, comes around. Affiliate marketing is coming back into fashion with a new breed of 'passive multiple income stream' gurus.

Just a couple of years back, affiliate marketing - selling other people's products and making a profit - was the easy way for beginners to start an online business. But it didn't always work out as easily as all that.

'Get Rich Quick' merchants oversimplified the processes of promoting products on the Internet. Gullible newbies believed the dotcom hype. And the Internet changed fast: new technologies and consumer expectations drove advances in ecommerce that made it more difficult for entry-level marketers to compete.

Those that succeed in the affiliate marketing game often publish their own guides as to how to do it. One such is Easy Chair Millionaire who provides a concise, step-by-step introduction for beginners and internediates alike. Although not covering every possible angle, it is a very good starting point and it  will give every aspiring Internet entrepreneur a basic grounding in how to start.

So, if AdSense is not delivering easy riches, what is?

The latest weeze is 'click-flipping'.

Weary of trying to get rankings for so-so sites and then earning pennies per click, the gurus tell us to forget free traffic and to buy it instead. The idea is to put up a website, stuff it with affiliate links (not AdSense), buy AdWords ads on cheap keywords and monetize the traffic on affiliate payouts. All you need is a credit card with a few thousand bucks short of its limit and you can be up and earning within hours.

So goes the theory. But we've been there before. Many Internet marketers started out as affiliate marketers: heck, you didn't even need a website. All you had to do was buy an ad, send the traffic straight to your affiliate's landing page and collect the commission. But, over time,  the dynamic of the market place meant that competing marketers bid the price of ads for the same keyword up to break-even (or beyond), Google turned into a giant slot machine and most people didn't make any money. And a few lost a lot.

Perry Marshall taught a generation of marketers how to master AdWords, and maybe all these newbie click-flippers will  need to learn those skills - and more. But it's going to take time and it's going to take money.

I don't buy it. By which I mean that I don't want to buy clicks. I want free clicks. If AdSense is not the cash machine it once was, then fine - we can all put affiliate links on our websites. I'm up for that - but I still want free traffic.

Which means I'll work for it. I'll continue to build good quality websites and I'll continue to do all the things you have to do to get indexed and ranked, and in time, to earn that free traffic. Which includes Blogini. Check it out!

That's the way to get rich slow. I can wait!

Google Adsense is undergoing a shakeout, and we shouldn't be too surprised.  There are many analogies for what's going on: in a way it's a replay of the dotcom crash. Too many freeloaders and snake-oil purveyors pile in who dilute and devalue the opportunity and destroy the very asset they were seeking to exploit.

Ironically, Google is THE great survivor of the dotcom boom: now worth billions and making their founders and shareholders very rich, they are just not going to disappear now. Rumours of the death of Asense are highly exaggerated.

What's happening is that the freeloaders and snake-oil sellers are being shaken out. Junky,crappy sites with thousands of worthless pages are being penalised. Abuses of the engine are being detected, websites are being evaluated for quality and wannabe Adsense newbies are being deterred. That's the good news. The bad news is that the innocent are also feeling the pain.

This is a good sign. The market is maturing. The survivors will emerge fitter, smarter, stronger. Viva AdSense!

If Adsense isn't working, who's fault is that?

Well, I don't think it's Google's fault. Google's stated mission is to index the billions of pages on the Internet and present them in an organized form to people who come to its website seeking information. And it wants to make money by doing so, and it has its shareholders to please. No problem with that.

To achieve its mission, Google has to present useful, high quality information so that it beats its competition and continues to make money. They can't possible check out every webpage so they use sophisiticated software algorithms to analyze the pages so that they can present the best, most useful pages. Again, no problem.

But here's the paradox. For any given keyword there are about 30 slots on the search results that every webmaster is competing to inhabit. That's the capacity of the first three pages that will survive the attention span of the average surfer.



All the wannabe webmasters in the world who are churning out websites on the most valuable keywords using recyled, non-original, near-duplicate content, or worse, computer-generated junk, have made the golden egg-laying Google Goose peck back. The advertisers don't want to appear on these pages, so they won't pay. Google doesn't want to display these pages, so it buries them deep in the index.  If the pages are displayed, the ads served up pay in cents, not bucks.You can't blame the goose!

I've worked hard. I've been an obedient pupil of a succession of gurus, and I've learned all the basics about building websites, keyword research, getting traffic, building empires, etc.

I've built my websites, sourced my graphics, slaved over my content and posted and pinged - and what happens? My highest-paying website, where I have a click-through rate of about 20%, now pays me not $1-$2 per click, but a lousy 3 cents. I'm seeing my Adsense income slip away. And I'm wondering whether it really is worth all this work to build a virtual real estate empire to earn Adsense income from free traffic when all I get is 3 cents a click.

OK - so I do earn the odd $20 from referrals, which is nice, but I've considered this to be the icing on the cake, not the cake.

Maybe I shouldn't be so surprised. Throwing up Adsense sites has been the route of choice for thousands (millions?) of wannabees seeking quick bucks and there has been much abuse of the system. Crappy websites, click fraud, black hat manipulation of the search engines - and much more - has created an environment where the goose that lays the golden eggs has been forced to look around and consider her position. True, the Google Goose still lays eggs, but they're just not as big and golden as they once were.

I've just read a couple of reports which put this situation in context. One is called 'The Death Of Adsense' and the other is 'Life After Adsense'. They're both free, and the author suggests a way forward for internet marketers who don't want to get all their eggs from the same basket.

You can download them here:

Death Of Adsense

I think this is a serious debate and I'd like to encourage others to explore alternatives to Adsense. If (when!) you've read the reports, why not post your comments here?

Gillian

---