Imagine a lemonade stand. Entrepreneurs get the ingredients, start your
business, and has dozens of customers each day. What he earns twenty
dollars a day. Not bad for a humble lemonade, right?
Now, I
throw in a twist: imagine the aforementioned entrepreneurs are in their
30's. They own the lot where the lemonade stand. The lot is located on a
main road in a fast-growing suburban area. All lots adjacent to your
business making thousands of dollars per day. Suddenly our lemonade
stand seems pretty silly.
This concept is called opportunity
cost, the economic consequences of choosing one thing over another. I'm
learning about this the hard way - I've been doing cents per click that I
could have been making dollars per click.
I will explain in
detail a little more. As I mentioned before, strongandfit.net profitable
blog is the first I ever had. As my traffic increased, so did my
earnings from AdSense. A few dollars a day until the ads, so it was
finally seeing the checks come at the end of each month (I'm new to
making money online, so I easily amused).
But I started to
notice something: a few products in particular kept popping up over and
over again in my blog (widget AdSense). "Wait a minute," I thought to
myself, "these products, of course, convert, so if someone is willing to
spend money on promotion." I realized I had inadvertently put in the
bottom of the economic chain: I was paying a few cents per click, while
another person was earning commissions on sales produced by these
clicks.
I did a little research and starts directly advertising
for these products with affiliate marketing. So far it seems to be
paying off, my blog is to make more money.
But there is another
advantage: I have complete control over what is posted on my blog. It
is becoming a win-win situation: My readers are referred to the high
quality products and earn more in commissions.
I can use
AdSense, but I'm spending more of my first "real estate" in my affiliate
marketing blog. Perhaps you should also consider doing this.
A note from Darren
As Kevin says, I have nothing against any of AdSense. In fact I think
it works quite well in some of my sites. For me the idea of
"opportunity cost" is very powerful. For every decision you make to
use any ad unit type in your blog (if it's AdSense, some other ad
networks, an affiliate product, an ad is sold directly to an advertiser,
an ad for a proprietary product that is a potential opportunity cost of
that decision.
The key is to test different options. Kevin has
been successful in replacing the affiliate ads instead of AdSense for
the products of other members would not work, but could do an ad for
your own product. For others, it could be about sharing Chitika ads or
other ad network. For others, it could monetize by selling ads directly.
For others it might be better to have no ads at all, but sell yourself
as a consultant in your blog.
Thursday, December 1, 2011
The Parable Of The Lemonade Stand: Is Costing You Money From Adsense?
10:18 AM
BermudaMaxus
1 comment
1 comments:
i dont think so
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