AdSense Case Study: What about Chitika?

As I'm working on my pages to finish Stage 2 of the AdSense case study, I've been debating about also using Chitika's eMiniMalls service with the Invisible Fence Guide. Not debating about whether it's allowed or not — it certainly is as long as you use it in non-contextual mode, which means you have to supply Chitika with a fixed list of keywords to use in selecting the advertisements — but whether I should use them at all on an AdSense case study. If I place them on the pages of the Guide and make money from those ads, doesn't that devalue the Guide as an example of how to make money with AdSense?

Chitika's gotten a lot of press because of its eMiniMalls service, with many AdSense publishers in particular crowing about how they're earning more with eMiniMalls than with AdSense. I think that over the long term the earnings from Chitika will level off and the program won't be as exciting. It's also a much narrower program that really only benefits sites that are directly or indirectly selling products from Chitika's merchant partners. As it happens, the Guide would work as an eMiniMalls venue because it does have products keyed to terms like “invisible fence”, “electric fence” and “hidden fencing”.

What would you like to see? Yes to Chitika integration on the Invisible Fence Guide? Or just keep it AdSense-only?

By the way, I see that the Invisible Fence Guide is now listed on Google's first results page for “invisible fence”. And yes, I'm definitely seeing traffic from people searching for Invisible Fence information.

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book.

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