AdSense complements: Chitika, MotionMall, AffiliateSensor, Amazon, etc.
Rick over at feedbuzzard has a good little piece introducing us to MotionMall, a company that webmasters can use to serve Amazon-based product ads. See Rick's entry MotionMall | New Kid on the Block for more details. Let me move the discussion up a level, however, to talk about complementary services of interest to AdSense publishers. In some sense this is also a continuation of my posting How to make $4000 in 4 months with AdSense.
First of all, let's make one thing clear: it is not against the AdSense Terms and Conditions to show non-Google advertising on your pages provided one of two conditions are met:
- the advertising is non-contextual; or
- the advertising is contextual but there are no AdSense ads (this means ad and link units, but not referral units or search boxes) on the page.
The key, then, is whether the ads are contextual or non-contextual. A contextual ad is one that analyzes the content of the page (the context of the ad) to decide which ads to serve. If there's any kind of process that involves the crawling of the page to determine the page's keywords and topics, don't display those kinds of ads in conjunction with AdSense ads. (Watch out for programs like Chitika's eMiniMalls that have both contextual and non-contextual modes — be sure you're using the right mode.)
Here's a listing of some ad programs that are complementary to AdSense:
- Chitika eMiniMalls, which displays interactive product ads and split the revenue they make from advertisers with you
- MotionMall, which displays Amazon-based product ads and indirectly splits the revenue by substituting their own Amazon ID for yours (you have to join the Amazon Associates program to make money) 15% of the time
- Various Clickbank-based programs which provide AdSense-like text ads that promote ClickBank and indirectly split the revenue in the same way, by substituting their ClickBank affiliate ID for yours some percentage of the time (make sure it's non-contextual, though)
- Amazon.com's Associates program, which earns you money every time someone buys an Amazon product through one of your referrals
This is just a small sampling of programs that are available. Lots of these programs are popping up everywhere, especially those that involve sharing revenue by doing affiliate ID substitution. Then there are also services like AdBrite that you can use to sell ad space on your site (which is effectively what you're doing with Google's AdSense program anyhow, except with AdSense you're doing it on a contingent basis) directly to interested advertisers.
The point of investigating and possibly using these programs is to wean yourself away from total dependence on AdSense. Financial advisors worth their salt will tell you that you should always diversify your investments. If all you're doing is using AdSense, aren't you putting all your eggs in one basket? What if your AdSense account gets suspended? What if you start getting more PSA ads than before? What if smart pricing really throws off your earnings? Having other programs to fall back on makes a lot of sense. Finding the programs is easy; finding the right programs for your site is what's hard. But some time aside now to think about and implement some complementary ad services to protect your future earnings.
Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense.
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