The Death of AdSense: Ingenious Affiliate Signup Ploy

Before I respond to Shane 's post that email is dead as a distribution mechanism, I wanted to post a followup to the The Death of AdSense post I made a few days ago, because — oddly enough — it's related to what Shane's saying.

As you recall, “The Death of AdSense” was a free report by Scott Boulch saying that nobody was making any real money from AdSense anymore and that there was a better way to make money, soon to be revealed by him in Part II of his report. Well, the report's available today, so I downloaded it and took a look. I knew there had to be something in the report to make Scott money. After all, he was paying a $0.50 commission for each referral to his site and thanks to the controversy his reports have generated he's gotten thousands of people to sign up… which is a big chunk of change even at $0.50 per referral. It's one thing to offer a free document in order to build up a mailing list, but to actively pay people to build that mailing list you want to have some way to, well, make money from all those people signing up…

Here's how he's going to make money. Part II of the report is titled “Life After AdSense” and it basically explains how to use cost-per-action (CPA) advertising networks to make money by buying traffic via AdWords ads and directing that traffic to the CPA networks and making money off the percentage of the traffic that actually converts. It's nothing really new, and most of the document is about explaining how CPA is better that pay-per-click (PPC) and how to use tracking IDs to fine-tune your PPC campaigns in order to find the profitable keyword sequences.

Oh, and at the end he provides helpful links to two CPA networks and urges you to sign up with them right now. Of course, those are referral links, so if anyone does sign up he'll be paid a commission from those CPA networks. If enough people do sign up, presumably that'll be enough money to pay off the referral commissions he owes. So in the end he'll have built himself a very large mailing list for next-to-nothing. And he'll be able to make money from that list for quite some time, I'm sure. Very clever scheme, and again reminiscent of the methods used to promote the controversial e-book The Rich Jerk. Really, we should all tip our hats to Scott's ingenuity.

Alright, show's over, folks. Nothing here to see… Move on, move on…

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Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. If you like this posting, why not link to his blog or bookmark it as one of your favorites?

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