Affiliate marketing vs Google Adsense

Affiliate marketing vs Google Adsense is one of the most heated topics of discussion when it comes to monetizing your website. Both are equally good and important for making money online. Although they are different, there is no huge difference in the amount of money that you make from them. So without any further ado let’s get into the definition followed by the differences between the two ways of monetizing your website:

Google Adsense

Google Adsense is an ad service by Google. Bloggers make money from this program by signing up followed by placing blocks of ads on their website, when  visitors click on these ads  money is made by the website owner (PPC). There is no fixed amount that is paid for each click, but on an average, you can get paid around $ 0.01- $2. Most of the times you would be paid on the lower end of the payment scale especially if you are a newbie( It also depends on the niche of your website).

Affiliate Marketing

This involves promoting relevant products on your website and you would end up making a commission once you make a sale. This may be difficult to start initially but it holds a lot more money making potential than Google Adsense. The commission could vary from 6 per cent to 50 per cent per sale and it can even be recurring commissions, so yeah, believe it or not, if this works you can actually end up making a lot of money.

Which one is better?

1. Placement of Ads

The placement of Ads is little different as compared to that in product promotion in affiliate marketing.You have blocks of ads which would be textual or have images in them and when a visitor clicks on them you make some money.

However, affiliate links are easy to incorporate into your websites and are relatively easier to use and manage. You don’t need to worry about them making your website look odd because Google Adsense is in charge of that (LOL).

How many times have you come across ads in between while reading content and have either felt annoyed or distracted? Well, that has happened to me several times and that is the reason I do not like Adsense as much as affiliate links. Affiliate links can be easily placed on the text without making it look weird and all over the place.

Adsense looks more like an IMAX presentation which forces you to buy products while it different with affiliate marketing where you just let people know that they could buy the product if they wish to and if they aren’t ready yet, that is okay as well.

2. Control on the type of Ads

In Google Adsense, you have no control over the ads that are being displayed on your website. Although you may not be interested in promoting some products on your web page but in the case of Adsense, you barely have a control on that. Google Adsense places ads which are relevant to your site or ads based on the visitor’s browsing history. In the case of Adsense, you are unaware of the ads that are being displayed !

In the case of affiliate marketing, you can promote products which are relevant to your niche website and products that you genuinely believe in. You have total control on the placement of  affiliate links which gives you full control on the type of products that you want to promote on your website.

3. Money

Google Adsense pays in pennies which are barely anything compared to the commission made in affiliate marketing. If you promote a product worth $100 and the commission rate is around 10 % then you make $10 per sale. Now, if you make 10 such sales in a week then the money you make in one week is around $100.

To make this kind of money with Google Adsense it will take you months (initially) until you have at least thousands of visitors visiting your site daily. The payout in the case of affiliate marketing is way more than what is possible in the case of Google Adsense. However, the pay even depends on the niche of your website but not all websites will be able to make that kind of money with Google Adsense.

SO, affiliate marketing is better and a faster way of making money online once you have some relevant audience on your website.

4. Losing out on Traffic

When you have visitors on your site and they click on Adsense ads then you are losing out on your website traffic. You want your content to be engaging and the bounce rate to be less in order to have better Search engine rankings . If you keep losing traffic to other sites whose ads are being displayed on your website then, in the long run, you might just end up having a promotional web page.

Try creating useful content and incorporating affiliate marketing so that you have people who would actually want to return to your site for more information on that particular topic. It is better to have an authoritative site than just having a site which solely depends on making money by diverting traffic to other sites.

It is a better option to make a few sales on your site rather than helping other sites to do that. Here, we need to realize that when you start making frequent sales on your website through affiliate marketing you would make way more money than what you would make out of Google Adsense.

5. Easy to make money and track your customer

In the case of affiliate marketing, it is easier to understand the customer who makes a purchase from your website. You can easily get to know the interests of your audience and see which one of the products is getting more clicks and sales. You can optimize that page or write more on that product in order to make more money from the content which your readers love the most.

In the case of Google Adsense you will never know the product interests of your audience and hence you would not be able to understand if they like your content or they were just too bored to read your content and preferred to jump onto someone else’s site. It is rather interesting on how less control you have over your audience when it comes to Adsense. So, if you want your online business to run for a really good number of years then you should probably opt for Affiliate Marketing.

6. Banned from Adsense !

It is relatively easy to not get an approval from Adsense and even easier to get banned! I have a few friends who got banned from Adsense for no reason. The only possible reason I could think of was maybe they clicked on their own ads, but they were quite sure about not doing that which left us with no solid reason of being banned from Adsense .There are times when you would get suddenly banned and might get into a lot of hassle to clear the issue and sometimes it might just be a lifetime ban from Adsense.

Getting an approval is relatively easier but you might need to have some traffic on your site in order to get approved. I tried twice to get an approval on my site since the first time it was disapproved because of some reason I do not remember(because of my site speed) but the second time it was approved. So, yeah you need to keep trying if you think nothing is wrong with your site and they approve most of the times.

These are a few major differences between Google Adsense and Affiliate marketing. I started with affiliate marketing and later learned about Google Adsense. Want to know how I made money online? Go through my online journey here. Let me know in the comment section if you had any experiences with Adsense

Let me know in the comment section if you had any experiences with Adsense or as a n affiliate marketer. If you liked the post then do not forget to share it !