I've been following this latest fantastic little adventure in internet marketing with a great deal of interest.
The Death of AdSense isn't something new. Savvy, big time players (these are NOT most Internet Marketing Gurus) have always said that AdSense isn't a business - it's something that can, CAN, generate an income, but which requires an exit strategy into a real business.
Now, you can take this several ways. It is possible to construct a more or less viable business model around AdSense. But, you need to have a lot more resources than most people who try AdSense as an income source have.
I'm sorry, but this is reality. For most (by which I mean somewhere between 95 and 98% of the people putting up AdSense sites), it's penny scraping and it's hard and it's getting harder.
Sure thing, you can build "authority sites." Uh huh. With PLR content? You think? I doubt it but try it and see.
Let's see who else I can get angry at me.
AdSense content ads still pay decent money in competitive markets - the problem is that competitive markets are difficult to get ranking in and therefore traffic for. Oh, it's possible, but it's an awful lot of work.
The major problem most MFA publishers face is that they don't do the work. Slap up a site and on to the next. Grab a template with a bunch of crummy content and HOPE you'll make a buck or 50 cents a day. Now that's nuts.
CPA (click per action), particularly for decent leads has generally always paid substantially more than something like AdSense. It is something you can establish a stable long-term business on. As long as you can get the traffic.
You can, certainly, get traffic through PPC. You can also lose your shirt. It's not a newbie game. If you're going to do PPC, you have got to do some serious studying and track everything very closely or you can go broke in short order.
Think about this. Say I do a monster hot viral deal and bag 27,000 marketers. And I turn them onto CPA at places that pay me a commission on sign up and a small percentage of the business those new affiliates bring in. Now, we're talking a little serious continuity. Month after month I'm getting a little bit from the efforts of what - 1000, 8000, 12000 people? Bring me another one of those funky drinks with the umbrella, the sun is strong and the beach is beautiful.
Is that worth 50 cents per? I suspect so. And eventually, there's going to be one or more dyn-o-mite products with major price tags, too.
Boy, I'm seriously jealous. We're talking genuine genius stuff here. You see, it doesn't matter a damn whether AdSense is dead or not. A new path can be worth a fortune to those who didn't have a clue - and who are willing to do the learning and the work to make it happen. Most won't, of course. It's a lot of work. But some will and they should do very well.
In one sense, Ad Sense has always been dead. You're throwing away your traffic for pennies. And it's a lot of work to get ANY traffic.
But for most, CPA is going to be a dangerous and potentially ruinous game. It sounds terrific, but nobody's telling you how to get those PPC costs for your landing pages down from maybe 5 or 10 bucks per click. Hey, wake up, remember the Google slap, landing page quality measures, etc.
There are some brilliant, knowledgeable, capable people running around loose who do give out valuable information. They aren't stupid. That means they do it for a reason. You can use their information to improve your business, but you absolutely have to get a grip on their goals too. You have to understand not only what you're doing and why but what they're doing and why.
You are going to have to stop believing blindly everything that sounds terrific and matches, more or less, your own experience. Ugly, but you have to use your head and actually think.
A zillion lemmings running blindly after the latest greatest revelation - it's the same stupid game of looking, over and over, for the one miraculous tool, idea, concept, piece of software that's going to make you a fortune. It isn't going to happen. The magic bullet doesn't exist. Stop wasting your time and money.
Create a workable plan - one you can actually carry out. MFA, affiliate sales, creating your own product, CPA (if you can do the PPC or are willing to learn). Any one of these can make you money. If you stop screwing around looking for the answer and the easy money. There is NO easy money. It's all either work (for most of us) or sheer bloody genius combined with an insane amount of luck (for the few).
Well, I hope I managed to offend everybody who's pulling your chain to suck a couple more nickels out of you. If not, maybe in my next article. But you - you have got to do some very serious work on your BS detector. You need to understand how you are being done to and why. It isn't necessarily a bad thing. You are getting really valuable information, but you still need to evaluate and understand it, not accept it as if Moses were dumping one of those stone tablets on you. Even I'm trying to sell you stuff.
Copyright 2006 Richard Keir
Richard's always had a bad attitude. And a somewhat deviant perspective and style. His latest product is available here at http://OptinCode.com and you can find out more about his other products at http://GeekWerkz.org
