Adsense Niche Sites In 2017… Really?
I was browsing the internet (bad idea all around) looking for topics, and I came upon a topic on a business forum I sometimes go on. It was talking about niche sites and so I clicked and read through.
It was filled with terrible advice about advertising with Google Adsense and other banners and stuff.
Needless to say, I’ll correct the record here, but let me spell this out clearly for anyone who only reads the first hundred words of an article: Adsense niche sites are a stupid idea.
Let’s talk about why and how you can take the basic idea of advertising with platforms like Adsense and flip them into something better without doing anything differently.
Why An Adsense Niche Site Is A Stupid Idea In 2017
Adsense is a program designed for site owners to make money in exchange for having adverts on their website. Specifically, ads from Google’s Adwords platform.
The reason the idea of an Adsense Niche Site is a bad one is two-fold:
- Ad networks base pay outs on impressions and clicks and so you need a huge amount of traffic for Adsense to be profitable
- Niche sites don’t get a lot of traffic
Undoubtedly the whole idea of an Adsense niche site must have worked in the past because that’s why people are selling ebooks about it, but you’re put the two above things together and you have a bad business model.
If you want to make money based on ad platforms paying you for driving clicks or giving advertisers impressions, build a huge, viral content site like BoredPanda.
If you want to build a small site with residual income that doesn’t take much effort or a lot of content to break even, then build niche sites.
But if the idea of crafting product reviews and complicated stuff doesn’t appeal to you and you’d rather follow a random internet guy’s guide to making an Adsense niche site, then at the very least forget the Adsense platform and follow my advice below.
How To Create An Ad-Based Niche Website That Makes You Money
Instead of signing up for Adsense and having Google ads that you can’t control and only make $0.50 from, why don’t you do the obvious and create the ads yourself?
Let’s say you have a text block at the top of your blog post. You can get a widget in there which will display a Google ad and you might get $0.10 a click or $1 per thousand impressions or whatever.
Or, you can sign up to an affiliate program that pays $30 per commission, load up Photoshop or make a text ad widget yourself using the same headlines that you find on any old Adwords copy and make a lot more money.
This way, you:
- Control the content
- Control the ad
- Get more money per click (on average)
- Don’t have to rely on someone else’s platform
… and you can split-test it all more effectively because you have access to all of the data.
This will not convert as highly as the other stuff I suggest (like writing reviews, building a high quality niche site and the like) but it will make you more money and be a better asset than the same site with the same content that just serves display advertising.
Final Thoughts
It’s a short article today because this is pretty basic stuff. Although there’s a lot you can do with the knowledge above that’s a bit more complex. It’s all about how you use the tools, tricks, tips and techniques, like everything else.
Maybe I’ll expand a bit on the above, but I’m pretty sure regular readers can connect the dots on their own and probably think of better stuff than I can anyway, so get to it…