On 9 August 2006, in Don’t settle for Google AdSense, Erik of ProductWiki stated, “While I believe that AdSense is a great source of potential revenue, it is by no means perfect and, in my opinion, needs to be updated to meet the demands of its users… Shopping.com outperforms AdSense by a factor of 4.6!”.

A few days before Erik, I published my experiences with Google AdSense: On 4 August 2006, I stated, “I’m doing a lot of research on different ways of making money online. Many rave about AdSense, but I’ve found that other programs work better for me. (Which is a shame really, as AdSense is by far the easiest & simplest to set up).”

Furthermore, on 13 August 2006 - before I found Erik’s post - I wrote about my objective preferences for alternatives to AdSense, “On the advertising front, I’ve cut down on AdSense and am focusing on eBay & Amazon UK - as these seem to be more profitable for me.”

Marketing genius, Seth Godin (author of Purple Cow & many other books) has also written about his AdSense observations, stating, “the eye is looking for anamolies (sic)”. I think banner blindness particularly affects Google ads: Google AdSense is very popular, so visitors are more used to seeing these type of ads and are therefore more likely to ignore them than they are other ads.

Alternatives to Google AdSense

eBay & Amazon are the main contenders. Yahoo! has entered the fray too. However, its emphasis on showing ads only to US visitors means extra work for site owners and has resulted in many of us opting for other alternatives, at least for the present. (I would have liked to test it myself, but being in the UK I’m ineligible to apply).

eBay

According to Michael D. Pollock, eBay Editor Kit is ‘too easy’ - that’s why there’s no WordPress plugin. Brilliant. I tried it myself and he’s right.

I’m so grateful to Michael for sharing the link to eBay’s Editor Kit, as all I knew about was the Commission Junction site (it seems eBay outsource their affiliate programme to a few ‘tracking providers’) and that one is really quite confusing. In fact, if I weren’t so determined, I would have given up on eBay before, purely because of the Commission Junction interface.

Try eBay Affiliates

Amazon Associates

One of the problems I have with Amazon, is how separate Amazon.com & Amazon.co.uk are. It’s not like with eBay, where ‘.com’ represents international; rather, ‘.com’ means US - being in the UK, that’s not helpful for me and yet the US is a big market. Consequently, I have both Amazon.com & Amazon.co.uk affiliate accounts - which means I work twice as hard for half the results.

On the plus side, Amazon’s affliate program rewards much better than AdSense. In my experience, affiliate programmes reward more highly because in order for the site owner to get paid, visitors must actually spend money. Whereas with pay-per-click advertising, they only need to click, which (theoretically) indicates interest in possibly making a purchase in the future.

Try Amazon Associates

Chitika

Chitika is popular with many bloggers. However, it has some bad press for being complicated to set-up and it also recommends quite high level of traffic as a minimum before applying, which is why I haven’t tried it yet.

Try Chitika

Next steps - development of All Things Bright

• Removing some of the AdSense ads and replacing with Amazon & eBay ones.

Have you tried any of these methods? What are your experiences?