I am doing a few experiments with Google ADSense and the Amazon associates/affiliate program currently. Before I go into detail about either of them – just wanted to say that I have had very little success with Google AdSense as I have mentioned before. The thing about ADSense is that, it seems like quite a risk to even get involved with. Particularly because, you have very little control over the income if you really think about it.

For example, lets assume that you have a site that is several years old that’s bringing in a decent amount of revenue via ADSense. You are at a massive advantage if you are one of the very few site(s) in that niche or market because you have effectively built up a competitive moat – as Warren Buffet says. But the issue here is that, like it or not, you are at the Mercy of Google. Meaning, every step in your little “adsense dance” has not only been choreographed by the mighty G – they actually control the music! In other words, if Google decides that your site is no longer as important as you might have thought – regardless of unique content or time spent on building it, they can and will de-index you in a heartbeat. The idea of someone being able to make you (and your profit!) disappear in a blink of an eye doesn’t sound fun to me. Google has been known to do this arbitrarily – even if your websites and marketing tactics are purely white-hat. Recently, I heard about a guy who had 600+ of his sites getting de-indexed from Google. Damn – That’s gotta fucking suck. The point here is that, don’t bet too much on Google or ADSense and diversify your online income as much as possible.

My latest Google ADSense project involves a very specific feature within the new Google+ platform. I have no idea if this is a bad move on my part because the “product” I am promoting is actually a Google product. I originally registered a domain with the name “GoogleXXXXX.com” and decided to dump that domain and grab a different one without “Google” in it – mostly out of any potential trademark violations. So far, I have populated the blog with 10-15 high quality posts along with another half a dozen scheduled to be automatically posted within WordPress. The site is less than 1 month old and contains 3 ADSense blocks within Post pages – although most of the products being promoted within these AdBlocks are either Google related or completely unrelated (ie: dating etc.). Not exactly sure if that is a bad thing or not – we’ll just wait and see.

As for my Amazon Affiliate site – I decided to go all out on it to see how it can turn out. The site is pretty much done and fully setup with enough posts for about two months (55+ product posts) set in the WordPress Scheduler so it will gradually push out these posts so it shouldn’t look suspicious or anything in the eyes of search engines. The thing is, this site actually does not look like a affiliate site at all – it looks more like a legitimate eCommerce site. The users are actually able to use a “add to cart” feature to really add products to the cart. At the very end however, when “checkout” is pressed they will get sent to Amazon via affiliate link with their entire cart preserved. The site also has things like: privacy policy, terms and conditions, return/refund policy, office hours, contact etc. to preserve the overall legitimacy and trust of the site. I am not going to touch this site for a few months and after I have a database of several hundred (or even a thousand+) products in the site, I am probably going to start thinking about sending traffic to the site. Keep in mind that this site focuses on only a certain type of product – it’s not necessarily a super narrow niche, but it’s a niche nevertheless. It seems like the people who are having success with Amazon Associates only focus on a certain type of product.

Oh, Also: I started another simple image based entertainment site because the idea seemed cool and I couldn’t find any serious competitors. Only time can tell how these sites can turn out – my deadline for all of my sites is 1 year. After 1 year, before domain-renewal time, I perform a assessment of the potential of any given site and either kill it off or sell it. So that’s what I am working on so far – I hope you are trying some things out on your spare time as well. Exciting times. Have a great day!