I have a website in the health niche. This site is about 2 years old and makes around $500/month consistently with adsense since last year. This site has a top 5 ranking on most search engines for some very good keywords and gets around 1,000 unique visitors a day. So, with those 30,000 uniques and $500 in adsense, I was happy with $16 eCPM. Who wouldn’t be? That is a pretty good eCPM. So, I was very happy with this site. Until a couple of days ago.
So what happened two days ago?
I got an email from one of my competitors, saying that he is willing to buy my site (they had seen the search engine rankings for it). I told them that the site is not for sale. Then, they gave me an offer which was very difficult to refuse. An offer of $20,000 for the site. I was shocked. Is my site that worth? How he is going to monetize the site making that much money? All these questions came to my mind.
At first, with the amazing offer price, I was just about to sell it. But then I thought, wait, why not try and see what he is going to do with the site. I can do that myself and see if my earnings can be increased. So I started researching the related sites and found that most of my competitors are not running Adsense but running some affiliate links which have some very big payouts.
I put those affiliate links on my site 48 hours ago and here are the stats I see for those 48 hours:
So in 48 hours, that’s a total of $652.60. So if I keep earning that sort of money every day, that would be around $9,789.00 per month from this site alone! Even if I average the figures down a bit to $200 per day (instead of current $326.30), I will be making at least $6,000 per month from this site, which was only making me $500 per month through Adsense until now.
So, Adsense is not always the best way to monetize your website. If you can the right type of affiliate programs which pay well and suit your niche, you can earn more, a LOT more!
Later on this month I will update you all on how the month went.
So, whats next?
As of now I have kept adsense on the site. I will keep them for next 5 days (total of seven days). Then I will remove them for next 7 days and will compare my affiliate earnings from these two weeks. That will decide whether I should remove adsense completely from the site or not.
What do you think? Have any of you had similar experience with changing from adsense to affiliate, or even the other way around?
i make around $300 with my blog per month but adsense does not work for me.
$6000 is sweet and 10x the adsense earnings. Affiliates are the new adsense
Nice switch and way to maximize your earnings! I think the site will produce better results without Adsense, as the focus of the visitor will have fewer options of spreading.
I cannot find the exact correct formula for most of my sites.
I do, however, have one site that makes 75% more than adsense with a specific affiliate product. Took some time to find the right one and that sucks. If only all my sites could make as much.
Kevin, can you tell me which affiliate company you used?
Maybe you will find the answer at the end of the month, bet you are glad didn’t sell eh!
Hi Kevin,
love yer blog, I read it every day now
what affiliate program turned out to be the best for health niche now that you had the programs on for few months already. I know you mentioned three, but which one is the best?
I get lot of visotors but no revenue.
Adsense is not working fine for me.
Thanks for this good advise
Affiliate deals seems headed to trump adsense.
I have little luck with affiliate products on my make money online site but I’m making a killing on my page one results non blog sites… I believe your figures!
good tips kevin, will bookmark your site now
Kevin you should try to find the hidden niche like this one you figured. Adsense isn’t worth for such a site with 1000 unique visitors a month for the perfect niche. OMG the site is definitely worth the $20,000 offer! I have a dog grooming blog which receives around 200 visitors a day but I don’t see any good monetization option because:
1. not enough good affiliate programs to promote
2. visitors arent interested on the current monetizing methods I have and I don’t find another good one to promote.
I think mine is a hidden niche but I guess it will take some time to find gold from it! Anyway I will be having an eye on how much did you make from the site. Don’t forget to update us.
with all these people writing about how much adsense sucks, I think I’ll stay away from it.