Affiliate Marketing vs Google Adsense

The affiliate advertising vs AdSense issue is mostly faced by those who are starting with internet marketing , or those running a website and are thinking about how to utilize it to make some money. There are advantages and disadvantages for each of these methods for monetizing a blog or website.

Each of these has its Pros and Cons, so how about we observe both and maybe you can make your own mind up on this issue.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate's own marketing efforts. Popular sources of affiliate products include ClickBank, Commission Junction, Amazon, Maxbounty and JVZoo.

You advertise a product on your blog and you get paid whenever somebody purchases. Affiliate commissions can be 50% and over of the sales price for electronically deliverable products (eBooks, software, etc) that have no replacement costs. Physical products can offer 4% - 12% commission.

Google AdSense

When you look at a Google search engine results page, you will see adverts to the right and organic search results on the left. Google adverts also show up above the organic search results, marked 'Sponsored'. These adverts are what Google refers to as its AdWords program: pay-per-click (PPC) adverts, where advertiser pay for every click made on the advert. They are listed in order of how much the advertiser offers to pay Google for the click – the more you will pay, the closer to the top of Page #1 of the SERPs your ad will appear.

Google also publishes these adverts on site pages and blogs who request them, such publications are offered a percentage of the click price for doing as such. This is Google's AdSense program.

Things to know: AdSense vs Affiliate marketing:

• It’s easier to get into an affiliate network than it is to get an approved AdSense account
• Affiliate marketing pays more than AdSense
• Most of the affiliate companies offer PayPal as a payment method, whereas AdSense does not.
• You can find affiliate products for all niches, but AdSense is not allowed on certain niches.
• AdSense offers recurring income, whereas affiliate marketing pays once per shot.
• AdSense is managed by Google alone, whereas there are many large and small affiliate companies.
• Affiliate ads are more attractive, whereas we don’t have control over AdSense ads.

Clearly, just from a look at the points noted above, affiliate marketing is more lucrative and beneficial than AdSense.  Still, before drawing your own conclusion, there are a few things you should know about affiliate marketing:

Affiliate marketing works only on certain pages, so every page of your blog will not be making money for you. AdSense, on the other hand, works even for those pages that do not work for affiliate marketing products. Adsense is a backbone for any blogger when it comes to making money online, because it keeps your cash machine flowing, though the payout per day is less than a single affiliate sale.

With one affiliate sale, you can make somewhere between $10-$100, depending on the product that you are pitching. In my case, the payment from one affiliate sale will be more than what I will be making with AdSense in a week.

I would suggest working on a combination of both AdSense and affiliate sales, done in the proper manner, so that you don’t become an affiliate market blogger.  With useful content, you will end up making some handsome amounts of cash by the end of the month.