You don’t need Adsense to Make Money

I receive weekly emails or messages on my Facebook Fan Page or Google+ account telling me that if you’re banned from Adsense, you can’t make money online.

While there are many ways to make money online, one of the easiest ways to monetize a website is with Google Adsense. Google is the biggest Search Engine in the world and they have a super big advertising network based on CPC.

The advantage you have with Google Adsense is that their Ad inventory is so large, that you can monetize any website in any language and almost in any niche.

There are many Adsense alternatives out there, and some of them are very good. Adsense is a monetization technique I still use but it’s definitely not my main income, however, it’s great for starters, and every day I receive emails, messages or comments where I read how many people lost their Adsense account and they say the alternatives don’t work as well.

Today, I’m here to show you a few payments I’ve received from other Adsense alternatives that have worked well for me.

But first…

How does an Advertising Network decides how much and when to pay you?

This is the first question you should ask yourself before anything. This will basically answer all your questions. If you’ve tried any alternative without luck, this might be the reason you’re not earning money.

There are different Advertising networks nowadays. We have:

• CPC networks: pay per each click (Adsense, Chitika, Adversal and others). Great for niche sites and SEO.
• CPM networks: pay per 1k impressions (Mylikes, Taboola, Tribal Fusion, etc). Great for websites with tons of traffic, no matter which niche.
• Performance Ad networks: pay per Action (Peerfly, Clickbank, Neverblue, etc), great for affiliate marketing and SEO niches.

Once you understand this, you’ll know which network is the best for you and the reasons behind it.

Adsense is a CPC network, so you make money per each click you receive. They have a large inventory from all the countries, so no matter which country your traffic is coming from, they probably have something to show them. Click costs will range from $0.05 up to more than $100 per click.

For reference, my average CPC on this blog (I don’t use Adsense at this moment), is around $5 per click. But this is a hot niche and most of my traffic comes from the USA.

However, I use some alternatives that have been working really great on other niches like Chitika and Adversal.

I’d use Chitika for English based niche sites as Chitika tends to perform bad with other languages.

And I’d use Adversal for different languages (English works well too), especially if I had traffic coming from all over the world. That’s it.

Here is some proof:

I made a total of $295 from Adversal in March. Then I received my payment at the end of April as they pay NET30. April and May earnings decreased to an average of $150, but June and July have been great so far (I made over $660 last month). I’ve been receiving Adversal’s payments for 6 months already.

As for Chitika, here’s some income proof:

I make less money with Chitika, but they have been consistent and I’ve been working with them for 18 months already.

And as a matter of fact, all my small niche sites where I’m using Adversal or Chitika receive no more than 100-200 visits per day. So less then 6k visits per month. What’s the secret?

SEO Traffic.

Yes. The secret to earn money with Chitika, Adversal or even Adsense, is to have search engine traffic (organic). If you receive direct traffic, paid traffic or social traffic your CPC will be lower and you won’t make as much as I make.

Why?

Because SEO traffic converts a lot better than referral or organic traffic, and because the ads can be generated based on the search queries too.

Adsense pays a lot more for SEO traffic (hence I have $5 CPC on average) but the difference with Adsense is that you CAN make money even with Social or other types of traffic because Adsense is a program from Google. And if you use Google as a search engine, or if you use Chrome, GMail, Android, etc. Google can see the websites you’re surfing and the emails you’re receiving, and then put some convenient banners in front of your readers without them coming from search engine traffic. You won’t have $5 clicks, but you will earn at least a cents per click (usually $0.05 or more).

Chitika and Adversal can’t offer you the same, because they don’t have the ecosystem that Google has created over the years.

Conclusion

1. If you have an Adsense account. Use it wisely. It’s a big asset.

2. If you don’t have an Adsense account or you were banned but you have search traffic, try Adversal or Chitika. Don’t forget Chitika works with English based websites only.

3. If you have paid traffic or traffic coming from social media sites and similar instead of search traffic, use a CPM Network! Tribal Fusion, Taboola and Mylikes have great CPM rates!

4. If you have targeted traffic in a certain niche, use CPA networks to maximize your profits. I’ll talk more about how to monetize almost any keyword with CPA networks in the near future, but I mentioned some of them in my Adsense Alternatives article.

P.S. As you can see, I just changed the image of my blog and went completely trough a new design. I like this a lot more because it looks like a blog instead if looking like an agency or enterprise website. I ditched my Adsense Ads so you can focus on content, and you’ll read a lot more from me in the next months, as I’ll be writing 2 new articles per week. Stay tuned because I’ll publish a lot of articles on how I make money online with different techniques!