What Have You

My team and I have been experimenting with Infolinks and Google Adsense ads for a few weeks now. This is in our attempt to increase our revenues from the sites that we maintain. However, we deleted the Infolinks codes from my sites today because of the following reasons:

1) My sites (because I still own and administer them) are not designed for Infolinks ads because I or any of my team members do some internal linking to our previous posts. Thus, the Infolink ads are sometimes sore to the eyes. I myself find the double underline words or phrases obtrusive. In this site, I have placed the codes for one day but removed it in less than 5 hours. I just wasn’t comfortable looking at my sites with too many underlined words/phrases. The look and feel of this site has gone from bad to worse (in my view).

2) Infolinks vs Adsense Income. After reviewing the income we generated for 16 days, we have come up with the conclusion that Infolinks ads income is terribly lower than Adsense. In fact, our Adsense income is 3 times that of our income from Infolinks (taking the average eCPM and CPC for 16 days). In view of this, I have decided to discontinue using Infolinks in all the sites that I own. This does not mean though that I’m making thousands of dollars monthly from Adsense. Nah, that would take years more to achieve (if I will still continue publishing articles or blogging in the future)

While others might disagree with these findings, my decision is firm and will remain the same. Some might claim that Infolinks is a good source of additional income. The truth is, that is a relative claim. Some “really big sites” I visit do not even use Adsense. Others rely solely on Chitika. Others make a killing on affiliate marketing.

You see, based on my experiences in making money online, I have tried almost all types of advertisements in this site and other sites I own. Many factors affect the way an online publisher makes money with his website. In my case, I have been most effective in making money doing paid blogging. I have earned more than $5k reviewing products, articles and websites for PPP, SR, Reviewme, Buybogreviews, etc. I have tried most of them and have made some money I could use for my offline businesses and research. Paid blogging helped me finance some “charitable works” offline. While this is true in my case, others make a good sum of money serving contextual ads like Google Adsense, Infolinks, Kontera and non-contextual ads like Chitika, Widgetbucks (don’t use this), Amazon affiliate marketing, et al.

In my opinion, making money online is finding the right way (or ways) to make money online. Looking from a distance, it’s just one big experiment. It’s a long-term trial and error. If one source of income is effective in your case, then I suggest you keep that, or else drop it. For one, it will only consume your site’s space, bandwidth and most probably, your precious time. For another, why keep something not worth keeping.

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