AdSense Vs. Affiliate Marketing- Which Is Better For Bloggers?
AdSense vs. affiliate marketing, which one to choose? that is the most questioned thing among new blogging aspirants, likely to start their journey.
Due to the pandemic, people are searching for ways to earn money online like never before. Blogging is definitely one of the topmost and trusted methods to earn money online. People, who have knowledge on any topic, can write riveting content can opt-in to this opportunity.
Read: Don’t Start Your Blogging Career Without Knowing These Factors
In order to make cash from your blog, you need to monetize your platform. This article is about monetizing your blog site either with Google AdSense or affiliate marketing product links. In this article, we will be revealing the key differences between both methods and why affiliate marketing is far ahead.
So let’s get started with a brief introduction to both of the methods.
What is Google AdSense?
Google AdSense is the most popular content monetization network in the world. Many people who dig for side hustle income, choose to blog and then monetize their content with Google AdSense. It was very popular among bloggers and content-based website owners until it strengthens its usability, policies, and payments for a long. If you want to know in detail about Google AdSense, you can read it here: What is Google AdSense?
You got a blog, created an AdSense account with your Gmail account, and applied for approval to your site; those things used to happen in the past. But from the past few years, AdSense policies and other things related to earnings have dramatically changed.
Now, the joining criteria are way harder than it was previously.
What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is selling other people’s products to customers in exchange for a commission. It would be a physical or digital product, any service which you do not own. The concept is pretty simple, you work as a middle man or commission agent and earn commission after each qualifying purchase. For a better understanding of affiliate marketing, you can read: What Is Affiliate Marketing And How Does It Work?
If you look at the top bloggers globally, they would agree that they earn hefty commissions by doing affiliate marketing. Many of them actually do not monetize their content with AdSense, and many suggest not to use it on your site for many reasons.
Now, these are the quick and brief introduction of both the monetizing methods. Now we will walk you through the notable differences why you should leverage affiliate marketing over Google AdSense. It would be quite similar to AdSense vs. affiliate marketing in many aspects.
AdSense vs. affiliate marketing, joining criteria:
The joining criteria between both AdSense and affiliate marketing have huge ups and downs. If you are tending to join AdSense, you would either have a website or a YouTube channel. After creating a website, you need to apply for AdSense approval for your site.
AdSense approval:
This is 2021, and the checklist of the AdSense approval is getting bigger and bigger. It has long and intensive points to follow up before applying and for a good reason. First of all, there are lots of restrictions and strict guidelines relate to your blog’s content. From copying to hate speech, from valuable to original, they are huge in numbers. For better clarification, you can walk through their content policies. You get a better comprehension of it here.
Besides that, there are lots of thing matter to get approval from the Google AdSense like your domain age, how many articles or blogs you have, your site duration, bounce rate, and lots of more. There are many reasons why AdSense does not approve blog sites.
On the other site,
Affiliate marketing approval:
Affiliate marketing is a service that companies use to boost their sales. There are thousands of companies and businesses are online, and many of them allow affiliate ships. That’s the reason; the approval process has quite a few major or minor differences. But most of the reputed companies where people work and earn hefty of cash has some basic requirements. You got to have a website or landing page. Comparatively, the content-related policies are also not hard either. There are no such things as your site duration, traffic, bounce rate, and others.
Now, let’s look around the earnings from AdSense and affiliate marketing.
Earnings from the Google AdSense:
AdSense offers the income through CPC. You integrate ads on your blog, it shows relevant ads on it. For each genuine click on those ads, you get a revenue percentage from Google. For the websites or blogs, Google ad publishers get 68% revenue. The earnings also depend on the things such as the locality from the click got, what was the bidding of that ad appeared, which type of ad that was, and many more.
Earnings from the affiliate marketing:
Affiliate marketing, on the other side, runs in a completely different way. The lion’s share of the affiliate networks run on one single obvious concept, you give the sale and receive the commission. The commission depends on the products and the company. Typically the digital products such as domain, hosting, or any software or tool, or these types of things, give the more significant earnings. If you take the comparison between AdSense and the affiliate earnings, affiliate earnings can easily beat AdSense. If you take the words from the biggest and most popular bloggers in the world, they would all agree that affiliate marketing has the immense potential to make money.
Why, with affiliate marketing, you can earn more?
The earning with either option depends on the traffic, the genuine and potential traffic. AdSense takes this part very seriously and for a good reason.
- With AdSense, you get paid for the clicks on ads. That’s why the clicks should be genuine. In fact, there is no guarantee that someone would buy the product or service even after clicking ads.
- In affiliate marketing, you don’t get paid for the clicks. The only thing matter is the qualified sales. That’s the result for each sale, and you get massive commissions that are incomparable with AdSense.
- Traffic source is also a vital point in AdSense earnings. AdSense mostly considers the organic traffic for their program. But for a new blog or website, it is a long journey to start getting traffic from the organic Google search.
- With referral marketing, there are no rules for the traffic. You can bring traffic from any legitimate source. The only thing you have to remember is what you are talking about the product or service to sell. You can get traffic from social media, email marketing by running various ad campaigns and more.
- The ads appear by AdSense mostly as per the viewer interest. But it is not the case all the time happen. Many times the ad-blind spots occur, and no ads appear there. Besides that, as mentioned earlier, not all ads have high bidding. The lower bidding ads give you lesser incomes.
- But, with affiliate marketing, you place custom links and banners into your website, which is solely on your hand. It is fixed, and every people come to your blog is a viewer of those banners or the links.
Account ban with Google AdSense and affiliate marketing:
That’s the last part of the article where the account dismissal will be discussed. No matter whether you choose Google AdSense or affiliate marketing, you are working with third parties. As they are companies, anything could happen. There is no guarantee that nothing wrong would happen with you ever.
Account ban related issues with Google AdSense:
As mentioned above, AdSense has a long list of strict policies to safeguard their advertiser interest and business. After a long time of waiting and vetted your application by humans, there are many chances that you would lose your account for many unfair practices. For many reasons like invalid activity, invalid traffic, spam practices, many publishers lose their AdSense account even though they are working with it for a while. A major drawback with Google AdSense is, in case you got a problem and need to contact AdSense, and there are no such emails, phone contacts, or chat support.
Account ban related issues with affiliate marketing:
With affiliate marketing, you do not need to worry too much about the strict policies about the content and CTR. As it does not have many strict terms and conditions, there are fewer chances to get your account ban. With AdSense, once your account got ban, your game is over. You cannot take part in that program again.
There are many companies and businesses online which run their affiliate network. For any reason, if you got terminated from any network, you can switch to another company and promote them. There is no end to the opportunities. Besides, you get various support channels by which you can connect with them to resolve your issue.
Affiliate marketing has better sustainability and earning scopes than AdSense for many reasons. But, if you want to use both the monetizing methods at once, you can do so. There is nothing wrong with it. AdSense does not restrict publishers from putting affiliate links or banners on AdSense monetized sites.
Thanks for reading. We hope you have enjoyed the article. Read more related articles,