AdSense: For New Blogs, It Doesn't Ad Up

Google AdSense is tempting for new bloggers.  You sign up, get approved in a day, paste their code into your blog, and bam, you're getting paid for blogging, every time someone clicks one of the ads. Ideally.

The problem isn't that you can't make any money with AdSense.  You can if you're good at it (Darren Rowse does).  But making good money with AdSense requires work, and it probably involves much more than new bloggers are willing to do.  Integrating the ads into your theme, placing them very close to or inside your content, etc.  Some even go so far as to place the links so that they're indistinguishable from your unpaid links, to trick readers into clicking them.  (This, incidentally, is a terrific way to make your readers never come back.  Is losing a reader worth thirty cents?)

No, my problem with AdSense has nothing to do with how much money you can make.  Especially if you're an established blogger with a loyal following, you might be able to make AdSense make good money for you.  My problem is that for new blogs, the message you are sending when you use AdSense is not the one you want to be sending.

Let's say you write a blog about weight loss.  When the inevitable "How I Lost 20 Pounds in Three Days" ad shows up, you are in some small way endorsing it, even if you completely disagree with the premise.  Many readers don't know that you have no control over what ads show up on your page.

Google does some minimal screening to prevent spam advertising before it serves the ads, but pretty much anyone who wants to can run an ad with Google's AdWords program.  You have no idea what's going to show up there.  I wouldn't click the ads that ran on my blog when I used AdSense.  Should I really be happy that a new reader clicked one?  (Speaking of Adwords, if you recently signed up for hosting and got $50 free Google AdWords credit, redeem it before it expires. You can use it run some text ads for your blog.)

And the last thing about AdSense for new blogs that I don't like is that it just doesn't look professional.  The ads don't look good unless you do a lot of work on integrating them.  What's more, it's pretty easy to tell that a blog is brand new and doesn't have many readers yet.  When I see a bunch of AdSense ads on a brand new blog, I kind of get a "desperate" vibe.  It's just not worth it in the beginning.  When you have a huge following, slighly annoying a bunch of readers to make 25 dollars a day might be worth it.  In the beginning, slightly annoying a bunch of readers with your ads and make twenty-five cents a day doesn't make "sense." (Or "ad" up, get it?)  Your readers are worth so much more than that.

Foodbuzz Featured Publisher Program

So what to do instead?  Well there are a few options.  If you're a food blogger, there the Foodbuzz Featured Publisher program, which I use on No Meat Athlete.  You still don't know exactly what ads you'll get, but they're all professional ads from fairly large companies.  The worst thing I've gotten in six months is a picture of a big juicy steak (my blog is about vegetarian running).

Though I'm not allowed to discuss the specifics of my contract, I can tell you that I make about three times as much per 1000 views with Foodbuzz as I averaged per 1000 views with AdSense.  (Foodbuzz pays based on the number of readers that see the ad, not clicks.)  It's not perfect, and I'm not sure that I'll renew my contract when it's up, but I've been pretty happy with it so far.  Plus they have a good community that has resulted in my meeting other food bloggers and getting a few new readers.  If you do sign up with Foodbuzz, make sure you read your contract carefully and that you are ok with exclusivity and the length of the contract.

Affiliate Links

Another option is affiliate links (or even graphic ads), where you sign up with companies so that when you mention products and readers buy them, you earn a commission.  This is what I've chosen to use as the primary way of generating revenue for this blog.  The Amazon Associates program is a great place to start, since they have such a wide variety of products.

The warning I'd give about affiliate programs is not to go out of your way to find products to link to.  If you already use something and you like it and it's relevant, then sure, mention it on your blog with an affiliate link.  But don't recommend anything you don't have personal experience with.  There's nothing illegal about it, but from a strictly business perspective, it's not worth it.  Your readers trust you; don't betray that trust.

Also, you should probably mention to your readers that you use affiliate links.  I think that having to mention it and explain what affiliate links are every time is overkill, because it disrupts the flow of the post and makes it even longer than it needs to be.  For this blog, I've chosen to explain it in the sidebar, in the "Note about Links."  Of course, you're free to do what you like on your blog.  If you're linking to products that you truly can recommend from personal experience, you wouldn't offend me by not mentioning that they're affiliate links.  But many people think you should, and that alone means it's something that you need to consider, even if only from a business perspective.