Your comment regarding Adsense vs. Affiliates was great – could be a post of its own.

I’m at the just starting out phase when it comes to building an income stream from websites so I’m definitely going to take your advice and make some serious attempts at Click Bank revenue.

Thanks for sharing!

Thanks for the idea of using a Feldenkrais practitioner (which I had to look up ). Right now I have to take it easy while the vertebrae fuse, at the three month mark I start physiotherapy.

After I’m sure everything is working fine I’ll be looking at ways to exercise safely, maybe yoga or Feldenkrais (after research) as know that sort of gentle/low impact exercise is very good for back problems.

For now I’m working on walking until the post op pain dies down as I’m also really unfit due to years of low activity, didn’t help getting a virus in the New Year that left me feeling as weak as a newborn baby (not fully over that yet!). I used to weight train until I met my wife and went to Uni in my early twenties and had quite a good body. While I was in hospital one of the nurses couldn’t find a vein in my arms, she actually gave up!! I’ve lost so much muscle mass it’s scary, the smaller veins are a symptom of the lack of exercise. I used to be REALLY vain about my body and if the operation has been successful I’ll be working on getting rid of the spare tire I gained over the last 15 years or so

David Law

For the successful operation….I am sure you gonna walk and enjoy your rest of your life like other normal guys!!Do share your health position once in few days…as it would make us happy to see you recovering

I’m VERY happy to still be alive, I was reasonably confident I would get through the operation OK, (I’ve decided when I die it’s going to be due to drowning, just have a feeling!!) but there’s always that small percentage of people who react badly to the anaesthetic, get a bad infection, surgeons/doctors/nurses screw up etc… so it was in the back of my mind when I was lay on the trolley outside the operating theater having the various injections to put me to sleep this could be the last thing I ever do!

That’s the first time in my life I’ve had a situation like that and it really does give you a new perspective on life. A couple of days later I was lay in bed on the ward in the middle of the night in pain and I heard a blackbird singing outside and I couldn’t have felt happier or more looking forward to life. After I got home I kept saying everything is awesome despite feeling like I’d been run over by a bus

Anyway, yes I generally agree with your assessment of affiliate sites and AdSense. As long as you don’t loose a lot of traffic AdSense is quite stable, if you look at my AdSense revenue for the last few months it’s hardly changed, but my Clickbank sales are all over the place!! When a Clickbank product was updated I had a big jump in sales in November at the same time the publisher increased the price and long term this resulted in less sales. So CB sales went up followed by a big down!

That being said look at the numbers for this month:

Google AdSense Revenue : $1,228.01 ($43.86 a day)
ClickBank : $518.95 ($18.53 a day)

This is for all my sites, the vast majority of which have AdSense on every page, but only a small fraction (less than 1%) are promoting Clickbank, I have two domains seriously promoting CB products, rest promote no products (info pages)!

If when I started building websites I knew about Clickbank (or affiliate marketing, I built sites for link bait) and had built say 5% of the pages I currently have promoting Clickbank products I’d probably be making 10x what I make from CB right now. Basically you can make many times more money promoting CB products than from AdSense, but AdSense income is far more stable and easier to maintain: any content can make some money from AdSense, the same can’t be said for CB.

If I was starting from scratch today I’d put as much time as possible into researching and promoting Clickbank products and have AdSense as the secondary source of income.

I don’t like the majority of other affiliate offers because of the really low revenue share they give, Amazon is as little as 4% which is pathetic! Clickbank is usually 50% or more, so at least you make a fair chunk of change without having to get hundreds of sales.

Despite all my Amazon stores being penalised by Google I still sell more books a month than I sell Clickbank products, but the books will sell for less than $20 each and my share per sale is pitiful ($1 or less!).

Last month I made $108.31 from Amazon, that’s probably a 5% share, so I sold $2,000 worth of products from penalised sites. Decided to look it up and I sold $1,902.08 worth of Amazon products at a 5.7% revenue share.

The CB products I promote are almost all at the 50% revenue share, so I only sold $1,000 worth of CB products.

So to make the same from Amazon as I make from Clickbank I’d need to sell $10,000 worth of Amazon products each month! Actually would be less since as you sell more the % share goes up to around 8%, so probably $8,000 worth of Amazon sales would match $1,000 worth of Clickbank.

The only good thing about affiliates like Amazon is you can create stores with thousands of products really easily, but you have to have a LOT of them AND have traffic to direct to them (they don’t pull in much search engine traffic) to make a pittance! I haven’t built an Amazon store in years. I’ve tried using datafeeds for other affiliates (Shareasale for example) to see if I can get them to rank in their own right, but so far no joy.

Would be great if I could crack the Google downgrading datafeed sites, but I won’t be holding my breath, I’ve tried all sorts of stuff from hosting the images, adding language translations to the sales text, cloaking the affiliate links… the only thing left would be to write the product descriptions from scratch and that would defeat the idea of using datafeeds (meant to make fast affiliate stores). If I’m, going to write the product descriptions myself, better to spend the time promoting CB products because of the better revenue share.

David Law

So sorry to hear about your plight with your back. You need to see a Feldenkrais practitioner. It’ll make all the difference in the world to you.
You need to learn how to move more efficiently, and they’re the ones who can help.

Best of luck on your journey.

Reading between the lines it seems affiliate sites start to go down if now maintained but adsense are more self sustaining.

I know you are partial towards affiliates I am towards adsense). I think there are more adsense millionaires than affiliate millionaire (this is only a guess and maybe I am very wrong about this). It is more a question to the Guru.