I also find AdSense the most stable income source, (I make money every day) but traffic wise Clickbank makes a LOT more money per visitor, but you do get days when you make little and even nothing the odd day.

Also it’s really easy to gain traffic from search engines as long as you don’t mind too much what SERPs you target, at one point I was getting around 6-8,000 visitors a day to a Poetry section of a site, (so all the traffic was poetry relevant, people looking for poems etc…) but the conversion was RUBBISH from AdSense (must have been a few cents a click and CTR was LOW). Conversely gaining specific traffic, say mortgage loans type traffic is quite hard, so when you choose a particular Clickbank (or any) product to promote your unlikely to pull in 5,000 visitors a day: most of my Clickbank pages are seeing 10s to hundreds of visitors a day each.

If you’ve read all my revenue reports you’ll see I recently lost a big chunk of traffic (my recipe site) which has cost me around $30 a day from AdSense. So $30 a day from about 8,000 unique visitors a day!

In comparison I’ve added a a few hundred extra visitors a day recently to Clickbank pages (so single pages, not whole sites) and those are making more than the lost $30 a day from 8,000 visitors!

My 12 year old son made over $100 from AdSense in about a 10 day period last month from a few hundred visitors on a site I gave him to use as a blog. In the same period the site would have made a few dollars from AdSense as well.

When you look at it that way AdSense is terrible, however it’s really hard to find good Clickbank products, so though there’s the potential to make a lot of money, in practice it’s quite hard to find the right products to promote.

With regards content, the content that makes about 80% of my money is written by me, I’d love to outsource, but find it hard to find good content writers. As I’m a SEO consultant I’m going to rewrite it anyway, so might as well do it all myself.

The template I use with best results AdSense wise is Talian that I sell at http://www.google-adsense-templates.co.uk/wordpress-theme-talian-with-adsense-and-seo-optimisation.html I consistently get 6% CTR on the majority of sites I use it on. I’ve considered switching all my sites to use it, but I’d then have over 50 identical looking sites!

David Law

Very interesting what you are doing. I would like to get back into Adsense as it seems to represent the most stable earnings, what with a heavy reliance on good ‘ol SE traffic.

I’m curious to know, which of your templates do you use mostly for your sites? And do you write your own content or outsource it?

Chris
http://www.ProfitsWithChris.com

I doubt I will since I have a problem with saving all the money I make

Currently owe about £90,000 on the mortgage which in Jan/Feb 2009 goes from a fixed rate of 4.79% to variable and with what’s happening right now with the credit crunch etc… looks like it will jump to over 7%!

Currently can pay an extra £9,000 this year (which I’ve already paid extra) then in Jan/Feb when there’s no longer a limit in over paying without a penalty I plan to throw as much of our savings at the mortgage as possible.

Unfortunately we are renovating our home, we live in a 4 storey ex guesthouse with around 16-18 rooms (depends on what you consider a room) and still have a lot of work to do (probably about £30K to £40K worth) so have to have some money for that as well.

Since I hate to be in debt all the affiliate revenue and a lot of my SEO business revenue is going on the house/mortgage for the next two or three years (I want the mortgage paid ASAP).

I can’t complain though, loads of people are loosing their homes right now and I’m worrying about paying a little extra mortgage interest which we can afford.

David Law