I’m glad I found your site, the info here is very good. I’ve been concentrating on Adsense but not really getting enough traffic so have been making very little. I agree with your point that cutting out the middle man may be a better way to go.

I would imagine as long as you are complying with Google’s TOS and as long as your pages aren’t MFA’s, I would say that you don’t have a thing to worry about. The 10k/month mark is impressive.

Just to let you know, I am not coming down on adsense. Obviously, you are doing something right. The only point I am making is that (as Grizzly found out), in some cases where the market is a social market, affiliate marketing can outpace traditional contextual ads in gains. Of course, the biggest money could be creating your own products and selling them direct or building a list and continuously selling to them. Then again, both of those require far more advanced marketing strategies. SEO and ranking organically is pretty much a straight shot once you understand how it works. Throwing adsense onto a niche is totally brainless as it requires absolutely no thought as to what the market may be interested in buying.

In the end, the ones who are on the other end of the clicks win more because most of the time, they collect customers while the adsense marketer simply collects **clicks**. I could go on and on about lifetime customer value and how once someone buys from you once, the chances increase greatly that they will buy from you again. I could state the case of how building a list through permission marketing, done right, could double your ROI easily. Those things are the true marketing elements that adsense marketers don’t worry themselves over.

When it is all finished, you have to ask yourself, what do you want more?….a paycheck from google OR a way to build a business that doesn’t necessarily have to rely on the whims and fickleness of a search engine.

Still, once again, 10k is very impressive.

Obviously, Adsense has been good for my sites

If adsense works for you and you want to try making money as an affiliate, try it but work what works best for you. I am not trying to try to pull away folks from the adsense camp…just trying to offer alternatives.

For me personally, I don’t like depending on organic search. If it hiccups, it makes me and my livelihood vulnerable.

That is exactly what I was talking about. Everyone gets so entranced with new, shiny things….new strategies and techniques that will supposedly automate your business and propel it into the stars. What they don’t realize is that the old is the new. Old school tactics still work and will work with any new technology in the future because in the end, there is one thing that doesn’t change- Us.

With regards to identifying which ads are money makers and not just there for testing, you go to the library and look at back issues “Hey, the same Pocket Fisherman ad for 8 months in Field & Stream..” then 2 different ones, then a new one – guess which one won.