Often is the question from marketers during coaching sessions on building content sites is wether to use Adsense or Affiliate programs.

A general rule of thumb is always go where the most frequent and high payouts are, but in making the decision between Adsense or affiliate programs, there are a number of things that should be considered.

Initially, it will all depend upon your niche or market. If an affiliate program exists  that converts well and also pays well, then you should take the affiliate program route, you can check this out simply by researching the marketplace details within Clickbank, Commission Junction or whichever Affiliate network is your preferred, in my experience Clickbank offers the simplest method and the highest rates of pay per product, however CJ can pay small percentages but on higher ticket items like digital cameras. I’m sure you would rather make dollars than you would cents, so using an affiliate program in this situation would be your best bet. However, if there isn’t an affiliate program, using a pay-per-click service such as Google Adsense will at least allow you to earn a little money from your content site.

This leads to another question though. How do you tell if the affiliate program you are looking at is a good one or not?  The answer to that question will take some research, but will be well worth your time. One of the very first things That I would encourage you to do is to contact the  affiliate manager and ask what the average conversion rate is for the affiliate program. You could also ask if they have any affiliates that would be willing to email you their experiences with the product. Once you have the answer to that question, visit a few affiliate marketing forums and ask if anyone has promoted the program before or if they have any experience with the owner or affiliate manager of the site. Usually if it’s a bad program, many people will tell you about it.

If you are finding it difficult to locate any suitable affiliate programs/products for your niche, then I would suggest using “Google Adsense” or any of the other Pay per click programs similar to it, perhaps Yahoo or MSN search marketing. Always check though to make sure you can’t make more money from something else. You don’t want to be making pennies on a site you could be making dollars from. In most cases Google  only pays out pennies per click, therefore if you receive 100 clicks and made say $2.00, and then conversly you received 100 clicks on an affiliate link and made $50, it obvioulsy makes a great deal of sense to focus on affiliate programs?

Testing and tracking with a good quality tracking system like Google Analytics is a great way to definitively decide which is the very best method of promotion for your site…in my humble opinion I would use both as long as the larger of the income streams isn’t eroded by the smaller!