Sometimes, things don’t go as planned when doing affiliate marketing. You did the design of website, coded it, promoted it for months, yet, it still won’t take off. If you already exhausted all your options. There is one possible and probably the best thing to do - It’s to dump the site, save some time and move on.

I have received a mail lately asking such question: “What will I do if I can’t make my site profitable?”

It would be a waste if we just dump the site, right? After all It maybe getting traffic from the promotion you did. So the best answer I can give is to put contextual advertising in it. This should only be your last resort. Yes, you won’t be earning as much if its a full blown affiliate site. But hey, its already a dead horse, just make the best out of it.

What are Contextual Ads?

Contextual ads are a way of earning a commission by getting clicks on these ads placed on a link on your site.

Example of contextual advertising companies are:

• Adbrite
  Sign up as a publisher to sell ads. Probably one of the largest. It allows adult & warez themed sites too.
• Adsense
  The biggest contextual advertising site on the net owned by Google.

And they don’t ask you to pay for anything to join.

Ok my post about the “No Money on Pinay Scandal Keyword” I kind of feel obligated to educate people on how adsense goes and how to UP your earnings.

Let me give you a little drawing, tell me, if you are Google, what will be your decision?

Most likely if you’re in the right mind, you’ll pick HIGH CTR to put Mr. Gates’ Ad to get the best ROI for him. Then if you’re google, you’ll reward the HIGH CTR site with high paying clicks. And if HP or Dell decided to join the bandwagon, you already know what site to pick. Because Google knows your visitors are golden converting machine.

Then, you’ll put Poor Advertiser on the LOW CTR site. This is not necessarily Smartpricing just yet. If Google sees your CTR is just crap, even for the Poor Advertiser will be hurting, Google will change the price of Poor Advertiser’s clicks to 0.01 to 0.20 which is called Smartpricing.

Demystifying CTR and Conversion Rate

CTR or click through rate is the rate of successful clicks per impression. How many chances does your ads are getting clicks. Example. Pedro is looking for the programming software that mr gates is selling. He saw HIGH CTR’s ads. Clicked on it. Well what do you know, successful click. Click. On to the advertiser’s site we go.

Conversion Rate. On the Advertisers site, Pedro did not purchase the product. He changed his mind. Conversion rate goes down.

That’s how it is. Conversion rate is not related to CTR. CTR Only gives you the chance to get the high paying advertisers and gives you the candidacy for Smartpricing.

edit: If you have HIGH CTR and Low Conversion most likely its click fraud. If you have LOW CTR and High Conversion, it doesn’t matter, your clicks are cheap anyway + you might get smart priced.

The big question : Does CTR affect my cost per click (EARNINGS)? YES. Is smartpricing real? Hell yes.

The thing is, if you’re confused about google’s tos about adsense and CTR? Don’t go quote it if you don’t know it yourself. CTR is there to let google know what kind of site you are. Conversion rate is for the merchant side. If the CTR and conversion rate has too much difference, you’ll get flagged as click fraud.

Hell, to make it simple, if you want to earn big bucks in adsense, aim for high ctr. Dump the conversion shit. You have no way of knowing anyway.

But hey, who am I? I have no 4 years of experience in blogging.