The premier search engine Google has come up with several programs that may be of interest to the solo small business owner. But there seems to be some matter of conflicting opinion about whether a web site owner should do anything to send his traffic away to someone else.
Here's the deal: Google allows web site owners to advertise products and services on their web site in exchange for a small referral fee each time a viewer clicks on one of the Google ads.
This is not an affiliate program since Google pays for each click rather than for a product that is actually purchased. In a sense, the web site owner is sharing in a PPC (pay per click) program. Google serves the ads and keeps track of the clicks. The web site owner puts Google's html code on his pages and provides relevant content for Google to match to its advertisers.
Most web site experts agree that a web owner ought to do everything in his power to make his site "sticky." By that, they mean that there ought to be content, news, events, and attractions at the site that will keep visitors from clicking away from the site.
Google Adsense ads are only profitable when a visitor clicks them, resulting in another web page being loaded and taking the viewer away from the original site. So in essence, the site owner is trading a visitor in exchange for a small fee that Google pays for the click-through.
The fee earned depends upon a number of factors including the competitiveness of the product related to the advertising keywords.
If a site owner is spending money to get viewers to his site, or if he is losing money when his visitors click away, one has to question the soundness of a strategy that purposefully sends traffic to another site.
Here's my take on the debate: The only way you will ever know if Google Adsense is a profitable strategy for you and your business is to give it a try.
Set up a free Adsense account, do your best to follow Google's instructions for maximizing your income, and give it a trial period to test the results.
Obviously, with any advertising strategy, it will pay to test, track, and refine your strategy over time to get the most efficient mix of content and web site utility to maximize your income.
If your web site sales go down more significantly than your Adsense income increases, then you can simply remove the Adsense code from your web pages. If, on the other hand, you can lose some "eyeballs" to Google ads, and profit accordingly, it may pay you to continue using Adsense.
You don't have a choice about the specific ads that Google sends to your web site. They are served anonymously by Google (supposedly they're non-competing for your specific product), so the ads you receive could be good attractors or not.
What you do have control over is the type of content you are matching to Google's advertising.
Adsense may only make financial sense for certain targeted niches that are relatively competitive. For example, your site may only be able to generate an income of $ .20 per click in some niches. A different niche might command ten times that amount. In one case the Adsense commission may make sense, when in the other it doesn't.
