With the mightly Google hammer having just struck down our favorite adsense technique we are desperately in search of another adsense strategy which can if not replicate the same CTR rate at least keep our business viable and strong..
As usual Dave and I take wildly different approaches to this problem, Dave has always been the “quick buck” type with our business decisions usually attaching big words about “smart business” and “long term thinking” to ideas which at least in my opinion are generally short term cash grabs.. I don’t say that as a dig against Dave just that our ideas on what a long term or smart decision are very different, but of course our financial situations are quite different with me looking for stable earnings I can count on so I can move back to Oakville in a nice house so I put a much bigger premium on stability over making $10,000 month asap.
This time around Dave has copied an idea from an adsense case study in which the site operator blended an rectangle ad in the top of the content and of course made scads of money doing so, the problem is given our template based design the sites look like crap (at least to me) and both of us can agree it looks spammy and will need a design that beautifies the adsense (which likely will require alot of testing and investment to figure out)
What are the benefits? Well the CTR is quite high and everything is nice and legal as far as Google is concerned.
Of course my approach to solving this problem is quite a bit different..
Based on what I know about organic SEO and the number of sites we are stuck with working on I feel our best bet to increase earnings is simply to increase our impression count, Id rather have 10% of 1000 then 20% of 100, if we were dealing with 5-10 sites I would likely agree that the boost to CTR was more important since we would be able to manage keeping the sites ranked over time just with investing a bit of time, however in the current scenario where we have 200 sites and definately need to work on at least 20-30 of those over the next 2 years I don’t believe there is enough time we can dedicate to both ranking new sites, maintaining content AND doing link building maintenance on the sites previously completed.. In beliving this I want to give other webmasters and users as little reason as possible not to link to us even if it ultimatly hurts our earnings.
What are the downsides? Well of course the CTR is somethly like half of Daves concept.
Who is right? I don’t know and I suppose thats part of the joys of partnership, we’re already pretty much agreed on a compromise and Im sure the rest of the details will fall into place soon as well.
I don’t mind our earnings dropping as long as I know I can bring them back up in the semi near future
