Make Money Online without AdSense

A lot of people, myself included on occasion, have recommended that people put Google AdSense on their site in order to make money.  The main reason for this is that AdSense is the easiest possible way to make money from your site.

The problem with AdSense is that without ridiculous amounts of traffic to your site the money you can legitimately make with AdSense will be very small.

There are several alternatives to Google AdSense which also put ads on your site in a similar manner to AdSense.  While I haven't tested any of them I doubt they pay any better than Google does since currently Google is the most expensive PPC (Pay-Per-Click advertiser) engine.

Other Options for Making Money Online

There are options for making money online without Google AdSense.  Keep in mind that these other methods all require significantly more effort than simply adding AdSense code to your blog.  The primary options are:

1. Affiliate Marketing (getting a commision from the sale of someone else's product)
2. Marketing your own product
3. CPA (Cost-Per-Action - where you can get paid for leads and sales)
4. With traffic you can get paid review gigs and such but I'm sure that comes later for most everyone reading this right now.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing typically requires a website.  Sending traffic directly via links in forums, blogs, etc are free but that is almost impossible to pull off today.  It's also really kind of spam like since the affiliate links are almost always to a sales page rather than an info page on the vendor's site.

Once you've created your website - which can be as simple as a few pages - then you need to drive traffic to it.  This can be done through PPC (this can get expensive) and SEO.  SEO involves building backlinks to your site at various blogs and forums.

You can read my thoughts on my arguments against Affiliate Marketing without website here.

Your Own Product

Creating your own product is not as hard as you might think.  However, until you are fairly successful I don't see any reason to do so.  First, you can promote someone else's product for up to a 75% commision and they get the customer support headaches.

If you really want to promote your own product you can create or find a free lancer to create it for you.  I haven't done this yet but I've read that you can get a free lancer for as little as $50.  I think you may even be able to get an eBook for less but you probably get what you pay for so be aware that you will likely need to rewrite any eBook you get cheap.

You can also join membership sites that provide you with products to sell.  The products require some rework so you aren't selling the same eBook as 1000 other people but much of this can be done in a day or less.

CPA

CPA is the hottest thing running right now in the "make money online" world.  However, it is an easy way to lose your shirt as I've personally found out.  You have to know what you are doing.  You need a very thorough understanding of PPC and the rules before you get started.  And frankly a lot of the most successful people are doing unethical and even illegal things to generate their sales.

According to the 2 courses I've taken on CPA, the best converting webpages are fake blogs and fake review sites.  In essence an internet marketer creates a page with a fake story on it about how some weight loss or teeth whitening product turned their life around.  Many argue this isn't unethical because it's telling a story and it's "marketing" not mislieading.  I strongly disagree.

To make real money in CPA you need to drive sales not just leads.  So most of the affiliate marketing skills and tactics apply.

You can find my story on CPA here.