Is Google Adsense Still a Viable Niche Marketing Strategy?

Over the years the popularity of Google Adsense as a niche marketing strategy has risen and fallen. That leaves many webmasters and online marketers today wondering if Google Adsense is still a good tool for making money with a website.

December was my first month earning over $1,000 as an online marketer. As the image above shows you, Google Adsense played a substantial role in producing that total. The quick answer is therefore yes, Google Adsense can still be an effective niche marketing strategy and a viable tool for making money with a website.

The problem is that far too many people think they can just piece together a website with copied content, slap on a few Google Adsense units and start counting their profits. It just doesn't work like that... at least not anymore. Websites need to be content-rich, provide real value to visitors who see them and ultimately benefit from targeted, matching advertisements where it's possible.

To really be able to capitalize on Adsense, you need to become familiar with keyword research. This will help you choose which niches and specific phrases to target. With a tool like the Micro Niche Finder you will be able to find not just how competitive a keyword is, but also what its corresponding Google Adwords cost is. This will help you to determine how potentially lucrative a site with Google Adsense for those words can be for you.

One alternative to Google Adsense that you may be interested in is Chitika Advertising. With Chitika, ad units are only displayed when somebody arrives to your site through the search engines. The advertisement then displays their exact search query in the question, "Searching for... ?" Related advertisements are shown below, and this combination can produce some very high click through rates.

As seen in the image above, my Google Adsense click through rate hovers around 1%, with some sites performing better, in the range of 3 to 5%. With Chitika, my click through rate is around 10%, leading to an eCPM (earnings per thousand impressions) many times greater than Adsense provides.

So to answer the question, yes, Google Adsense is still a viable niche marketing strategy. When used in conjunction with other online marketing programs and strategies on content-rich websites and blogs, Adsense can still absolutely be a tool for making money with a website. However you cannot build websites that provide no value to visitors and expect to see results. Google Adsense is just one of many tools that when deployed properly can help you succeed with making money with a website.