Make Money on the Web without a webpage - Revisited & Killed

People have been playing the GoogleCash game for a while now, and I've spoken about it before. It's all about finding an affiliate-program that converts well and pays well, and then placing ads on Google with AdWords to the affiliate-link.(If you didn't quite follow that, you may want to read this post.)

Some people have been making money this way, others have lost a bit to Google. I mentioned in an earlier post that I'd rather go make myself a cup of coffee -- it didn't seem to me to be a good way of making any money.

Well, now it seems Google doesn't like this either, because, when you searched for a term, often all the ads you got would be to the same merchant - through different affiliates. Now this is bad for Google, because it makes the ads less interesting to surfers. So last week, Google changed their policy. Now, only two ads to the same merchant will show at any one time, and those will be the best performing ones! So it will hardly pay to play the GoogleCash game anymore.

This is good news for affiliates who aren't afraid of a bit of work. If, instead of trying to set up an "instant-business" like GoogleCash, you provide your own information through your website or your email newsletter, you add value for your visitor - and you get the click that makes you money.

You could use Google AdWords to buy traffic to your website, if it converted really well (that is, a lot of your visitors became paying customers). Or you could do the best thing, and create several content-laden info pages, that the search engines would find and rank highly, and your visitors would love.

Now, I know I'm jumping into the deep end of affiliate marketing here, and this post isn't really about affiliate marketing. I just wanted to say that when you see something that looks like easy money, it is often too good to be true! I bet most people who tried this, lost their money anyway, and that only people who knew how to do proper keyword-research could get low enough prices per click to actually break even. Now, if you had this knowledge, I see no reason why you wouldn't play the game. You can make money on a lot of things if you know what you're doing! Which I guess is the whole message of this rather whimsical post:

Knowledge is key.

And love, of course, but you knew that,
Sten, Oslo, Jan. 12th 2005