Do have have a few/or many affiliate ads (banners) on your blog? And along with that, do you even use PPC (Pay Per Click) ads? If your answer to both the questions above is YES, then have you ever wondered what really gets you/might get you more income? Let’s discuss more on this and learn about this factor to make money blogging.

The Main Source Of Income From PPC Ads

Traffic from the search engines is much likely to give you clicks on your ads compared to the traffic that you get daily (friends, fellow bloggers in your niche etc). This is a fact because if I’m daily visitor of some site, I would hardly click on the ads because I’ve seen those ads several times yet I’m not really interested in them. It’s not only me who says this. These are the words of every blogger like me (a daily visitor of several blogs). This traffic doesn’t have much potential to convert into buyers from the affiliate ads BECAUSE the affiliate ads on the sidebar maybe totally different than what they might actually be interested in.

For example, you get much traffic on a post called “How To (add something) on Android” and you have a couple of affiliate ads on the sidebar, out of which one is for a WordPress Themes site and the other one is for a WordPress plugin! Do you think that the reader of the Android article would really be interested in buying that stuff??

The Main Source Of Income From Affiliate Ads

There’s no such main source for affiliate ads. But keeping it simple, it can be said that affiliate ads mostly attract visitors from the same niche. If it’s hard to understand that, let me give an example -Let’s say that you blog in the ‘SEO’ niche and visited a blog which you found out from one of your commentators on your guest post at a High PR blog. On that blog where you just paid your first visit, you see a banner never seen before. It is about a WordPress Plugin that increases affiliate sales and you were actually glad that you reached the homepage of that plugin because after watching it’s video, it really seemed wonderful to you! And you buy the plugin after a couple of days. But, the cookies were enabled on your browser and you just helped that blog owner to buy a coffee!

What Actually Works Better – Affiliate Ads or PPC Ads?

The answer is that – IT DEPENDS on several factors. These factors vary from blog to blog hence no 2 blogs can be compared for this subject. The factors are -

• The Main Traffic Source Of Your Blog
• The Kind Of Affiliate Products You Are Promoting
• The Size Of Affiliate Ads You Have On Your Blog (visibility)
• The Placement Of The Affiliate Ads/PPC ads on your blog, and some more.

The above factors can help you decide what really works better, ESPECIALLY FOR YOU because as I said earlier, that no 2 blogs can be compared regarding this issue.

The Earnings – Comparison

Depending on the factors mentioned above, you can make decide on what does really work for you and then you can compare the pricing, just like the following:

• PPC Ads have the meaning in the name (Pay Per Click). Hence the earning from here depends on factors above. If you have more than 50% (approx.) of your traffic through Search Engines, then PPC ads have a good potential to increase your earnings. The earnings vary from $0.01 to $2 per click.
• Affiliate Ads depend on the targeted traffic (traffic from the same niche). The earnings for each sale depends on the product and its rate of commission. Usually, affiliate commissions range from 30-70%. The other advantage of many affiliate programs is that there are recurring commissions which help in earning every month! Check out What “Affiliate Products To Promote And Definitely Earn” for some information regarding this.

So that said, here’s the final word for this article -

If you have much targeted traffic from your niche daily and you’re promoting the products from the same niche, you have much higher chances to earn much more from affiliate ads than PPC ads.