Dan Blackburns' Blog

I don’t really know why, but for some reason Google have stopped displaying Adsense ads on my article directory Article Content King. This felt like a real kick in the teeth at first. For years now I have spent at least 1 hour per day moderating all the articles that we publish on the site. I’m quite strict and only accept around 20% of all the articles that are submitted, so why they have suddenly decided to stop displaying ads on the site after 6 years is a mystery.

I have my suspicions that it is down to the member profile pages. While all the articles are moderated, these pages were not and I did catch  a couple members linking to adult themed websites and using pics of an explicit nature as their profile pic. But surely that is not enough to take down the entire site?!?

These issues have been dealt with, but it seems that Google are not interested in the site anymore.

This is the only site that has been affected. Even websites that I set up to syndicate (targeted) articles from article content king still have Adsense ads on them. It’s only Article Content King that they have a problem with. Oh well, their loss!

I went through the Adsense troubleshooter and gave Google a week to explain why they had removed ads from my site and to give them a chance to reinstate them, but they did not get back to me… I’m glad that they didn’t.

Adsense was paying me peanuts! In the 2 days that I have had ClickBank ads on my site instead of Google Adsense ads, I have made more money from the ad space than I did in the whole of last month with Adsense.

Oddly enough, Google search traffic has increased too!

OK, I may be hyping this up a little. The truth is that  I have made one ClickBank sale… but the commission on the sale was quite high! Maybe I got lucky or maybe this is the norm. The ads have been on the site 2 days more since then and I have not seen any additional sales yet, but I am confident at this stage that using ClickBank ads instead of Adsense ads will be more profitable… especially if I can get the targeting working better.

The first alternative to Adsense that I tried was MyClicBankAds. It’s free with a upgrade option costing less than $7 per month! Free members have their ads displayed 60% of the time, paid members have their ads displayed 100% of the time and unlock some additional benefits. With MyClicBankAds you can completely customize the ads to match the look of your site, and you can create ads of different sizes to display on the same page. It really is just like Adsense! Very user friendly and does exactly what it says on the tin.

The next script that I tried was CBrocket. It’s after installing this script, that I made a nice commission through ClickBank, but that could have been just luck. CBrocket is a script that you install on your own server.  It allows you to create ONE instance of a fully customisable, targeted ClickBank ad and also includes a search facility, so people can search the clickbank market place through your affiliate links.  It’s a pretty decent script, that for a one time fee of less than $50 is an absolute bargain. But there are several things that I do not like about this script.

1.  To create 4 different ad spots on each page I had to upload the script files in 4 different places. (Ok, not hard but…)
2. Every instance of the ads displays the same ads.
3. It takes several hours to pull all the products from ClickBank into the database, and rather than updating the existing database, it dumps and recreates the tables every time you refresh the database. (So it takes several hours every time and creates a massive drain on the server while it does this and slows the entire site down).
4. Placed on a site with tens of thousands of pages like article content king, it has introduced a noticeable drain on the server and has slowed page load time by almost a second.
5. If I did not have experience in installing, setting up and editing php scripts, I imagine that I would have been very frustrated by this script. It’s definitely not for the impatient, inexperienced  newbie.

Having said that, there are also several things that I like about this script. It is the script that I am currently using on the site after all. For example with CBrocket you have more targeting options. Integrating them on my site is going to take quite advanced php knowledge (more than I currently have), but they are there. This is the one thing that may keep me using this script in the long term as better targeting always equals more sales.

I have room to host it on my VPS server so it’s not costing me anything extra in hosting and not slowing the site down too much. If you are on a cheap shared hosting package and you install CBRocket, you will likely have your hosting company asking you for more money pretty quickly as the script does seem to be quite resource heavy, especially when it is pulling the products from ClickBank.

This is why paid membership at MyClicBankAds is my top recommendation out of the two. Yes, it’s a monthly fee rather than a one time fee, but using CBrocket does involve hosting costs. The upgrade price of less than $7/month for MyClicBankAds is very fair considering this. Using MyClicBankAds will not put a drain on your server at all because all the work needed to create and display  the ads is done on the MyClicBankAds server and not yours.

If you are using Adsense already, you can actually integrate MyClicBankAds with your existing Adsense ads so that Google display your ClickBank ads on your site when they do not have and suitable ones of their own, but if my 4 days experience of using direct sales ads insteads of Earn Per Click ads is anything to go by, you’d be better off just replacing your Adsense ads with MyClicBankAds or if you have the php coding knowledge and server space CBrocket.

Even though I am currently using CBrocket, I’d still recommend MyClicBankAds to you first. In the long run, it will probably be cheaper.

I’d love to know what you think. If you have anything to say, please leave a comment below.

Thanks

Dan