Is AdSense a good choice for my site?

[NatFree]

Hello everybody! I am not experienced webmaster. My site is devoted to prepaid phone cards <snip>. I am thinking about participating in Google AdSence and installing a Google's search on my site. I've studied my competitors' sites and I haven't seen these tools on competitors' sites. Probably these tools are not good for phone cards industry? May be so or not? I'll kindly appreciate any comments.

Nataly
<snip>

[edited by: Jenstar at 4:32 pm (utc) on Dec. 29, 2004]
[edit reason] No URLs or signatures as per TOS, please [/edit]

[jurii]

Just give it a try. It's free and if it doesn't work you can leave it again.

Prepaid phone cards sounds like a good keyword for Adsense.

[antoine]

The average bid at overture for prepaid phone cards is around the $1 -$2 mark. I would therefore assume you can earn around $0.50 a click with adsense. Of course this is just an estimate. You cant lose anything by trying. Maybe throw it up on the index page before making any huge website changes to see if it's worth while or not.

[HarryM]

NatFree,

It's against the TOS to post explicit urls, and you have done it twice. You should remove them before the mod does so.

[NatFree]

Great thanks to everybody for help.
I understand about URLs.

Nataly

[david_uk]

Given the site topic, as a visitor I'd assume that the site carried advertising. I'd feel that something was missing without it.

I think that one of the reasons adsense works well for me is that the topic is tightly focussed and therefore the ads are relevant. I'd imagine that it will work the same way for you. As others have said, there is nothing to lose. If it doesn't work then remove the code. Try it on the most visited page/pages to see what happens.

I'd suggest giving adsense a trial of a month or so before you decide. Altering the banner style and position makes a big difference. You need to experiment with the available options to see what works best for your site. If it does work for you (highly likely), you may find that over time you get some good solid growth. I've been with adsense a year next month, and in that time I've jiggled with banners and positions, and grown my earnings from the first month by a factor of ten times. You get good days and bad days - just look at stats over time, and over the long term.

I only started adsense to pay for site hosting. I cover my annual hosting charges in week now, and the rest is our holiday fund - we are going on a three week holiday in the US next summer thanks to the surplus :)

Oh, and don't forget to read and understand Google TOS. It's just not worth risking long term income for a couple of clicks on your own ads, or getting booted for other TOS violations. My advice is to ask TOS questions here, as emailing adsense with questions usually gets you a canned response from the Google fortune cookie generator.

Good luck with it!

[richmondsteve]

NatFree, a better question might be "Is there any risk to applying for AdSense and testing it on part of my site for a trial period of a week or two, then re-evaluating?" The answer is "No, not unless you can't afford to set aside 1-2 hours to apply and implement and another hour or so to evaluate the results in order to decide if further testing and optimization are warranted."