Adsense or E-Commerce Biz

advice needed from experienced adsense or e-tail entreprenuers

[kujoe]

Here’s my dilemma. Starting out, should I focus on adsense or an ecommerce business? If I start with an e-tail store I will be utilizing a drop-shipper until I become familiar with the shopping cart (Zen-Cart). Then if my marketing efforts are successful and I have enough traffic I can move onto sourcing my products from US wholesalers/distributors then eventually overseas suppliers.

My other option is to start niche websites with content to capitalize on adsense.

Not sure which I should focus most of my time on in the beginning as I will still have the day job and only be able to work on the web business in the evenings and weekends.

Let me know what you think. Is there anybody who is successful at both?

[diamondgrl]

Selling something requires something to sell. Being in the publishing business with Adsense requires something to publish.

Which do you have?

[OptiRex]

Have you got a saleable product or have you got exclusive and required information?

[TheDonster]

Also don't forget, if you install AdSense on a site where you're trying to sell a specific product, AdSense becomes a direct competitor for your item since every click on an advertiser may mean a lost sale for your site. Sales on my site definitely went down when I installed AS but I knew the income would outweigh the losses so it depends on how much you expect to make from your site?

[kujoe]

I wouldn't put adsense on my e-tail store site because my profit margin would most likely be higher by selling my own inventory. For adsense income I would build content sites with original articles about a specific niche. Both of these are gonna require time since I have a learning curve to work with and I only have some much time. The learning curve will probably be much higher dealing with the e-tail store since it's written in php and I know nothing about it. I'm thinking I will focus on the e-tail site and do the adsense thing on the side and let it build up over time with more and more sites.

What do ya think?

[send2paul]

Kujoe - hi :)

Adsense can be a full-time job if you're starting from scratch and intend to take it seriously and earn some serious money off it.

The advantage of creating Adsense related websites against an "e-store" website is that the only resource you have to "spend" is your time and knowledge. ("Knowledge" you may have to accumulate with experience of playing around with Adsense). With an e-store you, (as was stated earlier), have to have a product to sell - and then deal with all the other pit-falls and consequences related to that.

By accident I stumbled across Adsense earlier this year, even after I purchased a domain to start an e-store. And I've decided to just how far I can go with Adsense, (which is, after all, just coding on a webpage), before I decide whether or not to go down the e-store route.

[spaceylacie]

Hi Kujoe.

Marketing/getting a visitor base/exposure for a niche site is MUCH easier than doing the same for an e-tail store.

How much competition would your e-tail store have compared to competition for your niche site? Have you done any research on this?

If you have an exclusive product to sell, that isn't already readily available online, you could have e-tail success. If you have exclusive information to share, or info that's difficult to find online, you'll have a good chance at Adsense success.