Google Adsense is the most popular Pay per click advertiser on the net today. Adwords is a commonly used for advertising because of the name recognition, but is it the best way to advertise your website or affiliate link?

For most websites, the answer is no. When you place bids on the keywords you want, you are going to pay a lot of money per click. Around 15-50 cents a click is pretty average range for what a advertiser pays on Google Adwords.

Let’s say for example, you are advertising an affiliate link with Google Adwords. The affiliate program pays you 10% and your average sale is 50 dollars over it’s life. That will get you on average 5 dollars per sale. In order to just cover what you paid on Adwords on average, you would wind up needing a 10% conversion from clicks to sales if you are paying 50 cents a keyword bid. Any affiliate marketer can tell you that kind of conversion is unrealistic, unless you really know what you are doing and even then it isn’t a guarantee.

Some might then go for a less popular keyword that is cheaper. The problem with that is demographic targeting. The user is even less likely to convert to a sale if the keyword doesn’t match the product well. So you probably won’t make up much ground, if you choose a cheaper off-beat keyword either.

The worst sites to advertise on Google adwords are non-commercial sites like article sites, blogs, and forums. Why would you spend money on expensive clicks only to have someone check out your forum or blog? There is no money to be made unless they click on one of your ads too. Google adwords for these kind of sites is throwing good money down the drain. Thats why there are MFA (made for adsense ad sites) becuase they are just landing pages of ads, hoping people will click on an ad after clicking on their adword ad, that pays better than what they paid for the ad in adwords.

The only time Google Adwords is almost always profitable, is if you have an actual store or E-book site you are advertising directly, that you yourself own. You will then get 100% of the profit and get a good return on your Adword investment.

Alternatives to Google Adwords:

There is many alternatives to Google Adwords.

1) Free. There is many things you can do to improve traffic to your website for free. If you are advertising a commercial site like your online store, this isn’t a realistic option though. If your a real business you should set aside some money for an advertising budget because what you pay in advertising should lead to more sales and brand recognition of your business/site.

2) Less popular PPC networks. Many PPC networks pay very little because of lack of advertiser competition. This is an advantage to advertisers, since you should be charged much less than Adwords for the same keywords. However, you get what you pay for, as the targeting and the anti-click fraud measures is usually much poorer than Google Adwords.

3) Start your own affiliate program. Give your affiliates 10-15% of your earnings and let them do all the work promoting your product. Usually publishers get 60-70% cut on keyword bids on many PPC networks. A 15% cut on a sale is a bargain in comparison, considering you won’t do any work promoting. Plus, usually its a good SEO technique because you get other webmasters to give you a backlink when they promote your site.

4) Buy direct advertising. You can sponsor a review of your website on a blog through the many “pay per post” advertising services, such as SponsoredReviews. You can buy a text link on other websites through the text link ads network like TNX or in a high PR directory, to help your search engine rankings.