As traffic to your site grows, do you prefer aff marketing-or adsense to monetize?

This debate has gone on for years. I know there is no right or wrong answer-but getting traffic is hard work. Once the ball is rolling, which method will bring in more money?

For example, i have a zen based blog that focuses on relaxation and stress management techniques. How to balance your chi and meditation tips. Traffic is starting to grow quickly and im looking to monetize. Would you guys recommend adsense with its nickel and dime payouts? Or affiliate offers which pay more but have lower ctr?

Pick your poison type of situation huh.

I think its best to think about this before or while your designing the site. It should really be optimized for one or the other.

Good advice. In this case the site can work for both methods since the content is in the form of unique articles. I can always wrap the articles around adsense units, or i can throw in aff links in between paragraphs.

I guess what im asking is which method is worth the time and effort it takes to build traffic to the blog?

I would think affiliate would be better than adsense. You don't want the visitor clicking an adsense link and leaving your site for pennies in most cases.Keep them there bc the more links within your site that leads to another page on your site the better it is for you Once they click that adsense link, they are most likely gone .Affiliates I use have great ctr once the traffic is there.

I also have another site being built for a physical product and wouldnt dare put any adsense up on that puppy. Keep em focused on what your offering screw adscraps

Generally you'll make more with affiliate ads than Adsense provided you can pick good products that match your niche and make good ads.

If you're getting a low CTR on your affiliate ads, that means you have to spend some time improving your ads. You should be getting much, much higher CTRs on your own affiliate ads rather than Adsense because your own advertising isn't limited by the Adsense requirements. You can really go crazy with your own affiliate ads to get the click through.

However if you're focusing on cranking out sites and generating traffic in a variety of niches, then Adsense is obviously easier (letting you focus solely on generating traffic) and it's also the highest paying of the contextual ad services out there.

An overwhelmingly affiliate crowd lol. I suspect that folks in the adsense category would disagree with these posts. I use affiliate ads on my other sites, and its a ton of work to build traffic and worry about constant ad tweaking. Dont even get me started on those bastards shaving my aff sales! Sorry im venting a bit.

The CTR is totally upto you. The way you are going to place the links and the description for it is going to matter. Whether it is by pictures or rotating banners the creative must be relevant and somehow provide an specific description that what the visitor is going to get if he moves into it.

The presentation matters the most. The better the presentation and clarification the better CTR, so I would suggest go for affiliate program for something like travel or hotel and other daily used product as the people find it easy and convenient to buy while browsing to something interesting. So it is always to go for ads which have creatives which are attractive and you can get those by going for affiliate marketing.