Best way to monetize?

Hello everybody, let me start by saying thank you to the community here at BHW as I now have a small number of websites making money and I wouldn't have done it without you.

Now, on to my question:
While most of my websites are in the adult niche, my Wife and I co-own a website that could best be described as being in the "alternative healing" and "wellbeing" niche.
We are currently averaging about 500-600 uniques a day and approximately 1500 pageviews daily.
As it stands, we want to monetize the site and were initially looking at setting up a webstore using dropshipping (can't afford stock atm) but everywhere I look says dropshipping won't really make you any money and comes with a lot of hassle that makes it not worthwhile.
Then we thought of putting up an affiliate store as we would love to provide our users with a place to purchase healing products, but there is so much information out there that says Google hates affiliate stores and might give us a big slap; and we simply can't afford to lose our rank in the serps.

I've done so much reading on the subject, but I have absolutely no experience in this so I wanted to ask some of the old (and new) pros out there on BHW what they think I should do.

We don't really want to bother with adsense, because the payouts are so low, that is the other reason we were looking at an affiliate store, but we are open to anything so long as it sounds like it would work.

Amazon affiliate sounds like the way to go. Do you and your wife make products? Could try and sell natural, organic items.. etc

yep, def amazon products, safe and secure. Also make them relevant to your posts or articles. And do monthly recommendations etc ... Ohh and I would start making videos or reviews of products which you can then send them to your amazon link! good luck!

-Sasha

I agree that Amazon is the way to go with this one. Sasha has some good suggestions in the above post.

Hi,

Your primary concern seems to be to protecting your current websites serps and then monetizing.

Think of them as two separate issues.

Currently your website users come to your site for information. Don't change that.

If you want to set up a shop. Build a separate store, affiliate or otherwise on a different domain and refer your readers to that. If it works great if not you have done no damage to your core authority site.

I've seen people have success in this realm with Amazon. It's never an easy answer though without knowing the exact details of the site.

There are some clickbank products in your niche offering alot more commision than any amazon product ever would

Posted via Topify using iPhone/iPad

Hey everybody, thanks for all the suggestions, it helps a lot!

A couple of thoughts:

@IMNiklas, there are some clickbank products that offer a bigger payout (we are also on with shareasale and cj) but would they convert? I always thought the real point of an amazon store was the fact it is thought of as a trusted, reliable brand.

@GringoMonkey, I know our traffic isn't stellar by any means but it took us a long time to get to the amount we are at now, I couldn't imagine how hard it would be to rank an amazon affiliate store on it's own. Wouldn't referring them to what would initially be a thin affiliate store drastically reduce our chances of making sales or possibly even hurt us in the serps anyhow (assuming of course we would even have that problem)?

I'm not trying to discount your suggestions by any means and I appreciate ever one of them; I just really do not know so I think it is best to ask, that is why I came here for advice!

@Sashablack, I think your suggestion is the way to go. The funny thing is "Amazon" kept popping into my mind the other day when I was thinking about the site, and I have an affiliate account that's about 3 years old that's been collecting dust since I signed up. Seems like too big of a coincidence so I'm going with my intuition on this one.
Amazon it is!

Any other bits of advice?

Thanks again!!!!

Adsense is the best way!

I choose adsense as it offer retarget marketing, so you can optimize the CTR easily.